Roman Imperialism 9004404627, 9789004404625

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Roman Imperialism

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Roman Imperialism

Ancient History Editor-in-Chief Lee L. Brice (Western Illinois University) Editorial Board Jeremy Armstrong (Early Rome) (Auckland University) Denise Demetriou (Greece and Ancient Mediterranean) (University of California) Selene Psoma (Classical and Hellenistic Greece) (University of Athens) Daniëlle Slootjes (Late Rome) (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) Georgia Tsouvala (Hellenistic and Roman Greece) (Illinois State University)

Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspectives title are listed at brill.com/rpah

Roman Imperialism By

Paul J. Burton

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 2.2 (2019) of Ancient History, DOI:10.1163/25425374-12340004. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938214

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-40462-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-40473-1 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Paul J. Burton. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Roman Imperialism 1 Paul J. Burton Abstract 1 Keywords 1 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The Ancient Literary Sources for Roman Imperialism 7 1.2 The Present Work 8 2 Imperialism 10 2.1 Modern Theories of Imperialism 10 2.2 A Provisional Definition 17 3 Roman Imperialism 18 3.1 The View from Antiquity 19 3.2 Rome the Aggressor? Causes and Motivations 39 3.2.1 The Harris Thesis 39 3.2.2 Substantial Responses to Harris 44 3.3 The Theoretical Turn: Systems and Forces 56 4 The Diversification of the Field 73 4.1 Soft Power 74 4.2 Frontier Studies 78 4.3 Race, Ethnicity, and Romanization 83 4.4 The End of Roman Imperialism(?) 90 5 Conclusions 93 References 105

Roman Imperialism Paul J. Burton

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia [email protected]

Abstract Rome engaged in military and diplomatic expansionistic state behavior, which we now describe as ‘imperialism,’ since well before the appearance of ancient sources describing this activity. Over the course of at least 800 years, the Romans established and maintained a Mediterranean-wide empire from Spain to Syria (and sometimes farther east) and from the North Sea to North Africa. How and why they did this is a source of perennial scholarly controversy. Earlier debates over whether Rome was an aggressive or defensive imperial state have progressed to theoretically informed discussions of the extent to which system-level or discursive pressures shaped the Roman Empire. Roman imperialism studies now encompass such ancillary subfields as Roman frontier studies and Romanization.

Keywords Rome – imperialism – Romanization – warfare – politics – diplomacy – frontiers

1 Introduction “Imperialism,” noted Sir William K. Hancock, “is no word for scholars.” He was correct in two senses: there are perhaps almost as many definitions as there are users of the term (in Hancock’s words, “It does not convey a precise meaning”), and it is a decidedly polemical word, which reflects its nineteenth-century origin as a term of political abuse, rather than the sort of dispassionate analytical tool serious scholarship demands.1 1  Hancock 1940, 1. History of the term: Koebner and Schmidt 1964; on its origins, see also Flach 1976, 4–5.

© Paul J. Burton, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004404731_002

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The term ‘imperialism’ came rather late to modern discussions of Roman foreign policy and international relations. The word was unknown to Edward Gibbon and Theodor Mommsen, whose magisterial histories of Rome were the gold standard of Roman historical scholarship until the early twentieth century.2 The great Italian historian of Rome, Gaetano De Sanctis, occasionally deployed the term in discussing Roman expansion of the middle Republican period.3 Of course, that is not to say that scholars were not fascinated with the spectacle of the expansion of Roman power across the Mediterranean, particularly during the middle Republic (roughly 264–146).4 They, like Polybius, the ancient Greek historian of Rome’s rise to global power, sought a response to the questions “how and under what system of government nearly the entire world in less than fifty-three years fell under the sole rule of the Romans— something that has never happened before.”5 The first systematic analysis of Roman imperialism as a discrete topic within the field of Roman history was Tenney Frank’s 1914 Roman Imperialism. Prior to its composition, Frank had spent his sabbatical leave in Göttingen and Berlin attending lectures by the great Roman historians of the day, and had developed a dislike for the contemporary Mitteleuropäisch view of imperialism, which he regarded as “altogether too disingenuous and suspicious to account satisfactorily for the behavior of unsophisticated Roman statesmen.”6 Frank criticized the German Lebensraum justification for imperialism, which, in his view, led to needless wars, such as the one that broke out the year his book appeared. He rejected the idea that imperialism was “the national expression of an individual’s ‘will to live,’” driven by “the overcrowding of population [which] threatens to deprive the individual of his means of subsistence unless the united nation makes for itself ‘a place in the sunlight.’”7 His own view was arguably too

2  ‘Imperialism’ was first applied to the Romans in 1853 in France and in 1861 in Britain: Flach 1976, 4–5. 3  E.g., De Sanctis 1917, 509 and 1923, 575. 4  All ancient dates are BCE unless otherwise indicated. 5  All translations are my own. Polyb. 1.1.5–6, τίς γὰρ οὕτως ὑπάρχει φαῦλος ἢ ῥᾴθυμος ἀνθρώπων ὃς οὐκ ἂν βούλοιτο γνῶναι πῶς καὶ τίνι γένει πολιτείας ἐπικρατηθέντα σχεδὸν ἅπαντα τὰ κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην οὐχ ὅλοις πεντήκοντα καὶ τρισὶν ἔτεσιν ὑπὸ μίαν ἀρχὴν ἔπεσε τὴν Ῥωμαίων. The fiftythree-year period extends from 220 to 167, from the preliminaries to the Second Punic War to the breakup of the kingdom of Macedon. ‘The entire world,’ ‘global power,’ and similar terms refer to the world as the Greeks and Romans knew it, that is, the Mediterranean littoral from Spain to Syria, North Africa, Egypt, and Gaul. 6  De Witt 1939, 274. 7  Frank 1914, vii.

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optimistic by contrast, a product of Frank’s midwestern American upbringing, with its rural, small-town idyllic lifestyle and faith in the pioneer spirit.8 Explicitly taking his cue from Mommsen, Frank puts forward a thesis of Roman defensive imperialism. Rome’s expansion, he writes, was prompted by “specific accidents that led the nation unwittingly from one contest to another until, to her own surprise, Rome was mistress of the Mediterranean world”—thus echoing J.L. Seeley’s famous statement that the British Empire was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.”9 Unlike modern European states, Frank argues, the Romans were not driven by the desire to possess, but by fear of being destroyed by another state. In addition, the nature of the Roman state—a narrow oligarchy “of a few hundred nobles, suspicious of the prestige that popular heroes gain in war”—put a brake on men’s acquisitive instincts.10 Roman diplomatic practices played a role as well: “When one remembers that modern nations must employ all the arts of diplomacy to keep peace with their few neighbors, one is surprised not at the number of wars Rome fought but at the great number of states with which she lived in peace.”11 An unusual “selfrestraint … ultimately won Rome her great gains.”12 Frank was, nevertheless, realistic enough to acknowledge that, periodically, Rome traveled “the devious road of imperialism,”13 and behaved like “an unprincipled bully,”14 but he connected this behavior to an unconvincing factional explanation: “the democratic party [was] more eager for empire than the senatorial,”15 and its “jingo” leadership lured the ignorant, unsophisticated, and greedy plebs into imperialistic adventures.16 Defensive imperialism theories, with few exceptions,17 held the field for most of the twentieth century. In his inimitably positivist fashion, Maurice 8  See De Witt 1939, 273: “It seemed to him a precious personal asset that he had been permitted to grow up in a genuinely American small town and rural community, where pioneer standards of conduct continued strong.” Linderski (1984, 146–48) suggests that the Spanish–American War also influenced Frank. 9  Frank 1914, 120–21; acknowledgment of Mommsen’s influence: ix. 10  Frank 1914, vii–viii. 11  Frank 1914, ix. 12  Frank 1914, 55. 13  Frank 1914, 93 (in reference to the creation of the Sicilian province after 241). 14  Frank 1914, 114 (in reference to the Roman seizure of Sardinia from Carthage in 238/7). 15  Frank 1914, 65–66. 16  Frank 1914, 66 (characterization of the plebs), 91 (jingo leadership). It is probably here that the Spanish–American War influenced Frank’s thinking (above, n. 8). 17  E.g. Thiel (1954, 129, on Rome’s role in provoking the First Punic War): “Rome was the aggressor, and … the guilt of causing the war was on the Roman side and on the Roman side alone.” For a summary of other negative judgements, see Gruen 1984, 6–7.

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Holleaux pressed the Mommsen–Frank view, arguing that Roman interest in the Greek East was minimal down to 201/200, and was only stirred by a profound shift in the balance of power among the three major Hellenistic kingdoms—Antigonid Macedon, the Seleucid empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt— when the first two struck a pact to destroy the third, then ruled by a child. Rome only became interested and involved when a plethora of embassies from minor Greek states and Egypt arrived in Rome, drawing the senate’s attention to Antigonid–Seleucid aggression and seeking Roman intervention.18 Meanwhile, in Germany, scholars pursued a different line of argument, with its origins, once again, in Mommsen’s great work. In 1913, Eugen Täubler began dissecting and analyzing the elements of Roman treaties in order to account for Rome’s rise to global power.19 Twenty years later, Alfred Heuss followed a similar strategy, but shifted the focus away from treaties to the technical–legal underpinnings of Roman international friendship (amicitia). He argued that the existence of informal friendship (amicitia) or the performance of absolute surrender to Rome (deditio) did not necessitate or imply the existence of formal treaties.20 Picking up on the work of German scholars, Ernst Badian published his groundbreaking Foreign Clientelae in 1958. He argued that the most pervasive Roman overseas diplomatic relationship, amicitia, was strictly informal and extralegal; Roman dominance was thereby assured because the Romans thought of and treated their euphemistic ‘friends’ as clients—inferior partners in a patronage relationship similar to clientela, the patron-client relationship—which played a major role in Roman domestic social life.21 By 1968, Werner Dahlheim had synthesized the work of his predecessors, going back to Mommsen, and published one of the definitive works on Roman international relations. He successfully challenged Heuss’ attempt to impose formal legal strictures on amicitia and discovered a pattern of Roman management of their interstate relations: Rome imposed on allies in Italy permanent treaties of alliance (foedera), while overseas partners enjoyed only informal amicitia without permanent treaties of alliance.22 Although Dahlheim certainly exaggerated the distinction—recent scholarship has shown that relatively few Italian allies had foedera, and several formal treaties with overseas states 18  Holleaux, 1935 (reprint of the 1921 edition). On Holleaux’s approach, see Linderski 1984, 139–45. 19  Täubler 1913. 20  Heuss 1933. 21  Badian 1958. 22  Dahlheim 1968.

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are extant in the literature and inscriptions23—he placed the study of Roman Völkerrecht on a firm footing. In 1968, Ernst Badian published a study of Roman imperialism based on a series of lectures he delivered in South Africa in 1965.24 Badian attempted to establish that Rome’s non-annexationist policy in the East was a manifestation of imperialism of the ‘hegemonial’ type, which was in contrast to the annexationist policy Rome adopted in the West. He also examined the economic motive for imperial expansion, and concluded that Rome did not go to war in pursuit of economic gain, but “the profits, when they came, were welcome and taken as a matter of course.”25 In his exploration of late Republican imperialism, Badian argues that the Romans were almost completely averse to imperial expansion down to the Social War of 91–88; they almost had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Jugurthine War (112–105), for example. Evidently, the elite businessmen of the equestrian class had little interest in overseas ventures, and the land-hungry plebs were unable to marshal the necessary political power to push an imperialist agenda. The reforms of the Gracchi changed all this, but it took a long time for their effects to be fully felt. In the end, however, it was not the pressure of the equites or the plebs that motivated men like Pompey the Great to expand the Empire, but the competition among late-Republican dynasts themselves, whose ambitions the senate as a group seemed less and less able to contain. In 1975, Paul Veyne published a lengthy article—almost a short monograph—provocatively titled “Was there a Roman Imperialism?”26 Veyne answered mostly in the negative: “imperialism, in the sense of the pursuit of hegemony, which is at the root of almost every policy of conquest in history, was most often alien to the Roman senate (with one big exception: the Second Macedonian War).”27 The Roman conquest of the East was imperialist in neither the Thucydidean sense (the desire to dominate) nor in economic terms adumbrated by Lenin (see below), but was in fact a kind of isolationism, whereby Rome sought to manage the international system in such a way that their own absolute security and freedom of unilateral action were unthreatened. Roman imperialism, if it can be so called, was “humdrum” and 23  Italian treaties: Rich 2008; overseas treaties: Gruen 1984, 13–53. 24  Badian 1968 (appearing first in South Africa in 1967 under the Communications of the University of South Africa imprint). 25  Badian 1968, 20. 26  Veyne 1975. 27  Veyne 1975, 793. The Second Macedonian War was allegedly imperialistic since the Romans were eager to dominate the Greeks as they had recently dominated the Carthaginians, and to associate themselves with the cultural prestige of the Hellenistic world.

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“pedantic,” managed by the senate and maintained through its esprit de corps, which is what made it so durable across several generations.28 Conditioned to war in the primitive chaotic conditions of archaic Italy, the Roman senate perpetuated the ancient bellicosity—“habitude belliqueuse”29—out of sheer inertia, while at the same time prioritizing duty to the state above personal ambitions. The annual warfare Rome practiced out of sheer habit meant that Roman campaigns resembled plundering expeditions. Because of Rome’s intolerance of threats to its solitude and security, Roman diplomacy consisted of issuing demands rather than serious negotiation.30 More recently, Armin and Peter Eich have outlined a thesis similar to Veyne’s. They argue that the Romans were not engaged in ‘imperialism’ as such, but in a “state-building process” in a “coercion-intensive region,” which typically results in an “embryonic state” attempting to “monopolize violence.” This causes a “centripetal effect” whereby the expanding, violence-monopolizing state absorbs other populations in a kind of “domino effect.”31 As will be seen shortly, 1979 marked a watershed in the study of Roman imperialism, with the publication of William V. Harris’ War and Imperialism in Republican Rome.32 Harris, a British expatriate teaching at Columbia University in the US, provided a much needed corrective to the dominant paradigm of Roman defensive imperialism. The Second World War, the postwar experience of decolonization, and the Cold War superpower conflict relegated imperialism to the dustbin of history as an outmoded, evil aberration. In this context, the Roman defensive imperialism thesis had begun to seem rather too complacent, verging on the vicariously apologetic for the behavior of modern imperialists. Harris argued that Roman society was pervaded, exceptionally among its state peers, by a deeply embedded ideology of a warrior aristocracy in which the pursuit of glory and honor on the battlefield was paramount. The entire Roman socioeconomic and political system was sustained and perpetuated by a fanatical glorification of warfare and imperial conquest. The reaction was swift. As will be seen shortly, two full-length review articles by A.N. Sherwin-White and John North appeared in succeeding years in The Journal of Roman Studies—an unprecedented phenomenon.33 Harris responded with an edited volume of essays based on papers delivered at a colloquium 28  Veyne 1975, 805. 29  Veyne 1975, 818. 30  Veyne 1975, 819. 31  Eich and Eich 2005. This is similar to the Realists’ ‘security dilemma,’ or indeed Schumpeter’s ‘war machine’ (see below). 32  Harris 1979. 33   Sherwin-White 1980; North 1981.

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in Rome in 1982.34 His own paper took the form of a response to his critics (including Sherwin-White), while the rest (excepting Erich Gruen’s paper—an abbreviated version of Chapter 9 of his then forthcoming Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome) were in substantial agreement with Harris’ views. As will be seen in Section 3, Sherwin-White and Erich Gruen published major studies of Roman foreign policy in the East in 1984,35 challenging significant aspects of Harris’ thesis. Subsequently, full-length studies of aspects of Roman imperialism have chipped away at Harris’ arguments,36 but at the time of writing, his interpretation is nevertheless prevalent in more general works.37 1.1 The Ancient Literary Sources for Roman Imperialism Modern controversies over the nature of Roman imperialism are largely driven by the state of the ancient source material. Unfortunately, not a single theoretical treatise on imperialism (or the expansion of states, as the ancient world understood this concept) survives from antiquity; it is even doubtful whether one was ever written. Only stray observations on such matters exist in the works of Cicero and a few others. Polybius, our best source for Rome’s rise to global power during the middle Republic, wrote a Universal History in forty books, of which, sadly, only about one-sixth survives. But, as will be seen in Section 3.1 below, there are enough seemingly contradictory and counterintuitive observations in his extant text to cause endless debate over his personal opinions about the Romans and Roman imperialism. Polybius’ deep personal involvement in major events of the second century—he was an active politician in Greece, was suspected of disloyalty by the Romans and deported to Italy, but later worked in Greece on behalf of the Roman government—raises interesting questions about his (and his informants’) potential political biases. That said, modern scholarship generally credits him with being a critical, scrupulous historian, and his contemporary perspective on a crucial period of growth in Roman power is invaluable. The extant Roman sources are plagued by triumphalist, jingoistic narratives of Rome’s inevitable march toward world conquest, with the gods on their side. The Roman historian Livy is perhaps the most prominent surviving exponent of this view. He wrote a history of Rome from the beginning of the city (or Ab 34  Harris 1984. 35   Sherwin-White 1984; Gruen 1984. 36  Eckstein 1987, 2006, and 2008; Kallet-Marx 1995; Burton 2011. 37  See, e.g., Forsythe 2005, 286; Mattingly 2011; Waterfield 2014. Smith and Yarrow 2012 is a collection of papers by devoted students of the late Peter Derow, whose collected papers on Roman imperialism (Derow 2015), like some of his students’, are very much in the Harris vein. See also the items listed in Eckstein 2008, 5 nn. 5 and 7.

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Urbe Condita, to give his history its proper title) in one hundred and forty-two books; thirty-five survive. Livy is an invaluable source for the growth of Roman power across the early and middle Republican periods, and, as has been frequently observed, when his text runs out toward the end of the extant Book 45, it is like a light going out. Narrative histories of Rome fail us at this point: not only is Polybius fragmentary, but his successor Posidonius’ history of Rome is completely lost, and Livy’s successors only survive in scrappy fragments quoted for the most part out of context by later authors. Later sources contain very useful information about Roman imperialism, its nature, and its discontents. Sallust, an erstwhile protégé of Julius Caesar, wrote monographs on specific episodes in Roman history with heavy interpretive bias, as well as an annalistic history covering the years 78–67 that survives only in fragments. Sallust, like Livy and other Roman historians, has only one misgiving about Rome’s rise to global power: its pernicious effects on native Roman virtue and hardiness. Other sources, especially Tacitus, compose speeches spoken by Rome’s enemies that are critical of Roman imperialism; the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus’ claim that “the Romans create a desert and call it peace” is still in use.38 These are also important testimonia for Roman imperialism—if for no other reason than that they show that (some?) Romans were somewhat self-aware and reflective about how they wielded power abroad. At the very least, these critiques demonstrate that the Romans recognized that men naturally prefer freedom to slavery, and that imperial power, therefore, is precarious and transient. 1.2 The Present Work The contours of what follows have been determined in large part by the nature of the contemporary debate over Roman imperialism, but also by the editorial brief of Brill’s Research Perspectives series, and the personal preferences and expertise of the author. The primary focus is on the post-Harris contemporary debate, and so is necessarily heavily weighted toward North American scholarship on the imperialism of the middle Republic. The late Republican and Imperial periods cannot be left entirely out of account, but the nature of Roman imperialism during these eras was transformed in various ways, largely by internal political factors, even if the age-old motivations for expansion did not change significantly. Section 3 and portions of Section 4 could just as easily have been brought together under the heading “The Imperialism of the Middle Republic,” while a large part of Section 4 could have been subsumed under “The Imperialism of the Late Republic and Principate.” The aims of the RP 38  Tac. Agr. 30.5.

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series, however, are to provide an overview of recent important publications on the topic, and to arrange the discussion thematically rather than around single works. It therefore seemed preferable to discuss middle Republican imperialism within the framework of the dominant preoccupation of the scholarship on it, its origins, causes, and motivations, while contextualizing most of the epiphenomena of imperialism in the later periods, when expansion slows and diminishes in scale, Rome’s security focus shifts to frontier defense and internal policing, and the evidence for provincial acculturation becomes more plentiful. As for personal preferences and expertise, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of such a wide field even within the quite generous space constraints of RPAH, and so coverage is necessarily selective. Several works on Roman imperialism (mostly pre-Harris) I have not found enlightening enough to include in the survey or simply have not read because more recent advances in the field have rendered their insights, if not entirely obsolete, then at least in need of updating. The predominance of English-language scholarship is partly a reflection of my being a native speaker working in the academic Anglosphere, but is also attributable to the recent major scholarly conversations on Roman imperialism being conducted for the most part in English. Finally, those familiar with my previous work on Roman diplomacy, imperialism, and international relations will not be surprised by the views advocated (and rejected) here. Sections 3 and 4 are the heart of this study, where readers can explore the recent scholarly state of play in the fields of Roman imperialism and its various epiphenomena. Because the latest debates (especially on middle Republican Roman imperialism) have focused some attention on the question of what sort of imperialism Rome exercised, using a typology developed to describe the imperialisms of the past two centuries, it will be necessary first to define terms, including some discussion of the development of imperialism theory (Section 2). Sections 3 and 4 will also need to be foregrounded by a survey of ancient sources for Roman imperialism in the first part of Section 3. Literally thousands of items are potentially relevant here—two recent sourcebooks contain hundreds of passages between them;39 selected for discussion here are those that appear most frequently in broad scholarly discussions of Roman imperialism. Finally, my conclusions (Section 5) will incorporate my own current perspective on the nature of Roman imperialism as well as suggestions for future research.

39  Champion 2004; Erskine 2010.

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2 Imperialism Although the Romans did not know the word imperialism, they had a robust concept of ‘power,’ which they expressed as imperium, the etymological root of ‘imperialism.’ The semantic range of imperium embraces the power of magistrates and pro-magistrates (imperatores, sing. imperator) invested with imperium to give commands and to expect them to be obeyed. In time, imperium came to encompass the ‘power of the Roman people,’ but it was only around the turn of the first millennium CE that it acquired a territorial meaning—‘the Roman Empire’ as a geographical space.40 The ruler of this space, the Roman emperor (from the Latin imperator), now had a virtual monopoly on imperium. We will return to modern definitions of ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ at the end of this section. 2.1 Modern Theories of Imperialism Modern imperialism theory begins with the publication of John Hobson’s polemical Imperialism: A Study.41 It was written upon Hobson’s return to Britain after he had served as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian covering the Boer War. During the war he and many others witnessed the internment of Boers in concentration camps, which provoked among liberal critics, like himself, a re-evaluation of imperialism. Reflecting on the orgy of imperial expansion between 1870 and 1900 (the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’) by the British government and other European states, Hobson attempted to explain “the growth of [the British] Empire whose nucleus is only 120,000 square miles, with 40,000,000 population … in the course of a single generation [to] an area of 4,754,000 square miles with an estimated population of 80,000,000.”42 Such expansionism marked a sea change in British government policy, which in the decades just prior to 1870 had largely avoided annexation. What lay behind the change, Hobson argues, was over-saving by British industrialists and under-consumption by perennially low-wage British workers. Rather than raise wages, industrialists hoarded profits, leading to the search by the big banks (“the ganglion of international capitalism”) for profitable investment 40  Richardson 2008 (building on the discussion in Richardson 1986, 6–10); cf. Koebner 1961, 1–17; Kallet-Marx 1995, 18–29. Erskine (2010, 6) notes that translators who use place names rather than the names of individual peoples introduce a distorting effect; so, to say Rome ruled Syracuse is quite different from saying Rome ruled (i.e., expected to be obeyed by) the Syracusans. 41  Hobson 1965 (first published in 1902). Earlier stray observations about imperialism and Roman imperialism are gathered in Flach 1976. 42  Hobson 1965, 18.

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opportunities overseas for the excess capital—Hobson’s “economic taproot of imperialism” (the title of Chapter 6 of Part I of his study). Such investment was risky, however, due to the political instability in the places targeted for investment opportunities. The British government, therefore, followed the capitalists’ lead, attempting to secure the profitability of their investments by shoring up local stability, that is, by annexing territory wherever it could. The attraction of Hobson’s explanation is its elegant simplicity, which of course is also its fatal flaw. His “taproot” is “an intellectual conjuring trick,” since a mere two per cent or less of British capital investment abroad demonstrably found its way into the newly annexed territories in that period, the rest flowing into the advanced economies of the United States, Australia, and Canada, which, moreover, were in fact producing raw materials for British domestic consumption.43 Hobson’s identification of the “taproot” is also problematic. As he himself recognized, below the financial drivers of imperialism is a psychological aberration: an irrational “enthusiasm for expansion … irregular and blind,” “primitive lusts of struggle, domination and acquisitiveness,” which found expression in “the spirit of adventure,” and “the itch for glory and adventure among military officers” in the late nineteenth century.44 The revolutionary Marxist V.I. Lenin responded to Hobson’s work in his 1916 pamphlet entitled “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”45 Lenin argues that Hobson’s imperialist era (1870–1900) was in fact a “period of transition” from a period of free capitalist competition before 1870 to one of monopolism after 1895, when “finance capital,” which is to say Hobson’s surplus (investment) capital, predominated European finance. In this period, the “highest (or monopoly) stage of capitalism” was achieved, and the world and its markets were divided up among the capitalist nations. The armed clashes that followed, culminating in the Great War, were simply attempts by these nations to redivide global markets among themselves. The fatal flaw in Lenin’s theory is the same as that in Hobson’s: the “glut of capital” after 1895 that Lenin identifies performs in precisely the same way as Hobson’s surplus (investment) capital did between 1870 and 1900, that is, the glut did not flow in any substantial amounts into the tropics but into the United States and the ‘White Dominions.’46 Leaving that aside, Lenin’s articulation of the notion of informal empire, that is, the economic and political 43  Fieldhouse 1961 (quotation at 190). 44  Hobson 1965 (quotations from 59, 221, 213, and 50, respectively). See the critique of Mitchell 1965. 45  Lenin 1975 (first published in 1916). 46  Fieldhouse 1961, 198–99.

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subordination of peripheral areas without formal annexation by the capitalist metropoles, marked a significant advance in thinking about imperialism. Lenin recognized that from the 1870s to the years leading up to the Great War, the capitalist nations sought to expand their spheres of influence, resulting in several “transitional forms of state dependence.” Between 1870 and 1914, finance capital’s relentless search for lucrative investment markets resulted in subordination of areas only “informally controlled” by the capitalist nations. This informal control was qualitatively no different from the subjection of those areas that were formally annexed.47 In 1919, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter published a significant critique of Hobson’s thesis.48 Schumpeter shifted the blame for imperialism and the Great War from the bourgeois finance capitalists to the European aristocracy. In his view, the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie preferred peace to disruptive imperial adventures since successful investment and trade can only thrive in a stable international environment. The nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European aristocracy, by contrast, craved the wars inevitably brought about by imperial expansion because of what Schumpeter calls an atavism, a psychopathology deeply ingrained in the European aristocratic mind-set. This atavism perpetuated into the present a disposition of mind acquired in the dim past, when European aristocrats organized their lives around constant warfare. Although most of society (including the bourgeoisie) had moved on, the aristocracy was still living in this outmoded thought-world, where honor and status had to be won on the battlefield. Like the rulers of the great ancient Near Eastern empires, contemporary European ruling elites thoroughly mobilized their societies’ resources for war, and oriented their activity and ideology around warfare and the glory derived from it. In such circumstances a ‘war machine’ mentality invariably takes hold. If opportunities to go to war evaporate, as happened in the nineteenth century, new outlets for military aggression must be found: “created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”49 Imperialism, which Schumpeter defines as “the objectless disposition on the part of the state to unlimited forcible expansion,”50 is the perfect antidote to the threat of peace. European imperialism between 47  Lenin 1975, 241–42. 48  Schumpeter 1991 (first published in 1919). He was apparently unaware of Lenin’s 1916 treatise. 49  Schumpeter 1991, 33. Schumpeter (50) denied that the Roman Empire was imperialist since “the policy of the Empire was directed only toward its preservation.” The Republic, however, “was undoubtedly an imperialist period, a time of unbounded will to conquest” (51). 50  Schumpeter 1991, 7.

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1870 and 1914 was simply the outward manifestation of a social and ideological pathology of a ruling elite living in the past and unable to adjust to new conditions, like the last of the dinosaurs lumbering around, fighting for turf in a ruined landscape. Elegant as it seems, Schumpeter’s characterization of imperialism is an explanation rather than a definition—or, rather, a non-explanation. The ‘objectlessness’ of imperial motivation seems counterintuitive in its dismissal of the conventionally accepted motivations for imperialism—Lebensraum, commercial gain, bloodlust, among others.51 Its great strength is that it is a psychological rather than a material explanation. Schumpeter attempts to account for what lies behind such concrete manifestations of imperialism as the hunt for treasure or land, exceptional aggression, the pursuit of glory, and so on. He gets there, according to his own lights: the atavism of the nineteenthcentury European aristocracy is the deepest cause of imperialism. Whether one believes his explanation to be “incomplete,” it is, in the end, an insightful “rational theory of irrational drives.”52 Thus far theories of imperialism are traditionally labeled ‘metrocentric’: those built upon investigations of expansionist impulses emanating from the metropolitan core of empire. In 1953, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson published “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” the first of a series of studies in which the authors attempted to shift the focus of analysis of imperialism from the metropolitan center to the imperial periphery.53 The essay challenges the economic foundations of Hobson’s and Lenin’s theories by arguing that imperialism was stimulated not by British protectionism after 1870 (so Hobson) or monopolism after 1895 (so Lenin), but in the mid-Victorian era of ‘free trade,’ when Britain annexed thousands of square miles of new territory, including New Zealand, the Gold Coast, Labuan, Natal, the Punjab, Sind, and Hong Kong. Whatever one makes of the economic argument (as has been seen, these explanations are deeply vulnerable to statistical distortion), from a theoretical perspective Robinson and Gallagher’s most valuable insight (shared with Lenin) is that British power and control during the late Victorian era was exercised for the most part informally. Any useful definition of imperialism should allow for informal empire since “refusals to annex are no proof of reluctance 51  Greene 1952, 453–54. Schumpeter also leaves Britain out of his account, since he seems to have accepted the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ stereotype of the English: the English were industrially more advanced (and thus inherently more pacifistic), and politically more democratic (and thus inherently less atavistic) than their continental counterparts during the nineteenth century: Schumpeter 1991, 23–24, 29–30. 52  Doyle 1986, 124 (the first quotation); Heimann 1952, 184 (the second). 53  Robinson and Gallagher 1976a (first published in 1953).

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to control.”54 British Victorian imperial behavior was mostly consistent: “trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary.”55 The role of the periphery, where informal empire was imposed, also played a role in British imperialism. The British annexation of portions of Africa in the 1880s and 1890s was dialectic: chaos on the periphery, such as the ‘Urabi Revolt in Egypt beginning in 1878, sparked British military intervention, which eventually evolved into a permanent military presence and formal control. The British preference and general principle, however, remained informal control since it was cheaper, more efficient, and politically less controversial than establishing a colonial bureaucracy and continually sending out armies of occupation. Subsequent studies by Robinson and Gallagher elaborated on and refined the basic ideas behind their 1953 essay. Their 1961 study Africa and the Victorians exhaustively tested against the relevant documentary evidence their thesis that the British preferred informal control where possible and annexation only where necessary.56 The book’s main concern, however, is geostrategic. British formal control tended to develop only where and when military rather than economic security was at stake. So, for example, the British intervention in Egypt in 1882 to shore up the friendly regime of Tewfik Pasha was motivated by concern that his fall might close off British access to their Indian empire via Suez. Robinson and Gallagher’s subsequent essay in The Cambridge Modern History, “The Partition of Africa,” added a new dimension: the major European powers were all expanding “not the frontiers of trade or empire, but the frontiers of fear” in Africa in the nineteenth century.57 Great power activity abroad was driven by a deep-seated fear of peer competition in what was regarded as a zero-sum game, and of the chaos of local conditions, which were subject to sporadic violent outbursts from the burgeoning ‘protonationalisms’ in Africa (as well as in Asia). The circumstances on the periphery rather than metropolitan dispositions accounted for the final shape of the great powers’ colonial holdings: “gimcrack creations … spatch-cocked together,” in pink (British), green (French), blue (German), yellow (Portuguese), and orange (Spanish) on the map.58 The precise means by which the European powers interacted with the periphery is elaborated in Ronald Robinson’s 1972 essay, “NonEuropean Foundations of European Imperialism,” in which the author argues that the native collaborator was “the central mechanism” by which European 54  Robinson and Gallagher 1976a, 57. 55  Robinson and Gallagher 1976a, 67. 56  Robinson and Gallagher with Denny 1961. 57  Robinson and Gallagher, 1976b (first published in 1962; quotation from 99). 58  Robinson and Gallagher 1976b, 124.

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imperialism came to be exercised in Africa and Asia.59 The European powers intruded on traditional societies engaged in ancient rivalries; collaboration arose when some groups decided to leverage the power and resources of the imperialists against their rivals. The chief drawback of pericentrism—the term now applied to the body of theory developed by Robinson and Gallagher—is that, pushed too far, it can too easily shade into victim blaming, something from which the modern aversion to empire instinctively recoils. It must be noted, however, that Robinson and Gallagher themselves never fall into this trap. The third, and, at the time of writing, predominant school of imperialism thought is a set of theories that are usually subsumed under the name International Relations (IR) Realism. It is also called ‘systemic’ or ‘international-systemic,’ reflecting its theoretical focus on the interstate system as a whole rather than on metropolitan or peripheral states. Within IR Realism, so-called Classical Realism is derived from the theoretical and historical analysis by the fifth-century Greek historian Thucydides. During the Cold War, academics and politicians discerned deep parallels between Thucydides’ bipolar Aegean, divided between Athenian and Spartan power, and the bipolar post-1945 world, divided between US and Soviet power. IR Realism adopted as fundamental tenets such Thucydidean axioms as “might makes right” and “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”60 Classical realists believe that the world consists of self-interested states, locked in a competition for power and security, a situation that arises from human nature. Late Cold War conditions—chiefly the relative stability of the US–Soviet bipolar world order—inspired a variation on traditional Realism, dubbed ‘Neorealism.’61 According to this approach, interstate behavior is conditioned by the international system being in a condition of anarchy—not in the sense that the global order is chaotic (though it may be)—but in terms of the word’s original Greek meaning, an-archē, ‘the absence of a leader.’ The international system lacks a credible central authority, international law, and the means to enforce it. Under such conditions, states must compete violently and ruthlessly with each other to ensure their own survival and security—a scarce asset in the violent anarchy—or risk destruction by their more vigorous system competitors. It is a Hobbesian world in which all states must be prepared to go to 59  Robinson and Gallagher 1976c (first published in 1972). 60  Fliess 1966 is a full-length study of the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War. Eckstein 2003 is a useful corrective to modern misunderstandings of Thucydides’ supposed views in the form of a critique of political scientists who cannot read Greek and therefore routinely fall prey to inaccurate English translations. 61  The classic theoretical statement is Waltz 1979.

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war at all times or risk destruction. International life is harsh, brutal, violent, and dangerous, and militarism and war are normal. Because it is difficult to know much about the capabilities and plans of other states—the ‘uncertainty principle’—all states must prepare against anticipated threats and greater than anticipated threats—the ‘worst-case scenario.’ The brutal competition for superiority in order to create security ironically leads to less security in the system overall since security seeking is a zero-sum game: one state’s gain in security is the others’ loss, causing resentment and distrust to intensify; this is the ‘security dilemma.’ Succinctly, “the state among states … conducts its affairs in the brooding shadow of violence. Because some states may at any time use force, all states must be prepared to do so—or live at the mercy of their militarily more vigorous neighbors.”62 War, of course, is endemic in such a system. Power-balancing behavior can mitigate the violence, and the fewer large system competitors, the better (bipolarity is better than multipolarity, unipolarity is better than bipolarity). Critiques of IR Realism have not been lacking.63 Above all, it has been observed that it is a far better description of the world than an explanation of how it works. The epistemological parsimony of the theory—often vaunted as its greatest virtue—means that it simultaneously explains everything and nothing. Neorealism’s radical determinism is also radically ahistorical. Neorealists, though acknowledging that the internal culture of states affects the system, routinely leave these ‘unit-level’ factors out of their theoretical analysis. A further problem with Neorealism (and Realism generally) is that it omits what Richard Ned Lebow has called “the spirit” from its analysis of state motivation.64 Intangible (as opposed to material) factors such as prestige, honor, and morality often motivate international state behavior. Finally, Neorealism (and IR Realism generally) derives a great deal of its authority from what may be called ‘the realist shrug,’ a discursive strategy that amounts to assertions about the world and shuts down alternative interpretations and discourses. The credibility of the theory is in part derived from a form of argument that absolves itself from the burden of proof by simply asserting that ‘regrettable as it may be, this is simply how the world works.’

62  Waltz 1979, 102. 63  Here I summarize the arguments outlined in Burton 2011, 15–18. I will discuss the powerful response of IR Constructivism to Realism in Section 3.3. 64  Lebow 2008.

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2.2 A Provisional Definition In 1986, Michael Doyle published Empires, a major work of synthesis that attempted to use historical analysis to develop a typology of empire. If “Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire,”65 then empire, according to Doyle, is “a system of interaction [formal or informal] between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy—the effective sovereignty—of the other, the subordinate periphery.”66 Doyle also comments on the nature of the process: “It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence.”67 Some commentary on Doyle’s definitions is necessary. Although most of us who study imperialism focus on the process of establishing an empire, Doyle gives equal analytical weight to how an empire is maintained. This stands to reason; after all, the maintenance of empire can include ‘crackdowns’ on rebellious activity, or the extension of imperial frontiers to establish ‘buffer zones.’ And, as Polybius recognized, it is not enough to explain how a state acquires a global empire; one must also evaluate how the state runs that empire.68 Doyle also incorporates into his definition the mechanics of empire, which allows him to capture metrocentric analysis (empire achieved by force) as well as pericentrism (empire achieved through collaboration).69 Doyle’s core definition of ‘empire’ requires some exegesis. He divides imperial ‘control’ into formal and informal categories; these correspond to colonial/ annexationist and non-annexationist metropolitan policies, respectively. The definition, therefore, captures the basic insight of Lenin, and Robinson and Gallagher that the exercise of metropolitan informal influence over peripheral states is authentically imperial behavior. “Effective political sovereignty,” according to Doyle, amounts to metropolitan control of any aspect of a peripheral state’s policy, whether domestic or foreign. Empire results when the metropole exercises direct, formal control or indirect, informal control of the foreign and domestic policies of a peripheral state. Hegemony results from the metropole’s control of the foreign policy alone of the peripheral state. 65  Doyle 1986, 45. 66  Doyle 1986, 12. 67  Doyle 1986, 45. 68  Polyb. 3.4. This realization compelled Polybius to add a further ten books of his Universal History to his originally projected total of thirty. 69  The third mechanism of empire in his definition, dependence, refers to practical inequality and constraints imposed by the distribution of international resources and division of labor, which makes peripheral states highly sensitive to policy and economic change in the metropole. See Doyle 1986, 43.

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The weight of imperial power runs along two intersecting axes of metropolitan influence and the nature of imperial control: unequal influence by the metropole in empires results in a relationship of dependence, and under hegemony, a sphere of influence is established; equal influence between states in empires resolves in situations of interdependence, and under hegemony, in independence and diplomacy. Doyle tabulates as follows: Weight of power

Control Constraint unequal influence Equal influence

Scope of power (output) Foreign and domestic policy

Foreign policy

Empire (formal and informal) Dependence

Hegemony Sphere of influence

Interdependence

Independence, diplomacy

Source: Doyle, Empires, 44

Doyle’s typology of imperialism seems sufficiently comprehensive to capture the complex variety of known interstate relations, and will therefore be adopted here as a useful analytical tool for thinking about Roman imperialism(s) during different phases of Roman history and in different parts of the Mediterranean. 3

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Did the Romans have an empire, in Doyle’s terms? The answer is unequivocally yes, but the timing of it is difficult to pinpoint. From at least the fourth century, Rome exercised hegemony within central Italy. Communities that were granted (or burdened with) full Roman citizenship surrendered their civic identity as well as their foreign policy prerogatives to Rome, but at least retained some autonomy in the management of their own local affairs as municipia. Italian states lacking the vote at Rome (ciuitates sine suffragio) were in the same position, except they could not vote in Roman assemblies. Italian allied states (socii) paid no tribute but were subjected to a virtual war tax in the form of having to supply auxiliary units to the Roman legions serving under Roman commanders.70 Until the early second century, Rome refrained from 70  Erskine 2010, 12–15. Allied states also had to provide pay for their troops: Liv. 27.9.13.

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interfering in the allies’ domestic political sovereignty; hegemony, therefore, best describes Rome’s relationship with them.71 Roman expansion overseas necessitated the development of different forms of power and control. The nature of their imperium in the barbarian West— chiefly Spain and Gaul—and later, Britain, the barbarian fringes of the Balkans, and the lands around the Danube, is traditionally regarded as qualitatively different from their relations with the Greek East, the Near East, and the states of the North African littoral. Over the first group Rome exercised formal effective sovereignty (empire) from the beginning, through ongoing warfare and the onset of the process of provincialization (the establishment of permanent zones of Roman administrative and military control). Until parts of the second group were annexed as provinces over the course of the second and first centuries, Roman relations with them could be characterized as diplomacy/ independence (the Seleucid Empire between 200 and 192, for example), sphere of influence (the European Greek states between 196 and 146), or hegemony (Carthage after 201). Annexations of other areas (most notably, Britain, Dacia, Mesopotamia, Arabia) continued under the principate, but without the intermediate stages of informal control and hegemony, and client kingdoms gradually disappeared and were converted into new provinces (Mauretania, Thrace, Galatia, Cappadocia, Commagene, Osrhoene). Determining whether and in what form the Romans exercised empire is a relatively straightforward procedure. The more difficult questions, and the main preoccupation of scholars of Roman imperialism, is did the Romans covet an international empire, and how aggressively did they pursue it? To begin to answer these questions, we must first turn to the ancient sources. 3.1 The View from Antiquity In the absence of any extended reflections on state expansion (that is, imperialism) in the extant ancient record, scholars have traditionally focused on two bodies of evidence: anecdotal material concerning Roman foreign policy and international behavior that easily lends itself to analysis in terms of modern imperialisms, and scattered programmatic statements about the expansion of state power, including Rome’s. In terms of the first category, scholars have settled on several dozen or so passages that either demonstrate or challenge the notion that the Romans

71  For the suppression of Bacchus worship in the Italian communities in 186, see CIL 1.581 (the senatorial decree ordering the suppression in the Ager Teraunus in southern Italy); Liv. 39.17–19. Praetors were sent to investigate rumors of poisonings among the Italians between 184 and 180 (Liv. 39.41.5–6; 40.37.4, 43.2–3).

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were imperialists in the modern sense. In a famous passage, Polybius says that the Roman senate decided in 157/6 to make war on the Dalmatians across the Adriatic because, among other reasons, they did not want the Italians “becoming effeminate” due to a long period of peace.72 Similarly, in 303, Livy reports that there were no wars in Italy, but rather than let an entire year elapse without war, a Roman expedition to Umbria was arranged in response to a rumor of attacks on local farmers by cave dwellers.73 The destruction of the cities of Carthage and Corinth in 146 is often invoked to demonstrate the brutality of Roman imperialism—and the injustice of the Romans attacking far weaker powers. As for Roman cruelty and savagery in war, Polybius says that the Romans inspire terror when after a siege they storm a city, where in the aftermath human corpses, dogs cut in half, and other dismembered animals can be seen.74 Occasionally cited as an example of Rome’s appetite for expansion is the advice of Agelaus of Naupactus to the Macedonian king Philip V in 217 to put an end to the Social War and prepare for the coming “storm clouds looming in the West,” which would soon settle on Greece. He was referring to the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, the winner of which, Agelaus indicated, would not content itself with Italy and Sicily, but would begin expanding eastward.75 Diplomatic sharp practice is invoked as well. In 168 the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV was in the process of conquering Egypt, and was in fact within a whisker of taking Alexandria itself, when he was confronted by a Roman embassy led by C. Popillius Laenas (cos. 172). The king hailed the ambassador and held out his hand in the usual gesture of friendship. Instead of shaking his hand, however, Popillius filled it: he handed to Antiochus, and ordered him to read, tablets containing the senatorial decree urging him to reconcile with Ptolemy VI. When Antiochus asked to consult his friends about the decree’s contents, Popillius infamously did what Polybius says “was thought to be overbearing and totally arrogant”: he drew a circle in the sand around the king with a switch he was carrying, and ordered him to respond to the decree before leaving the circle. The king caved under pressure and agreed to comply with the decree.76 Two further diplomatic incidents are frequently cited. In 150, Ser. Sulpicius Galba lured 8,000 Lusitanians into surrendering with promises of fertile land for them to settle on—and then massacred them to a man.77 72  Polyb. 32.13.4–9 (ἀποθηλύνεσθαι at §7). 73  Liv. 10.1.1–5. 74  Polyb. 10.15.5. 75  Polyb. 5.104. 76  Polyb. 29.27.1–8: the quotation—βαρὺ μὲν δοκοῦν εἶναι καὶ τελέως ὑπερήφανον—at §4. 77  App. Hisp. 59–61.

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In 191, when the Aetolians surrendered to the consul, M’. Acilius Glabrio, but then objected to the harsh, non-negotiable terms he proceeded to lay down, the consul ordered slave collars and chains to be retrieved to demonstrate to the Aetolians just what Roman absolute surrender (deditio) meant for the surrendering party.78 Often brought into the debate about Roman imperialism are a string of cynical observations about Roman foreign policy in the later books of Polybius. The reason the Romans suggested to the Rhodians that they should try to mediate a peace between Rome and Perseus was so that they might later treat the Rhodians however they wished—harshly, as it turned out.79 The senate approved the shameless flattery of Prusias II, king of Bithynia, and so responded favorably to him when he came to Rome. By contrast, the senators, embarrassed by their relationship with Eumenes II, king of Pergamum, barred him not just from Rome but from all Italy, sending him packing when he arrived on Italian shores and later encouraging the Galatians to attack his kingdom.80 The senate prevented the vigorous young adult Seleucid royal, Demetrius, from securing the Syrian throne after the death of Antiochus IV since it better served Rome’s interest to have an incapable boy, Demetrius’ cousin Antiochus V, in power.81 When in 159 Demetrius extradited to Rome Leptines, who had assassinated a Roman legate, Cn. Octavius (cos. 165), a few years earlier, the senators released him in order to hold in reserve a grievance against the king.82 In 180 the Roman senate made it a point of policy to support such abjectly pro-Roman Greek politicians as Callicrates of Leontium against more independently minded statesmen—a beginning of a change for the worse in Roman foreign policy.83 In disputes between Masinissa of Numidia and Carthage, the Romans always decided in favor of the former, not because it was just but because it was in Rome’s best interest to do so.84 And, of course, the Romans had long since made up their minds to declare war on Carthage in 150, but were seeking a plausible pretext.85 Instances of Roman exploitation of the tangible benefits of empire are often brought into the discussion. In 264, the Roman consuls dangled the 78  Liv. 36.28.4–6. 79  Polyb. 28.17.9. 80  Polyb. 30.18–19. 81  Polyb. 31.2. 82  Polyb. 32.3.12. 83  Polyb. 24.10. 84  Polyb. 31.21.5–6. 85  Polyb. 36.2.1. Polybius (36.9) reports two negative and two positive Greek opinions on Rome’s treatment of Carthage, none of which can be securely identified as his own.

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promise of rich booty before the majority of voters if they undertook an invasion of Sicily to aid the Mamertines, Campanian mercenaries who had taken the city of Messana, against Syracuse.86 When Carthage suffered near collapse after losing the First Punic War, the Romans opportunistically—and “contrary to all justice,” according to Polybius—seized Sardinia and raised Carthage’s war indemnity by 1,200 talents.87 The Roman treaty with Aetolia allowed the Aetolians to keep all captured towns, while the Romans secured all the movable plunder—human beings included—from towns they captured, and half from those jointly captured.88 Soldiers eagerly enlisted for the war against Perseus since they saw how rich the soldiers who served in the wars against Philip V and Antiochus III had become;89 appetite for plunder is supposedly behind the rush of soldiers volunteering for service in the Third Punic War.90 At the end of the Third Macedonian War, the Roman commander Aemilius Paullus, on orders from the senate, and to reward his soldiers, turned over for plundering and destruction seventy Epirote Molossian towns, and oversaw the enslavement of 150,000 people.91 The tribute from the Macedonian Republics, set up after the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy in 167, sufficed to exempt all Roman citizens from paying taxes.92 Another form of exploitation of the benefits of empire was protectionism. The Romans banned the cultivation of the olive and the vine in Transalpine Gaul in 154, to the benefit of the owners of large Italian plantations.93 Cicero lent his support to a tribunician bill of 66 granting Pompey the Great an extraordinary command against Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, by citing the revenues of empire that had been lost as a result of the war with the king dragging on.94 On the other side of the ledger is an assemblage of evidence demonstrating Roman imperial restraint. It is, of course, the Macedonians, not the Romans, 86  Polyb. 1.11.2. It is uncertain whether it was a majority of the people or of the senators that was appealed to in this way; Eckstein 1980 and 1987, 80–83 believes it was the latter. 87  Polyb. 1.88.8–12, 3.28.1–3 (with the quotation—παρὰ πάντα τὰ δίκαια—at §2). 88   S EG 13.382. 89  Liv. 42.32.6. Although there is more evidence for attempts to avoid and interfere with the levy than for soldiers flocking to the standards out of greed for plunder: Burton 2017, 113–14 with references (Harris 1979, 48–49 ignores this). 90  App. Lib. 75, with Harris 1979, 102. All Appian says, however, is that the splendidness of the force and confidence in the successful outcome of the war caused both citizens and allies to be eager to sign up, ὡς γὰρ ἐς ἐπιφανῆ στρατείαν καὶ προῦπτον ἐλπίδα πᾶς τις ἀστῶν καὶ συμμάχων ὥρμα, καὶ πολλοὶ καὶ ἐθελονταὶ παρήγγελλον ἐς τὸν κατάλογον. 91  Polyb. 30.15; Liv. 45.34.1–6; Plut. Aem. 29.1–3. 92  Plut. Aem. 38.1. 93  Cic. Rep. 3.16. 94  Cic. Man. 14–19. Discussion: Beness and Hillard 2013, 145–47.

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who delight in war as if it were a banquet.95 In the late Republic, the Romans often passed up golden opportunities to annex vast swathes of prosperous territory—Numidia in 105 (after the defeat of Jugurtha), Cyrene, bequeathed to Rome in 96, and Egypt in the 50s.96 In 218, a law was passed restricting senators’ capacity to engage in maritime trade.97 When the Romans established the free Macedonian and Illyrian states after the abolition of the Macedonian and Ardiaean kingdoms in 167, they demanded from the inhabitants only half the tribute paid to their former sovereigns.98 They shut the Macedonian gold and silver mines as well, passing up the huge profits to be had from them.99 The second body of ancient evidence cited in discussions of Roman imperialism consists of programmatic statements about the expansion of states— positive and negative. All such discussions must begin with Polybius. Although “Polybius did not produce a theory of imperialism,”100 clearly he thought long and deeply about international power politics.101 Unlike Joseph Schumpeter, Polybius does not regard imperial expansion as “objectless.” “No sensible man,” the Greek historian writes, “goes to war for the sake of simply prevailing over his adversaries.”102 On the other hand, in Polybius’ world, war is “natural” for free states, as it is for kings.103 It is also natural for states “to believe it to be a splendid and wonderful thing to lead many men, and to rule and dominate.”104 Kings, in Polybius’ experience, despise political equality and seek to subject and reduce to obedience all men, or at least as many as possible.105 To do so, they must resort to treachery since treachery is prevalent in international

95  Polyb. 5.2.6. 96  Sall. Hist. 2.41 (= 2.43 M); Liv. Per. 70; Just. Epit. 39.5.2–3 (Cyrene; it was finally annexed in the mid-70s: Sall. Hist. 2.41 [= 2.43 M]; App. B Civ. 1.111); Cic. Leg. agr. 2.41; Just. Epit. 39.5.1 (Egypt). On the other hand, they took up the legacy of Attalus III in 133 by annexing his kingdom of Pergamum and creating the province of Asia. And, as Harris (1979, 154–58) points out, reluctance to annex the other states was driven by political rivalry rather than aversion to expansion per se. 97  Liv. 21.63.3–4. 98  Liv. 45.18.7–8. 99  Liv. 45.18.2–4. 100  Gruen 1984, 344; also, Baronowski 2011, 11. 101  Eckstein 2006, 100–104, to whom the following discussion owes much. But see also Harris 1979, 107–17; Gruen 1984, 343–51; Baronowski 2011, 61–175. 102  Polyb. 3.4.10, οὔτε γὰρ πολεμεῖ τοῖς πέλας οὐδεὶς νοῦν ἔχων ἕνεκεν αὐτοῦ τοῦ καταγωνίσασθαι τοὺς ἀντιταττομένους. 103  Polyb. 5.106.5, 21.22.8, φύσει. 104  Polyb. 6.50.3, κάλλιον καὶ σεμνότερον εἶναι νομίζει τὸ πολλῶν μὲν ἡγεῖσθαι, πολλῶν δ᾽ ἐπικρατεῖν καὶ δεσπόζειν. Discussion: Eckstein 2006, 193. 105  Polyb. 21.22.8. Discussion: Eckstein 2006, 87.

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politics.106 “Spears never rest,” Polybius says, quoting Euripides,107 because, in modern terms, the ancient Mediterranean international system was a formal anarchy; so, the Fourth Syrian War inevitably broke out since there was no credible system actor to intervene and block the side that seemed to act unjustly.108 In a remarkable anticipation of modern power-balancing theory, Polybius writes that during Carthage’s mercenary war of the late 240s/early 230s, Hiero II, king of Syracuse and close ally of Rome, ἀεὶ μέν ποτε κατὰ τὸν ἐνεστῶτα πόλεμον μεγάλην ἐποιεῖτο σπουδὴν εἰς πᾶν τὸ παρακαλούμενον ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν, τότε δὲ καὶ μᾶλλον ἐφιλοτιμεῖτο, πεπεισμένος συμφέρειν ἑαυτῷ καὶ πρὸς τὴν ἐν Σικελίᾳ δυναστείαν καὶ πρὸς τὴν Ῥωμαίων φιλίαν τὸ σῴζεσθαι Καρχηδονίους, ἵνα μὴ παντάπασιν ἐξῇ τὸ προτεθὲν ἀκονιτὶ συντελεῖσθαι τοῖς ἰσχύουσι. Polyb. 1.83.2–3

always showed great zeal in doing everything the Carthaginians requested, and now was even happier to oblige, convinced that it benefited himself, as regarded his kingdom in Sicily and his friendship with the Romans, to preserve the Carthaginians in order that it not be granted to the powerful to achieve its ends wholly without effort.109 Polybius regards such a policy as “completely wise and sensible” since “we should never help establish such great power for a single state with whom we cannot dispute about rights that have been agreed upon.”110 Finally, Polybius articulated the general principle that “they maintain their empires best who best persist in those same principles by which they won their empires in the first place.”111 106  Polyb. 13.3.1. 107  Polyb. 5.106.4, οὔποτε ἥσυχοι δορί. 108  Polyb. 5.67.11. 109  Some anti-Roman Greek statesmen felt the same way on the eve of the Third Macedonian War: Polyb. 30.6.6. The sentiment appears frequently in Polybian sections of Livy (Liv. 42.30.5–6, 46.4). See now Burton 2017, 74 n. 83. 110  Polyb. 1.83.3–4, πάνυ φρονίμως καὶ νουνεχῶς λογιζόμενος. οὐδέποτε γὰρ χρὴ … τηλικαύτην οὐδενὶ συγκατασκευάζειν δυναστείαν, πρὸς ἣν οὐδὲ περὶ τῶν ὁμολογουμένων ἐξέσται δικαίων ἀμφισβητεῖν. Polybius learned this lesson from his father Lycortas, who made an issue of disputing the Achaean League’s treaty rights with a Roman embassy in 184. See below. 111  Polyb. 10.36.5, κάλλιστα φυλάττουσι τὰς ὑπεροχὰς οἱ κάλλιστα διαμείναντες ἐπὶ τῶν αὐτῶν προαιρέσεων, αἷς ἐξ ἀρχῆς κατεκτήσαντο τὰς δυναστείας. This view is reiterated in the second Greek opinion on Rome’s behavior toward Carthage (36.9.5–8, οὐ ταύτην ἔχοντας αὐτοὺς τὴν προαίρεσιν κατεκτῆσθαι τὴν ἡγεμονίαν, etc.). Discussion: Baronowski 2011, 87–113.

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Specifically Roman imperialism, however, is the true focus of Polybius’ fortybook history. He credits the Romans with a strong expansionist impulse. After the Gallic sack in 390/387, he states, the Romans seized the opportunity to begin expanding by making war against their immediate neighbors.112 After the invasion of Pyrrhus in 280–275, the Romans attacked the rest of Italy, regarding it as their own property.113 After the defeat of Hannibal, Polybius says the Romans developed “a plan to conquer the entire world,”114 which before this, was limited to the desire to conquer Sicily after they captured and sacked Agrigentum in 262, and to drive the Celts out of the Po Valley as a result of the overwhelming Roman victory in the Battle of Telamon in 225.115 The victory over Hannibal prompted the Romans “to extend their hands to grab the rest and make an attempt on Greece and Asia Minor with an army.”116 Polybius chides those Greeks who think the Romans acquired their empire by chance or involuntarily (that is, defensively and “in a fit of absence of mind”); schooling themselves in great wars, he says, gave the Romans the courage not only to strive for rulership of the whole world and domination, but also to achieve that aim.117 At the heart of this Roman drive for domination, according to Polybius, is a grim determination: the Romans do everything with brute force.118 On the other hand, Polybius routinely assigns the responsibility for starting major wars, which result in the expansion of Roman power, to Rome’s adversaries. The latter attack Rome’s friends on the periphery, who then secure Roman protection against the aggressors; alternatively, chaos caused by wars near Roman zones of influence might prompt the Romans to intervene against one of the parties to the conflict of their own accord.119 Moreover, as stated before, it is not the Romans but the Macedonians who “delight in war as if it were a banquet.”120 The Macedonian king Philip V was the ruler whom Polybius identified as harboring the ambition to rule over the entire world; after all, he believed the impossible—that he was descended from Alexander the Great and Philip II as well as Antigonus the One-Eyed and Demetrius the Besieger.121 112  Polyb. 1.63.9. 113  Polyb. 1.6.4–6. 114  Polyb. 3.2.6, ἔννοιαν σχεῖν τῆς τῶν ὅλων ἐπιβολῆς; cf. 1.3.6, τὴν τῶν ὅλων ἐπιβολήν. 115  Polyb. 1.20.1–2 (Sicily), 2.31.8 (Po Valley Celts). 116  Polyb. 1.3.6, καὶ τότε πρῶτον ἐθάρσησαν ἐπὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τὰς χεῖρας ἐκτείνειν καὶ περαιοῦσθαι μετὰ δυνάμεως εἴς τε τὴν Ἑλλάδα καὶ τοὺς κατὰ τὴν Ἀσίαν τόπους. 117  Polyb. 1.6.9. 118  Polyb. 1.37.7, βία. 119  Walbank 1963, 11–12. The classic statement of the periphery driving Roman intervention is Holleaux 1935, discussed above, Introduction. 120  Polyb. 5.2.6. 121  Polyb. 5.102.1, with Walbank 1993.

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Further complicating the picture is the figure of Tychē, the goddess of fortune. It was her invisible hand that nudged the Romans toward world conquest.122 So much for a Greek outsider’s view(s) of the expansion of Roman power. What did the Romans themselves think brought about their empire?123 The gods, primarily, who approved of the Romans’ habitual seeking of a just (that is, a defensive) cause before making war. Although the earliest articulation of the concept of the just war, iustum bellum, belongs to Cicero, it is probably very old, intimately bound up as it appears to have been with the archaic fetial ritual.124 The fetiales were specially appointed priests in charge of important aspects of foreign policy, such as treaty-making, and who demanded from Rome’s antagonists satisfaction for perceived injury done to Rome (rerum repetitio), and if this was not forthcoming within thirty-three days, a iustum bellum could be declared against them. Just wars, according to Cicero, must have a good reason (causa), they must be proclaimed and declared, and only follow from the failure of seeking redress (rerum repetitio) from the offender.125 It was only the favor of the gods that would foster the increase of the Roman state, which the Romans prayed for every five years at the end of the censorial lustrum.126 The poet Vergil imagines Jupiter vouchsafing for Rome “empire without end.”127 Cicero proclaims that Roman dedication to the gods, religious scruples, and recognition that the will of the gods directs and rules all things have resulted in the Roman conquest of all nations and peoples.128 Elsewhere

122  See, e.g., 1.4.4–5, 15.20.5–8. 123  The classic account is Brunt 1978, but see also Harris, 1979, 125–30; Gruen 1984, 273–87; Morley 2010, 17. 124  Ager 2009, 17–21 (esp. 20: “The notion of having justice on one’s side in battle did not spring fully formed—and in martial dress—from the head of Cicero”). 125  Illa iniusta bella sunt, quae sunt sine causa suscepta … Nullum bellum iustum habetur nisi denuntiatum, nisi indictum, nisi repetitis rebus … (Cic. Rep. 3.35; also Off. 1.34–40). Cf. Diod. Sic. 32.5: the Romans take care only to embark on wars that are just, and make no casual or hasty decisions about them. 126  Val. Max. 4.1.10 (perhaps authentic). Note, however, that the prayer that the gods would make the Romans’ “affairs” greater and larger (di immortales ut populi Romani res meliores amplioresque facerent) could refer to anything: the empire in the territorial sense (so Harris 1979, 118), but more probably the state, its population, and the harvest. See Sherwin-White 1980, 177; Briscoe 1980, 87; Gruen 1984, 282–83; Eckstein 1987, xiv n. 10, xvi n. 16, and 2006, 191–93, with illuminating parallels. 127  Verg. Aen. 1.278–279 (imperium sine fine). 128  Cic. Har. 19.

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he states that the Romans cannot be slaves since the gods wished them to rule over all peoples.129 Given divine sanction for the imperium Romanum, it is no surprise that additional Roman explanations for their imperial success were predominantly moral. So, for the early second-century poet Quintus Ennius in his historical epic poem the Annales, “the Roman state stands on the character/customs/ morals and men of old” (moribus antiquis res stat Romana uirisque).130 In the Roman nostalgic historical imagination, older—antiquus—was always better than the degenerate present, as will be seen shortly. The Latin term mores, which combines the senses of the English words ‘character,’ ‘customs,’ and ‘morals,’ was a morally freighted word in the Roman vocabulary; so, mos maiorum, ‘the ways of our forefathers,’ that is, ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’ (which again combines moral character with ‘ancientness’) was the behavioral ideal of Roman political and social life.131 The term uir, ‘man,’ signifies much more than simply the male of the species, especially in epic poems such as Ennius’. A uir is also a ‘real man,’ that is, “one possessing manly virtues.”132 In Latin, uirtus literally means ‘manliness,’ ‘being a real man’ in a positive sense, that is, being a man in possession of a panoply of Roman moral virtues—sapientia (‘wisdom’), honos (‘esteem’), gloria (‘fame’), fortitudo (‘bravery’), disciplina (‘discipline’), clementia (‘mercy’), modestia (‘moderation’), pietas (‘dutifulness’), fides (‘good faith’), frugalitas (‘temperance’), nobilitas (‘renown’), dignitas (‘prestige’), grauitas (‘seriousness’), aequitas (‘fairness’)—whose morally charged meanings still resonate today in their English cognates.133 Virtus leads to— and justifies—imperium. “Rome rules over all nations,” according to Cicero, “because of its moral character.”134 According to the historian Livy, “when virtue was pursued, the Roman empire increased.”135

129  Cic. Phil. 6.19. Elsewhere (August. De civ. D. 19.21 = Cic. Rep. 3.36), Cicero argues that servitude is useful to Rome’s subjects. There is no need to attribute this argument to Panaetius (on whom, see further below): Strasburger 1965, 44–45; Ferrary 1988, 370–74; contra Baronowski 2011, 20–22. 130  Enn. Ann. 500 V = 156 Sk (quoted in Cic. Rep. 5.1). Cf. Liv. Pr. 9, consciously echoing Ennius: quae uita, qui mores fuerint, per quos uiros quibusque artibus domi militiaeque et partum et auctum imperium sit (“what were the lives, the morals, through what kind of men and with what skills the imperium was both created and increased”). 131  Cic. Rep. 5.1; Cic. Sen. 37. 132  Cf. OLD s.u. 3. 133  Lind 1972. 134  Cic. Ver. 2.4.81, [Roma] propter uirtutem omnibus nationibus imperat. 135  Liv. 4.3.13, dum … eniteret uirtus, creuit imperium Romanum.

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Cicero observes elsewhere a further reason for the growth of Roman power. Roman magistrates and commanders established a “protectorate over the entire world rather than an imperium,” he writes, by defending “their allies and provinces with fairness and good faith.”136 Cicero’s use of fides, ‘good faith,’ is important here. For the Romans, fides governed their interaction with their international partners, their friends and allies. Fides, as just noted, is a part of uirtus, but it is also divinely sanctioned; indeed, Fides was also a goddess in the Roman pantheon. In the Roman conception, the gods favored those who conducted their affairs with good faith and punished those who did not. Thus, fides Romana contrasted with Carthaginian Punica fides, which was a metonymy for bad faith, mala fides.137 Interestingly, in the passage just cited, Cicero contrasts the protectorate (patrocinium) established by Rome through fides and aequitas (another aspect of uirtus) with imperium, which here approximates ‘dominion’ in the sense of firm territorial control over other states by a superior power.138 The contrast emphasizes that, unlike Rome’s rivals for power, the Romans granted some measure of autonomy and freedom to their allies and friends. The principle of iustum bellum, governed by fides, ensures that all of Rome’s wars are defensive. Aggressive wars or wars undertaken despite the expressed disfavor of the gods (the late Republican dynast M. Licinius Crassus’ war on Parthia in 54–53 springs to mind) are fundamentally un-Roman. Even Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul can be construed as defensive in a pre-emptive sense. In 56, Cicero successfully argued (albeit in a speech written at Caesar’s behest) that unlike the defensive stance of previous commanders in Gaul, Caesar made war not only on those Celtic tribes already in arms, but on the rest of Gaul as well, thus freeing Italy from fear of anyone living between the Alps and the North Sea.139 136  Cic. Off. 2.27, nostri autem magistratus imperatoresque ex hac una re maximam laudem capere studebant, si prouincias, si socios aequitate et fide defendissent; itaque illud patrocinium orbis terrae uerius quam imperium poterat nominari. Cf. also Cic. Rep. 3.35, noster autem populus sociis defendendis terrarum iam potitus est (“Our people have come into possession of the entire world by defending its allies”). 137  On fides, see now Burton 2011, 38–42. 138  Cf. OLD s.u. 7. 139  Cic. Prou. cons. 32, Caesare imperatore gestum est, antea tantum modo repulsum … [Caesar] non enim sibi solum cum iis quos iam armatos contra populum Romanum uidebat bellandum esse duxit, sed totam Galliam in nostram dicionem esse redigenda, 34, nihil est enim ultra illam altitudinem montium [sc. Alpium] usque ad Oceanum quod sit Italiae pertimescendum. Caesar himself, of course, is always careful to construct defensive arguments for his wars in Gaul, despite his (unstated) motives to secure as much plunder as possible for himself and his supporters, and to achieve status parity with Pompey (Stevenson 2013, 187–92).

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Cicero’s assertion that Rome’s imperialism is overwhelmingly defensive is, of course, an exaggeration; after all, in the passage in the De Officiis immediately preceding his assertion that Rome’s patrocinium was established through aequitas and fides, he writes that Rome fought wars “on behalf of its allies, or for the sake of imperium.”140 Earlier in the work, he argues that war can be fought for the sake of imperium and in order to seek glory, but must originate from just causes, and be pursued with less fierceness.141 In another treatise, Cicero states that wars should only be fought in defense of good faith (that is, to defend allies) and for the sake of safety, but admits that revenge is a legitimate motivation as well.142 He also asserts that the Roman people have grown great not by accident, but by planning and discipline—with an assist from Fortune.143 Elsewhere, he proudly proclaims that the Roman imperium is Rome’s gloria, and even that Roman military virtue has compelled the entire world to obey Rome’s imperium.144 The programmatic statements about the imperium Romanum emerging from the Roman sources are therefore overwhelmingly positive—predictably so. There were some misgivings, however. In the nostalgic historical imagination of the Romans (excepting flatterers of the powerful), the present was always worse than the past; history was nothing more than a process of continuous decline.145 As noted earlier, Roman writers who gave any thought at all to the downside of empire were preoccupied by a single concern: the negative effect of the possession of empire on the moral character of the conquerors. Invariably, these same authors wondered “when it all started to go wrong.” In the late 30s, in the context of the civil war between Antony and Octavian, Livy wrote that 140  Cic. Off. 2.26, bella aut pro sociis aut de imperio. 141  Cic. Off. 1.38, Cum uero de imperio decertatur belloque quaeritur gloria, causas omnino subesse tamen oportet easdem, quas dixi paulo ante iustas causas esse bellorum. Sed ea bella, quibus imperii proposita gloria est, minus acerbe gerenda sunt. 142  Cic. Rep. 3.34, aut pro fide aut pro salute, 35, ulciscendi. 143  Rep. 2.30, non fortuito populum Romanum sed consilio et disciplina confirmatum esse, nec tamen aduersante fortuna, precisely reflecting Polyb. 1.6.9, quoted above. Could this constitute evidence that the De Re Publica accurately transmits ideas emanating from the interlocutors of the dialogue, members of the ‘Scipionic Circle,’ among whose number was Polybius? 144  Cic. Man. 53, gloriam … imperium; Mur. 22, militaris uirtus … orbem terrarum parere huic imperio coegit. 145  Cf. Hor. Carm. 3.6.46–48: aetas parentum, peior auis, tulit / nos nequiores, mox daturos / progeniem uitiosiorem (“the age of our parents, worse than their parents, bore us, more wicked, soon to bring forth a more depraved offspring”). This has been called “chronological primitivism” (Adler 2011, 15, citing Lovejoy and Boas 1997, 1–7 [first published in 1935]). The pervasiveness of such thinking owes much to the preoccupation with the life cycle, which serves as the predominant heuristic metaphor for human beings.

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“the Roman state is tottering under its own weight.”146 “In recent times,” he elaborates, “riches have introduced greed, and pleasures in abundance the desire to destroy oneself and everything else through indulgence in luxury and lust.”147 The rot had set in much earlier, though: in 187, in Livy’s view, when the riches of Asia entered Rome via the triumph of Cn. Manlius Vulso over the Galatians.148 In Livy’s version of the Elder Cato’s speech of 195 in favor of preserving the Oppian sumptuary legislation, Cato argues that the influx of the plunder of Syracuse into Rome after the Sicilian city fell in 212 was the first sign of danger; Rome’s current involvement in the Greek East was only making things worse.149 For Sallust, the Roman state was riven by civil discord as a result of the rise in immorality after the “fear of the enemy,” metus hostilis, was removed with the destruction of Carthage in 146.150 Cicero believed the moral character of Roman rule changed for the worse sometime before Sulla, but was completely undermined after the dictator’s time.151 The interlocutors of Cicero’s De Re Publica (set in the early 120s) worried that licentia—exploitation of the provincials, in other words—would transform the empire from one of justice maintained through voluntary obedience to one of force maintained through terror; following that, the Republic would be completely lost.152 For Tacitus, the sequence was clear: human nature led to empire, empire to greed, greed to civil discord, civil discord to autocracy.153 Some scholars have recently sought to recover from statements Roman authors put in the mouths of Rome’s opponents authentic ancient critiques of imperialism.154 So, infamously, the speech of Calgacus, an otherwise unknown 146  Liv. Pr. 4, res … iam magnitudine laboret sua. For a defense of res meaning both the Roman state and Livy’s task of writing about it, see Burton 2008, 86 n. 38 (which, along with Burton 2000, establishes an early date for the composition of Livy’s preface). 147  Liv. Pr. 12, nuper diuitiae auaritiam et abundantes uoluptates desiderium per luxum atque libidinem pereundi perdendique omnia inuexere. 148  Liv. 39.6.6–9. Livy’s view probably originated with Calpurnius Piso (FRH F 36 = Plin. HN 34.8.4), who also believed that pudicitia was lost in 154–153 (FRH F 40 = Plin. HN 17.38.244). 149  Liv. 36.4.3–4. This detail may be authentic since Cato’s speeches were available for Livy to consult. 150  Sall. Jug. 41; cf. Sall. Cat. 10. Others chose this date as well: Vell. 2.11; Flor. Epit. 1.33.1; cf. August. De civ. D. 1.30. 151  Cic. Off. 2.27. See also Sallust’s second stage of Roman decline after Sulla’s return from the East in 84 (Sall. Cat. 11.5–6). 152  Cic. Rep. 3.41. This precisely parallels Polybius’ statements on this dynamic (see above); further evidence that the dialogue accurately transmits ideas from the ‘Scipionic Circle’ (above, n. 74)? 153  Tac. Hist. 2.38. 154  See especially Harrison 2005; Griffin 2008; Adler 2011 and 2013.

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Caledonian chieftain determined to stop the expansion of Roman power in Britain under the governor Agricola in the 80s CE: raptores orbis, postquam cuncta uastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, auari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiauerit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Plunderers of the world, now that earth is not enough for their allpillaging hands, they even scour the sea. If their enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they are ambitious. Neither East nor West has satisfied them; they alone of all men covet with equal passion wealth and poverty. Using false names they call rapine plunder, and slaughter empire, and where they make a desert they call it peace.155 Such critiques had a long and distinguished pedigree in Latin historiography. Julius Caesar in The Gallic Wars allows his enemies to deliver powerful arguments against the imperium Romanum. After being ordered to make restitution to Rome’s friends, the Aedui, the German chieftain Ariovistus, also a Roman amicus, complains that Roman friendship appears to be a doubleedged sword: it should be a protection and a distinction for himself, instead of a detriment that deprives him of his tribute and hostages; if the latter should occur, he warns, he will renounce his friendship with Rome as eagerly as he sought it.156 The Celtic chieftain Critognatus charges the Romans with envy (inuidia) of other peoples’ lands: they wage war, annex territory, change indigenous rights and laws (iure et legibus commutatis), and crush the land under perpetual slavery (subiecta perpetua premitur seruitute).157 Sallust continues the tradition in his Histories, in what purports to be a letter from Mithridates VI of Pontus to Arsaces XII (Phraates III) of Parthia. Anticipating Tacitus’ Calgacus, who called the Romans raptores orbis, Sallust’s Mithridates labels the Romans latrones gentium, “robbers of nations,” whose motive for making war on all nations, peoples, and kings is “a bottomless craving for power and riches” (cupido profunda imperi et diuitiarum). “Cunning 155  Tac. Agr. 30.5. 156  Caes. Gal. 1.44.5, amicitiam populi Romani sibi ornamento et praesidio, non detrimento esse oportere, atque se hac spe petisse. Si per populum Romanum stipendium remittatur et dediticii subtrahantur, non minus libenter sese recusaturum populi Romani amicitiam quam adpetierit. 157  Caes. Gal. 7.77.15–16.

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devisers of treachery” (callidi et repertores perfidiae), they have won an empire by tricking other states with their friendship (amicitiam simulantes … per dolum), which they make and break at will. Their appetite for conquest and empire is insatiable—they turned to the East only when the Ocean blocked their expansion westward. There follows a history lesson: an ignoras Romanos … neque quicquam a principio nisi raptum habere, domum, coniuges, agros imperium? conuenas olim sine patria, parentibus, peste conditos orbis terrarum; quibus non humana ulla neque diuina obstant, quin socios, amicos, procul iuxta sitos, inopes potentisque trahant, excindant, omniaque non serua et maxume regna hostilia ducant? Do you not know that they have possessed nothing from the beginning except what was stolen—home, wives, fields, empire? Do you understand that they were created to be a scourge of the entire world who once upon a time lacked fatherland and parents, and for whom nothing human or divine prevents from seizing and destroying friends, allies, those close by and far away, the weak and the powerful, and from considering as enemies all who do not bow to them, especially kingdoms?158 The allusions to the Romulean foundation of Rome as an asylum for brigands and exiles, and to the rape of the Sabine women are transparent. Mithridates closes the letter with a recap of the Romans’ many faults—and a few of their virtues: they are armed against all, especially those that have the greatest potential spoils (greed); they have grown great by daring and deceit (treachery), and by joining war to war, in which they destroy everything or die trying (insatiable appetite for conquest and empire).159 Even Livy, that most patriotic of extant Roman historians, allows his historical figures to criticize Roman imperialism. As Eric Adler has already pointed out, Hannibal’s exhortation before the Battle of the Ticinus contains a savage indictment of Roman power likely of Livy’s own composition; it is absent from Polybius’ version of the speech.160 Hannibal characterizes Rome as the cruelest and most arrogant of all nations, throwing its weight around, telling other states with whom to make war and with whom to make peace, and 158  Sall. Hist. 4.69.17 M (= McGushin 4.67.17). 159  Sall. Hist. 4.69.20–21 M (= 4.67.20–21 McGushin), Romani arma in omnis habent, acerruma in eos, quibus uictis spolia maxuma sunt; audendo et fallundo et bella ex bellis serundo magni facti. per hunc morem extinguent omnia aut occident. Virtues: courage (audendo) and determination (extinguent omnio aut occident). On this passage, see now Adler 2011, 17–35. 160  Liv. 21.43–44; cf. Polyb. 3.63–64. Discussion: Adler 2011, 87–98 and 2013, 294–95.

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where they can and cannot go—even though the Romans themselves fail to observe their own boundaries, in this case, the Ebro River in Spain. In 184, the Roman ambassador, Ap. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 185), had to endure a strident dressing-down by the Achaean League statesman Lycortas, father of Polybius. Lycortas complained that his own defense of Achaean conduct in its war on Sparta was not the sort of speech “of allies before allies, nor of a free people, but of slaves before masters” (neque sociorum apud socios, neque liberae gentis esse, sed uere seruorum … apud dominos). He then went on to expose the nature of the ‘freedom’ bestowed by Rome on the Greeks in 196: the call to freedom was empty (uana) since the Romans are failing to honor the equity of the Achaean treaty with Rome, and their friendship and alliance. Lycortas, like so many others in this survey so far, charged the Romans with hypocrisy. So the Achaeans killed a few men? After recapturing Capua from Hannibal, the Romans decapitated the Capuan senators. So the Achaeans tore down Sparta’s walls? The Romans not only tore down Capua’s walls, but destroyed the city itself and its farmland. The treaty between Rome and Achaea is equal (aequum) only in appearance (specie); in reality (re) Achaean liberty is precarious (praecaria libertas). The message the Romans are sending by criticizing the Achaeans is that “freedom, in the Roman mind, is also empire” (libertas apud Romanos etiam imperium est); in other words, the powerful set the terms and conditions of the freedom of the weak.161 One final example. In mid-172, a Roman embassy visited Perseus, demanding responses to accusations against the king made by Eumenes II of Pergamum earlier in the year. Perseus angrily accused the Romans of being greedy and arrogant (auaritiam superbiamque obicientem), and demanded a new treaty based on equality (ex aequo foedus) before storming off.162 It should perhaps be noted here that Livy also reproduces what purports to be an excerpt of a senatorial debate, no doubt derived from Polybius, in which some senators are made to criticize diplomatic sharp practice.163 The debate took place in March 171, following the return to Rome of ambassadors to the East. Livy says that the leaders of the embassy, Q. Marcius Philippus and A. Atilius Serranus, prefaced their report with a boast that they had deceived king Perseus by making a truce and holding out the false hope of peace. They explained that because Perseus was fully armed and ready, but the Romans were unprepared, the king could have had a significant strategic advantage, but 161  Liv. 39.36.5–37.17. The parallel between Capua and Sparta is imprecise, of course, since the Capuans were Roman citizens. 162  Liv. 42.25. For a defense of the authenticity of the passage, see now Burton 2017, 197–201. 163  Liv. 42.47. On this, see Briscoe 1964 and now, Burton 2017, 110–13.

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the truce period would deprive him of this, allowing the Romans to mobilize and begin the war on equal terms. They also reported that they had broken up the Boeotian confederacy so that it could never be used to support Macedon again. A large section of the senate, says Livy, approved of the embassy’s success as displaying the height of reason (summa ratione), but the older senators disapproved. Unlike their enemies, who relied on cunning (uersutia) and cleverness (astus, calliditas) in war, they argued, the Romans used their fides and uirtus to wage war justly and in accordance with sacred principle (iusto ac pio … bello). For these reasons the older senators were displeased by Marcius’ new and overly clever wisdom (noua ac nimis callida … sapientia), but the greater part of the senate, preferring expediency to honor (potior utilis quam honesti cura), approved of his actions. The latter statements, it should be stressed, are in Livy’s own voice. Sallust’s Mithridates could not have put it better. The Augustan-era historian Pompeius Trogus, whose forty-four-book universal history, Historiae Philippicae, survives in a later Epitome by someone called Justin, was perhaps the least shy about criticizing Roman imperialism through his historical mouthpieces.164 He records an embassy, surely apocryphal,165 of the Romans to Aetolia in ca. 237, ordering the Aetolian League to free the cities of Acarnania and withdraw its garrisons.166 The Aetolians berate the Romans in precisely the same terms as Sallust’s Mithridates, discussed above: the Romans were “mere shepherds who occupy land seized through robbery from its rightful owners, who could not find wives because of the lowliness of their origin, and so carried off their wives through state sanctioned violence.”167 After his defeat by the Romans in the Second Illyrian War, Demetrius of Pharos complains to Philip V of Macedon that the Romans, “not content with the boundaries of Italy, but grasping, with shameless hope, for an empire of the entire world, are waging war with all kings.”168 The most vitriolic speech in Justin’s Epitome (and the longest, being not an abridgment of Trogus’ version, but a word-for-word excerpt) is reserved for Mithridates VI.169 As in the Sallustian 164  This section derives from Griffin 2008, 91–92, and Adler 2011, 37–58 and 2013, 296–98. 165  Gruen 1984, 64. 166  Just. Epit. 28.2. 167  Just. Epit. 28.2.8–9, nempe pastores qui latrocinio iustis dominis ademptum solum teneant, qui uxores cum propter originis dehonestamenta non inuenirent, ui publica rapuerint. 168  Just. Epit. 29.2.2, [Romani] qui non contenti Italiae terminis, imperium spe inproba totius orbis amplexi, bellum cum omnibus regibus gerant, a sentiment repeated by Justin, in his own (or Trogus’) voice at 39.5.3, Iam [sc. 96] enim fortuna Romana porrigere se ad orientalia regna, non contenta Italiae terminis, coeperat. 169  Just. Epit. 38.4–7.

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letter of Mithridates discussed earlier, his speech in Trogus condemns the Romans as greedy and grasping aggressors. He also repeats the letter’s charge (and the calumny of Demetrius of Pharos) that the Romans are especially hostile to kings: they are at war with all kings all the time, and that it is a law among them to hate all kings. Another parallel with the Sallustian letter (and the Aetolian speech, discussed earlier) are the cheap shots and put-downs concerning Rome’s origins: they hate kings because their own were so awful; they are a “cesspool of refugees” (conluuie conuenarum), whose founders were suckled on the teats of a wolf, as they themselves proudly admit, “so that entire people have the character of wolves—insatiable for blood, greedy, and hungry for empire and riches.”170 And so back to Tacitus. In his Histories, the Gallic rebel Civilis complains, as Lycortas has done over 250 years before, that the Roman alliance had become a burdensome slavery, and rails against the greed of Roman governors: quando legatum, graui quidem comitatu et superbo, cum imperio uenire? tradi se praefectis centurionibusque: quos ubi spoliis et sanguine expleuerint, mutari, exquirique nouos sinus et uaria praedandi uocabula When does even a legate with imperium come among us, accompanied by a burdensome and arrogant retinue? We are handed over to mere prefects and centurions who, when they have had their fill of plunder and blood, are then changed, and new receptacles for spoils, new words for plundering, are discovered.171 Greed was also the complaint of Boiocalus, a chieftain of the massive Ampsivarii tribe, which despite serving Rome loyally for fifty years, was now, in CE 59, effectively homeless and starving. The Romans refused to settle them on some vacant land around the Rhine, preferring to keep it for Roman soldiers’ flocks to ravage. “Let them not prefer a desert and wasteland,” Boiocalus argued in his speech before the Romans, “to friendly peoples.” He then called upon his gods to submerge the land beneath the sea rather than let “the plunderers of lands” (terrarum ereptores) occupy it.172 The sentiment is reminiscent of Sallust’s latrones gentium, and, of course, Tacitus’ own raptores orbis. Tacitus’ Boudicca lists her personal grievances against the Romans: she swore to avenge not her 170  Just. Epit. 38.6.8, sic omnem illum populum luporum animos inexplebiles sanguinis, atque imperii diuitiarumque auidos ac ieiunos habere. 171  Tac. Hist 4.14. Discussion: Adler 2011, 130–34, 137–39. 172  Tac. Ann. 13.55, modo ne uastitatem et solitudinem mallent quam amicos populus.

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kingdom or her power but “her lost liberty, her body destroyed by whips, and the defiled chastity of her daughters. Roman greed has come to the point that they leave unsullied neither bodies, old age, nor virginity.”173 In the Latin writers, then, the Romans are characterized by greed, deceit, arrogance, hypocrisy, injustice, power hunger, and bloodlust. There are hints of critiques of Roman imperialism in Greek writers as well. Polybius’ cynical commentary on Roman power has already been detailed. Continuing the theme of anti-Roman sentiments in the speeches of Rome’s enemies, several times in the speeches of Polybius’ historical figures, and once in his own voice, the Romans are labeled barbaroi, ‘barbarians.’ Agelaus of Naupactus uses the term to describe the Romans (and Carthaginians) in his speech to Philip V, mentioned earlier; both Lyciscus, an Acarnanian ambassador, and (probably) Thrasycrates, a Rhodian, excoriate the Aetolians for allying with barbarians (the Romans) against Philip V in 211; and Polybius offhandedly refers to those who practice the October Horse ritual, including the Romans, as barbarians.174 Cassius Dio, in his version of Boudicca’s speech, goes much further than Tacitus, decrying the Romans’ treachery, tyranny, greed, hypocrisy, arrogance, injustice, and impiety. The queen mocks the Romans’ cowardice, luxury, and effeminacy: they hide behind their walls, trembling in fear; they cannot endure heat, cold, hunger, or thirst; when the wine and olive oil run out, they perish; they bathe in warm water, drink unmixed wine, eat artificial delicacies, and sleep on soft beds with boys; they are slaves of a bad lyre-playing, makeup-wearing, singing girl, “Ms Domitia Nero.”175 Boudicca reverses the metaphor Pompeius Trogus’ Mithridates uses to characterize the Romans: the British are now the wolves, the Romans mere hares and foxes.176 Perhaps to appease his readers, Dio also has Boudicca play up to traditional Greco-Roman stereotypes of the British: the queen proclaims her people hide in marshes and hills, live in trees, subsist on grass and roots, swim naked, and neither farm nor practice a trade.177 Finally, the philosophers Carneades and Posidonius (the latter was also a historian) are commonly cited in scholarly discussions of ancient critiques of Roman imperialism. Carneades most famously appeared in Rome in 155 173  Tac. Ann. 14.35.1, libertatem amissam, confectum uerberis corpus … contrectatam filiarum pudicitiam ulcisci. Eo prouectas Romanorum cupidines, ut non corpora, ne senectam quidem aut uirginitatem inpollutam relinquant. 174  Polyb. 5.104.1–2 (Agelaus); 9.37.5–6 (Lyciscus); 11.5.1–2 (Thrasycrates); 12.4b.2–3 (Polybius). Discussion: Champion 2000 and 2004, 47–57, 193–203, 245–54; Baronowski 2011, 149–51. 175  Dio 62.3–6 (“Ms Domitia-Nero” is the only way to convey in English the feminine form of Nero’s name in Greek—ἠ Νερωνίς ἠ Δομιτία [62.6.5]). 176  Dio 62.5.6. 177  Dio 62.5.3, 5–6, 6.3.

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as part of a delegation of philosophers from Athens, seeking the cancellation of a 500-talent indemnity levied against the Athenians by Sicyon after the Athenians sacked Oropus.178 During his time in Rome, the philosopher argued for and against justice on consecutive days with equal power of conviction.179 Part of his argument against justice—not necessarily on this occasion180—was a condemnation of Roman rule over the Mediterranean: “all those peoples who enjoy imperium, including the Romans themselves, who have power over the entire world, if they wish to be just, that is, to restore the possessions of others, should return to their hovels and lie down in poverty and miseries.”181 Such a view, not seriously intended, but part of an intellectual exercise, not surprisingly did not catch on, nor was it developed in antiquity, so far as is known, into a full-fledged condemnation of what we would call imperialism.182 The philosopher and historian Posidonius is credited with the philosophical view that in the ‘Golden Age’ of man, the rulers were wise men who protected the weak from the strong and governed for the benefit of all, but then vice set in and rulers turned into tyrants.183 The fragments of Posidonius’ Histories hint at a similar dynamic. In the context of the Sicilian slave wars, he observes that in households the powerful should treat the humble humanely because cruel treatment provokes slaves against their masters, just as among states arrogant rule provokes civil dissension and disorder.184 The Roman state, whose good laws and customs caused them to gain the greatest empire the world had ever known, later descended into vice and lassitude.185 And so we can connect the dots, as some scholars have attempted to do,186 and tease out a coherent theory of empire from the remaining fragments of Posidonius: all empires contain the seeds of their own destruction because the 178  Plut. Cat. Mai. 22; Gel. 6.14.8–10; Macr. 1.5.14–16. 179  Quint. 12.1.35; Cic. Rep. 3.8–12 (= Lactant. Diu. inst. 5.14.3–5). 180  “Carneades was [a] member of an Athenian embassy seeking favor from the senate. A deliberate insult to Roman character would be impolitic in the extreme” (Gruen 1984, 342; also Baronowski 2011, 23–26). Ferrary 1988, 353; Champion 2004, 197; Griffin 2008, 94–95 apparently remain unconvinced. 181  Lactant. Diu. inst. 16.2–4 (= Cic. Rep. 3.21) omnibus populis qui florerent imperio et Romanis quoque ipsis, qui totius orbis potirentur, ut iusti uelint esse, hoc est si alieno restituant, ad casas esse et in egistate ac miseriis iacendum. 182  Despite Ferrary 1977, 152–56 and 1988, 351–63, we should probably believe Cicero’s interlocutor Philus that the critique of Roman imperialism is in fact derived from Carneades (Baronowski 2011, 18). 183  Sen. Ep. 90.5. 184  Diod. Sic. 34/35.33. 185  Diod. Sic. 37.3.1. 186  E.g., Strasburger 1965; Baronowski 2011, 55–60.

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ruling power becomes corrupted by its own greatness and provokes rebellion in its subjects. This was what happened to the Roman Empire after the destruction of Carthage, climaxing in the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies (91–88/7), but restored, in Posidonius’ view, by Pompey the Great in the 60s (Posidonius was Pompey’s house historian). The assumed parallelism between these passages, however, is tenuous and imperfect. In the passages from the Histories, Posidonius is clearly not thinking about the life cycle of empires but of states. So, in the Sicilian slave war passage, the parallel is, explicitly, with stasis in poleis between citizens, not with empires and their discontents. In the passage on the decline of Rome from greatness into decadence, the consequences are strictly internal: stasis between the senate and the people.187 Posidonius did not fashion a coherent theory of imperialism, or a critique of it. What emerges with stark clarity and consistency from the foregoing survey of the evidence is that ancient writers rarely questioned the notion that bigger is better—that empire is a good thing.188 The Romans asserted their power, wielded it—well or badly—boasted about it, and worried about losing it; Rome’s enemies were wary of it, complained bitterly about it, but coveted it, sometimes did their best to escape it, or lived with it. Contemporary inscriptions tell precisely the same story. The epitaphs on the tomb of the family and descendants of Scipio Barbatus (cos. 298) glorify their successes in war. C. Duilius (cos. 260) boasts that he was the first to celebrate a naval triumph, which was awarded for his victory over the Carthaginians at Mylae in his year as consul. Augustus famously proclaims in his Res Gestae that he extended the boundaries of all the provinces, added more new ones than anyone else, and received deferential embassies from as far away as India. The letter of T. Quinctius Flamininus, author of Greek freedom after defeating Philip V of Macedon in 197, asserts Rome’s good faith, nobility, and generosity against its calumniators (the Aetolian League). The Scipio brothers promise to care for and promote the good of Heraclea-by-Latmus in exchange for their good faith. Perpetual good faith is also requested in return for Roman recognition of Teos’ sacredness and inviolability by M. Valerius Messalla, who writes to the Teans of the Romans’ extraordinary piety toward the gods—the secret of their imperial success. Attalus II of Pergamum warns a Galatian priest at Pessinus that he will undertake no action without Roman approval since 187  Diod. Sic. 37.2.2. 188  Cf. Eckstein 1987, xiv: “the Romans wanted Rome to be strong rather than weak, and, in general, ‘big’ rather than ‘little’” (further discussion below). Only Agatharchides of Cnidus, according to Baronowski, 2011, 22–24, 26–27, opposed imperialism on principle, but he was not necessarily critical of Roman imperialism per se (Ferrary 1988, 232–36).

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success will draw their envy, reproof, and suspicion (as indeed they expressed toward his brother, Eumenes II), while failure will bring destruction, to Rome’s great delight.189 As has been demonstrated here, negative views of empire generally and of the Roman Empire in particular gain in intensity only in the late Republican and Imperial periods, when the corrupting effects of Roman power were felt both at home and abroad, and Roman rule hardened and became largely unchallengeable. Nevertheless, Cicero, a strident critic of the post-Sullan Empire, could observe (and expect his audience to agree) that it is a wonderful thing to rule over foreign peoples.190 This contrasts completely with the modern postSecond World War general consensus that empire is bad. The impact of this difference is apparent in modern scholarship of the past forty years, to which it is now time to turn. 3.2 Rome the Aggressor? Causes and Motivations 3.2.1 The Harris Thesis Modern studies of Roman imperialism must begin with William Harris’ War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, briefly described in the Introduction.191 The Harris thesis for the most part comprises a rigorously metrocentric assess­ ment of Roman imperial motivations and capabilities. Harris convincingly demonstrates that the Roman attitude toward war and its associated rewards and honors was overwhelmingly positive. This is why, in his view, the Romans went to war with astonishing regularity: almost every year, year after year, “the legions went out and did massive violence to someone.”192 He connects Roman bellicosity with the pursuit of the unique Roman cultural ideal of ‘manliness,’ uirtus, which generated among the warrior aristocracy a never-ending search for gloria (glory) and laus (esteem), which was secured primarily by success in war, and publicized in the Roman aristocratic funeral and the triumph. The martial spirit of the aristocracy ‘trickled down’ to the ordinary citizens through their participation in their aristocratic generals’ great military victories and triumphs, and the distribution of plunder and the awarding of distinctions and prizes for valor in battle. Long periods of mandatory military service for every male citizen between his late teens and mid-twenties reinforced and perpetuated the militaristic character of Roman society, which fetishized 189   C IL I2 6–15 (Scipionic epitaphs); ILS 65 (Duilius inscription); RG 26–32 (Augustus) RDGE 33 (Flamininus to Chyretiae); RDGE 35 (Scipios to Heraclea); RDGE 34 (Messalla to the Teans); Welles RC 61 (Attalus II to a Galatian priest). 190  Cic. Ver. 2.2.2, quam praeclarum esset exteris gentibus imperare. 191  Harris 1979. 192  Harris 1979, 53.

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war and pursued it with an exceptional brutality and ferocity. This militarism Harris labels “pathological,”193 a classic Schumpeterian atavism. Fierce political competitions between aristocrats for a limited number of offices, namely the consulship, were fought and paid for with the booty of imperial conquest, which also financed the distribution of land and largesse to the soldiers, as well as massive building projects undertaken following military victories. The aristocracy plundered Rome’s enemies, seeking cash to buy Italian land and slaves to farm it. Occasionally, members of the equestrian class compelled the Roman state to extend its power in support of business opportunities. And, of course, the lower classes sought booty as a means of escaping their miserable plight. “Desire for economic gain,” therefore, “was a factor of the greatest importance” in motivating the Romans to attack their neighbors.194 That imperial expansion was a persistent Roman aim is best seen in the primary sources, particularly Polybius, who, Harris argues, attributes to the Romans a peculiar drive toward increasing their power, but also in a few Roman literary sources, in the censorial prayer, and in the Roman cult of Victory (Victoria).195 Rome’s occasional refusal to annex lands during the middle Republic does not equate to a senatorial principle of non-annexation; rather, the Romans annexed wherever convenient or profitable. The Romans’ seeming determination to find credible, defensive public justifications for their wars, to ensure all wars were ‘just wars,’ iusta bella, was at best a public relations ploy, a thinly veiled attempt to use divine sanction as diplomatic cover for “nonnegotiable demands … usually set at an unacceptable level”196—and thus bound to provoke wars. These provocations are both proof of and explanation for the Roman atavistic bellicosity embedded in the Roman social and political system. Harris closes the volume with a study of all (except one) of Rome’s major wars between 327 and 70 in order to demonstrate that Rome’s wars were only occasionally undertaken in self-defense or out of fear; an opportunistic, aggressive stance toward all competing states was the Roman default position. 193  Harris 1979, 53. 194  Harris 1979, 93. 195  Harris (1979, v and ix) is insistent against his critics that he does not believe the Romans had a plan or policy to expand indefinitely, and he is correct: “Those who have denied that there was any real drive at Rome to increase the size of their empire have very often claimed to settle the issue by arguing that the Senate did not plan the expansion of the empire over long periods … What is in dispute is not whether there was planning of strategy over long periods—for which no ancient state was equipped—but whether there was a strong continuing drive to expand” (107). 196  Harris 1979, 167. Arthur Eckstein calls this ‘compellence diplomacy’; see below, 3.3.

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As Harris’ critics throughout the four decades following the appearance of his book have demonstrated, his thesis is a classic case of overcorrection. It is true that the hardly sustainable Roman ‘defensive imperialism’ position was still dominant in the 1970s, and required the devastating bludgeon of Harris’ masterly deployment of the sources to finally break it apart. For Harris, Roman exceptionalism lay in their excessive bellicosity, brutality, and bloodthirstiness.197 Sherwin-White, in his early review of WIRR, recognized the lopsidedness of Harris’ presentation: “The book might have been called Rome the Aggressor” since the focus is on “the ruthless aggression of Rome at the expense of relatively inoffensive neighbors,” without consideration that at least some of those neighbors may have amounted to existential threats, as the Romans themselves apparently believed at various times in their history.198 Sherwin-White also objects that Harris does not take sufficient account of countervailing Roman internal political dynamics that pulled in the opposite direction from expansion, namely the corporate senatorial interest in preventing military glory, or at least too much of it, accruing to any of its individual members.199 John North also remarked on this in an early response to WIRR: 197  Though he avoids the terms ‘exceptional’ and ‘exceptionalism’ to describe Roman aggression, see Harris 1979, 2: “it would … be hard to find other ancient states as willing as Rome apparently was during the middle Republic to tolerate the casualties and hardships of imperial expansion for such a prolonged period”; 51: “In my view it is … likely that the regular harshness of Roman war-methods sprang from an unusually pronounced willingness to use violence against alien peoples, and this willingness contributed to Roman bellicosity.” In the Preface to the paperback edition, Harris writes (ix), “in the middle Republic … Rome was an exceptionally aggressive state.” 198   Sherwin-White 1980, 178. Harris occasionally allows that Roman fear was an important factor (e.g., 1979, 176), but routinely dismisses the evidence for it as propagandistic excuse or justification for aggression (cf. 1979, 186–88 [the First Punic War], 193–94 [the Gallic War beginning in 238], 197–99 [the Gallic War of 225–221], 205 [the Second Punic War], 206 [the First Macedonian War], 211 [the Gallic War of 201–193], 212–15 [the Second Macedonian War], 221–22 [the war with Antiochus III], 229–30 [the Third Macedonian War], 236–38 [the Third Punic War]). 199   Sherwin-White 1980, 178 (“The senate as a corporate body might be expected to take a cooler view of foreign affairs than the three or four ambitious men who each year had a tangible prospect of an active command”). Cf. Rich 1993, 54–55: “Common sense suggests that the majority [of senators] who stood to be disappointed of the highest prizes would not make it easy for the minority to win them”; 62: “Many senators’ votes in favour of war were undoubtedly coloured by their expectation of profit for themselves or their friends. However, at each such meeting there will have been more senators who did not stand to profit personally from the decision, and some for whom it would mean the advancement of personal enemies.” Astonishingly, Harris (1979, 34) writes, “the aristocracy’s collective idea of the interests of the res publica did much to keep the struggle for glory within bounds,” but never follows it up with proper analysis of what this means for his thesis

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the nature of aristocratic competition and the regulation of a senator’s career tended to rein in expansionist impulses, as did other factors, such as the structure of the Italian alliance system, manpower and resource limitations, and Roman self-representation as a people of fides.200 The allegedly exceptional Roman aristocratic glorification of war and conquest, therefore, was tempered by the fact that Rome’s system competitors suffered from the same pathology (in Harris’ terms), and by various internal factors, especially aristocratic competition and manpower constraints.201 One of the major flaws in Harris’ work is his account of the beginning of Rome’s major middle-Republican wars contained in his fifth and final chapter. That the war Rome was forced to fight against Pyrrhus on Italian soil is omitted from the list is indicative of the problem: only by ignoring, explaining away, or downplaying inconvenient evidence can Harris’ thesis be consistently sustained. A comparison of Harris’ footnotes to his main text in his fifth chapter is instructive. So, for instance, in the main text Harris asserts that “Not even Livy claimed that the Samnites attacked Roman or allied territory in the first seven years of the Second Samnite War (327–321), though he did try to put some responsibility on to their shoulders.” This is contradictory enough on its own, and indeed in the accompanying note Harris cites several passages from Livy and one from Appian that demonstrate, precisely, that the Samnites attacked Roman and allied territory.202 Harris also casts doubt on the evidence for the Etruscans and Umbrians laying siege to Sutrium, a Latin colonia, as “a propagandistic invention or distortion,” without actually engaging directly with the texts that support these claims.203 In other cases—the Celtic invasion of Italy in 225, Philip V’s alliance with Hannibal against Rome, to say noth(cf. Harris 1989, 141: “the occasional willingness of the Senate from the 170s onwards to restrain the avarice of provincial governors was based at least as much on political considerations as on concern for the well-being of the provincials” [emphasis added]). SherwinWhite (1980, 178–79) notes that Harris’ argument that aristocratic competition prevented the annexations of Egypt and Cyrene in the late Republic, “[if it were] applied to the period before Sulla … would undermine the whole thesis of the book.” 200  North 1981, 6–8; on the latter point, “A reputation for supporting the oppressed has to be maintained as well as earned” (7); “In a real sense, [the Romans] became the prisoners of their own reputation.” (8). On the Romans as a people of fides, see Boyancé 1964. 201  On the latter, see Sherwin-White 1980, although Harris allows for these in passing (1979, 114 [on the failure to annex Macedonia in 167], 151–152 [on the failure to annex Numidia in 105], 145, 233 [on difficulties recruiting troops in the Third Macedonian War], 244 [resisting rebellions and invasions]). 202  Harris 1979, 177 and n. 3. 203  Harris 1979, 178–79.

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ing of the aforementioned invasion of Pyrrhus, to name but three—claims of Roman aggression as the main cause of the wars that resulted seem simply counterintuitive. To maintain his position, Harris is forced to cherry-pick the evidence, elevating that which supports his thesis (and in the absence of it, invoking “the [Roman] habit of annual warfare”204), and downplaying that which does not. This method, as several scholars have pointed out, leads to such absurdities as the preference for the very late and sometimes unreliable source, Zonaras, over Polybius, a well-informed near contemporary, on the outbreak of hostilities with the Celts in 238.205 Polybius’ explanation of the outbreak of the Third Macedonian War is also summarily dismissed without supporting argumentation.206 One final aspect of Harris’ study that has drawn criticism is what Walter Eder has called “the chicken and egg problem.”207 Did the Roman aristocratic ideology of perpetual warfare and expansion precede Roman imperialism or vice versa? The closest Harris comes to answering this question is when he states that “much of the social ethos concerning war is … explicable in purely internal Roman terms,” and that the Romans “did not feel themselves driven into war by external circumstances.” On the other hand, he admits the line between social ethos and external circumstances “is not … sharp … for social ethos and external circumstances worked on each other.”208 Such equivocation only begs the question, and is reflected in Harris’ choice of starting point, 327, when the Second Samnite War broke out.209 How, when, and why did the exceptional “social ethos” originate? A definitive answer eludes Harris.210

204  Harris 1979, 197. 205   Sherwin-White 1980, 180; Eckstein 1987, 7–8, against Harris 1979, 193–94. 206  Harris 1979, 227–28; for the plausibility of Polybius’ account, see now Burton 2017, 91–96. 207  Eder 1982, 551. 208  Harris 1979, 41. 209  North 1981, 4. 210  Harris (2016, 20 n. 4) says that he provided an answer to this question (“necessarily speculative”) in Harris 1990, but the latter only pinpoints a period (the mid-fourth century) when, for various reasons, “there was an intensification of Roman belligerence” (506) arising from the competition for military glory, which was “itself not new” (504). On Rome’s mid-fourth century transformation, when its power rapidly increased after it finally recovered from the Celtic destruction of ca. 387, see now Eckstein 2006, 229–37; Armstrong 2016, 233–89. We will return to the question of the origins of Roman imperialism in the Conclusions.

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3.2.2 Substantial Responses to Harris Two major responses to WIRR appeared in 1984—Erich Gruen’s Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, and Adrian Sherwin-White’s Roman Foreign Policy in the East, 167 B.C. to A.D. 1. Both books focus on the expansion of Roman power in the East (overlapping by several decades in chronological scope, from the 160s to the 120s), and argue that Rome was, for the most part, a passive, reactive, and remote hegemon. As he did in his substantial 1980 review of WIRR, Sherwin-White challenges Harris’ problematic assumption “that the Senate as a whole was the active instrument for the realization of the ambitions of, primarily, the consular families.”211 The facts are that little more than half of the nobilitas could expect the opportunity of gaining glory in their consulships; about half of the senate could never aspire to senior magistracies, and thus, a potentially prestigious military command; and the drive for wars of conquest by the great consular families could rarely sway the senatorial group as a whole, committed as it was to maintaining a level playing field.212 Sherwin-White demonstrates how these internal dynamics affected Roman foreign policy in Asia Minor (his geographical focus) between 188 (the Peace of Apamea) and 133 (the bequest by Attalus III of his kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor to Rome): “the Senate as a whole and its senior members who initiated policy did not take a serious view of Roman interests in the region.”213 The story of how the Attalids were given free rein to play kingmakers throughout Asia Minor and the Near East during this period is proof enough of that. Logistics and the lack of sophistication of the Roman diplomatic system are to blame for Rome’s indifference. Most of the rest of the book is a study of the Mithridatic Wars, their causes and consequences. These chapters demonstrate that geography, logistics, and manpower constraints (to say nothing of domestic politics) often limited Rome’s ability to operate in Asia Minor, although in the post-Sullan era, the senate and individual dynasts (Lucullus, Pompeius, Antonius) became more aggressive in the area. Although transparently inspired by his engagement with the scholarship on Roman imperialism (Badian and Harris, among others), Erich Gruen claims that his Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome is not about Roman imperialism as such. The book’s subject, he states, “is the Roman experience in Hellas and the Hellenic experience under the impact of Rome.” It is an effort to explain the political continuities in the East after the coming of Rome rather 211   Sherwin-White 1984, 11. 212   Sherwin-White 1984, 11–15. 213   Sherwin-White 1984, 57.

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than an attempt to apportion praise or blame.214 These purposes determine the work’s perspective—Hellenocentric rather than Romanocentric—and its structure: an analysis of attitudes around and institutions governing the interaction between East and West, followed by long narrative sections, organized by region. Given its largely pericentric (that is to say, Hellenocentric) focus, and elucidation of a persistent pattern of Roman passivity and indifference to eastern affairs, combined with the author’s insistence that Roman imperialism is not his subject, the book takes on the character of being a response to Harris by stealth. Through the relentless accumulation of detail, a strategy similar to Holleaux’s, Gruen gradually impresses upon the reader that the nature of Roman imperialism (or whatever it was) in the East during the middle Republic was overwhelmingly defensive. Part I of HWCR is designed to demonstrate that the Romans adapted their own diplomatic practices to those of the Greeks as they became more and more enmeshed in the affairs of the Hellenistic East. Gruen challenges the notion that the Romans imposed their own indigenous, deeply alien diplomatic institutions on uncomprehending Greeks—a problem that supposedly hastened the growth of Roman power in the East, according to some scholars.215 The Romans generally avoided striking formal treaties where possible, but when such compacts were necessary, these were overwhelmingly Hellenic in character. The Romans preferred informal methods of establishing diplomatic relations—through interstate amicitia, ‘friendship’—which functioned in precisely the same way as interstate φιλία among the Greeks, from whom the Romans borrowed the concept. Roman amicitia was not a distinctly Roman form of diplomatic control, cynically imposed on uncomprehending Greeks and manipulated to enhance Roman power. The Romans participated in the world of the Greek states on Greek terms, engaging in traditional Hellenic mediation between disputing states, and deploying the slogan ‘the Freedom of the Greeks,’ which had been developed, both as slogan and strategy, by the Hellenistic kings. Gruen rounds out his analysis by taking on one of the most deeply entrenched ideas about Roman international relations: that, despite calling their international partners amici, ‘friends,’ they regarded and treated them as clientes, as though they were constrained by the structural dependence of the socially pervasive and peculiarly Roman patron–client relationship, for

214  Gruen 1984, 8. 215  E.g., Badian 1958 (on clientela); Dmitriev 2011 (on deditio and Rome’s manipulation of the concept of Greek freedom); Grainger 2017 (on Roman diplomatic style toward eastern powers).

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which the Greeks had no equivalent.216 Certainly the Greeks traditionally behaved deferentially toward the great Hellenistic kings—usually to secure some advantage for themselves; the Romans simply inserted themselves into this power dynamic without imposing clientela, whose rigid bilateral obligations were precisely what Rome wanted to avoid in the East. In Part II, Gruen demonstrates that the senate’s interest in and attention to eastern affairs was intermittent, and there was no one individual or faction that was favored to undertake military and diplomatic tasks in the East on the basis of expertise in Hellenic affairs. The senate as a body was more interested in bringing successful commanders back down to the level of ordinary senators rather than elevating them to special status, ‘go-to men’ for eastern affairs. The notion that philhellenism played a role in setting foreign policy in the East, which Tenney Frank once labeled “sentimental politics” and regarded as fundamentally anti-imperialistic, is also untenable. Roman national interests, not cultural proclivities, were paramount. In this same section of the work, Gruen discusses attitudes toward empire and expansion, using most of the ancient evidence discussed earlier in this section, and the economic benefits of empire. He argues that Harris confuses “the rewards of conquest … with the motives.”217 The evidence for Roman decision-making around its eastern campaigns demonstrates that the economic motive was far from significant—or even present—in senatorial war decisions, which makes sense since warfare did not profit the state in the first instance: the state treasury was the last assignee of plunder, after the soldiers and their generals. In addition, the Romans often reduced indemnity payments, which in any case were demanded to cover the costs of war rather than exploited as ongoing revenue streams. Rome also routinely parceled out the economic benefits of empire to allies and friends. The Roman state’s exploitation of the profits accruing from empire was above all political—designed to reward good behavior and punish bad—rather than rational.218 Gruen also explores Greek responses to Roman activity in the East. He finds that the Greeks were confused by Roman behavior—distant, uninterested, and absent for long periods, and then suddenly, bafflingly interventionist. Greek confusion about Roman policy was generated not by the imposition of alien practices by the Romans, but by the strangeness of the Roman approach to 216  Badian 1958, building on the ideas of Mommsen, Premerstein, and Gelzer. See above, Introduction. 217  Gruen 1984, 314; cf. Briscoe 1980, 87. 218  Gruen 1984, 288–315.

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rule. The Greeks were used to frequent, sometimes violent interference by the great Hellenistic powers in their immediate neighborhood; Roman hegemony thus seemed inexplicable: allowing the Greeks to conduct their own affairs without Roman attention, or even awareness, for long stretches of time, and then, suddenly, scrutiny by Roman statesmen and a reassertion of Roman state and security interests in the East. This is not the place to subject to minute scrutiny the third part of Gruen’s book, comprising its second half, a narrative of Roman expansion into different regions in the East, entitled “The Patterns of Behavior.” The latter are fairly clear: intervention when Rome’s perceived interests—national security, economic, moral, reputational, among others—were at stake; military and diplomatic withdrawal once these had been restored; neglect of and indifference to “Hellenistic politics as usual”219—petty squabbling over parochial grievances, making and breaking alliances and philiai; the dispatch of largely ineffectual embassies at the request of aggrieved parties; the escalation of disputes to a point where the Romans could be convinced that their own interests were at stake; and after long Roman absences, sudden, swift, and devastating military intervention restoring or altering the status quo. What I am interested in here is Gruen’s thinking about imperialism, both the Romans’ and in a general sense. Despite Gruen’s claim that his book is not about imperialism, its contents have profound implications for how we interpret Roman behavior in the East in the middle Republic. Gruen’s analysis is, for the most part, rigorously pericentric: it was the Greeks who drew the western power into their system of interstate relations, while the Romans tried to remain aloof. “Hellas ultimately fell under Roman authority,” the final sentence of the main text reads, “not because the Romans exported their structure to the East, but because Greeks persistently drew the westerner into their own structure—until it was theirs no longer.”220 The rebuke to Harris’ metrocentric analysis is clear, but only at the end of the study: “Resort to a theory of sheer aggression and militarism [to explain the imperial expansion of the Republic] is simplistic.”221

219  Gruen 1984, 441. 220  Gruen 1984, 730; pericentric analysis throughout: see 527 (“Rome was dragged into the maelstrom by contending Greek politicians, exiles or oppressed communities with special axes to grind”), 529 (“Hellenic circumstances generated the involvement of Rome— and Hellenic ingenuity endeavored to sustain it”), etc. 221  Gruen 1984, 725. Earlier (1984, 281–87), Gruen allows that the Romans were atavistic aggressors of Harris’ type in Italy, but not in the East.

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The key question, however, is what motivated the Romans to become involved in eastern affairs whenever they did. Among Gruen’s answers: to protect Italian shores,222 to demonstrate their overwhelming military power,223 to shore up their position through shows of force,224 to follow through on diplomatic brinksmanship and bullying,225 to assert or restore national pride,226 to restore the national and military reputation,227 to make an example of former enemies—and friends grown too great—228 and to emasculate the presumptuous.229 Gruen’s Romans, in other words, behave like strict pragmatic realists— as do his Greeks, of course.230 Gruen has very little patience for explanations based on Roman fears. So, for example, in his view it defies credibility that the Romans would fear an invasion of Italy by Philip V after the king struck his pact with Hannibal in 215; after all, here was a “king who had twice before fled at the very sight or report of Roman ships.”231 The same is true of the Second Macedonian War: no need to fear a Macedonian invasion of Italy, or the pact between Philip and Antiochus to destroy Ptolemy V.232 When Antiochus crossed to Greece in 192, the senate betrayed no fear that he would cross to Sicily and Italy.233 Fear played no role in the Republic’s war with Perseus either.234 Protecting friends, which Cicero vaunts as the source of Rome’s imperial power, plays a minimal role in Roman foreign policy, even in the run-up to the Second Macedonian War, when delegations from Athens, Aetolia, Rhodes, Pergamum, and Egypt beat a path to the door of the curia complaining of the depredations of Philip and Antiochus.235 On this score, Gruen is no Holleaux. The main complaint of scholars who have engaged with HWCR is that Gruen, like Harris, goes too far—he overstates his case. So, he exaggerates the 222  Gruen 1984, 366–67, 372. 223  Gruen 1984, 378. 224  Gruen 1984, 380. 225  Gruen 1984, 397, 417. 226  Gruen 1984, 397, 636. 227  Gruen 1984, 418 (to demonstrate that “Rome was not a helpless, pitiful giant”), 429, 454. 228  Gruen 1984, 516, 571, 574. 229  Gruen 1984, 527, 571. 230  Gruen 1984, 507 (the Greeks abandon Perseus for “Pragmatic rather than ideological or sentimental reasons” when his prospects against Rome sink). 231  Gruen 1984, 377 (the Romans wish to prevent a crossing by Philip to Italy, they do not fear it), 397 (the quotation). 232  Gruen 1984, 383–84 (crossing to Italy), 387–88, 615–16 (pact). 233  Gruen 1984, 633. 234  Gruen 1984, 417, 418. Rich (1993, 63–64) convincingly argues that fear played a significant role in many of Rome’s war decisions. 235  Gruen 1984, 383.

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differences between Italian and Hellenic diplomatic systems; the Romans’ lack of familiarity with Greek international philia before their engagement in affairs east of the Adriatic; the absence of any significant Roman contribution to Hellenic diplomatic practices; the unimportance of eastern expertise when appointing ambassadors and generals to the East; the difference between Roman imperialism within Italy and in the East; the unimportance of the prospect of booty in Roman war decisions; and, more generally and most crucially, the reluctance of the Romans to become involved in the East.236 Gruen’s account of Rome’s entanglement in eastern affairs is as unsatisfying as all pericentric explanations of imperialism—and for the same reason: it seems counterintuitive on the face of it that the victims of imperialism are those most responsible for their fate. The Greeks may have found the Romans’ imperial style, for lack of a better word, baffling: “What kind of hegemon was this who shirked responsibility and had to be prodded to exercise any hegemony at all?”237 The Greeks were used to the more interventionist and ever present threat of the great Hellenistic kingdoms in their immediate neighborhood. But swift Roman redeployments following war and reluctance to ship legions overseas to settle parochial and regional conflicts does not mean they were not interested in having their hard-won imperium obeyed and respected in the East over the long term. Even Gruen cannot deny that Roman national pride, honor, and reputation motivated Roman interventions. Gruen’s claim that his book is not about Roman imperialism is thus somewhat disingenuous. Indeed, his interpretation of Rome’s eastern expansion— pericentric, rational, pragmatic—renders the process of Roman expansion purely explicable in modern international political terms. In so doing, Gruen shifts the debate over the nature of Roman imperialism beyond the traditional aggressive/defensive divide. Arthur Eckstein, one of Erich Gruen’s Berkeley students, turned to a problem pointed out by both Harris and Gruen, that the senate as a body was incapable of long-term policy planning in the manner Polybius seemed to attribute to them when he said the Romans developed a plan for world conquest.238 Eckstein argued that the senate was heavily dependent on ad hoc decisions by Roman generals “on the spot.”239 This was especially the case in overseas operations, where close consultation of the senate was impossible given the constraints of 236  Rich 1985. 237  Gruen 1984, 355. 238  Polyb. 3.2.6; cf. 1.3.6 (above, n. 114). Harris 1979, v, ix, 107 (above, n. 195); Gruen 1984, 203; Morley 2010, 21–23. 239  Eckstein 1987, 232, 267, 296, etc. Richardson (1986, 177–78) discusses the phenomenon in the context of Republican Spain.

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ancient long-distance communications and travel. While the senate directed general strategy and set goals for each mission (prouincia, ‘assignment’), it was up to the general to decide how to implement these, within limits determined by the general’s knowledge of “the current general mood of the senate,”240 and his feel for what would be militarily and politically acceptable to the senate majority. The latter included many of his political enemies, eager to cut a gloria-seeking general back down to size. “It would have been political suicide” for a general to veer substantially away from the senate’s vague provincial mandates.241 Of course, the decisions taken by a general in the field, his acta, were all subject to ratification upon his return, but as Eckstein demonstrates, these were, with few exceptions, routinely and uncontroversially approved by the senate. Eckstein documents across the seventy years of his study over 350 major and minor instances of senatorially approved generals’ decisions, not including “a whole galaxy of specific diplomatic interactions and decisions” mentioned in the sources but largely undocumented in their details.242 The senators approved these arrangements because they were primarily “Italy firsters,” men overwhelmingly concerned with the security of the homeland, and with little interest in or knowledge of lands overseas.243 With very few exceptions, the senate’s default foreign policy stance across Cisalpine Gaul, Sicily, Spain, Africa, and Greece was essentially defensive; in the case of Spain, for example, the mandate was to hold the Ebro line against Carthaginian expansion there. If more aggressive expansionistic behavior there was among the Romans, it belonged to the gloria-seeking generals, who, however, were constrained from rising too far above their senatorial colleagues by domestic political concerns and forces. Eckstein thus demonstrates that during the period covered by his study, the Romans as a body were defensive imperialists, with individual generals occasionally taking a more aggressive stance in their sphere of competence, but within notional limits established by their senatorial mandate, to say nothing of the senate’s general reluctance to extend commands beyond a magistrate’s year in office. Eckstein thus comes down firmly on the anti-Harris side of the discussion, which is also indicated by the running debate he pursues with WIRR in his footnotes, especially in the first third of his study.244 In addition, he homes in on one of the major weaknesses of the Harris thesis—the 240  Eckstein 1987, 250. 241  Eckstein 1987, 95. 242  Eckstein 1987, 214–15. 243  Eckstein 1987, 66, 322. 244  Eckstein 1987, xiv n. 8, 8 n. 16, 13 nn. 37–38, 17 n. 54, 19 n. 66, 55 n. 122, 58 n. 135, 77 n. 11, 100 n. 106, 271 n. 4.

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notion that the Romans were exceptionally aggressive: while it is true, Eckstein argues, that “the Romans wanted Rome to be strong rather than weak, and, in general, ‘big’ rather than ‘little’ [and] continuously to expand its political influence … so did every other ancient state.”245 Eckstein’s emphasis on the initiative of individual generals in policy making on the fly is perhaps best demonstrated by the case of Ap. Claudius Caudex (cos. 264), who managed Rome’s relations with Syracuse and Carthage across the Straits of Messina, a series of decisions that ultimately resulted in war with both states. But what distinguishes Claudius’ actions from those of the other generals discussed in Eckstein’s study is that they did not take place in a formal state of war. All the other case studies document decisions taken in a theater of war, where the senate was already deeply committed to victory, and when its mandates probably amounted to “do whatever you can to damage the enemy’s position and improve our own.” After all, that is what Rome’s generals routinely seem to do; Scipio seizing the opportunity to secure an alliance with the Numidian chieftain Syphax in 206, at great personal risk to himself and necessitating a brief exit from his Spanish prouincia, is the most extreme example, but telling nevertheless.246 In other foreign policy circumstances, the senate dispatched officials with more specific (though not greatly detailed) instructions; in the case of the embassy to Philip at Abydus in 200, the Roman envoys were charged with ordering the king not to make war on any Greek state, nor to interfere with Ptolemy’s possessions, and that he submit his differences with Rhodes and Attalus to arbitration, paying due restitution for damages.247 The message was duly delivered; the result—a declaration of war on Philip—was the decision of the Roman people, following on from a majority decision in the senate. Clearly, individual decision making in a theater of war was far less constrained than in delicate diplomatic missions—and all were subject to senatorial ratification in any case. This makes the myriad decisions taken by generals during the Celtic War, the Second Punic War, and the Second Macedonian War—the bulk of Eckstein’s focus—seem less remarkable as an aspect of Roman foreign policy. 245  Eckstein 1987 xiv, thus presaging the ideas developed in Eckstein’s mature works (2006 and 2008). So too his observations on the “primitiveness of the structure of foreign relations” and “of the general structure of diplomatic interaction,” whereby “diplomatic interaction … often took the form of crises verging already on war,” resulting in “constant international disorder.” These thoughts would later be transformed into Eckstein’s thesis that “compellence diplomacy” was a function of the violence and brutality of the anarchic ancient Mediterranean international system. See further below. 246  Discussion at Eckstein 1987, 221–22. 247  Polyb. 16.34.1–7; Liv. 31.18.3–6; cf. App. Mac. 4.

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Robert Kallet-Marx took the story of the expansion of Roman power in the East from his teacher Erich Gruen’s formal stopping point—146—down to 62.248 He also picked up another loose end left by Gruen, who briefly cast doubt on traditional views on the provincialization of the East.249 Kallet-Marx argues that the Roman prouincia of Macedonia following the defeat of the pretender Andriscus in 148 was not bureaucratically administered annexed territory, overseen and held down by an army of occupation. The proconsular commander and his legion were preoccupied with safeguarding Macedonia’s perennially troublesome and lengthy northern and western frontiers. They were quite simply too busy to intervene in the affairs of the adequately selfgoverning Macedonian administrative districts, the merides, in place since the days of Philip II.250 Nor were parts of Greece an administrative appendage to the prouincia.251 The proconsul rarely departed from the Macedonian frontier to intervene in Macedonian, much less Greek affairs. The few records we have of such interventions show that if the Greeks (and Macedonians) wanted Roman assistance in disputes, it was they who had to undertake the arduous journey to the proconsul on the Macedonian frontier. They might as well have approached the senate in Rome, as indeed they more often did. The idea that the Macedonian province, as well as Asia prouincia after the Attalid bequest, was somehow spontaneously ‘created’ by a lex prouinciae (a modern term with no ancient authority252), with myriad legal, administrative, military, and financial arrangements (‘imperial’ or ‘provincial structures’) suddenly in place, is fundamentally ahistorical. Rome could not possibly have enforced such arrangements throughout the Balkans and in western Anatolia with a mere two legions. The Romans expected voluntary compliance with Rome’s interests, broadly conceived, of course; that was the nature of imperium: the power to give commands and expect them to be obeyed, with or without the visible presence of coercive power, stemming from the conviction on the part of those “under Roman sway” of the salience of that power.253 248   Kallet-Marx 1995. 249  Space constraints prohibit a thoroughgoing analysis of the provincial system (although aspects of Roman provincial administration will be treated in the next section). The best general study available in English is Lintott 1993. Case studies of individual provinces are now legion, but are not referred to here to keep the present work’s bibliography within reasonable bounds (Millett 1990; Isaac 1992; Woolf 1998; Revell 2009 are representative). 250   Kallet-Marx (1995, 14) dates this innovation to 167, but see now Burton 2017, 4–9, 188–89. 251  As argued by, e.g., Lintott 1993, 10, 24, 37. 252   Kallet-Marx 1995, 18; cf. Lintott 1993, 31. 253   Kallet-Marx 1995, 25, part of a larger discussion of the meaning of Roman imperium (18–29). Richardson 2008 is now the definitive discussion of the term.

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That the proconsul on the spot became the eventual focus of the inhabitants of the Greek East for adjudicating disputes and granting privileges (‘freedom,’ exemption from taxation, and so on) was a product “of a long process of adaptation and experience and [was] not imposed at one blow by victorious commanders.”254 Even after such traditional, putative chronological dividing lines (167 or the early 140s), when Roman power supposedly became more aggressive and interventionist than before (more ‘imperial’ than ‘hegemonic’), the dynamics of Roman rule remained pretty much the same. Roman proconsuls on the spot and the senate in Rome tried their best to avoid being drawn into the minutiae of Greek affairs while getting on with the job of providing security for their imperium. The initiative for the gradual enmeshing of the proconsuls into local affairs (complete with military garrisons, judicial assizes, and so on) rested largely with the provincials, who were drawn to the Roman commander on the spot, “by a sort of natural magnetism,” as “the most authoritative and powerful figure in the vicinity.”255 “Local legal and administrative structures must have been gradually but noticeably eroded over the generations by the tendency to resort to this useful source of power.”256 The second half of Kallet-Marx’s study is perhaps the most controversial. He argues forcefully that hatred of oppressive Roman rule, manifested most clearly in the rapacious activities of the equestrian tax farmers, the publicani, was not the main reason for the success of king Mithridates VI of Pontus in disrupting Roman control in Asia in 89–88, or for the massacre of “some thousands” of Romans and Italians in Asia prouincia in 88.257 Kallet-Marx effectively reverses the judgment of our best source for the massacre that hatred of the Romans outweighed fear of Mithridates in motivating the perpetrators, preferring instead Cicero’s silence on Greek complicity in the massacres in his speech in defense of the Manilian Law.258 The idea that the Greeks of Asia were quietly seething under oppressive Roman rule and rapacious publicani defies 254   Kallet-Marx 1995, 20. 255   Kallet-Marx 1995, 51, 96. 256   Kallet-Marx 1995, 96. 257   Kallet-Marx 1995, 155, playing down the traditional figure of 80,000 supplied in Memnon FGrH 434 F. 22.9 and Plut. Sull. 24.4 (cf. 150,000 in Val. Max. 9.2 ext. 3), preferring the vagueness of Cicero’s “so many thousands” (Man. 11)—“Who counted?” (Kallet-Marx 1995, 155 n. 118). 258  App. Mith. 23, ᾧ καὶ μάλιστα δῆλον ἐγένετο τὴν Ἀσίαν οὐ φόβῳ Μιθριδάτου μᾶλλον ἢ μίσει Ῥωμαίων τοιάδε ἐς αὐτοὺς ἐργάσασθαι, (“by which [sc. the massacres] it became clear that it was not so much out of fear of Mithridates as hatred for the Romans that Asia did such things against them.”) Cf. Kallet-Marx 1995, 155: “[the] complicity [of the Greeks of Asia Minor] in the crime was recognized at the time to have been due after all more to the ‘fear of Mithridates’ than to ‘hatred of the Romans.’”

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Kallet-Marx’s picture of a provincial system with an extraordinarily light touch, and of his assignment of the “quantum leap in the number of Romans resident or doing business” in Asia Minor to the period after the First Mithridatic War.259 Because the Roman authorities were a remote presence in the daily lives of the Asia Minor Greeks, the latter could have arisen spontaneously at any time, but only did so after Mithridates had overrun all Asia and issued his order, complete with rewards for the compliant and punishments for the disobedient. In the aftermath of the war that followed (the ‘First Mithridatic War’), the cities of Greece struggled to recover, and Roman personnel became more intrusive in the daily lives of the Greeks. Kallet-Marx shows that the Romans’ reassertion of their imperium in the East in the 70s was vigorous and generally successful. He also argues that the seizure of imperial policy by a series of popular leaders in the 60s marked a new era of Roman provincial administration in the East. Overcoming the senate’s traditional restraint, the Roman people were now determined to enjoy the fruits of empire to an unprecedented extent. Only then did the Roman authorities and publicani settle down to the systematic exploitation of the eastern provinces—hegemony had become empire. Overall, Kallet-Marx builds a compelling case for the continuities of Roman imperial control and policy in the East, but in my view mistimes the beginning of the serious Roman exploitation of Asia prouincia. He attempts to show that the nature of the Roman imperium was the same in Asia Minor as it was in Macedonia: distant, slow to develop, with but a legion preoccupied with garrison duty and keeping the peace.260 But, of course, Asia in the later second century did not suffer from anything like the security problems of the Macedonian frontier. The proconsul of Asia, his troops and his retinue, had more leisure time to meddle in the lives of the inhabitants of Asia Minor. Unfortunately, we have little evidence for the daily petty humiliations suffered by those sub imperio populi Romani at the hands of resident Romans and Italians. We can only occasionally catch a glimpse of these standard dynamics of empire in action, with representatives of the hegemon, official and unofficial, flaunting their superiority to their neighbors, asserting their privilege in various ways in the cities and towns—generally throwing their weight around.261 259   Kallet-Marx 1995, 136. 260  Even for Macedonia this is a difficult argument to make since it assumes constant pressure on the Macedonian frontiers across five decades between 148 and 100, but only a handful of campaigns in only a dozen years is actually attested (148, 143 or 142, 141, 135, 119, 114–111, 104, and 101 or 100). 261  See Ferrary 2002 for slaves and freedmen, agents of Roman publicani, extorting money from Greek aristocrats. Campbell (1984, 243–54) describes the Imperial-era suffering of the provincials from enforced hospitality/billeting, requisitioning, and beatings (cf.

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What we can see with greater clarity, however, as Kallet-Marx shows through analysis of the epigraphic evidence, are the rapacious activities of the equestrian publicani inside both the province of Asia proper, and in the free cities and territories scattered throughout western Asia Minor, where they had no legal right to operate. These men not only extorted amounts well above what they bid on the tax contracts in Rome, but also became (along with members of the proconsul’s retinue and resident wealthy Romans and Italians) the source for loans, at extortionate rates of interest, for those who could not afford to pay the amounts demanded by their fellow publicani. The floodgates were opened to this sort of activity in the late 120s, when the revolutionary tribune Gaius Gracchus had a law passed authorizing the censors to auction off tax-collecting contracts to the highest bidders.262 The staffing of the jury courts with equestrians, another innovation of Gaius Gracchus’, only made matters worse. The equestrians now had the power to punish proconsuls who restrained the activities of their fellow equestrian publicani, which, of course, encouraged proconsuls to look the other way (and anticipate receiving a cut) as the publicani plundered the wealth of Asia.263 P. Rutilius Rufus was convicted of extortion in 92 for his activities as P. Mucius Scaevola Pontifex’s legate in Asia in 98–97. The suit was a travesty: Rutilius was merely following his boss’s orders to rein in the tax gatherers.264 This is only the most famous case of a particularly egregious sort of equestrian corruption before the Mithridatic War; there must have been many more of a lesser sort that are now invisible to us. Kallet-Marx is, of course, aware of all this. “The behavior of Roman magistrates in the provinces,” he writes, “was not uncommonly marked by arbitrariness, brutality, venality, and other types of corruption.”265 Elsewhere, he surmises that “The quartering of even one legion, and the demands, legitimate and illegitimate, of its commander, were an unpleasant burden on those on whom Campbell 2002a, 176–77; Campbell 2002b, 91–92). Isaac (1992) demonstrates that the little information we have for mundane abuses is limited to Antioch (270–77), Alexandria (277–79), and Judea (115–18, 137, 279–87, 291–304)—the latter from invaluable Talmudic literature. To this should be added a late addition to the second-century Third Sibylline Oracle (350–355, Geffcken’s edition), where it is predicted that the province of Asia will receive three times as many goods as the Romans have taken, and as many Asians who looked after (ἀμφεπόλευσαν) a house of Italians, twenty times as many Italians will serve (θητεύσουσιν) in poverty and incur myriad debts. 262  Cic. Ver. 2.3.12; Diod. Sic. 34/35.25. 263  App. B Civ. 1.22. 264  Dio fr. 97. 265   Kallet-Marx 1995, 153.

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they fell.”266 Such observations merely beg the question: if such behavior at the top of Roman officialdom could and frequently did occur, then how much more common must have been the routine minor offenses against the Greeks by Roman and Italian soldiers, migrants, and businessmen? The Greeks of the free cities were, of course, highly sensitive to infringements on their sovereignty, as indeed the inscriptions abundantly demonstrate. I therefore find it very hard to believe that the massacre of 88 was not motivated above all by hatred of the Romans, as indeed Appian says. Whether “some thousands,” “so many thousands,” 80,000, or 150,000 Romans and Italians perished on that occasion, “the scale and the savagery of the massacre is shocking.”267 One final point. The argument that if the Greeks truly hated the Romans, they could have risen up at any time before 88, but only did so then because of fear of Mithridates, fails to convince. As Kallet-Marx himself demonstrates, at the heart of the concept of imperium was the power to compel obedience, even in the absence of coercive force. When Roman imperium in Asia seemed salient and vigorous (albeit distant), that is, from 126 on, defiance of it seemed imprudent; when that imperium was swept away by Mithridates after he defeated a scratch force commanded by M’. Aquillius (cos. 101), captured Aquillius himself, and overran all western Asia Minor, including the Roman province, the success of a longed-for insurrection suddenly seemed possible. Mithridates’ success and his decree, but more importantly, the failure of Roman imperium, let the victims of Roman rapacity and arrogance off the leash. 3.3 The Theoretical Turn: Systems and Forces Despite its long history, it has taken an unusually long time for imperialism theory to enter the scholarly conversation on Roman imperialism. Indeed, the study of ancient imperialism has traditionally been deeply undertheorized. William Harris’ WIRR and Erich Gruen’s HWCR were informed by various early theorists of imperialism, but the insights from theory were not consistently applied.268 The trend was reversed by the first of three books discussed in this section, Arthur Eckstein’s Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, which rigorously applied International Relations (IR) Realism theory to the evidence for ancient interstate conduct.269 Eckstein justifies his approach by 266   Kallet-Marx 1995, 41. 267  Eckstein 1997, 366. 268  Harris 1979 259–60 (an “Additional Note” on Joseph Schumpeter); Gruen 1984, 3–5 (on Hobson, Lenin, and Schumpeter—a mere two pages of text in a book of 730 pages, excluding backmatter). 269  Eckstein 2006.

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stressing the intellectual cost of the unfamiliarity of ancient historians and political scientists with each other’s work: Realism has “much to contribute to our understanding of the emergence of Roman hegemony,” while the story of Rome’s rise “may help to confirm [for political scientists], via a specific and complex case study, the general validity of Realist paradigms.”270 The book is also a sustained polemic against WIRR, which Eckstein undermines essentially by using Harris’ thesis against him: The present study … applies to other ancient states the insights and method of analysis pioneered by Harris concerning Rome. It finds militarism, bellicosity, and diplomatic aggressiveness rife throughout the polities of the ancient Mediterranean both east and west. And it argues that while Rome was certainly a harshly militaristic, warlike, aggressive, and expansionist state from a modern perspective, so too were all Rome’s competitors, in an environment that was an exceptionally cruel interstate anarchy.271 It will not be necessary here to repeat the fundamental tenets of Neorealism, outlined in Section 2. Eckstein’s main theoretical concern is to show that the ancient Mediterranean world was a violent anarchy, which shaped state behavior in broadly predictable ways. All states had to be ruthlessly securityseeking, power-maximizing, heavily militarized entities or risk destruction at the hands of others. In such a system, warfare was a routine occurrence, and the rise and fall of empires were entirely natural phenomena. Setting the stage for his explanation as to how Rome established a unipolar hegemony by 188, Eckstein adopts the IR Realist concept of a ‘power-transition crisis.’ The latter occurs when there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the distribution of capabilities across the system (a precipitous decline and/or rapid rise in power of one or more states); “in such cases the current distribution of status, territory, and influence within the system comes increasingly into disjuncture with the realities of power—and hence it breaks down.”272 A war of adjustment—“hegemonic war”—is the result, bringing the apparent and real distribution of capabilities into line. During the run-up to such wars, decisionmaking becomes more and more “stereotyped and constrained” as “the choices available to politicians appear to them more and more foreclosed by the actions of others and the pressures of the crisis itself.” “Cognitive closure” is 270  Eckstein 2006, 7. 271  Eckstein 2006, 3. 272  Eckstein 2006, 24.

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the result: the feeling that there is no alternative to war.273 States that attempt to manage the power-transition crisis may be ‘unlimited revisionist states’ (also called ‘revolutionary states’), which seek to overthrow the system as a whole; ‘limited revisionist states,’ which seek to adjust to the new realities of power; or ‘status quo states,’ which support the system the way it is. The latter, of course, are rare. After briefly dismissing a few competing IR schools of thought— Neoliberalism and Constructivism (on which, see below)—Eckstein moves on to building his case that the Romans were not exceptionally violent, warlike, and aggressive among their system competitors in Mediterranean antiquity. He demonstrates that both the Classical Aegean and the world of the Hellenistic kingdoms were harsh and violent anarchies, as were Tyrrhenian Italy and the western Mediterranean generally. In the case of Classical Greece, “war [was] normal,” and diplomacy fairly unsophisticated: by the time diplomacy was resorted to, crises had already progressed too far along the road to war to be reversed, and negotiation was limited to the issuing of non-negotiable, mutually unacceptable demands, played out in public. This crisis diplomacy is called ‘compellence diplomacy’ by political scientists, who describe these public displays of face-saving bluster as “contests of resolve.”274 Given the harsh anarchy of the Classical Greek inter-polis system, it is no surprise that it produced an intellectual like Thucydides, the ‘father or Realism,’ who described his world in terms similar to how modern Realists describe theirs, and indeed directly influenced the latter. So, his Athenians are made to say that “by a law of nature men rule wherever they can.”275 His “truest cause” of the Peloponnesian War is the growth of the power of Athens and Sparta’s fear of it—the essence of a classic power-transition crisis. Fear, in fact, is the predominant motivator for Thucydides’ state actors.276 Like modern Realists, Thucydides does not downplay the importance of the internal culture of states—the ‘unit attributes’— but adopts a ‘layered explanation’ for state action, in which system pressures in combination with unit-level factors explain state behavior. His “truest cause” of the power-transition crisis of the Peloponnesian War thus leaves room for the contrast between the restless energy of Athens and Sparta’s reluctance to undertake distant imperial adventures, alongside the systemic explanation.277

273  Eckstein 2006, 24–25. 274  Eckstein 2006, 43, 60–61. 275  Thuc. 5.105.2. 276  Thuc. 1.23.6 (φόβον). 277  Thuc. 1.23.6 (τὴν ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν), 1.68–71.

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Alexander the Great cast a long shadow over the Hellenistic world: the men who ruled his successor kingdoms, both great and small, aspired to his example. It was a world of constant warfare in which the eventual tripolar balance of power between Antigonid Macedon, the eastern Seleucid Empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt was not so much based on consensus but stalemate. The Hellenistic kings seized every opportunity for aggrandizement and to steal a march on the others. Because they were essentially usurpers, all the kings had to demonstrate their legitimacy through success in war, seizing “spear-won land” (δορίκτητος) and fighting from the front. The constant need to defend their legitimacy, enrich their troops, and secure the loyalty of their gift-devouring ‘Friends’ (courtiers who helped run their empires), meant that the Hellenistic states were Schumpeterian war machines, which created the wars upon which the survival of their regimes depended. Polybius was the Thucydides of this period, his Histories providing a proto-Realist view of the world, which was anarchic and dominated by fear. As in Classical Greece, “war was normal” in this world. Between 323 and 160, a period of over 160 years, there were only six years without at least one of the major Hellenistic kingdoms being involved in major wars.278 It was into this situation that the Romans were drawn after 207, when a significant power-transition crisis occurred in the Hellenistic state system. The Ptolemaic regime, one of the three pillars of the rough de facto tripolar balance of the Hellenistic system, was on the verge of collapse in these years, and Philip V of Macedon and the Seleucid king Antiochus III, unlimited revisionist monarchs, swooped in to destroy Ptolemaic power. The smaller Greek states (and the Ptolemaic regime) called on Rome, the least threatening (because most distant) great power, to prevent this.279 Eckstein then introduces the tough Tyrrhenian neighborhood in which the Roman state grew up. He demonstrates that the Romans were surrounded by, in the Roman historian Livy’s terms, terrores multi.280 The Latins, Etruscans, Celts, Samnites, and the cities of Tarentum and Carthage (Rome’s nearest system competitors in the western Mediterranean) were all heavily militarized, expansionist powers. Rome struggled to survive in its original Latin context. The Etruscans were the aggressors against Rome from the traditional end of the Roman monarchy (ca. 509) to around 310, after which Rome turned to the attack, still fighting them as late as 241. The Po Valley Celts, of course, famously destroyed Rome itself in ca. 387, curtailing its development and reducing its security for several generations in the fourth century. The destruction left an 278  Eckstein 2006, 83. 279  Eckstein 2006, 113. 280  Liv. 7.12.7.

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‘indelible psychological mark’ on the Romans, leading to an existential struggle in which the only way to prevent massive Celtic invasions and destruction of Roman territory (which happened often) was to clear them out of the Po Valley entirely, by any means necessary. To the south, the Romans had to compete with the extremely warlike Samnite peoples, especially after they captured the fertile Campanian plain.281 The Romans responded positively to the pleas of the leading city of Campania, Capua, sparking three major wars with the Samnites, who remained hostile and fearsome to Rome until the early first century (they formed the backbone of the resistance and held out longest against the Romans in the Social War). The Tarantines, who established a Greek empire in southern Italy in the late fourth and early third centuries, were formidable rivals as well, but what made them potentially an existential threat to Rome was their summoning of Pyrrhus of Epirus, second cousin of Alexander the Great and a prominent player in the post-Alexander era, to help them resist the encroaching power of Rome. During the Pyrrhic War, Pyrrhus dealt terrible defeats to the Romans, bringing them to their knees as the Celts had done a century before. This was “a permanent trauma in Roman memory,” and increased Roman paranoia about the outside world.282 Then there is Carthage, eventually Rome’s chief system competitor in terms of state power, and a formidably warlike state, despite persistent stereotypes of them as “unwarlike … clever merchants interested in profit and afraid of war.”283 The first two Punic Wars often resembled life-and-death struggles, with the Roman state once again coming within a whisker of total destruction after suffering three major defeats at the hands of Hannibal in the opening phase of the Second Punic War. Roman exceptionalism, Eckstein concludes, lay not in its militarized, bellicose, and diplomatically aggressive stance toward the outside world—all states were like this—but in the self-imposed constraints on Roman aggressive behavior. As was seen earlier, the Roman instinct to find a defensive justification for war, and to wage only just wars, was probably very ancient, intimately bound up, as it was, with the archaic fetial ritual. It is easy to be cynical about all this—almost all developed states issue defensive justifications for going to war, rerum repetitiones often took the form of non-negotiable demands likely to be unacceptable to the offending party (‘compellence diplomacy’), and the 281  This makes the assertion of Tim Cornell (2004, 128) that the Samnites “were not capable of imperialist expansion by the permanent conquest of other peoples’ territories” most implausible. 282  Eckstein 2006, 156. 283  Eckstein 2006, 163.

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fetial procedure may have been obsolete during most of the period of overseas expansion.284 The Romans nonetheless seemed particularly concerned with the gods’ view of their behavior, and indeed “asserted that they were different from other peoples … because of deep religiosity and fear of the gods.”285 In any case, it was the existence of these self-imposed constraints, and their persistence in Roman internal discourse, that were unique among Rome’s system competitors.286 Even if the fetial ritual was obsolete in the middle Republic, the cooling-off period lived on in the senate’s instinctive inclination to debate whether to go to war and on what grounds, and to attempt negotiated solutions to escalating international crises.287 And, of course, Rome’s internal political culture deeply affected foreign policy decision-making: unlike in the Hellenistic kingdoms, where consultation, if sometimes deemed necessary by the kings, was confined to their inner circles, in the Roman republican system, open and widespread consultation and debate were absolutely necessary before decisions were taken, especially on such matters as whether to go to war, where the lives of Rome’s citizen militiamen were put at risk. “A conscripted citizen-soldier and his family are going to be politically sensitive to wars of choice as opposed to wars of necessity.”288 Eckstein also finds exceptionalism in the integrative character of Roman foreign policy, that is, its openness to immigration by outsiders, which contrasts with Rome’s Greek contemporaries, who “tended toward virulent exclusivity.”289 The Romans’ “divorce of citizen status from ethnicity or geographic location” in Italy was an amazing achievement—‘out of the box’ thinking that deeply impressed even Philip V of Macedon.290 Citizenship, as was seen earlier, was burdensome in the early days: incorporated communities lost their civic identity, ciuitates sine suffragio, citizens lacking the vote, were half-citizens, paid a war tax, and had to supply troops for Roman wars; allies (socii) also had to supply troops, as well as their equipment and pay. But these burdens were compensated by internal autonomy and the absence of garrisons. Rome’s far-flung 284  See, e.g., Harris 1979, 166–75. 285  Eckstein 2006, 220. 286  Eckstein 2006, 217. 287   Examples: the three attempts by Appius Claudius Caudex to negotiate with the Carthaginians before crossing to Sicily in arms in 264 (Eckstein 1987, 93–101); the ongoing negotiations with Antiochus III in the 190s (Gruen 1984, 620–36); and the thirteen or so embassies the senate sent to various states between 175 and 171, attempting to isolate Perseus and thus bring him to heel diplomatically (Burton 2017, 64–77 [embassies], 120 [the number, with scholarship]). 288  Eckstein 2006, 232. 289  Eckstein 2006, 147; also Morley 2010, 51–52, 105–107, 117. 290  Eckstein 2006, 252, 312 (Philip, with Syll.3 543).

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citizens, half-citizens, and allies became for the most part reconciled to these arrangements not so much from fear of Rome (though this certainly existed) as fear of the other system predators—the Celts especially. As Eckstein notes elsewhere, after Hannibal came within an ace of obliterating Roman power in 216, only forty per cent of Rome’s allies defected to the Carthaginian side (mostly out of fear of Hannibal).291 The remainder of the final chapter of the book is a summary and preview of Eckstein’s next book, Rome Enters the Greek East. He argues that after the collapse of Egyptian power beginning around 207, the eastern Mediterranean entered a power-transition crisis. Soon, the unlimited revisionist kings Philip V and Antiochus III began attacking Ptolemaic possessions with a view to destroying Ptolemaic power completely. The Romans’ response to calls for help from small to middling Greek states and from Ptolemaic Egypt was nonexceptional behavior. Roman interest in the East had always been minimal, but they were now convinced by eastern diplomats that the situation was extremely dangerous to themselves (their one experience with the Hellenistic dynasts— the invasion of Pyrrhus—probably lent credence to what the ambassadors told them about Philip and Antiochus). The embassies from the East were thus the catalyst for Roman intervention: “the Greek envoys presented the Senate with a ‘worst-case scenario’ about the kings—and the Patres reacted accordingly.”292 Not that the decision was undertaken lightly: the senate was deeply divided, taking a long time to reach ‘cognitive closure,’ and the Roman people, exhausted from the recently ended Second Punic War, initially rejected the proposal to go to war. Philip was defeated, but Roman withdrawal from Greece and the resentments of the Aetolians eventually drew Rome into hegemonic war with the last of its peer competitors, Antiochus III. During the long diplomatic escalation toward war, each side refused to compromise on their demands and tried to achieve a better strategic position—to get ‘the better of the balance,’ in political science terms. The Roman victory over Antiochus in 189 established Rome as a unipolar hegemon in the Mediterranean world. Twenty years of relative peace in the East followed. In his review of Harris’ WIRR, John Briscoe pointed out that while it is true that the Romans went to war almost every year, Philip V and Antiochus III devoted themselves to “continuous and largely self-imposed warfare.”293 Harris’ response to this near-fatal observation for his thesis, in a footnote, was “it is no use saying” this since “the Roman case involved not single rulers, but 291  Eckstein 2008, 20 and n. 59. 292  Eckstein 2006, 275–76. 293  Briscoe 1980, 86.

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the consensus of a whole social order, sustained over centuries.”294 What is surprising is that it took as long as it did for a systematic demonstration of Briscoe’s observation to appear. This is Eckstein’s central achievement. His use of Realism shifted the analytical focus away from unit-level phenomena, the hallmark of Harris’ thesis, to the system-level, thereby demonstrating that Harris’ insights about Roman bellicosity could be applied to all their system competitors, since they were all “functionally similar units.” There exists, I believe, a valid criticism of Eckstein’s handling of unit-level phenomena, which Realists call ‘nonstructural supplementary variables.’295 As earlier noted, Eckstein approves of a Thucydidean ‘layered’ approach that encompasses both system- and unit-level factors since, as Waltz observes, international systemic structures “shape and shove; they do not determine the actions of states.”296 Eckstein is insistent that “No modern theorist of international relations believes” that unit-level factors, the internal culture of states, do not matter.297 To what extent, then, do unit-level phenomena matter? Eckstein (and the Realist literature) is unclear on this point. But the overwhelming thrust of his analysis is that they matter little: suspicion of ‘worst case scenarios’ in violent anarchies such as the ancient Mediterranean lead to ‘cognitive closure.’ In the Hellenistic anarchy, all states “regressed toward Waltzian ‘functional similarity of units.’”298 Eckstein’s downplaying of unit-level attributes— or, at least, his failure to give them analytical weight anywhere near that given to system-level pressures—creates a lopsided picture. So, in one instance, the positive response by great powers to requests for help from smaller states, on the one hand, arose from a unit-level concern for “prestige” and “self-interest” (rejection would mean absorption of that state—and its resources—by the one threatening it), “a desire to dominate,” “a will to power,” and “a militaristic 294  Harris 1984, 25 n. 3. Harris (2016, 42–43) has reiterated the point (“What is without parallel in the ancient Mediterranean is a centuries-long history of almost unremitting warfare”), and has dismissed Eckstein’s Realist approach as a “bizarrely named American political science doctrine … since the doctrines in question are not actually realistic at all.” He condemns Eckstein’s picture of universally militarized states as a “silly historical falsehood” and “pseudo-history,” and accuses Eckstein of using Realism “to provide coverage [sic] for the foreign policy of the contemporary United States.” 295  Eckstein 2006, 68. 296  Eckstein 2006, 27, 185 (citing Waltz 2000, 24). 297  Eckstein 2006, 33; also 8 (“No theorist of international relations argues that the nature of the system within which states exist, or pressure from the characteristics of that system, provides by itself a full explanation of specific interstate behavior”), 308 (“No Realist theoretician argues that the individual actions of the governing elites of individual states are absolutely determined by the interstate structures that form their environment”). 298  Eckstein 2006, 94.

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and aggressive unit culture.” On the other hand, these unit-level phenomena were “in part” shaped by the system: they were “natural responses and adaptations” to systemic pressures.299 Again, the Hannibalic War arose “in good part from the tragic pressures of the interstate system,” but “the existence of a rivalrous relationship and a bad history were additional factors.”300 That history matters, and surely required discussion. At one point, Eckstein implies that internal mitigating factors that restrained bellicose behavior among the Classical Greeks were canceled out by the fact that there was no international law.301 Classical Greek statesmen, “living in a culture that stressed personal honor and status, and the unacceptability of accepting insult or injury, culturally preferred resistance to others, and the use of force,” but these preferences were “in part a response to the pressures originating in the interstate anarchy.”302 The vagueness of Eckstein’s analysis, apparent in these last statements, also points to a ‘chicken and egg’ problem for his thesis as a whole. Which came first—the cultural preferences or the pressures of the system? There is little need to recapitulate in full Eckstein’s follow-up and companion volume to Mediterranean Anarchy.303 His theoretical stance remains largely unchanged but with two significant concessions. First, not all anarchies are as savage as the ancient Mediterranean, and so it is “debatable” whether the modern interstate system should be used as a comparison.304 Second, Eckstein now accepts the notion that modern diplomatic structures

299  Eckstein 2006, 179, 277 (the quotations). It would seem that all that is left for autonomous unit-level responses is concern for prestige and honor. I do not doubt these were universally powerful incentives, given, as Eckstein elsewhere says (2008, 89 n. 47, 220), slave-owning aristocratic decision-makers tend to obsess over such things. But the evidence he cites—Polyb. 24.10.11—cannot prove the point that in general the great ancient Mediterranean states were honor bound to respond positively to appeals for help. The passage refers specifically and solely to the Romans, who through their “brilliant spirit and noble policy” (ψυχῇ χρώμενοι λαμπρᾷ καὶ προαιρέσει καλῇ) take pity on all who appeal to them. 300  Eckstein 2006, 175 (emphasis added). 301  Eckstein 2006, 41: “informal customs of conduct among the Greek polities served somewhat to mitigate the violence of interstate anarchy. But there was no international law,” which amounts to saying that the violence of the anarchy was mitigated—but it was still anarchy. 302  Eckstein 2006, 76 (emphasis added). 303  Eckstein 2008. 304  Eckstein 2008, 11. In Eckstein 2006, 36 a similar concession was made, but not in terms of the modern interstate system (“the western European state system” of unspecified period was noted there: n. 87).

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help ameliorate the tone and even the substance of modern interstate interactions [which] allows modern governments to warn each other of possible conflicts of interest at an early stage, creating the possibility of modifying a policy at a point when no one is greatly committed to it. Moreover, such interactions in the modern world are usually couched in a specially tactful diplomatic language which has been developed over centuries, and which is employed by a corps of specially trained diplomatic professionals.305 This concession has important implications for the Constructivist response to Eckstein (see below). In the first third of the book, Eckstein builds on the almost century-old thesis of Maurice Holleaux that the Romans’ earliest interventions in the East—the First Illyrian War (229), the Second Illyrian War (219), and the First Macedonian War/the Aetolian War (214–205)—were minimal in purpose and reflect their lack of interest in becoming entangled in Greek affairs. The (very loose) ties of informal amicitia established with a handful of Greek polities and peoples along 400 miles of Illyrian coastline was not a protectorate, as some scholars still argue, and perhaps not even a ‘sphere of influence,’ as it is defined in political science terms (above, Section 2).306 The second part of the book goes a very long way to make a short point— and for good reasons. Across 150 pages covering a chronological range of just eight years of poorly documented history (207–200), Eckstein hacks away at scholarly opiniones communes and pieces together the surviving shards of literary and epigraphic evidence to show that the secret pact to destroy Ptolemaic power, struck between Philip V and Antiochus III in winter 203/2, actually existed; that Philip’s campaigns in Asia Minor during 202–200 were directed against Ptolemaic holdings, in coordination with Antiochus’ viceroy in Asia Minor, Zeuxis; that fears of the pact and its effects caused a ‘diplomatic revolution,’ whereby states traditionally hostile toward each other, neutral, and antiRoman during the First Macedonian War, sought Roman intervention against Philip and Antiochus during 203/2–200; that their fears were well-founded because the collapse of Ptolemaic power triggered a power-transition crisis; and that the Romans became sufficiently convinced that this situation was an existential threat to themselves, and so declared war on Philip.

305  Eckstein 2008, 12 (ideas explicitly rejected by Eckstein 2006, 29–30). 306  Eckstein 2008, 54.

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The final part of Eckstein’s book is an international systems analysis of the hegemonic wars that followed Philip’s refusal to concede to the Roman envoys’ demands. These wars—the Second Macedonian War and the war with Antiochus III—mark the second and third stages, respectively, of the powertransition crisis that had begun with the collapse of Ptolemaic power starting in 207. The twenty-year transition, ending with the peace of Apamea (188), was achieved, as many such crises are, according to Eckstein, through massive violence. Following their usual pattern, the Romans withdrew all their troops from Greece following the defeat of Philip. Their declaration of Greek freedom—freedom from interference by any potential hegemonic powers in the East, from tribute, and from military garrisons, each city enjoying its ancestral laws—was a congenial policy to the Romans’ by now long-standing modus operandi in the world east of Italy, which Eckstein calls “smash and leave”: inflict massive amounts of violence, then withdraw all troops and personnel, leaving behind a sphere of influence.307 The five-year (196–192) diplomatic confrontation with Antiochus III that followed was a classic case of a public “contest of resolve” between the two superpowers in a bipolar system, where both disputants try to get “the better of the balance,” that is, to secure strategic advantage for their side, whereby their respective “established expectation levels” concerning the “contested periphery”—Greece, where their hegemonies overlapped and interests clashed—were consistently not met.308 Once again, Rome defeated its nearest system competitor in the war that followed, and ejected Antiochus from Asia Minor to beyond the Taurus–Halys line. The result was unprecedented for the Mediterranean world: a unipolar situation “where [there was] only one political and military focus, and only one dominant actor [with] a preponderance of power in [its] hands; Rome was now the sole remaining superpower.”309 A sixteen-year period of relative peace followed. But why did it not last? Eckstein concludes his analysis with an attempt to answer this question. Roman predominance and unipolarity did not necessarily mean that empire, or even hegemony (in Michael Doyle’s terms) was established. The informal sphere of influence—‘sway’—that the Romans preferred before 188 continued after that date. The Romans expected their interests to be protected and their wishes to be followed (that is, again, the function of imperium)—but very few of these were clearly articulated. The disappearance of Rome from the East resulted in “off-shore” or “long-distance” balancing—a “hands off” approach 307  Eckstein 2008, 285, 301, 305, 339. 308  Eckstein 2008, 312–15. 309  Eckstein 2008, 342.

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to maintaining the Roman sphere of influence.310 The Greek states resorted to “internal balancing,” maximizing their internal resources to build the capacity for independent action; libertas remained. As long as a peer competitor did not emerge from this situation, Rome was content to keep its distance. Such a figure did emerge in the late 170s in the form of Perseus, son of Philip V, in charge of an enlarged Macedonian kingdom—and a military phalanx of 43,000 men.311 Eckstein makes a powerful case for the Realist reading of events between 230 and 188, although he is occasionally dismissive of contrary evidence, or stretches it to the breaking point. So, in order to preserve his hypothesis of Roman indifference to eastern affairs down to 201/200, he must dismiss Polybius’ view that the Romans went to war against Demetrius of Pharos in 219, in part because they feared the flourishing of the Macedonian kingdom to the east of Illyria.312 To downplay further the connection between the Illyrian situation and Macedon, Eckstein also dismisses Demetrius’ coordination of military maneuvers with Philip V in autumn 220 as a mercenary deal instead of an alliance.313 Eckstein’s “diplomatic revolution” thesis, although in the main convincing, occasionally pushes the evidence too far. He argues, for example, that Rome harbored an enduring hostility toward the states—Athens, Rhodes, and Ptolemaic Egypt—that had tried to end the First Macedonian War against Rome’s wishes and without its involvement, despite good evidence to the contrary.314 310  Eckstein 2008, 363. 311  On Perseus and the Third Macedonian War, see now Burton 2017 (figure at 8, 86, 100, 126, 183). 312  Polyb. 3.16.3–5. Not even Holleaux denied Roman fear of Macedon. 313  Polyb. 4.19.7–9. Mercenary deal: Eckstein 2008, 65 (so too Gruen 1984, 370–71). Both, however, accept a similar deal Scerdilaidas made with Philip—Philip bought his friendship and alliance for twenty talents annually (Polyb. 4.29.6–7)—as a proper alliance (Gruen 1984, 373; Eckstein 2008, 66). Eckstein also misdates this event to autumn 220; it more properly belongs in late winter 220/219. I owe this and the previous argument to Augustine McManus, a former honours student of mine. 314  Athens was an adscriptus on the Roman side in the Peace of Phoenice in 205 (Liv. 29.12.14, dismissed as an annalistic fabrication by Eckstein 2008, 210–11, but see now Burton 2013, 215–18). The Rhodians were not contradicted by the Romans when they asserted the 140year old (continuous) friendship with Rome in 168 (Polyb. 30.5.6; even if the Polybian MSS are wrong, and Polybius originally wrote “forty” instead of “one hundred and forty,” as Holleaux 1935, 35 n. 6 believed, that would put the establishment of the relationship precisely within the time frame of the Rhodians’ First Macedonian War mediation efforts). The alleged distance between Rome and the Ptolemaic regime since the establishment of amicitia between them in 273 (Liv. Per. 14 with Burton 2011, 107–108) is belied by Rome’s desperate purchase of Egyptian grain in 211 or 210 (Polyb. 9.11a, dismissed by Eckstein 2008, 202 as a mere “business deal,” but see now Burton 2011, 188 n. 40). An embassy was sent to Rome by the ministers of Ptolemy V in 204/3, probably to seek renewal of the

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My own work on Roman imperialism in the middle Republic, Friendship and Empire, is in part a response to Eckstein’s Realist interpretation.315 The theoretical framework is provided by IR Constructivism and its key insight: that the internal discourse of a state culture, its language and ideas, including values, norms, ideologies, and practices, matter just as much as (if not more than) sheer power and self-interest in shaping the structure of the international system when projected outward. If the prevailing discourse of international relations is brutal, aggressive, and violent, the international system will be brutal, aggressive, and violent: “anarchy is what states make of it.”316 The nature of the international system can therefore be transformed by discursive acts; communitarian discourses of interstate cooperation and peace, for example, can supplant or at least temper the pessimistic Realist discourse that has dominated and shaped contemporary international relations since the Cold War began. Like Eckstein’s ‘layered’ approach, a ‘modified’ Constructivism seems best suited to studying ancient international relations. This approach attributes explanatory force to both the international discursive and ideational practices that pure Constructivism emphasizes as well as such factors as self-interest and fear that dominate Realist epistemologies in the construction of the international system. The key difference is that I regard these factors as primarily discursive rather than descriptive phenomena: they cannot be held to exist objectively outside the realm of discourse or to affect system structures independent of discourse.317 A shared ancient international discourse centered on “prestige, honor, altruism, morality, and emotion,”318 combined with a distinctively Roman discourse of fides, ‘good faith,’ ‘trust,’ and amicitia, ‘friendship,’ projected outward, shaped the ancient Mediterranean international system (rather than vice versa). Ancient state behavior was conditioned by a complex interplay of Realist factors (‘fear’ and ‘appetite’) and the powerful, shared internal discourses of ancient societies obsessed with shame and honor. new king’s father’s amicitia with Rome—evidently with no qualms about Roman hostility (Polyb. 15.25.14; Eckstein 2008, 204 doubts the embassy ever reached its destination). 315  Burton 2011. A preliminary study (Burton 2003) appeared in time for Eckstein to consult for his 2008 book. Eckstein 2009 and Burton 2009 is a debate over whether the Hellenistic Mediterranean was truly anarchic, Eckstein applying his Realist approach, and I a Constructivist approach to the concept of deditio. 316  Wendt 1992. 317  Burton 2011, 21–22. 318  Burton 2011, 22.

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Because language and ideas are the focus of analysis, my book begins with the terminology of ancient Roman international relations, specifically the discourse around amicitia, ‘friendship.’ Ernst Badian’s view that the Romans called their international partners one thing—‘friends’—but thought about, treated, and constructed them as something else—‘clients’—is untenable once close attention is paid to both the trajectory of Roman imperialism and the dynamics of friendship interaction. The foreign clientela model confuses means with the end: the Romans did not achieve predominance simply by assuming a position of predominance. A holistic understanding of friendship requires its analysis as a process, with a beginning, a life course, and an end. Through the dynamics of reciprocity and the exchange of gifts, services, and favors, relative status in friendships is in a constant state of flux, resulting in structural but fluid asymmetry. The structural but static inequality of the patron–client relationship was entirely different—as the Romans understood. Both relationships are bound together by fides, mutual trust, but there the similarity ends. Friendships, as sociological modeling shows, are characterized by choice: individuals can choose to become friends with others; autarchy: friendship is unconstrained by formal, institutional structures or rigid hierarchies; trust and affection: both distinguish friendship from looser bonds (acquaintances, co-workers, etc.), and affection marks friendship off from tighter, formally hierarchical relationships (mentor–student, patron–client, lord–vassal); complementarity and similarity: friends are not simply idealized ‘second selves,’ but engage in exchange strategies to achieve status and secure material and emotional resources, resulting in a fluid asymmetry between partners over time. The phenomenology of ancient Roman ‘interpersonal amicitia’ maps precisely onto that of Roman ‘international amicitia,’ because that is the dominant social metaphor the Romans chose to apply in their diplomatic engagement with the outside world. The application of the discourse surrounding friendship had a structuring effect on the ancient Mediterranean system. At the heart of Friendship and Empire is a ‘processual’ analysis of the life course of Rome’s international friendships, with individual chapters on the beginning of friendship, its exchanges, and its end. Roman international friendship began as a result of wartime cooperation, diplomatic solicitation of friendship, voluntary absolute surrender (deditio), or deditio under duress, following defeat by Roman forces. In the latter two situations, there was qualitatively no difference in Roman treatment of the surrendered; this is because fides, ‘good faith,’ was operative in both. Fides governed all amicitiae, regardless of the circumstances of their establishment. The seriousness with which the Romans regarded their good faith (or at least their reputation for

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good faith) had a structuring effect on the international system in that it restrained self-interested Roman behavior. The Romans took pains to publicize their fides since behavior inconsistent with it would negatively affect their international reputation, fewer states would turn to them for protection, and their influence in the international sphere would decline—a real-world consequence of a unit-level attribute.319 The next chapter analyzes part of the life span of international amicitiae, the friendly exchange of favors, beneficia. For Rome’s friends, these typically took the form of providing troops for Rome’s wars; of providing military supplies, materiel, and money; of facilitating troop movements and intelligence gathering; and offering advice and mediation. Rome’s amici enjoyed a great deal of freedom of action within the mutually constraining reciprocity of the friendship bond. This ‘response flexibility’ was a blessing and a curse for Rome’s friends: it allowed a good deal of autonomy but created a good deal of uncertainty as to Roman expectations as well. The beneficia performed by the Romans consisted of positively responding to requests for armed or diplomatic intervention by pre-existing amici or other states; submitting to and offering mediation; making provision for their amici in treaties of peace; providing material rewards for service in Roman wars; and intervening in civil disputes in friendly states. Rome’s freedom of action—typically, to respond to friends in distress, or not, as was sometimes the case—was perhaps greater than its friends’, depending on time and circumstances. So, most famously, the Romans ignored the pleas of Saguntum, their amicus in southern Spain, when it was under attack by Hannibal in 219–218. But powerful moral constraints— self-imposed, at the unit level—acted strongly upon Roman behavior in the aftermath: Roman commanders began searching for survivors, buying them out of slavery, and eventually rebuilt Saguntum and greatly expanded its territory.320 When the Roman people initially refused to authorize a declaration of war on Philip V in 200, the consul Galba tried to persuade them to reconsider by urging them not to let what happened to the Saguntines happen to Rome’s Greek friends and victims of Macedonian aggression.321 Earlier, when Hiero II of Syracuse cynically mocked the Romans’ fine talk about their fides, he must have cut them to the quick—and that was the point.322 The anecdote shows not only that the Romans widely publicized their fides, and that other 319  See Liv. 42.8.6 for the case of the Statellate Ligurians, enslaved en masse by M. Popilius Laenas in 173: the senate was concerned that nobody in future would dare surrender themselves to Roman fides (ne quis umquam se postea dedere auderet). 320  Liv. 24.42.9–10, 28.39.12. 321  Liv. 31.7.6–7. 322  Diod. Sic. 23.1.4.

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states—Locri and Maccabean Judea among them323—recognized this, but, more importantly, the Romans felt morally compelled to live up to their obligations and constraints—and Hiero knew it. The inherent flexibility of the amicitia tie, along with the considerable freedom of choice and interpretation of the relationship’s obligations (autarchy) on both sides could, and often did result in relationship breakdowns. As the final chapter of Friendship and Empire argues, disputes between Rome and its friends were typically couched in moral terms: both sides accused the other of breaking fides in some way. Polybius listed Demetrius of Pharos’ “ingratitude” first among the reasons for the Roman declaration of war on him in 219. The Roman view of their international partners through the moralizing lens of amicitia accounts for the nature of their disputes and the outbreak of wars: the former were competitions for status, both real and perceived, within the relationship, while the latter were attempts to readjust relative status according to moral as well as power-political criteria. Punishments meted out by Rome after wars or during diplomatic tiffs were typically ‘hard but fair,’ a practical adjustment of relative status within the relationship, and an attempt to punish those most responsible for the initial moral transgression(s). Given the Romanocentric focus of the surviving sources, little is heard of Roman violations of fides and immoral international conduct, with the exception of the history of the Roman–Carthaginian relationship, from the intervention at Messana in 264, through the seizure of Sardinia in 238/7, and down to the destruction of the city of Carthage itself in 146. The moralizing language in which much of this analysis is cast in the sources reflects the actual terms of the debate, which constructed the processes and outcomes of these disputes. Both parties were attempting to adjust their relative status within the relationship at crucial points in their history. When the last Carthaginian indemnity payment was deposited in 151, that is, when the last sign of Carthaginian subordination to Rome was removed, Carthage asserted itself in an attempt to reclaim status within the relationship. The Romans, on the other hand, began looking for ways to re-establish Carthage’s subordinate position. Carthago delenda est was the public expression of the breakdown of amicitia. The study concludes by observing that the ideas behind and the discourse of Roman amicitia not only consolidated Roman power, but also shaped the Mediterranean system anew:

323  A stater issued by Epizephyrian Locri, probably in 282 BC, depicts the goddess Pistis (= Fides) crowning the goddess Roma (Caccamo Caltabiano 1978). Judas Maccabeus learned that allies of Rome could rely on their friendship (1 Macc. 8:1, 12).

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Between roughly 264 and 146 BC, the Romans somehow managed to refashion the entire Mediterranean system, a dangerous, war-prone, and violently anarchic environment, into a shape and substance that was more congenial to themselves and their own most pressing national security concerns. Whether by design or accident, the effect of this activity was more security for more states, gradually tilting the nature of the system away from violent anarchy to a more stable collective security regime.324 The addition of IR Constructivist theory to the set of explanations for Roman expansion, including Realism, enriches our understanding of a complex, lengthy process. The recovery of the moralizing discourse of ancient diplomacy, usually brushed aside as mere window dressing or self-interested obfuscation, enhances the database of evidence for the rise of Rome’s Mediterranean-wide sphere of influence. This is not the appropriate forum for a lengthy response to Friendship and Empire’s critics, several of whom were clearly motivated by enthusiastic interest in the work and sympathy with its general approach.325 Several criticisms are of the ‘we must agree to disagree’ variety; others belong to the category of ‘not the book I would have written’; still others are based on misreadings or misunderstandings of portions of my argument. In terms of the latter, John Briscoe asserts that when Quinctius Flamininus and Villius Tappulus accused the Thessalian Magnesians of ingratitude in 192, they were speaking the language of clientela rather than amicitia. But suspicions and even accusations of ingratitude were (and remain) not untypical of friendships in crisis.326 Second, both Briscoe and Altay Coşkun object that I cite Cicero’s assertion that conquering Roman generals traditionally became patrons of the communities they defeated, but I do not comment on it or its implications for my thesis and its challenge to Badian’s foreign clientela model.327 This is because the Ciceronian evidence does not invalidate my thesis that Rome as a state did not become a patron of other states.328 Coşkun suggests that Scipio Africanus’ 324  Burton 2011, 354–55. 325  See Valdés Matías 2012; Baltrusch 2013; Briscoe 2013; Davies 2014; Coşkun 2017. 326  Briscoe 2013, 258 (citing Liv. 35.31.13, 39.7). Rome’s dispute with its amicus Demetrius of Pharos, as noted above, was couched in terms of, precisely, “ingratitude.” 327  Briscoe 2013, 258; Coşkun 2017, 915 and nn. 12–13 (with Cic. Off. 1.35). 328  Burton 2011, 4–5 n. 11. The other passages Coşkun cites at 915 n. 12 do not affect my thesis either: one (Cic. Fam. 15.4.15) states that Cyprus and Cappadocia are clients of his addressee, Cato the Younger; the other (Suet. Aug. 60) that allied and friendly kings would comport themselves “in the manner of clients” (more clientum), not that they actually were clients.

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personal interactions with leaders of other states (Masinissa, Syphax) cannot be used as evidence for international amicitia practiced by Rome as a state, since this would require interaction by those men with the senate.329 Livy concludes his account of the exchange of Roman envoys with Syphax in 213 with the clear, declarative statement, “thus was friendship begun between Syphax and the Romans.”330 When Syphax sought friendship and recognition from the senate in 210, this was happily granted.331 Scipio’s friendship with Masinissa was deeply personal, but his good faith toward Rome long outlived Scipio.332 Scipio’s correction of the Spanish tribesmen when they saluted him as king in 211, and Scipio Aemilianus’ advice to Jugurtha in 134 to cultivate the friendship of the Roman people at large rather than individual Romans point in the same direction.333 Finally, Gwyn Davies suggests that it “should ring alarm bells” that for all my emphasis on language, I dismiss stock phraseology and legal formulas (socii or foederati) as mere “terminological inexactitudes.”334 The notion of “terminological inexactitudes,” however, belongs to Louise Matthaei, and my argument is more attenuated than Davies suggests: I argue that unless explicit proof exists to the contrary, socius et amicus indicates an informal (untreatied) relationship. I also do not ever question that foederati refers to anything other than treatied partners.335 The theoretical turn has shifted the debate over the motives for Roman imperialism, and particularly its development during the Republic from the late fourth century, away from strictly metrocentric, pericentric, and systemic analyses toward a broader synthesis. Meanwhile, the study of Roman imperialism has become considerably diversified in recent decades. 4

The Diversification of the Field

Since the 1970s, the epiphenomena of Roman imperialism have generated a massive literature. This section, therefore, will more closely resemble a highly selective, idiosyncratic bibliographic essay rather than a broad overview of all

329  Coşkun 2017, 916, 920. 330  Liv. 24.48.13, ita cum Syphace Romanis coepta amicitia est, (noted by Burton 2011, 94–95 [emphasis added]). 331  Liv. 27.4.5–10 (noted by Burton 2011, 95). 332  constantissimae ad ultimam senectam fidei (Liv. 28.16.12, noted by Burton 2011, 110). 333  Polyb. 10.40.5 (Africanus); Sall. Jug. 8.2. 334  Davies 2014, 534. 335  Burton 2011, 80–81 (citing Matthaei 1907).

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fields or an in-depth discussion and critical analysis of the major works such as was undertaken in the previous section. As indicated in the Introduction, most of the material discussed here corresponds to the shift of the study of Roman imperialism from the middleRepublican to the late-Republican and Imperial periods. After the rapid acquisition of an overseas imperium (consisting of a mixture of formal empire, informal hegemony, and a sphere of influence), the great dynasts of the late Republic and early Empire, from Marius through Augustus, expanded the imperium Romanum, largely out of personal ambition and outside the traditional constraints of aristocratic competition. Consolidation of the Empire in the form of provincialization continued apace, with the ongoing conquest of the Spains, and the acquisition of Macedonia, Africa, Asia, Transalpine Gaul (Narbonensis), Bithynia-Pontus, Syria, Cilicia, Cyprus, Crete, Cyrene, and Gallia Comata, among others. Augustus oversaw the incorporation of Egypt, Achaea, Galatia, Judea, the Alpine regions, the Germanies around the Rhine, and the Danubian provinces. Although expansionist impulses never really went away, countervailing pressures—the personal security of the emperor, the search for adequate frontiers, internal revolts, and so on—often put a brake on these. Cultural adaptation to Roman dominance (‘Romanization,’ for lack of a better term), ongoing since the conquest of Italy, continued, especially in the areas recently annexed. The clearest archaeological and literary traces of this phenomenon cluster around the first two centuries CE, and so although visible from the fourth century BCE in Italy and from the third century in the earliest acquired provinces, ‘Romanization’ is usually studied in the context of the early Empire. 4.1 Soft Power ‘Soft Power’ is a relatively recent coinage. It refers to “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion [sticks] or payments [carrots].”336 States that use policies, culture, and values to attract other states into believing in that state’s credibility (and hence, legitimacy as a leader) are exercising soft power. I have grouped under this heading research on ancient Roman diplomacy and Roman foreign policy in the East.337

336  Nye 2004, x (Nye had coined the term in 1990). 337  Romanization, of course, could just as easily be discussed here as in the section below on Race and Ethnicity. I have placed it there since it has recently been debated in scholarship dealing with Roman encounters with the ‘Other.’

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As has been seen, my own work on Roman amicitia, although an extended theoretical statement about imperialism in its intent, focuses on the diplomatic aspects of ancient interstate relations. Arthur Eckstein, in addition, has introduced the concept of ‘compellence diplomacy’ to ancient studies. Perhaps because ancient states, including Rome, lacked permanent diplomatic institutions and personnel at home and abroad, the study of Roman diplomacy as a discrete specialism has emerged only recently. Aspects of it have been treated by scholars as part of larger studies of Roman foreign policy or in short-form essays. So, for example, Alan Watson has investigated the fetial priesthood and its rituals, as well as the absolute surrender ritual, deditio, in a short monograph.338 Dieter Nörr has examined deditio in the context of an extended discussion of a Latin inscription from Alcántara, Spain, apparently recording a surrender of a group of people to Rome in 104.339 Contrasting short analyses of deditio have been published by Burton and Eckstein, as noted earlier.340 In 2002, Claude Eilers revisited Badian’s foreign clientela thesis with a theoretical examination of patronage couched in a larger discussion of what Roman patrons did for their clients in the Greek cities.341 Since then, a massive research project housed at the University of Trier (SFB 600), “Roms auswärtige Freunde,” has produced several important monographs on the subject,342 and three major edited collections of papers on various aspects of Roman diplomacy have appeared.343 Recently, John Grainger has produced Great Power Diplomacy in the Hellenistic World, in which he argues that unlike the Hellenistic kings, who took their oaths seriously and did not break treaties opportunistically, the Romans pursued a ruthless strategy of duplicity and browbeating in their diplomatic relations. Filippo Canali De Rossi has done a major service to those working in the field of Roman diplomacy by comprehensively cataloguing every recorded Roman diplomatic interaction during the Republic; the latest volume ends in 183.344 Although Canali De Rossi has yet to define ‘diplomacy’ (he classifies reports of omens from the Italian countryside and the ager Romanus as diplomatic activity), the books are an invaluable resource, providing not just 338  Watson 1993. 339  Nörr 1989. 340  See above, Section 3 n. 315. 341  Eilers 2002. 342  A complete list at Coşkun 2017, 913 n. 8. 343  Eilers 2009; Jehne and Pina Polo 2015; Grass and Stouder 2015. 344  The latest volume, as of this writing, is Canali De Rossi 2017. To avoid extending the bibliography unduly, I have not included references to the earlier volumes; interested readers can find them on the Scienze e Lettere website (http://www.scienzeelettere.it/).

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a running narrative (thus far, largely based on Livy’s extant books), but also the testimonia on each interaction in the original languages, plus the relevant bibliography. Another aspect of Roman soft power that has come under closer scrutiny in recent decades is Rome’s foreign policy in the Greek East, specifically the policy of ‘the freedom of the Greeks.’ As was seen earlier, Tenney Frank referred to T. Quinctius Flamininus’ declaration of Greek freedom in 196 at the Isthmus of Corinth as “sentimental politics.” Erich Gruen demonstrated its purely Hellenic origins.345 Arthur Eckstein argued that the evolution of Flamininus’ policy can be linked with conversations he had with the Achaean League politician Aristaenus.346 In his wide-ranging study of Greek and Roman interactions in the second and first centuries, Jean-Louis Ferrary argued for the concept of freedom as articulated by Flamininus at the Isthmus as having purely Greek origins; the freedom of the Sicilian and Illyrian amici of Rome, in his view, was fundamentally different—and attenuated.347 More recently, Sviatoslav Dmitriev has argued that Greek freedom was an extraordinarily flexible concept and had deep roots in fifth-century Greece. Its flexibility meant that hegemons could cynically manipulate the concept to exert their power and control over lesser states, as the Romans consistently did, according to Dmitriev.348 But as Lintott has argued, the Roman version of Greek freedom “may have de facto involved a greater degree of genuine independence than previous declarations by Hellenistic kings, since in the immediate aftermath the Romans were cautious about direct intervention in Greek affairs.”349 Whatever the case (and certainly Rome became more interventionist in Greek affairs over time), there can be no doubt that the price of freedom bestowed by a great power— any great power—was some degree of dependence. It is important to note that the discussion of Roman foreign policy in the East, particularly in the second century, is inextricably bound up with the issue of philhellenism and ‘eastern expertise’ among the Roman senatorial aristocracy. Gruen argued strenuously against the notion that the senate was divided between philhellenic and anti-hellenic factions, that the senate developed and routinely dispatched a cadre of “eastern experts” to the East, and that philhellenism influenced Roman foreign policy.350 Ferrary argued along similar 345  Gruen 1984, 132–57. 346  Eckstein 1990. 347  Ferrary 1988, 5–218. 348  Dmitriev 2011. 349  Lintott 1993, 37. 350  Gruen 1984, 203–87.

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lines but allowed that philhellenism could influence the policy of individual senators.351 Roman diplomacy deserves far more attention than it has received—Canali De Rossi’s work should be a major stimulus to this end. I am unconvinced by Dmitriev’s overly cynical analysis of policies of Greek freedom, particularly as it applies to Rome; after all, as has been seen, the Romans well knew the dangers of gaining a reputation for a lack of fides, ‘good faith’—the basis of their relationship with the Greeks. In another recent study, John Grainger has promulgated a similar view: the Hellenistic kings, unlike the Romans, engaged in diplomacy without ruthlessness, opportunism, and in good faith. This simply goes against the facts; to take but one example, Philip V and Antiochus III’s pact to destroy the vulnerable boy-king Ptolemy V, a deal characterized by Polybius as shameful (αἰσχύνης), savage (θηριωδῶς), impious (ἀσεβείας), cruel (ὠμότητος), greedy (πλεονεξίας), and lawless (παρανόμως), was pursued by the two kings with mutual bad faith (αὐτῶν παρασπονδούντων … ἀλλήλους).352 As for eastern expertise, although foreign policy expertise in particular areas goes against the grain of the Roman senatorial ideology of “universal aristocratic competence,”353 the senate certainly did not deprive itself of the benefit of experience in the region: generals with prior experience in Greece were so employed again (P. Sulpicius Galba [cos. I 211, cos. II 200]), or prorogued (T. Quinctius Flamininus [cos. 198], M. Valerius Laevinus [cos. 210], M. Fulvius Nobilior [cos. 189], Cn. Manlius Vulso [cos. 189], Galba [210– 206]), and magistrates formerly used as commanders in Greece were later used as diplomats (Cn. Octavius [pr. 168], L. Anicius Gallus [pr. 168], Valerius Laevinus, P. Sempronius Tuditanus [cos. 204], P. Villius Tappulus [cos. 199], M. Baebius Tamphilus [cos. 181], Galba), and vice versa (Q. Marcius Philippus [cos. I 186, cos. II 169], Ap. Claudius Centho [aed. 179]). P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum (cos. I 162, cos. II 155) served as an ambassador to the East in 204, then as a military legate in 168–167, and then again as an ambassador in 150. A. Atilius Serranus saw military action in the East, serving as praetor in 192, propraetor in 191, and military legate in 171, but between those assignments he was also part of an important embassy to Greece in 171. All of this and more is well known to Gruen and rehearsed in his chapter on “Eastern Experts.”354 But while it is true that Roman society knew nothing of ‘professionalism’ in terms 351  Ferrary 1988, 497–615. 352  Polyb. 15.20. 353  Rosenstein 1990, 178. 354  Gruen 1984, 203–49.

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of diplomacy or lobbying or intelligence—there was no ‘Hellenic House’ on the Roman equivalent of Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row, no firm devoted to advancing Greek causes on the Roman equivalent of Washington’s K Street, no ‘Eastern Desk’ at the Roman equivalent of the CIA—it would have been peculiarly self-defeating for the senate not to avail itself of vital strategic intelligence and knowledge of Greek lands and its people by men with prior experience with them, especially in crisis situations. 4.2 Frontier Studies355 One of the great scholars of Roman frontier studies, C.R. Whittaker, accurately sums up the history and historiography of the field: Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, published in 1976, proved to be the catalyst that saved Roman frontiers from the spades of the archaeologists. Up until then Roman frontier studies had more or less confined themselves to a series of international, archaeological congresses, begun in 1949 under the inspired leadership of the late Eric Birley which, while vastly increasing the data available from Bearsden in Scotland to Bostra in Syria, had added little to our overall understanding of what precisely constituted a Roman frontier.356 Luttwak’s book,357 a remarkable synthesis of ancient historical scholarship on the frontiers, provoked great controversy in the short term, followed by important full-length studies that were more ‘big picture’ than the piecemeal esoterica of the published Limeskongresse transactions to which Whittaker alludes. Luttwak, who was a strategic analyst and consultant on President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council in the 1980s, argues that Roman Republican and Julio-Claudian frontier systems were hegemonial and expansionist, relying on client kingdoms to do much of the routine work of policing, and acting as a first line of defense. Thus was an “economy of force” 355  Although the vast majority of Roman frontier studies concerns the limes under the principate (also the main focus of this section), Dyson (1985) demonstrates that later Roman methods of frontier management evolved from earlier, Republican practices along a frontier stretching from the Po Valley and Liguria to Transalpine Gaul and Spain, incorporating Sardinia and Corsica along the way. Such methods included terrorism and violence, mass enslavement, population transfer, colonization, building communications infrastructure (roads, etc.), encouraging trade, developing foreign clientela, diplomacy, and Romanization. 356  Whittaker 2004, 28. 357  Luttwak 1976. The “Fortieth Anniversary Edition” of Luttwak’s book (Luttwak 2016) contains a fiery response to his critics, with only minor corrections to the first edition.

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achieved, whereby only twenty-eight legions (after 9 CE, twenty-five) sufficed to protect the massive empire for several centuries.358 Between the beginning of the Flavian dynasty and the death of Septimius Severus (69–211 CE), Rome relied less on client kingdoms, adopting a system of ‘preclusive security,’ that is, annexing territory until natural frontiers were reached or constructing fortifications where natural frontiers did not exist. After the third-century CE crisis, there developed a third system of ‘defense in depth,’ whereby smaller fortifications replaced large garrisons on the frontiers, and mobile strike forces were stationed well behind the perimeter lines, which belatedly reacted to invasions instead of attempting to pre-empt or resist them. Ancient support for the shift to this system Luttwak discovered in the fifth-century pagan historian Zosimus, who vilified the Christian emperor Constantine for fatally weakening the defenses of empire by withdrawing garrison forces from the frontiers into the cities of the empire.359 Crucial support for Luttwak’s thesis from a Roman historian appeared in 1983.360 Arther Ferrill asserted the basic correctness of Zosimus’ analysis: Constantine’s grand strategy was “defective.”361 Psychologically, robust frontier defense was critical to morale since “the army, not the walls or forts, defended the frontiers,” and soldiers knew that when the fighting beyond the frontiers became too difficult, they could retreat behind their fortification lines.362 Because Ferrill’s main focus, as his subtitle indicates, is “the military explanation” for the fall of the Roman Empire (he finds it primarily in the “barbarization” of the western armies363), he apparently absolves himself from being doctrinaire about Luttwak’s (or Zosimus’) thesis. So, Diocletian’s preclusive security regime “was not … the grand strategy of the second century.”364 Despite Constantine’s reforms, moreover, the Roman army that fought and lost at Adrianople in 378 CE was still a first-class fighting force, and the loss was “the result of a failure of leadership, not a lack of training, discipline, or esprit,” as Zosimus alleges.365 Even as late as Theodosius, “the fighting quality of the frontier forces was still reasonably high.”366 On Ferrill’s own 358  Luttwak 1976, 14. 359  Zos. 2.34 (cited at Luttwak 1976, 231 n. 218). 360  Ferrill 1983; see also, more briefly, Ferrill 1991. 361  Ferrill 1983, 25; also Ferrill 1991, 47 (“disastrous change,” “catastrophe”), 48 (“a loser’s strategy”). 362  Ferrill 1983, 28. 363  Ferrill 1983, 83, 129, 140, 167–68; Ferrill 1991, 51, 60–62. 364  Ferrill 1983, 43. 365  Ferrill 1983, 65. 366  Ferrill 1983, 83.

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showing, poor decision-making, personality clashes, and power struggles between eastern and western emperors seem to have exerted far more influence on the Roman military situation at any given moment than a coherent ‘grand strategy.’ One of the earliest full-length, and still most devastating, responses to Luttwak is Benjamin Isaac’s The Limits of Empire.367 Isaac’s starting point is that the defensive posture of the Roman military and its emperor usually posited in frontier studies has its intellectual roots in the apologetic “defensive imperialism” tradition. “[The army’s] primary function,” Isaac writes, reversing the usual perspective, “was to promote the security of Roman rule rather than the peace of the inhabitants of the provinces.”368 At all times during the principate, “Romans considered expansion desirable if it could be attained at reasonable cost.”369 This is why most of the wars on the Parthian/Persian frontier resulted from Roman incursions and attempts to annex parts of Mesopotamia. In fact, across almost 300 years of interaction, “except in the 150s, Parthia never took the initiative in attacking Roman territory, nor is there any evidence that it ever laid claim in earnest to the Syrian region.”370 The primary function of the Imperial army was, therefore, conquest; during periods of peace, it was an army of occupation, not defense.371 Army units were stationed in cities across the eastern provinces primarily to control rather than defend local populations. The Romans lacked accurate maps, intelligence, a general staff, and central planning, which meant that developing a rational grand defensive strategy, even in the short term, was simply not an option. The pervasiveness of the Roman ideology favoring expansion (provided it was not too costly) also contributed to the irrationality of the frontier zones.372 Deeply influenced by Isaac’s work, Fergus Millar subjected to rigorous analysis the entire eastern Roman frontier zone from the Taurus to the Tigris and Antioch to Eilat (ancient Aila) from the time of Augustus to the death of Constantine.373 Not surprisingly, he discovered multiple contradictions to Luttwak’s thesis. The hegemonic system of client states and alliances in the East, the hallmark of Luttwak’s hegemonic expansionary phase of the Roman Empire down to the reign of Nero, actually varied according to the whims of the various emperors and the availability of eligible rulers; the periodic restoration 367  Isaac 1992. 368  Isaac 1992, 158. 369  Isaac 1992, 51. 370  Isaac 1992, 28–33 (with quotation at 28). 371  Isaac 1992, 5. 372  Isaac 1992, 372–418. 373  Millar 1993, esp. xi–xix, 1–222 (Part I, with Isaac’s influence noted at 3 n. 3).

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of the Judaean dynasty of Herod the Great in the figures of Agrippa I and II are only the most obvious cases in point. Second, the ‘preclusive security’ regime was less a coherent ‘system’ than a series of improvisations in response to threats and opportunities on the eastern frontier beginning with the great Jewish revolt (66–73/4 CE). Third, following the revolt, Roman emperors, with few exceptions, pursued a policy of expansion and control throughout the region using three methods: building roads, which were more “line[s] of movement through an area, not a ‘frontier’ held as a line” against attackers on its flanks;374 projecting Roman power beyond the Euphrates, from Trajan onward, which was “a strategic commitment which would last for centuries, until the Islamic conquests”—Hadrian’s withdrawal being a temporary expedient;375 and fortifying the frontier well into the fourth century. So much for Zosimus’ view that Constantine destroyed Roman security by adopting a strict ‘defense in depth’ strategy on the eastern frontier. Charles Whittaker’s comprehensive study of the Roman frontiers appeared (in English) in 1994.376 Whittaker synthesized massive amounts of archaeological material from northern Britain, the areas around the Rhine and Danube rivers, north Africa, and the eastern border with the Parthian/Persian empires to demonstrate that the Roman frontiers were “more zonal than linear.”377 The supposed natural boundaries—rivers and mountains—and the artificial ones—the African fossatum and walls, such as the Hadrianic and Antonine walls in Britain—functioned not as borders or barriers marking the limits of Roman power. “Rivers,” Whittaker argues, “were not natural frontiers but lines of communication and supply,” mountains were permeable, and walls and fossata were designed to control (and tax) movement, not to prevent it.378 Whittaker also demonstrates the falsity of Zosimus’s assertion, discussed earlier, since it is resoundingly refuted by the archaeology of the Rhine and Danube limites.379 Susan Mattern’s Rome and the Enemy was another blow to the Luttwak thesis.380 The book amplifies Isaac’s observations that the Romans’ lack of access to those resources we usually think of as crucial to foreign 374  Millar 1993, 138 (of the Via Nova Traiana). 375  Millar 1993, 102. 376  Whittaker 1994 (first published in French in 1989). 377  Whittaker 1994, 8. 378  Whittaker, 1994, 56, 26–27, 91. 379  Whittaker 1994, 206. Mention should be made here of Elton 1996, another critique of Limeskongresse-style studies on military fortifications. “Roman Frontier Studies,” Elton writes, should be renamed “Roman Fortification Studies” (viii). 380  Mattern 1999.

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policy-making—accurate maps and ethnology, and the acquisition of reliable intelligence—inhibited the development of anything resembling grand strategy in antiquity. The absence of economic rationalism contributed to an irrational approach to frontier defense. The imperial budget was routinely stretched by the “incalculable expenditures on conspicuous consumption and public handouts necessary to maintain the image and status of the emperor,”381 as well as by wars habitually undertaken, and unprofitable parts of the empire graspingly maintained, for reasons of status and prestige—“image,” “face.”382 Wartime expenditure, moreover, was typically inflated by prestige projects: Trajan did not need to build the longest bridge in the world across the Danube, all in stone, and designed by a famous architect, simply for the sake of transporting his troops; he did so for the prestige—to win “the awe and respect of his countrymen, and perhaps, from barbarians, terror.”383 Mattern is in substantial agreement with Isaac that the Republican ideology of continuous expansion did not disappear with the rule of the emperors: conquest continued to be a “good and glorious thing.”384 International relations was perceived as a competition for status and honor, where humiliation of the enemy, genocidal revenge on rebels, and disproportionate responses to minor delicts by allies were deemed necessary to maintain Roman decus, honor, and maiestas, majesty, or “greaterness,” as Mattern translates the latter term.385 In this world, “status and security depend[ed] on one’s perceived ability to inflict violence” since the entire Empire had to be held down by a relatively insignificant number of troops (a few hundred thousand for a population of some sixty million), capable of fighting on only one front at a time.386 Although I am certainly no expert in this field, my sense of it is that Luttwak’s thesis has been almost completely demolished but has triggered a large controversy that threatens to become as much a scholarly dead end as the Roman ‘defensive’ vs. ‘aggressive’ imperialism debate. The argument over the function of the Roman frontiers—whether these were static boundaries or fluid zones of cultural and economic contact and control—seems to be played out, with the second alternative comfortably edging out the first.387 381  Mattern 1999, 142. 382  Mattern 1999, 161. As Appian (Pr. 7) observed, honor forbid relinquishing even unprofitable territory once acquired by Rome. 383  Mattern 1999, 149. 384  Mattern 1999, 164. 385  Mattern 1999, 162–210. Honor in international relations under the principate is also a concern of Lendon 2001 and Isaac 1992, 387, 392. 386  Mattern 1999, xii. 387  Cf. Whittaker 2004, 30: “Is the Grand Strategy debate, then, simply self-indulgent?”— clearly a rhetorical question, anticipating a positive response.

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Because Mattern, Isaac, and Millar have thoroughly demonstrated that the Roman impulse to expand did not disappear under the principate, but was merely constrained by other, mostly political factors, I am not convinced by the notion that the army of the principate was consistently on the defensive after the Julio-Claudians. Attempts in the 1990s to prove otherwise, arguing for entrenchment of static frontiers from Hadrian onward, were met with a devastating critique by Whittaker in 2004.388 He also argued there that while there is evidence for Roman planning of individual campaigns, and occasionally for a strategic plan for some limited stretches of the Empire’s 4000-mile frontier zone, there was no coordinated, long-term grand strategy. There did exist a “broad, ideological desire, deeply entrenched in the Roman psyche, to extend imperial power forever, sine fine,” but that is very far from a grand strategy as it is commonly understood.389 If the field of Roman frontier studies is not to stagnate entirely, or to revert to “the spades of the archaeologists,” Kimberly Kagan is probably correct that grand strategy should be redefined more broadly to include “the setting of a state’s objectives and of priorities among those objectives, allocating resources among them, and choosing the best policy instruments to pursue them.”390 But one wonders whether Kagan’s favored locus of analysis, Roman troop deployments, most of them ad hoc and in response to military crises or the expansionistic whims of individual emperors, amount to grand strategy, or whether removing “long-term goals and objectives”—“what we would call grand strategy”—from the discussion of Roman imperial grand strategy leaves us with any meaningful approximation of the concept for the pre-modern world.391 4.3 Race, Ethnicity, and Romanization It has become increasingly difficult to discuss Roman imperialism and frontier zones with neighboring peoples without considering the ethnic identity of those peoples. This is as much (and perhaps more) a consequence of modern cultural trends and identity politics as any intrinsic interest the topic has generated. Before the culture wars of the 1980s, only two brief studies (in English) on the cultural politics of Roman antiquity were available to those who showed any interest in them: A.N. Sherwin-White’s Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome, and Denis Saddington’s contribution to Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen

388  Whittaker 2004, 6–11 (summarizing the opposing position). 389  Whittaker 2004, 28–49 (quotation from 37). 390  Kagan 2006, 348. 391  Kagan 2006, 352 (whence the quotation; emphasis added), 354–61 (troop deployments).

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Welt II, “Race Relations in the Early Roman Empire.”392 In a significant way these studies were a product of their times and places. Sherwin-White was writing at a time when the process of decolonization was almost complete, and Britain was adjusting to the influx of immigrants from its former colonies, as well as the crisis sparked by Rhodesia’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence under white minority rule, to which the British government was strongly opposed. As it did throughout contemporary British society, these events provoked Sherwin-White to ponder received opinion about race and power. He wished to investigate the “commonplace … that the ancient world knew nothing of colour bar and racial prejudice [due to] the assimilation of foreigners and barbarians into the culture of the Roman empire.”393 He discovered that whenever Romans turned their attention to outsiders (Jews, northern barbarians, Greeks), they exhibited (latent) racial and cultural prejudice, which, unlike modern race prejudice, was driven almost solely by the ‘otherness’ and exclusivity of non-Romans, and not so much by political and economic competition from them.394 Saddington was working at the University of Rhodesia in what is now Harare, Zimbabwe. He concluded, rather optimistically (understandably, given the time and place of writing), that the Romans exhibited hostility to “cultural backwardness” rather than race prejudice, that indigenous revolts lacked a “nationalist aspect,” and that “no impenetrable barriers to good social relations”—such as a color bar—“between them and their subjects arose.”395 Since the late 1980s, Erich Gruen has devoted most of his research attention to Roman cultural interactions with non-Romans. Two collections of essays treat the Roman cultural engagement with Hellenic culture during the middle and late Republic.396 These studies are less about Roman attitudes to the ‘Other’ than the evolution of Roman identity under the impact of the influx of Greek culture into Rome. Two further books explore how the Jews adapted culturally to the Greco-Roman Mediterranean; the story Gruen tells here is a lot more optimistic about Jewish social integration, and cultural adaptability and flexibility than the traditional picture.397 Gruen’s first study of Roman and Greek cultural attitudes toward, and constructions of others appeared in 392   Sherwin-White 1967; Saddington 1975. Others, listed in Saddington’s bibliographic note (1975, 113) including Frank Snowden’s work on ancient attitudes toward black people, are less concerned with exclusively Roman cultural politics and attitudes toward others. 393   Sherwin-White 1967, 1. 394   Sherwin-White 1967, 93. 395  Saddington 1975, 131–32, 134. 396  Gruen 1990 and 1992. 397  Gruen 1998 and 2002.

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2011.398 The book is in part a response to a major work by Benjamin Isaac entitled The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity.399 The latter is a very pessimistic book, designed to show that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of race founded on biological determinism were derived by men of the Enlightenment, such as Georges-Louis Buffon, from ancient Greek and Roman theories of race founded on environmental determinism, whereby climate and place of origin determined human mental as well as physical characteristics. The latter, despite the book’s title, Isaac calls “proto-racism.”400 Gruen challenged the idea that such theories were as widespread and deeply embedded in ancient thought as Isaac thinks. In terms of Roman attitudes, Gruen believes that “the enemies of Rome … could be treated with circumspection and nuance by Roman intellectuals, no mere objects of abuse and slander.”401 Although certainly less bleak than Isaac’s view, Gruen goes too far in the other direction, sometimes stretching the evidence to the breaking point. The idea that the famous Roman slander against Punica fides did not appear in extant texts, and thus did not exist, until late in the first century, well after the destruction of Carthage, seems implausible on the face of it.402 That Tacitus’ overwhelmingly negative depiction of the Jews in the extant portion of Book 5 of his Histories is ironic and playful rather than splenetic and abusive also seems incongruous. The Romans mocked rather than hated the Jews and their behavior, Gruen’s argument goes, because they had nothing to fear from them; one wonders how much larger of a Jewish revolt between 66 and 73/4 CE, or how many more troops than the 10,000 after 70 CE and the 20,000 in the second century in Judea would be necessary to render them fearsome to contemporary Romans.403 There can be no doubt that Isaac’s claims demand a response: so, the same ancient writers who argue that climate determines character state that social and political institutions do as well (a ‘chicken and egg’ problem);404 and almost every ancient people one can think of—Jews, Numidians, Germans, the Romans themselves—disproves Isaac’s contention that the ancients believed “mixed origin necessarily leads to degeneration 398  Gruen 2011. At the same time a collection of essays on the same topic and edited by Gruen appeared: Gruen, ed. 2011. 399  Isaac 2004. 400  Isaac 2004, 5. 401  Gruen 2011, 353. 402   Polybius, for one, criticized “Punic artifice” (Φοινικικῷ στρατηγήματι, 3.78.1). The Phoenicians, the ethnos of the Carthaginians (hence ‘Carthaginian’ = ‘Punic’ = ‘Phoenic[ian]’ in the Latin tongue), were derided in these same terms as early as Homer (cf. Od. 14.287–297). 403  Isaac 1992, 83 on the numbers. 404  See, e.g., Airs, Waters, Places 16.

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and deterioration” (“ethnic contamination”).405 Gruen’s study, however, is an overcorrection. Most other full-length Roman studies that deal with Roman attitudes toward non-Romans (and vice versa) are engaged in the question of ‘Romanization,’ a vast field of study that can only be summarized here.406 British historian and archaeologist Francis Haverfield popularized the theory early in the twentieth century.407 His original concept was that the Romans preserved civilization from “the wild chaos of barbarism” by magnanimously bestowing their culture on their uncouth subjects, who passively absorbed Roman ways, recognizing Roman culture as superior to their own.408 As Richard Hingley has shown, crediting the Romans with taking up ‘the white man’s burden’ in this way originated with the men of the officer class of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, who regarded themselves as culturally and biologically descended from the Romans. As descendants of the Romans, these classically educated men regarded it as their duty (and burden) to carry the torch of Greco-Roman civilization to the benighted peoples of Africa, Asia, and India, as the Romans had to the inhabitants of ancient Europe.409 The inherently racist roots of the theory of Romanization, perhaps not surprisingly, were not recognized until the late twentieth century, largely as a result of Hingley’s work, as well as the “post-colonial turn” in Roman 405  One detailed example should suffice: according to Sallust, the indigenous north African Gaetulians—“rough and uncivilized men who feasted on the flesh of wild animals and the fruit of the earth like cattle” (asperi incultique, quis cibus erat caro ferina atque humi pabulum uti pecoribus, Sall. Jug. 18.1)—intermarried with immigrant Persians (18.7), resulting in the Numidians, who won reputation and glory (nomen gloriamque) by conquering their neighbors (18.11–12). The characterization of the pre-Persian Gaetulians is not complimentary; the expansion of the Numidians, on the ancient principle that ‘bigger is better,’ is heartily approved. 406  My focus here is on the Romanization of the (primarily western) provincial areas of the empire from the late Republic to around 200 CE, for which the evidence, both literary and archaeological, is infinitely richer than for earlier periods. Of course, Romanization (or something like it) must have taken place in Italy and the earliest western provinces from the beginning of Roman expansion, a process for which we are afforded mere glimpses (see Dyson 1985). A vast literature on individual provinces, including aspects of their acculturation, has grown up of late, but cannot be discussed here (Richardson 1986, on Spain, can stand as representative of the genre). For the Romanization of Italy, see Torelli 1995, who argues that the process accelerated between the Social War and the early Augustan period. 407  Haverfield 1912. The concept, as with so much else in the field of ancient history, originated with Mommsen. 408  Haverfield 1912, 10. Although as Morley 2010, 108–109 notes, elsewhere Haverfield could be far more nuanced about the process. 409  Hingley 2000.

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studies.410 Scholars influenced by post-colonialism shift the focus from the Romans to their subjects, and emphasize the agency of the provincial subjects in the process of their acculturation to ‘Roman-ness.’ In 1990, Martin Millett published an important synthesis of the archaeological evidence from Roman Britain, arguing that the process of Romanization there was imitative and dialectical: indigenous elites sought to maintain and increase their status in their communities by imitating Roman manners, and the non-elites followed suit, imitating their betters.411 In another important study, Peter Wells demonstrated that Romanization was a two-way street in the Germanic areas around the Rhine: immigrants to the region (not necessarily Romans or Italians) “went native” in a lot of ways, and indigenous people clung fast to their traditional ways while picking and choosing, as from a menu, which elements of Roman-ness to emulate.412 Greg Woolf coined the term ‘becoming Roman’ for the acculturation of the Gauls: Roman governors encouraged Gallic leaders to adopt Roman humanitas, ‘civilization,’ in exchange for privilege and status; and the Gallic leaders naturally complied, resulting in “a clear convergence between the pragmatic interests of new Gallo-Roman aristocrats and the civilizing ethos of the empire’s ruling classes.”413 Talk of a ‘civilizing ethos’ is a reminder that despite the impact of postcolonialism on the studies of Woolf and others, the Romanization model of active cultural transfer by Roman rulers is still powerful. But how much evidence is there for a coherent, long-range Roman policy of acculturation in the provinces—a ‘civilizing mission’? Archaeology cannot answer this question; only literary evidence can. As has been noted throughout this essay, longrange policy-making—a plan of world conquest, the establishment of permanent, scientific frontiers—was simply unavailable to the Romans (or to any ancient society). It would be very surprising, moreover, if the relatively tiny number of Roman officials could have imposed Roman culture everywhere and deeply across the Roman Empire.414 If a ‘civilizing mission’ there was, it was on the initiative of individual governors. So, for example, governor of Britain (77–84 CE) and Tacitus’ father-in-law, Cn. Julius Agricola, encouraged urbanization of British towns in the Roman fashion, with temples, courts of law, and permanent dwellings, and provided a Roman-style education for the 410  The papers collected in Webster and Cooper 1996, and Mattingly 1997, as well as Webster 2003 and Mattingly 2011 are good introductions to the application of post-colonial theory to the study of Roman antiquity and Romanization. 411  Millett 1990. 412  Wells 1999. 413  Woolf 1998, 74. 414  Morley 2010, 111.

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sons of British chieftains. The latter took to the Latin tongue, wearing togas, lounging around in the porticoes and the baths, and banqueting in the Roman style.415 Cassius Dio writes that before the loss of three legions to a German ambush in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, the Roman governor Quinctilius Varus tried to Romanize the Germans too quickly: cities were built, markets and peaceful assemblies were held, and there was a gradual adaptation to Roman ways.416 Finally, in his panegyric of Italy, the elder Pliny, who saw service in Spain, Gaul, Germany, and Raetia,417 claims that Rome has “softened the customs” of the peoples of the world, united them under a single tongue, and “bestowed civilization on mankind.”418 Such is the extent of the literary evidence for a Roman ‘civilizing mission’ abroad. Clearly much of whatever ‘Romanization’ consisted of was undertaken on the initiative of non-Romans. Some post-colonialist studies of Romanization have gone much further. Several scholars have interpreted the persistence of indigenous elements in art, architecture, and religious practices as a form of protest against Roman rule.419 Borrowing a concept from AfroCaribbean studies, Jane Webster has likened the process of Romanization to ‘Creolization,’ whereby the encounter between Roman and non-Roman resulted in a contested cultural fusion that produced entirely new and distinctive material culture—a new, Creole cultural dialect, as it were—which was neither Roman nor non-Roman.420 The virtues of this interpretation are it gives agency to the provincial subject, preserves the element of protest, and is also culturally relativistic, instead of regarding Roman culture as inherently superior and choiceworthy for non-Romans. In her recent post-processual, structurationist study of Roman material culture in the provinces, Louise Revell has problematized, as others have done, the idea of a monolithic culture of Roman-ness. There existed, in her view, “a multiplicity of Roman identities” since “being Roman” was “a discourse of possibilities.”421 In terms of provincial agency, Revell argues that Roman 415  Tac. Agr. 21. We need not agree with Tacitus’ cynical conclusion that by thus adopting ‘civilization’ (humanitas), the Britons were paving the way for their own servitude. 416  Dio 56.18. 417  Syme 1969. 418  Plin. HN 3.5.39, ritusque molliret … humanitatem homini daret. 419  Hingley 1997; Webster 1997; Wells 1999, 170, 146–52, 196–98; Aldhouse-Green 2003; a critique: Woolf 1998, 19–23. 420  Webster 2001, 218 (“Creolization is frequently … a process of resistant adaptation. What emerges from this process is not a single, normative colonial culture, but mixed cultures” [emphasis in the original]). 421  Revell 2009, ix–x. So, too, Woolf 1998, 11: “Becoming Roman was not a matter of acquiring a ready-made cultural package … so much as joining the insiders’ debate about what

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identity was maintained and perpetuated through the mundane usage by nonRomans of the Roman social structures of urbanism and religion, specifically the imperial cult; “as they incorporated these … within their everyday experiences, they were both constrained by and reproduced this specific discourse, accepting Roman ideology, thereby perpetuating the power of the imperial authorities.”422 “Roman imperial ideology,” then, “was not merely a one-sided imposition from Rome, but relied upon the actions of [its] subjects and their recreation of [its] power.”423 This dark vision of automatic reproduction of Roman ideology and power through Rome’s control of provincial space has been likened by Neville Morley to a kind of ‘Hobson’s choice’: the costs of opting out of Roman culture were unacceptably high, and so provincials were confronted by a choice that, in fact, was no choice at all.424 While it seems clear that the traditional Romanization model is inadequate as a description of what went on at the provincial cultural interface, discarding it altogether as a “false paradigm” seems extreme.425 The well-intentioned reorientation of analysis away from rulers to subjects is indeed valuable, but seems anachronistic when discussing ancient societies. Without entering into the debate about what ‘being Roman’ meant (it was certainly a multifaceted phenomenon), Roman-ness (or some version of it) was reproduced and reinforced in these traditional societies through the pragmatic workings of hierarchy and deference. Status-seeking local elites emulated their conquerors and local non-elites emulated local elites. If for no other reason than this, the pull of Roman culture was strong. I agree with Woolf that Romanization was an “adaptive strategy,” perhaps even “resistant adaptation,” in Webster’s terms, and with Millett that aspirational emulation was key to the process, although the package did or ought to consist of at that particular time”; Morley 2010, 114: “the idea of ‘Roman culture,’ conceived as a homogeneous and clearly defined set of social, material and intellectual practices, is itself an invention … [It is] better to think of multiple ‘Roman identities’ and ‘Roman cultures.’” 422  Revell 2009, 77. 423  Revell 2009, 99. 424  Morley 2010, 125–27. Morley acknowledges the influence of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) concept of empire: “it colonises every available space, influences every discourse and is impossible to escape without setting oneself outside normal social interaction altogether” (127). Hardt and Negri maintain that in the globalized, thoroughly interconnected world, the Empire (a matrix of states and organizations—the US, the G8, NATO, the IMF, the WTO, multinational corporations, NGOs, the UN) fills every space (including discursive space), branding and targeting the ‘enemy’—those who refuse to participate (setting themselves outside normal social interaction altogether, in Revell’s terms)—as terrorists. 425  Mattingly 2011, 22. Revell (2009, 8) claims her work belongs in the “post-Romanization intellectual climate.”

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I doubt the process was much of a negotiation so much as a Hobson’s choice, that there was available to non-Romans no viable alternative to reproducing imperial authority and power. Lack of choice is not—or at least severely attenuates—agency. 4.4 The End of Roman Imperialism(?) It is a cliché of Roman imperial studies to characterize the Republic as a period of expansion and the post-Augustan principate as one of consolidation. After the chaos and violence of late Republican expansion and civil war, the Romans crossed the “Augustan threshold” to stable imperium, settling down to the task of imperial administration.426 By the early second century CE, Louise Revell writes, “Although there was still some idea of expansion, army activity was more about policing and consolidation.”427 Tim Cornell’s challenge to this picture has spawned a lively debate on the nature of Roman imperialism under the principate.428 As already seen in this essay, both Benjamin Isaac and Susan Mattern demonstrate that the Roman imperialist impulse, in fact, never went away. Cornell’s argument, in his words, is simple: the pax Romana, ‘the Roman peace,’ or the absence of major wars of expansion, was to some extent real, but it began in the second century, not under the principate. Over the course of the last two centuries of the Republic, the character and frequency of Roman warfare changed from the almost continuous wars of expansion in the fourth and third centuries. Imperialistic wars became more sporadic (200–196, 191–188, 171–167 in the East, 200–179 in Spain), punctuated by long periods of peace. Long stints by soldiers serving abroad altered the “seasonal, biological rhythm” of traditional Roman warfare.429 The increase in Roman imperial commitments abroad changed the character of the soldiery: “from a citizen militia drawn from small farmers it came more and more to depend on recruitment among the rural proletariat … made possible by successive reductions of the minimum property qualifications for service.”430 The wars of the late second and first centuries, instead of being expansionistic, were mostly concerned with containing internal unrest within the empire, and then became civil wars. The expansionistic adventures of Pompey in the East and Caesar in Gaul were exceptional. The pattern continued into the principate: the imperialistic wars of Augustus, Claudius, Domitian, and Trajan were 426  Doyle 1986, 93–97 (“Augustan threshold”). 427  Revell 2009, 25. 428  Cornell 1993. 429  Cornell 1993, 156. 430  Cornell 1993, 157. On the reduction of the minimum property qualification, see Rich 1983.

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separated by long periods of peace, brief civil wars, and the suppression of revolts. The twin processes of the consolidation of the empire and the professionalization of the army, which began in the second century, fundamentally changed the formerly militaristic character of Roman society. The Roman army became a marginal group in three senses: it was a tiny sliver of the empire’s population (1), serving in remote areas of the empire (2), and engaging in activity mostly alien to the lived experience of the vast majority of the empire’s population (3). The result was that the illusion of the pax Romana among all but a tiny number of the empire’s inhabitants actively engaged in military activity became deeply entrenched. A few studies of recent years are worth mentioning in this context. David Potter argues that the rhetoric of imperial restraint, such as Aelius Aristides’ assertion that the Romans possessed the best parts of the world and could expand if it wanted to, but there was no need to actually do so,431 was used as cover for the emperors’ sound policy of monopolizing military commands for themselves and their family members, and avoiding unprofitable military adventures.432 After all, Augustus, although not shy about expanding the empire, believed that “battle or war should never be undertaken unless the hope of gain could be shown to be greater than the fear of loss”; those who thought otherwise were like men who fished with a golden hook: no catch could outweigh the loss of it if it were carried off.433 Cassius Dio thus criticized Septimius’ Severus’ annexation of Mesopotamia, which the emperor thought would be a bulwark for Syria, as being a complete waste of money and a cause of constant (expensive) warfare.434 William Harris concurs with Potter that the largest item in the imperial budget—the army—left little room for increasing troop numbers to annex new territory or fight major wars.435 In addition, the soldiers themselves became less and less suited to aggressive warfare as their lives on the frontiers became more “sedentary,” involving routine administrative and garrison duties. The chronic insecurity of the emperor’s position predisposed them to rein in their armies and commanders, thus constraining further expansion. The emperor Tiberius called this “holding the wolf by the ears”;436 what he meant, in part, was that he was both the leader of the Roman armies, and their hostage. 431  Aristid. Or. 26.10, 28. 432  Potter 2013, 325–32. 433  Suet. Aug. 25.4, proelium quidem aut bellum suscipiendum omnino negabat, nisi cum maior emolumenti spes quam damni metus ostenderetur. 434  Dio 75.3. 435  Harris 2016, 112–50. 436  Suet. Tib. 25.1.

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The temperament of individual emperors was also a factor: Tiberius eschewed expansion and Hadrian rolled back Trajan’s conquests because (among other reasons) that is who these men were.437 Harris also tries to account for why the Roman ideology of warfare and expansion, so strong during the Republic, apparently disappeared under the principate. Fewer and fewer senators served in the military before entering public life, he argues, and local elites who were co-opted into the senatorial class could not be induced to undertake aggressive wars. A consensus has thus emerged among most scholars (Mattern, Potter, Harris, but oddly enough, not Cornell) that imperial expenditures and the security of the emperor’s person were the most significant factors limiting imperial expansion under the principate. But the incentives were strong as well, including the virulently militaristic ideology of the regime established by Augustus, the general belief in antiquity that war was a good and glorious thing, and the absence of constraints on resources at the emperor’s sole disposal.438 I tend to agree with Mattern (against Harris) that the ideology of glorious warfare did not disappear during the principate, at least among the imperial family and its propagandists. But as Brian Campbell notes, even “newcomers to the ranks of the Senate assimilated many of its traditions,” including that of leadership in war, even after opportunities in which “they could display their uirtus [grew] disappointingly small.”439 And this stands to reason: at least until the Severan era, “senators continued to hold most of the great provincial commands.”440 Tacitus’ father-in-law Agricola’s eight-year campaign in Britain, which offered plenty of scope for independent and belligerent action, is only the best-known case in point. Isaac and Millar, moreover, are surely correct that Rome’s stance toward the outside world remained fundamentally aggressive. After all, the Romans clearly had long-standing territorial ambitions east of the Euphrates, and acted on them by consolidating control there from Trajan onwards (excepting Hadrian and Antoninus Pius), while the same could not be said of the Parthians’ activity west of the Euphrates, which was limited to periodic raids rather than territorial acquisition.441 To appreciate the persistence of Roman warfare and expansion between Republic and principate, one must take a holistic view of military activity under the emperors, whether that consisted of conquering 437  Whether to go to war or not was a personal decision, belonging exclusively to the emperor: Campbell 2002b, 9. 438  Campbell 2002b, 12–14. 439  Campbell 1984, 321, 348. 440  Campbell 1984, 340. 441  Isaac 1992, 19–53.

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Britain, Dacia, and Mesopotamia; invading Parthia, raiding free Germany, and campaigning in the Caucasus; or placing forward camps well beyond the Danubian limites, building formidable bridges, roads, and walls to overawe the locals, and bullying the inhabitants of provincial towns and cities. Roman imperial ideology and attitudes persisted too. Just as M’. Acilius Glabrio had once angrily threatened to cast Aetolian envoys into slave collars and chains for talking back while surrendering to the general’s fides (above, Section 3.1), so nearly 600 years later, in 375 CE, the emperor Valentinian I died of a massive stroke while railing against the “ingratitude” of the Quadi, whose envoys, even while begging for forgiveness, sought to absolve their people from any blame for their actions.442 Roman imperialism never ended. 5 Conclusions To conclude, I will offer my perspective on Roman imperialism. What follows is, of course, opinion. I will proceed by analyzing the situation on the ground in Rome, and then gradually zoom out to the peripheral and then to the system levels. Throughout, I will try to indicate the continuities and differences between Republic and principate. Scholars of Roman imperialism (and I am no exception) have struggled with the question of the origins of Roman imperialism. The opacity of the sources for the early Republic frustrates clarity. Perhaps Rome’s imperialism was geographically determined, that is, the Romans were exceptionally blessed by their location, the fertility of their land, and the robustness of their population.443 Perhaps it was due to outside pressure, which compelled the competitive aristocracy to adjust “its value system, behavior patterns, and social as well as communal structures … entirely toward public service, communal leadership, and achievements in war,” resulting in the ruling elite’s “exceptional strength, cohesion, and discipline,” and a general populace willing to submit to discipline and aristocratic leadership for the sake of communal survival.444 For Arthur Eckstein, as we have seen, the pressures of anarchy in the Tyrrhenian region is a sufficient explanation. Tim Cornell has made a good case that the nature of the Italian alliance system drove Roman expansionism: because the allies paid no tribute, the only means of asserting Roman control over them 442  Amm. Marc. 30.6.1–3 (ingratam); Soz. HE 6.36.1–4; Socr. HE 4.31; Jer. Chron. a. 375; Epit. de caes. 45.8; Oros. 7.32.14; Zos. 4.17.2. Discussion: Whittaker 1994, 48 and 2004, 46. 443  Raaflaub 1996, 289–90. 444  Raaflaub 1996, 291.

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on an ongoing basis was to hold an annual auxiliary levy—and something had to be done with those troops.445 More recently, Jeremy Armstrong has suggested that the gradual integration of mobile gentilicial warlords and their values (an atavism, in Schumpeter’s terms) into the Roman community, and the latter’s acceptance of the warlords’ leadership and values, resulted in a largescale, community-based militarism. This was in turn accelerated by the trauma of the Gallic sack and recovery, culminating in the forcible incorporation of the Latins into the Roman political and military infrastructures.446 Several of these theories (warlordism, the Italian alliance system) are more manifestations of the tendency toward expansion than explanations for it; others (geographical determinism, systemic pressures) resemble necessary rather than sufficient conditions for expansionism in Italy in general, but say little about Roman militarism in particular. What sparked Roman imperialism was probably a combination of system pressures, the early and frequent existential threats to the Roman state, a heightened level of national paranoia as a result, and a stubborn determination (Polybius’s βία) to survive. What perpetuated Roman imperialism was probably a combination of a coercive protection regime of warlord clans over a vulnerable population, individual major victories (especially over the Latin League in 338), accompanied by a massive expansion in the Roman manpower and resource base, and the expansionary momentum of the Italian alliance system. There can be no doubt that Rome grew up in a tough neighborhood. Central Italy in the fourth century was not for the faint of heart. We know of four existential threats to Rome in less than 200 years, all of them beyond historical doubt, and can only imagine how many times before that the fledgling state had come close to being snuffed out. After all, the root-and-branch destruction of cities, and the slaughter and enslavement of entire populations after victory in war was standard operating procedure across the Mediterranean at least since the first urban centers appeared in the late fourth millennium. The near-destruction of Roman power at the hands of the Celts in ca. 387, of Pyrrhus of Epirus between 280 and 275, of the Celts again in the 220s, and of Hannibal of Carthage in 218–216 understandably inspired a watchful paranoia in the Romans. The ‘uncertainty principle’ and the relative primitiveness of Roman intelligence gathering systems intensified this paranoia. As Peter Brunt so aptly put it, “Roman reactions to the possibility of a threat resembled those of a nervous tiger, disturbed when feeding.”447 445  Cornell 1995, 366. 446  Armstrong 2016. 447  Brunt 1978, 177.

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Because it took several generations for the Romans to recover from the first Celtic attack, it is also understandable that, once back on their feet, they would seize opportunities to expand their power against their neighbors, reducing their sphere of insecurity by pushing threats farther away from the city. The sacred boundary of Rome, the pomerium, within which was civilian rather than military space, symbolized this mentality. Rome attempted to monopolize violence in central Italy by engaging diplomatically and militarily with its neighbors. The resulting centripetal effect led to a classic security dilemma, in which expansion designed to neutralize threats simply multiplied them. For reasons of national honor and reputation, there was never any question of surrendering territory once acquired, even over those areas that did not pay for themselves, as Appian acutely observed.448 It would be surprising indeed if powerful, slave-owning male aristocrats behaved otherwise.449 This is not to say that the Romans seized any and every opportunity for aggrandizement. Wars are expensive in terms of blood and treasure. The debts incurred by the treasury during the Second Punic War were not paid off until 187.450 Polybius notes that the Greeks were rightly grateful to the Romans for incurring every expense (and every danger) in going to war against Philip V for the sake of Greek freedom.451 The supply of manpower available to Rome, even at the height of its empire in Italy, was never bottomless, as is sometimes believed. Recruiters lowering or ignoring the property qualification, and occasionally calling up freedmen and slaves during times of crisis are enough to show that.452 During the Republic down to the second century, it would have been difficult to convince citizen-soldier-farmers to undertake wars of choice, especially those that would involve long absences from home.453 This was demonstrated with great clarity in 200, when the citizen army assembly initially voted down a consular proposal to make war on Philip V. Difficulties of recruitment began as early as the 170s, and peaked between 154 and 133 due to 448  App. Pr. 7, καὶ τῶν ὑπηκόων ἐνίοις προσαναλίσκουσιν, αἰδούμενοι καίπερ ἐπιζημίους ὄντας ἀποθέσθαι (“they spend money on some of their subjects, although they bring losses, being ashamed to give them up.”) 449  Eckstein 2008, 89 n. 47, 220 (discussed above, Section 3.3 n. 299). 450  Liv. 39.7.5. 451   Polyb. 18.46.14, πᾶσαν ὑπομεῖναι δαπάνην καὶ πάντα κίνδυνον χάριν τῆς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐλευθερίας. 452  Rich 1983, 290–91 (slaves and freedmen enrolled during the Second Punic War; proletarii enrolled during the tumultus of 198, 193, 181, and 178, due to slave uprising in the first case, and Celtic emergencies in the north in the others); 327–28 (enrolment of proletarii in 107 for the Jugurthine War, and in 105–103 during the Cimbric emergency and the second Sicilian slave war; freedmen and proletarii enrolled during the Social War). 453  Eckstein 2006, 232.

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the unpopularity of serving in the wars in Spain.454 But perhaps what weighed most heavily in the minds of Rome’s rulers, the senators of the Republic and the emperors of the principate, was the lesson of those historical existential threats, that destruction could easily follow the decision to go to war. War was risky, as everyone knew (at least that is what the Polybius passage just quoted indicates). “Rome suffered ninety major defeats on the battlefield during the Republic, and some defeats were catastrophic in scale.”455 The senate in 264 knew that helping the Mamertines came with the grave risk of provoking Carthage and Syracuse to war, just as Augustus later on appreciated the erosion of Rome’s strategic position and security (as well as his own personal security) as a result of the Teutoburg forest disaster. The ideology of military glory was powerful among the Roman elite, but aggressive behavior was constrained to a significant degree by risk aversion and appreciation of resource limitations. Roman internal political culture also played a role in the character of Roman imperialism. For some unknown reason(s) at some unknown period, like all ancient states, the Roman ruling elite developed an ideology of glorification of warfare. Militarism pervaded Roman society. Roman citizen-soldiers were highly trained and disciplined, becoming a formidable fighting force designed and ever ready for conquest. Republican praetors and consuls clawed and scratched at chances to increase their glory by winning great battles abroad and celebrating triumphs at home. But in a ruling aristocracy that surrounded itself with safeguards against tyranny, these opportunities could not be allowed to accrue to a few individuals or to occur too often. Individual military expertise was impermissible in Rome’s political culture, where the myth of “universal aristocratic competence” had to be preserved in order to keep aristocratic competition within bounds.456 For most of Rome’s career of conquest, moreover, it was a Republic: advice, consent, and debate among and between different groups of citizens were all necessary parts of decision-making, especially when it came to war decisions. The people whose lives and property were (or would be) jeopardized had the sole right to authorize war (or not). Voracious conquest of everything the Romans could get their hands on, as the ideology of military glory urged, was constrained, to a significant degree, by the humdrum routines of the political process, as well as the resource and manpower limitations outlined earlier. Add to that the self-imposed constraints of iustum 454  Rich 1983, 317–18. Despite Harris 1989, 132, recruitment difficulties were not “unprecedented” in 151. 455  Eckstein 2006, 219 (citing Rosenstein 1990, 179–203). 456  Rosenstein 1990, 178, who demonstrates that even defeated Roman generals went on to hold further public offices.

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bellum, fetial procedure (and its eventual replacement by diplomacy and deliberation), and deditio in fidem and Rome emerges as exceptional among its system peer competitors for throwing up obstacles in its own path to war.457 Under the principate, “holding the wolf by the ears,” the emperor’s status as hostage as well as leader of the army, had a similar effect. The monopolization of military glory by the princeps and his family often meant forgoing opportunities for imperial expansion. Because the ideology of the relentless pursuit of military glory had not changed, however, any reluctance to expand had to be covered up by thick layers of propaganda about the pax Romana and assertions that the Romans already possessed all the best parts of the world, but the rest, even profitless deserts and wastes, would be conquered eventually.458 In terms of the causes and motivations behind Roman imperial expansion, the defensive imperialism thesis should finally be laid to rest—not that the Romans were not on the defensive sometimes, or that defensive wars resulted in acquisition of territory or influence. Because of system pressures (and/or internal discourses), the Roman default position was military assertiveness (not aggression), but so was everyone else’s. Strategic and security advantages lay behind this behavior, but strict rationalism alone never guided war decisions. The Romans went to war often enough for reasons of national pride, prestige, honor, and status, as well as individual glory-seeking. This was a constant from Republic to Empire. During the Republic, the Romans sometimes went to war to demonstrate their magnanimity, their aristocratic high-spiritedness, and to protect their reputation for fides, that is, by responding positively to pleas from lesser states for help and protection. Fear was also a powerful motivator, as Polybius (following Thucydides) well knew. The expenditure of resources on war, to say nothing of the risks of war, was more likely to be undertaken when fear was involved. The windfall profits that resulted from successful war were welcome, but rarely constituted a motive for undertaking war, and were certainly never the sole reason for it. As Augustus observed, hope of gain had to outweigh the fear of loss before war was declared.459 Such cost-benefit analyses were routine, but no war could ever be considered a ‘slam dunk,’ and all that had to be decided was whether to profit-take or not. And, as everyone knew before going to war, the state treasury would be the beneficiary of last

457  Although, as Ager 2009 points out, the fact that the Romans believed the gods approved of their wars in advance meant that negotiated solutions with mere human beings may have been doomed to failure from the start. 458  Str. 17.4.25 (840); App. Pr. 7; Aristid. Or. 26.10, 28. 459  Suet. Aug. 25 (quoted above, Section 4.4, n. 443).

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resort when it came to dividing up the spoils, if spoils there were.460 As Tenney Frank showed long ago, insofar as such things can be determined from our woeful evidence, the treasury enjoyed only a modest surplus (Frank estimates at 30 million denarii) during the period 200–157. In the latter year, according to the Elder Pliny, the surplus was 22.5 million denarii. Frank shows that between 200 and 157, all the booty deposited in the treasury and indemnities from conquered enemies covered only half the state’s military expenses, which amounted to seventy-seven per cent of total state expenditure.461 The treasury may have had a net deficit of 135 million denarii between 150 and 90.462 Yes, it is true that these statistics show that “the state had no difficulty in devising ways to dispose of its revenues,”463 but such a narrow profit margin also indicates that the windfalls from successful warfare had little impact on the state’s bottom line, and that decisions to go to war, and thus to increase short-term military expenditure, could never have been taken lightly. So it was under the principate as well. State spending on the military in peacetime was at least forty per cent and perhaps as much as half of the revenues the Empire took in during the first century CE.464 Augustus, who as was seen earlier believed cost-benefit analysis was crucial before undertaking battle or war, sets out in detail in his Res Gestae the enormous sums he often had to transfer from his own pocket to the state treasury; the military treasury (aerarium militare) alone was seeded with an initial grant of 170 million sesterces from Augustus, with a promise of an annual subvention.465 Augustus’ famous advice to his successor that the empire be kept within its present bounds accompanied a list of the troops under arms, and an account of the revenues and expenses of empire.466 This indicates that through trial and error during his long life, Augustus had come to appreciate better than most “the relationship between the size of the army, its cost, and the size of

460  Harris 1989, 156 vaguely asserts that “the private profits [expected from the Third Punic War] would fall to senators as well as others,” and “Senatorial hopes for profit were an encouragement to another war against Carthage.” But if the Roman victory had been as swift as they evidently expected, then only one senator—the general allotted the war—could expect to profit to any significant degree. 461  Frank 1933, 145–46; Plin. HN 33.17.55. 462  Frank 1933, 228–30. 463  Harris 1979, 70. 464  Campbell 1984, 163–64. However, the assertion of Ferrill 1983, 26 that “the costs [of the army] were low,” at an estimated half-billion sesterces a year (or a mere thirty per cent of revenues: Ferrill 1991, 38), is untenable. 465   RG 17.2; Dio 55.24.9–25.3 (with some errors). 466  Tac. Ann. 1.11.

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the empire.”467 Tiberius complied with Augustus’ instructions, to a degree (he was all too happy to unleash his nephew Germanicus on the Germans between 14 and 16 CE), but many of his successors did not—and most of them would have preferred to expand. The ideology of conquest was simply too powerful, despite the unprofitability of expanding the empire—“wars were expensive.”468 This is not because of any increase in expenditure on troops; legionary numbers remained static, and soldiers of the professional standing army cost the same in peace as in wartime. But the activities associated with war—the payment of auxiliaries, the building and repairing of roads and bridges, the requisitioning of pack animals, the construction of fleets, the replacement of damaged arms, the building of forts, the maintenance of supply, the billeting of troops—all these things cost money. Bad emperors extorted these things, but honor (once again) demanded that these things be paid for. The list just given does not even include the post-war expenses necessary to promote the prestige of the emperor and the glory of his victory—the games, the shows, the construction of monuments, the cash handouts to the Roman populace, the soldiers’ bonuses, and so on. Political constraints on expansionistic behavior during the Republic find a parallel under the principate as well. Another aspect of “holding the wolf by the ears” under the military monarchy was potential challenges from senatorial rivals and members of the imperial family. The emperor had to ensure that his rule was not endangered by military defeats, long absences from Rome, or concentrating dangerous amounts of power and military resources in the hands of others, who could become potential rivals.469 Tiberius allegedly worried about Germanicus’ successes, Claudius about Corbulo’s, Domitian about Agricola’s.470 If the pace of expansion under the principate is anything to go by, these concerns exerted an even more powerful effect than the aristocratic competition of the Republic. After all, excepting those of “the Roman empire at its greatest extent, 117 CE” under Trajan, maps of the Roman empire at the death of Augustus and those of the Antonine age look pretty much the same. A corner of Germany here, a thumb-shaped protuberance north of the Danube into Dacian country there, bits and pieces of the East, and a portion of Britain do not amount to much for a 400-year period—especially when compared to the previous 400 years. The Empire was not the Republic. Something funda467  Mattern 1999, 91. Whittaker (1994, 25) believes that Augustus was referring to the size of the provinces rather than advising against further conquest. 468  Mattern 1999, 142. 469  Campbell 2002b, 11–12; Ferrill 1991, 40. 470  Tac. Ann. 2.26 (Germanicus), 11.19 (Corbulo), Agr. 39 (Agricola).

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mentally had changed during the long reign of Augustus; as Susan Mattern says, “the ferocious competition for glory that fueled the conquests of the late Republic did not exist in the Principate,” and the emperor’s need to maintain a monopoly on military glory “explains the slow pace of conquest under the Principate.”471 In other words, emperors “held the wolf by the ears”; mid-Republican generals did not. Shifting our gaze from the metropole to the imperial periphery, Rome’s stance toward the outside world was encapsulated in the concept of imperium: the power to issue commands and expect to have them obeyed. How frequently such commands were issued is a different matter entirely. The nature of imperium emerges clearly from the declaration of Greek freedom in 196 and its aftermath. By redeploying all its legions from Greece by the end of 194, the Romans were not abdicating imperium in the East; the expectation was that the Greeks, in gratitude to Rome for securing their freedom, would conduct themselves in accordance with Rome’s national security interests. The Achaeans intuited this correctly, the Aetolians did not, instead inviting Antiochus III to Greece to liberate them (sc. from Rome’s imperium). At the end of the subsequent war against the Aetolians, the Romans had to spell out in legal terms what upholding Rome’s interests, that is, maintaining Rome’s imperium, meant: the Aetolians were to “to preserve the power and majesty of the Roman people without fraud.”472 During the Republic, as it grew, the imperium Romanum was manifested in different ways in the East and West. Scholars have long acknowledged these differences. In Italy, Rome’s allies were bound by compacts (not always formally expressed in treaties) to supply troops for the Roman legions, or to supply troops and tribute. In the European provinces—Spain, northern Italy, Gaul, and Germany—Rome pursued imperium with persistent force. This was due the nature of these prouinciae and their inhabitants. The Celts of northern Italy and, later, Transalpine Gaul, were the perennial enemy of Rome, its greatest existential threat. The further away they could be pushed beyond the Roman sphere of security, the better. We should not doubt Polybius when he says that by the late third century, the Romans made it their mission to drive the Celts out of the Po Valley altogether after enduring a series of Celtic invasions and attacks.473 Although it is an exaggeration to say that two centuries 471  Mattern 1999, 202. 472  Polyb. 21.32.2, ὁ δῆμος ὁ τῶν Αἰτωλῶν τὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ τὴν δυναστείαν τοῦ δήμου τῶν Ῥωμαίων. The phrase “without fraud” has fallen into a lacuna but can be supplied by Livy’s close translation of Polybius’ text: imperium maiestatemque populi Romani gens Aetolorum conseruato sine dolo malo (Liv. 38.11.2). 473  Polyb. 2.31.8.

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of continuous warfare were necessary to subdue the Iberian peninsula, it is true that the bloodiest and most savage fighting of the Republican period took place there. Spain fell to Rome as the spoil of the Second Punic War, and even after that war ended in Italy and Africa by 201, in a sense it continued in Spain since the Romans had to secure what it had already gained— the profitable southern and eastern coastal strips formerly controlled by Carthage.474 Hostile tribesmen had to be pushed back as far away as possible from these areas, according to the usual Roman strategic priority to increase their sphere of security. And so the Romans were compelled to wage a “war in outer space”—in areas that were simultaneously within and beyond the actual reach of Roman arms and influence.475 Its people were simultaneously within the Roman imperium and outside it, rebellious provincial subjects and externae gentes. Rome was thus on a permanent war footing (though not necessarily at war) in Spain throughout the two centuries that followed the defeat of Hannibal.476 As they did the Germans, the Romans regarded the unconquered Spanish as recalcitrants, people who refused to acknowledge overwhelming (and righteous) Roman power by willingly surrendering, and so applied the Vergilian principle of “spare the submissive, crush utterly the intransigents.”477 The Romans hammered away at the Spanish, and Julius Caesar (periodically) and then Augustus (for twenty-five years) hammered away at the Germans because they would not acknowledge Rome’s imperium, they would not surrender, they would not become subiecti. For the Romans, once martially engaged with these tribal, uncivilized peoples, admitting defeat at their hands and withdrawing from their lands was simply not an option. National honor demanded victory, as Appian observes (see above). This is why Augustus, after twenty-five years of fighting in Germany with no result, was compelled to carve two new provinces out of Gaul and call them Germanies— as though these were newly conquered territories east of the Rhine. “Mission accomplished.” The situation facing the Romans in the East and North Africa east of Numidia was far different. These places were dominated by sophisticated, cosmopolitan peoples with their own long histories of political and social development. 474  According to Harris 1989, 126, Roman expansion beyond the coasts was unnecessary since “The Carthaginians had shown that a Spanish empire could be held … without constant advances to the north and west.” In 220, however, the Carthaginians would have been destroyed by a massive Spanish host attacking their territory, were it not for Hannibal’s strategy of retreating before their advance south of the Tagus river (Polyb. 3.14.2–9). 475  Vervaet and Ñaco del Hoyo 2007. 476  Cornell 1993, 157 (on long pauses between Spanish wars). 477  Verg. Aen. 6.853, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

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As usual, perceived threats to Roman security emerging on the periphery in these regions were dealt with by force, but afterward the Romans were initially mostly content to leave states there to their own devices. The Greeks found this behavior confusing; they were more used to the nearby great powers, the Hellenistic kingdoms, militarily encroaching on their autonomy. The Romans’ reluctance to deploy troops overseas for long periods probably owed much to their commitment to upholding the Republican ideal of a citizen militia engaged in seasonal warfare, and, of course, because of the expense. North Africa and the East eventually became ‘provincialized.’ Throughout Roman history, annexation outside Italy was undertaken reluctantly, and mostly because of security concerns: Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica had to be annexed to prevent Carthage from surrounding Italy; Spain to prevent Carthage from reconquering its empire there; the Po Valley and Narbonensis to remove the existential Celtic threat to Italy. Annexation meant exploitation, to a greater or lesser degree. The provinces had to pay for themselves—a process that apparently took a long time. Cicero complained that before the acquisition of Asia none the provinces paid their way.478 And, once again, Appian says the Romans did not give up provinces—even unprofitable ones—because of national honor. Tacitus says he often heard his father-in-law Agricola say that Ireland could be held by two legions and some auxiliaries—around 8,000 men.479 The fact that the island never became part of the Roman Empire indicates that Rome’s leadership believed that Ireland could never pay its way. As has been seen, much has been made of Roman failures to annex land that was theirs for the taking, and to exploit provincial resources to the fullest. But just as “refusals to annex are no proof of reluctance to control,”480 failure to fleece is no proof of reluctance to exploit. As Armin and Peter Eich correctly observe, “Rome got the maximum it could get under the given circumstances.”481 KalletMarx concurs: “the absence of a large complement of troops in the East … imposed limits on the [acceptable] degree of exploitation and oppression of provincials.”482 In other words, the level of exploitation was in inverse proportion to the willingness of the provincials to be exploited without resorting to revolt; and so the greater the level of coercive force on the ground, the greater 478  Cic. Man. 14, nam ceterarum prouinciarum uectigalia, Quirites, tanta sunt ut eis ad ipsas prouincias tuendas uix contenti esse possimus. He was undoubtedly exaggerating: Harris 1979, 69 and 1989, 130 (vs. Badian 1968, 8). 479  Tac. Agr. 24, saepe ex eo audiui legione una et modicis auxiliis debellari obtinerique Hiberniam posse. 480  Robinson and Gallagher 1976a, 57. 481  Eich and Eich 2005, 28 (emphasis in the original). 482   Kallet-Marx 1995, 340.

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the level of permissible exploitation. Recognition of these facts underlies the ancient opinio communis that the best way to maintain an empire is to abide by those principles through which it was first obtained.483 Tiberius may have been alluding to the same dynamic when he declared he wanted his subjects shorn rather than shaved.484 In terms of the process of provincialization, the Romans were as passive and reactive as they were in areas where they exerted only informal control. At first, the Roman commander on the spot was in all likelihood far too busy (or far too uninterested) to become involved in the minutiae of the everyday lives of the provincials. The latter had to come to him if they wanted to leverage his authority in their causes and disputes. That this distance between subjects and commander gradually narrowed over time was on the initiative of the provincials. As the representative of the imperial power, the Roman governor’s authority trumped that of local authorities, and the provincials gradually began turning to him rather than the latter for judicial decisions. Jurisdiction was thus added to the governor’s primary functions—maintaining the security of his province and overseeing the collection of taxes. Because of its habit of military assertiveness, when not engaged in wars of expansion or peacetime endeavors (building roads, bridges, aqueducts, and so on) the Roman legions practiced occupation—maintaining law and order among the local population, assisting in tax collection, and myriad other functions colonial armies must serve. The exercise of imperial power brought with it the usual mundane petty humiliations such enterprises always inflict on imperial subjects. Finally, zooming out to the system level as a whole, the international system of the ancient Mediterranean appears to be assimilable to both an IR Constructivist and an IR Realist reading of the evidence. Those approaches that are a uia media, a “moderate” or “thin” Constructivism, or a “layered” Realism are probably the most suitable theoretical frameworks of analysis.485 As unsatisfactory as that may seem at first glance, this compromise enriches our understanding of the process of imperial expansion. The international system “shaped and shoved” states in certain directions, but state-level internal culture determined the nature of a state’s responses to those forces. The ancient evidence appears to show that internal discursive practices—morals, religious obligations and taboos, norms of conduct, ideology, among others— when projected outward had constitutive effects on the ancient international 483  Polyb. 10.36.5, 36.9.5–8, Cic. Rep. 3.41, etc., discussed above, Section 3.1. 484  Dio 57.10.5, κείρεσθαί μου τὰ πρόβατα, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἀποξύρεσθαι βούλομαι. 485  Wendt 1999: 1–2 (“moderate” or “thin” Constructivism), 40, 90, 178 (“uia media”); Eckstein 2006, 55, 67, 77, 181 (“layered” Realism).

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system. The Roman Empire was molded and maintained by mankind’s more aggressive instincts tempered by unique internal discourses and attributes. Determining the precise extent to which unit-level versus system-level factors, and discourse versus system realities shaped Roman imperial behavior over the centuries, is the task of future research. Also to be placed on the agenda, as a matter of some urgency, is a resolution to the ‘chicken and egg’ problem, outlined earlier: which came first (and why)—Roman expansionism or the Roman ‘social ethos’ of expansion? Even more urgent is the identification of the catalyst(s) behind whichever of these is prior to the other. A good place to start is to apply the large amount of Italian archaeological discoveries of recent decades and new archaeological approaches to the existing narratives of Roman expansion in Italy.486 A more holistic approach to the Roman frontier is also called for, that is, to synthesize the findings of individual scholars working on different sectors of the Roman frontier, and to explore whether and/or how these diverse systems functioned together to maximize security within the empire as a whole.487 It would be useful to test empirically Tim Cornell’s theory about the end of Roman imperialism by comparing, in terms of territorial extent (both absolutely and as a percentage of the existing empire), resources, and populations, Roman expansion during the early and middle Republics (roughly 350–146), during the late Republic and Augustan period (146–14 CE), and during the post-Augustan principate (14–ca. 400 CE). Finally, a more comprehensive answer is required to the question as to why, in the end, Rome was so successful—why, that is, Rome won. Past scholarly responses to this question—Badian’s foreign clientelae thesis, Harris’s thesis of exceptional Roman aggression, Eckstein’s emphasis on Roman citizenship inclusivity and self-restraint, among others—should be tested against each other, recent archaeological discoveries, and in the light of what the ancient literary sources themselves say on the matter. As has been the case several times before in the history of scholarship on Roman imperialism, there seems to be no shortage of work to be done.

486  Terrenato (2010) has shown the way, arguing for more creative theoretical approaches to the pre-expansionary phases of Roman development, borrowing from historical anthropology. 487  Kagan 2006, 347.

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