The Source:
P. A. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes, Oxford University Press 1990
Reflections on Roman Imperialism
From the third century B.C. Rome was enlarging her dominions beyond the seas. I shall not seek to determine the question how far aggression or fears of aggression … provided Rome with motives, as they often provided pretexts, for expansion, or how far the real cause of expansion must be sought in the mere desire for power and glory, or in greed for the profits of empire.
Schumpeter, in his book on imperialism, traces the “unbounded will to conquest” which the Romans displayed to a “policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism”, and this seems an apt description of much of the process. But a historian of Rome can hardly follow him when he ascribes conquests to the need of the landowning class who governed to divert the minds of the people from agrarian reform to military glory. To say nothing of the fact which he acknowledges that the nobility might themselves be unconscious that their domestic class interests dictated sincerely felt fears for Rome's safety and of the doubt we might feel in making unconscious motivation a determining factor in events, it was often not the governing class, but agrarian reformers or popular leaders who carried out annexations.
Nor … is there any evidence that slavery was a decisive factor. Like all ancient peoples, the Romans had always had slaves, and their wars increased the supply. Never were slaves so numerous as in Italy during the first century B.C. But there is hardly a hint in the texts that any war was prompted by the need for slaves. At most some generals may have embarked on unauthorized expeditions in a lust for booty which included slaves. And in the spoils of empire tribute must be accorded a larger place than booty. Once a people had come under Roman rule, it paid taxes to Rome, but it was of course immune from slave-raiding. Free subjects of Rome could not legally be made slaves. It is thus absurd to suggest that the empire was designed to keep up the supply of slaves, especially in the period after Augustus, when the policy was normally to defend the provinces already annexed without enlarging Roman dominions.
The provincials were worse off than the Italians in that they had to pay taxes to Rome. The Romans justified this on the ground that they needed a revenue to pay the army which protected the provincials. It is significant that they thought it necessary to provide any justification at all. In their own estimation their rule rested on right and not on mere force; they were accepting the established doctrine of Greek political philosophy that government exists for the welfare of the governed. The apologia is not quite convincing, since Italy profited as much as the provinces from the Roman peace, and far more from public expenditure, and yet paid little in taxes until c. AD 300, long after it had lost other privileges. But at any rate from the time of Augustus Roman arms did secure peace and order. …
… [Peace] lasted on the whole for 250 years: nothing like it had been known before, or has been repeated since.
For long it was not the practice of the Romans to govern much. The governor had only a small staff, and he did little more than defend his province, ensure the collection of the taxes and decide the most important criminal and civil cases. The local communities were left in the main to run their own affairs, though everywhere Rome supported oligarchies and would not countenance disorder or attacks on property rights. By the end of the pre-Christian era, the local communities had become responsible for collecting the imperial direct taxes. Their functions were all the more considerable because their territories were sometimes extensive …
Men of rank and education in the provinces understood that the preponderance of Roman strength doomed resistance or revolt to failure. Time helped to reconcile them to a yoke they could not throw off, the more readily because Rome preserved peace, and guaranteed their local liberties and power, and their economic interests. Gradually they were to gain still more. …
… Rome also relied more and more on provincials to fill the ranks of the army. They … were partly Romanized by long service in a Latin- speaking force, and were rewarded with the franchise at latest on discharge.
Since the bureaucracy remained small, the government depended for essential administrative tasks on local magnates in every region; they too were enfranchised in increasing numbers even in the East, where Latin did not spread, and where Rome was content to uphold and diffuse Greek culture and the Greek language. Rome had no need, said Aelius Aristides, of garrisons in the cities; they were held for her by the best people, who had become Romans. Thus the upper classes in the East too were Romanized at least in sentiment; here the empire lasted longest, and the subjects of Byzantium were to call themselves Rhomaioi.
Early in the third century the citizenship was bestowed on almost all the inhabitants of the empire by a single edict. This was only the culmination of a long process.
But citizenship no longer carried with it equal rights under the law; the upper classes were privileged, enjoying a sort of benefit of clergy.
Nor did it involve the intense patriotism of the old city state. Its chief importance lay in the fact that by luck or merit citizens could rise to the chief posts in the government. …
… In the third century most senators were not Italians. From Trajan [Emperor 98–117] onwards most emperors came from the provinces …
… The empire had now long ceased to be an alien dominion imposed on unwilling subjects by force. Its structure was certainly stratified socially. At the top the landed aristocracy provided the ruling class; at the bottom were the peasantry and the slaves.
Fortune or talent, however, permitted a few men to rise from the lowest ranks of society to affluence and power. In the army a peasant might be promoted to the highest offices … and in the late empire, when the hierarchical social order had become more rigid, cases of such promotions actually became more common.
… In the fields or the mines slaves had little hope of freedom, but the slaves who were extensively employed in the household, in trade and industry and even in public administration and the professions, were manumitted in thousands; the prospect of freedom was an incentive to good work, which it was in the interest of the masters to provide. …
Romanisation of the Local Ruling Classes in the Roman Empire
In his Panegyric on Rome Aelius Aristides claimed that the Roman empire was the first that rested on consent and not on force. No troops were needed to hold down the cities, because the most powerful of the local citizens, men to whom Rome had granted equality of rights, kept each of them loyal.
It was for this class in Asia that Aristides spoke; he was himself the son of a landowner who had received the Roman citizenship. Of course in the West the citizenship was far more widely diffused. Only there did many whole communities possess it, and there too more individuals could win it as a reward for military service, since over two thirds of the Roman army were raised and stationed in the western provinces. As a consequence, in the west there were far more provincial citizens of low social status.
My concern here, is however, with members of the local ruling classes, men of good family and property. They too more often secured Roman rights in the west, where there were numerous communities of Latin status, not found at all in eastern provinces; in these cities the magnates could obtain the citizenship by serving as local magistrates, or sometimes as councillors, quite automatically. Yet in the east individual grants had also become more and more common.
The distinction [east-west], though important, is one of degree. Everywhere it was the Roman policy to win over, and to enfranchise, the local leaders.
Enfranchisement implied, in some sense, Romanization. This took a cultural form where Latin was the language of government and education. The elder Pliny conceived it as the mission of Italy to unite and also to civilize mankind, giving them a common speech. … Tacitus suggests that the amenities of a civilized life might accustom warlike tribes to docile submission.
Whatever its purposes, the government could do no more than encourage a process which, with no system of public education, it lacked the means to impose. Provincials Romanized themselves. In some regions Italian settlers or Latinized veterans supplied them with models to imitate. Everywhere knowledge of Latin must have made it easier for them to influence Roman officials, and to take part in trade beyond their own region. Assimilation might win favours.
… Service to Rome was the primary consideration. The enfranchisement of provincial soldiers is only the most conspicuous illustration of this principle. But hardly any class of men rendered more important services to the Roman state than those charged with local government. While most Roman troops were defending the frontiers, it was largely their task to preserve internal order.
No large administrative bureaucracy ever existed under the Principate, except in Egypt, and the local magnates were even left to collect the direct property tax, the main source of imperial revenues. The empire could hardly have survived without their loyalty or acquiescence. …
… In provincial cities assemblies long continued to elect the magistrates, but their choice was limited to men of property. They could not legally initiate policy, and Rome could be expected to stamp on sedition. Roman officials were indeed also supposed to prevent the oppression of the people by the 'potentiores'. But the officials had the same social and economic interests and attitudes as the local oligarchs. In the second century at latest the humiliores were being subjected under Roman criminal law to treatment once reserved for slaves. Later, in the interest partly of the landowners, the peasants were to be bound to the soil like serfs. The masses could not look to Rome for effective protection against their local masters. …
… Of course, in many or most subject communities oligarchic rule was no novelty and wherever it had existed previously the oligarchs would seem to have been the losers, in so far as Roman conquest terminated local sovereignty. Hence in the early stages of Roman expansion some aristocrats took the lead in resistance.
But in fact true independence had been rare in the past: most communities had been controlled by kings, or by some other neighbouring state, and had at best been left to manage their internal affairs. Liberty in this sense the local oligarchs retained, or acquired, under Roman rule, if only because governors, even when entitled to intervene in the cities at their discretion, seldom had leisure or staff for continuous and systematic interference.
… Only in the second century did the central government begin to attempt a closer supervision. Though this must have been resented by the local magnates, they had by then long come to accept Roman domination as inevitable, and precisely in this period they began to enjoy not only the benefits of peace and security for their possessions and privileges, but also increasing opportunities for sharing in the imperial administration itself.
Rich and educated men, who knew most of the world about them, could see that a single commune was too weak by itself to challenge Rome. At the same time co-operation with fellow-subjects was impeded by the persistence of old jealousies and rivalries. Even within one province or region there was little or no consciousness of a common nationality) which in modern times has militated against the growth of loyalty to an imperial power. …
… Without the leadership and organization which the local magnates could alone, or best, provide, rebellions were rare. Continuous resistance did not keep the embers of disloyalty burning. Time and habit promoted the acceptance of Roman rule. Aristides’ ancestors had already been subjects for nearly twice as long as British rule endured in large parts of India.
The Roman citizenship, which symbolized, rewarded and fortified the loyalty of the magnates, also prepared the way for the final step in Romanization: their admission to a share in imperial government, which removed the distinction between rulers and subjects.
It was the easier for Rome to offer this concession and for the magnates to accept it, because in education and economic interests provincial magnates closely resembled the old Italian ruling class. I have never been able to discover that the promotion of leading provincials had any effect on Roman policy, or on the ideas of emperors, senators or Equités. They were apparently uncritical of the established order; the right of the city of Rome to be fed and amused at the cost of provincial taxpayers was never impaired, and Italy was allowed to retain immunity from the heaviest taxes until about 300.
Indeed in the reign of the first provincial emperor public money was first provided for the poor of all Italy, and of Italy alone; and provincial senators were required to invest in Italian land, so that they might regard Italy as their real patria. … Still, in so far as provincials involved in the central government retained connexions with their original homes, this must have served to attach their peoples still more firmly to Rome. By the time that the eternal city celebrated its millennium under an Arab Caesar, its dominion had virtually ceased to be foreign to the men of rank and property. To a Severan jurist Rome was 'communis nostra patria'. …
… From first to last Roman society and politics were aristocratic. The Princeps himself was most secure when he ruled with the consent of the upper orders. At every stage in Rome's history the aristocrats who ruled at Rome found it most natural to support men like themselves elsewhere. Community of interests and sentiments made it easier to admit them to their own circle. It was only the non-democratic institutions of the Roman Republic that made the extension of the citizenship a suitable instrument for winning the consent of the Italians by giving substantial political rights to the domi nobiles, and it was the well-tried success of this policy that suggested to the autocrats its further extension; they built on Republican experience.
[MH: In another book, domi nobiles are defined by Sema Karataş as the “municipal aristocracy” and she quotes T.P. Wiseman — “Men who at Rome appeared as upstarts, ignoti homines et repentini, might well be aristocrats in their home towns, the heirs to generations of wealth and pride. We must think of them not as “new men”, but as domi nobiles.”]
In this way they fostered and rewarded the growth of an empire-wide loyalty to Rome, if only among the men who were the natural leaders of provincial subjects.
We can never know how deeply that loyalty penetrated the masses. They do not speak to us on parchment or stone. The eloquence of an Aristides illustrates what men of rank and education thought: for the rest we have to make dubious inferences from the actions of Illyrian peasants whose valour saved the empire in the third century or of [those] who sided with barbarians and helped to disrupt it. Yet perhaps the former fought primarily for pay, and the latter in blind discontent with their miseries; Rome may have meant little to both, whether for good or ill.
And Rome would be remembered not for what these inarticulate peasants thought of her, but for what the privileged few said in reiterated laudations.
Addenda
[It] would be hard to prove that most local oligarchies consisted chiefly of families with high lineage and hereditary claims to patronage. Probably there were analogies everywhere to the rise of new families at Rome itself, where they were always replacing those which had died out or sunk into poverty, and where some were tainted with servile blood. Increased economic activity under the Roman peace must have enabled many entrepreneurs to amass fortunes in trade and industry, which would be invested in land, and become in later generations the source of social and political distinction. Numerous curiales were probably descended from such rich freedmen …
… Marcus Aurelius regretted that descendants of slaves could no longer be excluded from the Athenian Areopagus … Patronage of the types familiar in Italy and Gaul is not recorded in many parts of the empire any more than in Judaea, but where it did exist, it had not precluded class conflicts, either in republican Italy, or in the Gaul of Caesar's time or of Tiberius' reign … The acquisition of land by the rich must often have involved the dispossession of indebted peasants, as for instance in Republican Italy.
[MH: Unusually I found no cover to display for this book, just a black rectangle.]
Book contents:
Sulla and the Asian Publicans
The Revolt of Vindex and the Fall of Nero
Tacitus on the Batavian Revolt
Charges of Provincial Maladministration under the Early Principate
Augustan Imperialism
Reflections on British and Roman Imperialism
The 'Fiscus' and its Development
Procuratorial Jurisdiction
Conscription and Volunteering in the Roman Imperial Army
The Administrators of Roman Egypt
Did Imperial Rome Disarm her Subjects?
The Romanization of the Local Ruling Classes in the Roman Empire
Josephus on Social Conflicts in Roman Judaea 14. Laus Imperii
The Revenues of Rome
Remarks on the Imperial Fiscus
Publicans in the Principate
Roman Imperial Illusions
Please send comments or corrections to me directly at mgs.heller@gmail.com
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