Keith Hopkins, Political Economy of the Roman Empire
Part 1: Steady State, origins, evolution, tax, government, power configurations
Keith Hopkins wrote:
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
1 Introduction
The Roman empire lasted as a single political system for five centuries and more. At its height, it stretched from the Black Sea to the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. This essay explores how the empire was governed, how its wealth was created and how that wealth was distributed among competing elements of the population: the central government, the emperor, the aristocracy, the army, the city of Rome, municipal élites, peasants and slaves.
2 Origins and Evolution
By origin, the Roman empire was an empire of conquest, one of a handful of empires which developed throughout the world in the golden millennium of empire formation and religious innovation (c.550 BC– AD 650). This worldwide evolution of large pre- industrial states depended crucially on three material innovations: the effective use of iron weapons and tools, writing and money. Iron was used to conquer and plough. Writing was used to organise collectives of humans toward common objectives, both instrumentally and symbolically in spite of distances in space and time (for example, via written religious texts and law codes). Coinage (first introduced in large quantities into Rome in the third century BC) was used to store value and to reward, motivate and exploit subjects.
In this perspective, the Roman empire represented only one further stage in the gradual evolution of states from tribes to kingdoms and from kingdoms to larger and larger empires. Rome was thus the grandchild of Mycenae and Troy and the heir of countless and now unknown warring tribes, which have left no epics or histories. Rome was also the immediate heir and beneficiary of important empires, such as Carthage (conquered in 202 BC), Macedon (conquered in 168 BC), Syria (63 BC) and Egypt (30 BC). Symptomatically, the first Roman emperor, Augustus (31 BC– AD 14), wore the image of that other great empire- builder Alexander on his signet ring but then later changed his seal to his own image.
One secret of successful empire lay in frequent and sometimes radical innovations. Politically, for example, Rome changed from an early monarchy of allegedly Etruscan kings (traditional dates 753– 509 BC) to a native oligarchic aristocracy. And then, much later, Rome changed again, from a primarily aristocratic form of government back to monarchy (31 BC– AD 476 in the West, and for much longer in the eastern empire). But even this oligarchic aristocracy (509– 31 BC, in a period conventionally labelled the Republic) was itself significantly restrained by a powerful combination of participatory democracy and the widespread obligation of citizens to military service. So aristocratic leaders had to solicit election to high political office from their social inferiors. And laws were passed by a mass electorate. In disputed votes on the passage of laws and in disputed elections for high office – and most elections were disputed – the plebs had effective political power, even though the collective power of the people was constitutionally manipulated in an elaborate block- voting system, which repeatedly gave disproportionate weight to the more prosperous citizens.
Aristocratic exploitation of the poor was also limited by the collective power of the Roman citizen army. Once drawn up in military formation, the armed citizens had irresistible power; their repeated withdrawal from cooperation with the rich was celebrated in historical myth, as the ‘secessions of the Plebs’. The aristocracy had little choice but to give way and concede privileges to the people. These populist movements, enshrined constitutionally in the prestige and powers of the ten Tribunes of the People and in the Roman sense of collective identity, were historically and symbolically important. They performed perhaps the same function in Roman cultural self- perception as the English charter myth of the Magna Carta or the American individualistic dream of Abraham Lincoln or the self- made as millionaire, from rags to riches.
The threat of using military force to resolve political issues recurred and civil wars broke out toward the end of the period of rapid imperial expansion (225– 30 BC). Social tensions were exacerbated because the rewards of empire were very unequally distributed. For example, in this period, a huge number, well over 1 million, perhaps even 2 million slaves were imported from conquered provinces into Italy. And these imported slaves displaced even larger numbers of free peasants in central and southern Italy. Tens of thousands of these slaves were subsequently freed and absorbed into the Roman citizen body. The ejected peasants, in their turn, created wave upon wave of migrants to different areas. Many of them were recruited into the Roman army; others went to the city of Rome, where they were tempted by the prospect of state- subsidised and later free wheat doles; others migrated to other growing Italian towns. Yet more peasants and ex- peasant soldiers emigrated to colonies, where they were granted land by victorious generals, at first in southern and northern Italy and later also in the conquered provinces.
This process of overseas colonisation (49– 13 BC), especially during and in the aftermath of bitter civil wars, served multiple functions. It removed literally tens of thousands of Italian peasants from the crowded Italian land market and gave them bigger individual plots overseas, which were useful as bulwarks of Roman power in the conquered provinces. So imported slaves and Roman colonists moved in opposite and complementary directions: slaves to Italy and free Romans to the provinces. And, at the same time, the mass emigration of free citizens from Italy freed more land for ownership by the newly enriched and land- hungry aristocrats, who in this period of expansion and insecurity wanted their large estates in Italy worked by imported slaves. There was no other investment opportunity that offered the same security and status.
Together, mass overseas colonisation and the regular provision of free wheat doles to a large number of citizens (more than 200,000 adult males) in the city of Rome provided the economic underpinning of Augustus’ political settlement.
Augustus was the victorious leader of one faction in the long civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination, in 44 BC. He successfully turned his military power into a quasi- constitutional but autocratic monarchy (the so- called Principate or high empire (31 BC– AD 235)). Augustus and his immediate successors transformed the governance of the Roman state. Familiarity with their long- lasting success should not blind us to the brilliant inventiveness of their reforms.
First, the army was recruited decreasingly from among Roman citizens living in Italy and increasingly from among citizens living in the provinces and from provincials (see section 6.3). The army was no longer recruited AD hoc for particular campaigns but was recruited long- term for from sixteen to twenty- five years, with a very large terminal bonus (equal to almost thirteen years’ pay), which helped ensure loyalty. The army (except for the small élite palace guard and metropolitan police force) was not stationed in Italy but strung out defensively along the distant frontiers. In short, the citizen army that had so threatened the central polity during the last century of the Republic was demilitarised and disempowered. The army was well paid but dispersed so that it could not easily unite to rebel. Few modern third- world countries have managed to control their military so effectively. (Admittedly, the palace guard played a hand in choosing and dismissing emperors – but the selection of emperors rarely had consequences for the efficiency of government.)
Second, under the emperors, the old aristocrats who had survived the murderous civil wars of the late Republic were apparently seduced by their individual chances of success in a superficially restored oligarchy. But now there was an emperor in charge to ensure that all the traditional oligarchic rules about power- sharing were strictly enforced (such as short tenure of offices and long gaps between offices). So, politically successful aristocrats spent about fifteen or twenty long years competing with one another, under the sceptical and supervisory eyes of a less than generous emperor (or his heir), who repeatedly used capricious cruelty (if we are to believe aristocratic commentaries), confiscations and executions as techniques of control. The end result was that the Roman aristocracy became, much more than it had ever been before, an aristocracy of office with extremely low rates of hereditary succession (see section 6.1 for more details). As in the army, élite vacancies were increasingly filled by provincials. So the élite of the conquerors merged with the élite of the conquered.
Third, the emperors at Rome effectively changed the nature of Roman citizenship. The plebs at Rome were disfranchised and no longer constituted the electorate for competing aristocrats; for that task the emperors probably considered that they were too volatile and corruptible. So the emperors enlarged on republican tradition and bought off the plebs with bread and circuses. Not that the metropolitan crowd was completely depoliticised. After all, it still remained each emperor’s biggest captive audience. That was where he knew he was king and god; the people in circus or amphitheatre were his personal claque, mostly conned into servile flattery, bought by lavish gifts and shows, but from time to time, as both sides must have known, the crowd could turn nasty and bayed for blood.
The disfranchisement and demilitarisation of the citizens at Rome allowed citizenship itself to become a status symbol. Here the emperors built on what had long been a radical Roman tradition. After all, Rome had begun as a city- state. It had conquered the surrounding towns and tribes and, as it expanded, had incorporated its successive neighbours into partial and then full citizenship. It was a stroke of generous and self- interested genius. Julius Caesar, Augustus and their successors followed this absorptive tradition and increasingly rewarded first Italians, then leading provincials with the symbolic status of citizens. In the reign of Augustus, citizens numbered about 4– 5 million people (about 7– 10 per cent of the empire’s population). Thereafter, the number of citizens steadily increased, until in AD 212 practically all the inhabitants of the empire were awarded full citizenship. It was now time, the emperors apparently considered, for the traditional divide between conquerors and conquered to be forgotten. All inhabitants of the empire were now both citizens and subjects. But they were by no means all equal. A new empire- wide stratification of respectables (honestiores) and mean folk (humiliores) now separated the privileged from the exploited. And, needless to say, several exquisite gradings (e.g. ‘most perfect’, ‘most egregious’, ‘illustrious’) differentiated the élite.
3 The Fiscal System
Early Rome was, and for long remained, a warrior state. In order to survive and flourish, Rome had to exploit not only its enemies and allies but also its own citizens. Initially, it exploited its own citizens primarily by exacting military service, civil obedience and a small proportional tax on property (0.1 per cent of capital value each year). All citizens (adult males) were liable to military service, up to ten years in the cavalry and sixteen years in the infantry, although even in the infantry obligations were graded according to wealth. For example, the very poorest citizens (proletarii) were considered capable of contributing only children (proles) to the state. At the very least, this rudimentary system implied that the Roman state from early times kept lists of all its citizens and recorded the value of each citizen’s property so that each could be allocated with rough justice to one of seven classes (knights, classes I– V, proletarians). Seen another way, the Roman system of obligation, whether to fight or pay taxes, differentiated and reinforced various layers of the status pyramid. But overall the state did not require much money, because most administrative jobs, even the highest, were undertaken by volunteers, that is, by those who could afford them. This ancient parsimony moulded the Roman state’s expectations for centuries.
In retrospect, one central problem of the Roman state during this period of rapid growth was how to reward the beneficiaries of empire differentially (e.g. how to let the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful) without alienating the support and compliance of the various strata at the bottom of the social pile. Even the richest Romans needed the obedience of the Roman free poor, slaves, allies and conquered subjects. And that dependency of the rich on the poor constrained exploitation. The problem was all the more intractable because, as the empire expanded, relative positions, even at the bottom of the social scale, shifted.
The allies provide a neat case in point. As Rome defeated its neighbours, they were successively embraced as Latins or allies, as almost like Romans. The sole obligation of the allies in return was to provide Rome with soldiers, annually or as requested. The more Rome expanded territorially within Italy, the more generous Rome became in extending allied status to its defeated Italian enemies. Again, in retrospect, it seems that Rome’s continuous drive to territorial expansion derived partly from Romans’ own warrior ambitions and greed and partly from the repeated need to reinforce the allies’ military obligations by getting them once again to provide troops. By the end of the second century BC, allies were regularly contributing perhaps two- thirds of the Roman field armies without sharing significantly in the profits of empire. Small wonder, then, that the allies eventually rebelled. Surprisingly, their dominant collective objective (at least in the Roman records) was not secession but overt equality with full Roman citizens. Rome, after a considerable struggle, adroitly surrendered. At one stroke, then, in the 80s BC, the number of adult male Roman citizens trebled to close to one million. Once again, the Roman state had managed to restore the delicate balance between beneficiaries of empire and its exploited subjects.
Defeated enemies understandably paid most of the costs of empire. At first, Roman conquerors compensated themselves handsomely for the trouble of overcoming resistance, with booty, comprising stored treasure in gold and silver, or captured humans, who were either ransomed or sold as slaves. Ideally, this booty was originally handed over to the Roman state, though victorious generals occasionally dedicated a portion to a god to whom they had made a solemn vow in the heat of the battle in return for securing victory. Gradually, generals also took an increasing share for themselves and their lieutenants and distributed relatively modest sums to their lesser officers and soldiers. By the end of the period of rapid imperial expansion, conquering generals and administrators of pacified provinces routinely expected to make substantial personal profits with which to cover the costs of their political careers and their social ostentation at Rome. They shared some of these profits of office with their entourage and occasionally secured land grants for their retiring veterans. Also in the growing empire, defeated enemies paid huge indemnities to recompense Rome for the costs of defeating them. Carthage, for example, paid an indemnity over fifty years after its second defeat, in 202 BC. But gradually these indemnities were transformed into routine taxation, only some of which went to pay and feed occupying troops. The substantial rest was remitted to Rome.
4 Taxation and the Central Government
The Roman empire began as an empire of conquest, which gradually and disjointedly moved along an axis from booty to indemnities to taxation. Some sense of the scale of Roman taxation would be helpful. Unfortunately, reliable statistics are scarce. In the third century BC, before its expansion overseas, the Roman state subsisted on low and fluctuating taxation, which reflected its own unpredictable needs and its reliance on the voluntary services of its citizens. A generous estimate puts its revenues then at 4– 8 million sestertii per year. By 150 BC state revenues had risen sevenfold to 50– 60 million sestertii per year (at roughly constant prices); before the middle of the last century BC, revenues had risen again sixfold, to 340 million sestertii, as Rome conquered the wealthiest kingdoms accessible. By the middle of the first century AD, again at near constant prices, revenues had more than doubled to about 800 million sestertii per year. In sum, tax revenues had risen at least one hundredfold in three centuries. But Roman taxes were low as a proportion of probable gross product. Per capita taxes amounted to only 13 sestertii per person per year, or, at a standard (and arbitrary) farmgate price (3 sestertii per modius of 6.55 kg), 28 kg wheat equivalent per person/ year, 11 per cent of minimum subsistence. This tax load in wheat terms was more than the English or French governments raised regularly in the seventeenth century but very much less than they raised in the eighteenth century.
Since many inhabitants of the Roman empire produced and consumed significantly more than minimum subsistence, the actual rate of taxation was significantly less than 10 per cent, probably closer to 5 per cent of gross product. Of course, the tax burden was probably not evenly distributed. And taxes transmitted to the central government were probably less than the total of taxes exacted by greedy and corrupt tax collectors. It seems clear that, at least in Egypt, the Roman state operated a pervasive and invasive apparatus, even at these levels of tax extraction. When I say that taxes were low, I do not mean to imply that Roman peasants, paying for benefits they could not see, typically experienced them as low. Indeed, there is significant evidence that many Egyptian peasants struggled to pay their poll-tax in cash by splitting it into several instalments.
Why were Roman taxes so low? Two immediate answers come to mind: one genetic (in the Genesis sense), the other structural. Genetically, the Roman state had set its tax targets only by the need to recover the costs of war and defence. Since it was an empire of conquest, taxpayers were defeated subjects (after 167 BC until the fourth century AD, the citizen inhabitants of Italy paid no land tax). And, since it was an empire of conquest, the state did not offer its subjects much service: rudimentary justice to prevent violence, roads for speedy military communications and defence. Tax collection was the main job of provincial governors. But even by the second century AD, there was only one Roman élite administrator for every 400,000 inhabitants of empire, whereas in twelfth- century China there was one élite administrator per 15,000 people. Roman administrators levied their taxes and by and large provided only peace in return.
Structurally, the Roman state always operated a binary system of beneficiaries. The state shared the profits from conquest with its leaders and, to a lesser extent, with its soldiers. Public taxes were low so that private incomes of the rich, primarily rents from estates, could be higher. Rents and taxes were in competition for a limited surplus. And, at the same time, they were complementary. The profits of the rich bound them into supporting the state, of which they were the prime beneficiaries. The aggregate wealth and income of the aristocracy, broadly understood, was probably as great as, or greater than, the tax income of the central government. That is why emperors in need repeatedly confiscated the estates of the super-rich, both as an expression of their autocratic power and because these were the biggest assets available in the Roman economy. But, even if these stolen estates were incorporated into the private property of the emperors, their management had to be delegated back to an aristocrat (in the broad definition of the term). In sum, aristocratic wealth seriously constrained the central government’s tax-raising powers. And, in the later empire, rich landowners’ capacity to resist the central government’s attempts to raise taxes was the rock on which the western empire foundered.
5 The Steady State
The Roman empire was one of the largest political systems ever created, and one of the longest lasting. Only the Chinese empire lasted longer. At its height, in the second century AD, the Roman empire stretched from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the Black Sea and from Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England, to the Red Sea. Its land mass was equal to more than half that of the continental United States. The territory once occupied by the Roman empire is now split among forty different countries. Its population totalled perhaps 60 million people, or between one- fourth and one- sixth of the whole world’s population at the time.
Size matters; it was an important source and index of the power that Rome exercised. In a pre- industrial economy, land and labour are the two primary ingredients of wealth. The larger the Roman empire became, the more people it subjected and the more taxes it exacted. The more wealth the Roman state controlled, the more territory it was able to acquire and defend. For example, between 225 and 25 BC, the period of Rome’s striking imperial expansion, the population subject to Roman rule increased perhaps fifteenfold, from about 4 to 60 million people. But the government’s tax revenues rose by at least a hundredfold (from about 4– 8 million sestertii in 250 BC to more than 800 million sestertii in 25 BC, at roughly constant prices: see section 4). Rome had conquered and absorbed several mini- empires (Macedon, Syria, Egypt) and numerous tribes. It had total control of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.
The huge size of the Roman empire was a symptom of the fanatical dedication at all levels of Roman society to fighting wars and to military discipline and of the desire both for immediate victory and for long- term conquest. ‘No human force could resist Roman might’ (Livy 1.16.7). Some Romans even imagined that they could, if they wished, rule or had already ‘subjugated the whole world’ (Augustus, Res Gestae, Preface). As it was, they absorbed all that (or more than what) was then worth conquering, with the giant exception of the Parthian empire, on its eastern borders. Further expansion, as the first emperor, Augustus, was reported to have said, would have been like fishing with a golden hook (Suet. Aug. 25.4). The prize was not worth the risk. A Roman historian in the second century, looking back over more than a century of ‘long and stable peace and the empire’s secure prosperity’, wrote:
Since they [the emperors] control the best regions of the earth and sea, they wisely wish to preserve what they have rather than to extend the empire endlessly by including barbarian tribes, which are poor and unprofitable. (Appian, Preface 7)
Appian commented that he had himself seen some of these barbarian ambassadors at court in Rome, offering themselves up as subjects. But their petitions had been refused, as they would have been ‘of no use’.
The empire’s persistence was a symptom of the thoroughness with which Romans destroyed previous political systems and overrode the separate cultural identities of the kingdoms and tribes which they had conquered. Or, rather, the Romans, particularly in areas of already established polities and high culture, left their victims with a semi- transparent veil of selfrespect that allowed them an illusion of local autonomy. This partial autonomy was limited to individual towns (not groups of towns). And it was restricted by Roman provincial governors’ expectation of subservience and, reciprocally, by the local élites’ own desire for assimilation – whether that meant assuming Roman culture and Roman- style rank or borrowing Roman power in order to resolve local power struggles. Either way, as élite and sub- élite provincials became more like Romans, and filled Roman administrative posts, local independence was systematically undermined. And provincial cultures all over the empire, at least in outward veneer, became ostensibly Romanised.
For example, by the end of the second century, half of the central Roman senate was of provincial origin. In western Europe, the language of the conquerors percolated to all levels and effectively displaced native local languages as the lingua franca. Latin became the common root of modern Romance languages. But, in the eastern half of the empire, Greek remained the accepted language of Roman government. Even there, it was an instrument of change; for example, in the ancient culture of Egypt, writing in Greek letters (Coptic) displaced native Egyptian demotic script. And many Romans, to establish their credentials as people of high culture, learned Greek. Assimilation was a two- way process, by which the ideal of what it meant to be Roman itself gradually changed. That said, the impact of Roman rule is still visible in the ruins of Roman towns from all over the empire: temples to Roman Jupiter and to the Capitoline gods, statues of emperors (in some towns by the dozen), triumphal arches, colonnaded town squares and steam baths. To be Roman was to be sweaty and clean. The Roman empire was an empire of conquest but also a unitary symbolic system.
A modern map gives only a slight indication of Roman achievements. Rome’s huge empire was created when the fastest means of land transport was the horse- drawn chariot, the pack- donkey and the ox- cart. So the Roman empire was in effect several months wide – and larger in winter than in summer. But the modern map shows up the empire’s single salient feature: the centrality of the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean Sea was at the centre of Roman power, if only because transport by land, in Roman conditions, cost fifty or sixty times as much (per ton/ km) as transport by sea and about ten times as much as transport by river.
So the Roman empire was at heart a fusion of coastal cultures, bound together by cheap sea transport, except in winter, when ships usually did not sail. The suppression of piracy during the last century BC made the Mediterranean into the empire’s internal sea. Cheap transport gave the Roman empire a geopolitical advantage, which in its economic impact was the equivalent of the highly productive irrigation agriculture at the core of other pre- industrial empires. The city of Rome could profit from and enjoy the surplus produce imported from all its coastal provinces. Rome stood at the centre of a network of major cities (Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Cadiz, Ephesus, Aquileia), all of which were on the seacoast or rivers.
The city of Rome was by far the richest market in the whole empire, by volume and by value. Prices there were highest. It was there that merchants could make (or lose) their fortunes. It was there that the emperor and high aristocrats had their palaces. Rome was where emperors and aristocrats spent a large part of their taxes and rents. Rome was the prime engine of long- distance trade. The principle behind this assertion is simple. Whatever was imported into Rome from the provinces as money taxes and money rents, provincial towns had to earn back (taking one year with another) by the manufacture and sale of goods. In order to be able to pay money taxes again in subsequent years, provincial towns (villages, peasants) had to earn back the money that they had paid and sent overseas in taxes and rents. This simple equation – taxes plus rents exported roughly equalled in value exported and traded goods – however oversimplified it is, highlights the lines of trade and the volume of traffic that criss- crossed the Mediterranean, through a network of coastal or riverine towns centred on, and fuelled primarily by, consumption in the city of Rome.
The centrality of the Mediterranean should not blind us to the huge landmass of Roman conquests. Julius Caesar, in pursuit of military glory, advanced Roman power to Gaul and Britain. Under Augustus, armies and administrators incorporated large territories in north- western Spain, western Germany, Switzerland and the Balkans. In sum, the Romans had advanced the boundaries of empire as far as the ocean in the west and the Sahara desert in the south. To the north- west, the rivers Rhine and Danube (eventually supplemented by a long line of forts) roughly demarcated the comfortable limits of Roman power and also served as convenient lines of supply to the frontier armies.
The considerable distance between the city of Rome and its land frontiers had far- reaching but diverse, even contradictory, implications. Distance and slow travel overland effectively insulated Rome and its political leaders from attack by marauding barbarians (until AD 410) or by rebellious generals, whose collaboration was in any case hindered by fragmented commands split along an extended frontier and among rival aristocrats. Frontier armies intervened effectively only twice in central politics (in AD 69 and 193) in more than two centuries.
The Roman military was depoliticised – an achievement all the more remarkable if we compare it with the frequency of coups d’état in contemporary third- world states. Complementarily, sheer size and slowness of communications also prevented close control and swift reaction by the central government to crises on the periphery. Even in an emergency, for example, it took nine days for a messenger on a series of horses to ride from Mainz, Germany, to Rome. Routine messages about the death of rulers took very much longer and the time of their arrival was unpredictable. In the late third century AD, in an effort to resolve these problems, emperors split the empire into four parts, each with its capital closer to the frontiers. But there was another and seemingly insuperable problem. The northern territories were economically less developed, less urbanised and less densely populated than the southern coastal regions of the Mediterranean. These northern regions could only with difficulty in Roman (as against post- medieval) times produce sufficient taxes to pay for their own extensive defence.
6 Configurations of Power
6.1 Emperors and Aristocrats
For emperors, too, the maintenance of control was (it seems reasonable to imagine) a central objective. If it was, they were not very good at it. Of the first eleven emperors, only four died (or were reputed to have died) naturally. The basic problem was the founding ideology of the Principate. Monarchy was made more acceptable to the traditional senatorial aristocracy by the fiction that the emperor was only first among equals (princeps). The clear implication was, therefore, that any Roman aristocrat of distinguished descent could himself become emperor. Hence, there was a long-term structural tension between emperors and aristocrats. That was a basic feature of Roman politics. Emperors in the first century killed dozens of aristocrats. They repeatedly created a reign of terror that would have made Ivan the Terrible seem mild.
The Roman aristocracy was remarkably different from any feudal or post- feudal European aristocracy. At its core was a political élite of 600 senators. They were chosen in each generation both from among the sons of senators and from a politically inactive, much larger landowning élite, originally based in Italy but increasingly derived from all over the empire. Ideologically, the image usually represented by Roman élite writers (and by modern historians suckered to think that ideology represents reality instead of disguising it) is that the Roman senatorial aristocracy was hereditary. But, in fact, intergenerational succession rates in the Roman aristocracy were remarkably low. The basic reason was that, unlike European feudal and post- feudal aristocracies, which were aristocracies based on land ownership and hereditary title, the Roman senatorial aristocracy was a competitive aristocracy of office. And, in order to be a top official (ordinary consul or supplementary/ suffect consul), the successful contestant had to have held a whole series of administrative posts; this demand was sometimes relaxed for claimants of very distinguished descent, who were promoted quickly without any qualifying military experience. In short, the successful Roman political aristocrat had to have been a successful administrator and to remain in favour for years, sometimes under different emperors or influential advisers at court.
The net effect, as I have indicated, was an extraordinarily low rate of succession in the Roman political élite. Roughly speaking, in the first two centuries AD and beyond, far fewer than half of top consuls had a consular son(s); among the second rank of supplementary consuls, overall far fewer than a quarter had a consular son, grandson or great- grandson. The number of consuls after AD 70 varied between eight and ten per year, far fewer than the usual cohort of twenty entrants to the senate at age about 25; allowing for death, between half and two- thirds of entrants to the senate achieved a consulship. By extension, it is reasonable to assume that among the third- ranking senators who never became consul, succession rates were even lower than for first- or second- ranking consuls. Overall, the succession rate among all known senators in the second century was less than half that of British barons in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.
The great majority of senators were newcomers to the political aristocracy. Looked at from another perspective, and as in modern political élites, most Roman politicians came from families that sent representatives into politics for only one generation. Complementarily, and this for our present purposes is most important, there was a rather large pool of rich landowners spread across the empire, some of whom occasionally sent a son as its representative into central politics. These provincial families subsequently profited for generations in their home localities from the hereditary honorary status that their exceptional representative’s political success had secured through senatorial membership or consular status, without incurring, again, the huge expense, risk – or profits – that a political career involved. The Roman aristocracy, broadly understood, had a small semihereditary core, a fluid and porous outer ring of politically and administratively active representatives (albeit with no explicit representative functions) and a broader pool of potential senators who were politically active, if at all, only at the local level.
By tradition, senatorial aristocrats were the wealthiest men at Rome. Under the Republic (until 31 BC), they were the generals and governors who benefited most from the booty and plunder of wars and provincial administration. Under the Principate, emperors controlled senatorial aristocrats (at least according to history books written by senators and their allies) by a whole array of divisive tactics. I list them without being able to assign them relative weights:
capricious and terrorising persecution, imprisonment, murder
strict adherence to the old-fashioned rules of oligarchic power sharing (short tenure of office, collegiality, gaps between offices, age- related promotion, prosecutions for corruption)
cutting of the ties between political careers and popular election (the Roman plebs were disfranchised early in the first century AD)
supplementing of collective senatorial decisions (senatus consulta) with individual decisions made by the emperor himself (decreta), sometimes in consultation with friends (consilium)
denial of military experience to the most prestigious aristocrats – an increase in the status costs of being an aristocrat at court in Rome (many were bankrupted)
promotion of provincial newcomers to senatorial rank (which diluted hereditary hold)
The cumulative impact of all these devices was to weaken the collective and institutional power of the senate as a consultative, policy- making body. The court, and its corridors, displaced the senate as the powerhouse of the Roman state.
Nevertheless, the monarchy, for all the aristocratic complaints, provided a carapace for aristocratic enrichment. The landowning aristocracy, broadly understood, increased in aggregate prosperity. The basic reason for this is clear. In republican times, nearly all senatorial wealth was concentrated in Italian landholdings and investment in in-town housing, supplemented by investment through agents in collective enterprises, such as overseas trade and tax collection. Expert scholars will know the slender evidential base for generalisations of this type, but my reasoning is simple enough. The larger the investment needed (for example, in Roman housing or in overseas trade), the more likely was senatorial involvement. After all, a single 400- ton ship laden with wheat arriving in a port near Rome was worth up to 1 million sestertii, the minimum qualifying fortune for a senator; one luxury cargo arriving in Alexandria from India is known from a recently discovered papyrus fragment to have been valued at 7 million sestertii. If no senators were involved in such ventures (to say nothing of silver mines, of which more later), we have to posit the existence of a class of equally wealthy non- senators. These were presumably the ascendants of future senators. And I have already argued for the existence of a wider group of basically landowning ‘senatorands’ – that is, families capable of sending a representative into aristocratic politics occasionally. Under the emperors, aristocratic wealth was no longer concentrated in Italy.
Under the emperors, aristocrats increasingly owned estates spread over the whole empire. In the second century, they were legally required to own first one- third, later reduced to onequarter, of their estates in Italy – in itself an index of their continuing provincialisation. Over time, aristocrats collectively owned a significant share not just of Italy but of the whole Mediterranean basin. In the middle of the first century AD, six senators were reputed (of course it was an exaggeration, but a straw in the right wind) to own all Tunisia. Aristocrats’ aggregate wealth increased, as did the fortunes of individual aristocrats. A few illustrative figures will suffice. Cicero in the middle of the last century BC wrote that a rich Roman needed an annual income of 100,000 to 600,000 sestertii; in the late first century, Pliny, a middling senator, had an annual income of about 1.1 million sestertii per year. In the fourth century, middling senators in the city of Rome were said to enjoy incomes of 1,333 to 2,000 Roman pounds of gold a year, equivalent to 6– 9 million sestertii per year. In sum, aristocratic fortunes, on these, admittedly vulnerable figures, had doubled or trebled in the first century of the Principate and had again risen more than sixfold between AD 100 and 400. Monarchy and the politico- economic integration of the whole empire, however superficial, had enabled aristocrats to become very much richer.
6.2 The City of Rome
The city of Rome was by far the largest city in the Roman world. By the end of the first century BC, it had a population of about 1 million people. It was as large as London in 1800, when London was the largest city in the West. Rome could be so large because it was the capital not just of Italy (population c.7 million) but of a Mediterranean empire. Rome’s population had grown rapidly by more than six times from an estimated 150,000 in 225 BC. The capital’s growth was fed by three streams of immigrants:
free citizens and allied rural emigrants from Italy (as small peasant families were displaced by fewer slaves working on larger farms);
slaves, adult males particularly, who were forced to migrate by Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean basin in the last two centuries BC;
free craftsmen and traders, particularly from coastal towns in the Mediterranean.
The city of Rome grew, and its huge size was maintained only by a steady stream of immigrants. Rome could be so large, partly because the Roman state (from 58 BC) continually subvented and guaranteed (with occasional glitches) a basic supply of wheat to its registered free citizen population. The reported number of recipients varied, but in the reign of Augustus seems to have stabilised at around 200,000– 250,000 adult males. Each received 33 kg wheat (5 modii of 6.55 kg) per month, which was more than enough for one adult (if he did not live on bread alone), but not enough for a family. In the fourth century AD, state handouts were supplemented by rations of wine and pork.
The state supply of free wheat to a fixed number of adult male citizens had significant political, economic and demographic implications. Free distributions symbolised citizens’ right to benefit collectively from the fruits of conquest. Romans were now the chosen people. The first emperor, Augustus, reportedly wondered whether to abolish the wheat dole but wisely decided against it, allegedly on the grounds that the issue might become a political football and others might seek or gain kudos from the dole’s restoration. Augustus’ successor, Tiberius (AD 14– 37), preserved the dole but abolished the people’s participation in elections. Citizens at Rome had become state pensioners, bribed into quiescent dependence by bread and circuses. The emperors’ generosity underwrote their continued popularity. Rome was, after all, the main stage on which emperors acted their role as rulers of the world.
Economically, the exaction, storage, transport and distribution of 100,000 tons of wheat per year to Rome was a sizeable task. The wheat came primarily from southern Sicily, North Africa and Egypt. The volume itself was not the problem, though at peak periods Rome’s port at Ostia and the short stretch of the Tiber (21 km) along which barges were hauled must have been jammed. Egypt alone yielded in wheat tax more than the city of Rome and the frontier armies needed together. It was more a problem of organisation, consistency of supply and price. On the private market (since state supplies had to be supplemented), wheat prices in Rome were four times higher than they were in Egypt and two to three times as high as they were in Sicily and the rest of Italy. The city of Rome stood at the peak of a pyramid of rising prices. The total cost of supplying state wheat to Rome amounted to more than 15 per cent of state revenues (100,000 tons at 9 sestertii per modius = 135 million sestertii). But the supply of free wheat to citizens at Rome presumably also helped the labour force buy wine and oil produced on the estates of the rich and/ or held down the price of labour in the capital. The free wheat dole subsidised the rich as well as the poor.
Demographically, the attractions of the free wheat dole and the huge consumer market that Rome constituted must have helped stimulate a continuous flow of immigrants to the city of Rome. In outsiders’ imagination, the streets of Rome were paved with gold. For the Christian writer of Revelation, Rome was a scarlet harlot adorned with gold and jewels, sitting astride its seven hills, sucking the blood of countless nations and drinking from a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of fornication; Rome was the ‘great city that holds sway over the kings of the earth’. In a Jewish writer’s imagination, Rome had 365 streets; in each street there were 365 palaces; each palace had 365 storeys; and each storey contained enough food to feed the whole world. Rome, with its huge baths, its temple roofs glistening with gilded bronze, beckoned as a city of opportunity even to those who had little chance of ever going there.
But in pre- industrial societies, larger cities have higher deathrates than smaller cities, and smaller cities have higher deathrates than the surrounding countryside. The city of Rome was a deathtrap, which sucked people in and killed them off with infectious diseases. Even the baths, which cleansed the relatively prosperous, may have helped concentrate diseases (like modern hospitals); Roman doctors recommended baths for people suffering from malaria, cholera, dysentery, infestation by worms, diarrhoea and gonorrhoea, and the emperor Hadrian allowed the sick to use baths in the morning before the healthy.
So Rome could maintain its huge population only by constant influx of immigrants, both from its Italian hinterland and from overseas. If deathrates in Rome were only ten per thousand higher than in the rest of Italy – and Wrigley thinks that in London in the eighteenth century, the difference may have been significantly greater than that – then Rome, with a population of 1 million people, needed 10,000 migrants a year. If the difference in mortality between metropolis and countryside was fifteen per thousand, then just to maintain its population, Rome needed 15,000 fresh migrants per year. Immigration to Rome took place at double the rate of migration to the army (see section 6.3). It must have prevented any natural increase in Italian population and/ or contributed, like military recruitment, to Italy’s depopulation. On the other hand, migration had a triply beneficial impact. It allowed an effective increase in agricultural productivity (the remaining peasants, fewer in number, could each work more land); it provided migrants who were lucky enough to return to their hometown or village an image of metropolitan lifestyles (classy pots and silk underwear); and it either increased or maintained the market for agricultural and manufactured (handmade) exports.
6.3 The Army
The army was the biggest (typically 300,000 soldiers) and by far the most effectively organised power grouping in Roman politics. It combined hierarchy, training, a clear command structure, discipline, regular pay, flexibility in unit size (from small maniple to army- size groups of several legions) and aggressive persistence in the pursuit of fixed objectives. It had no similarly effective rival or imitator in civilian politics. During the late republican period, soldiers, in search of bounty and security, had repeatedly intervened in central Italian politics. But, under the emperors, as part of the Augustan settlement, the army was effectively depoliticised. This was an amazing political achievement.
After 31 BC, frontier armies intervened directly in central politics only twice in more than two centuries: in AD 69 (after the death of Nero) and in AD 193 (after the assassination of Commodus and the auctioning of the imperial throne by the palace guards). The Roman peace meant both an end to imperial expansion – with the exception of Britain and Dacia (modern Romania) and the absorption of marginal client kingdoms such as Mauretania (modern Morocco) – and the internal pacification of conquered provinces. As a result, for almost two centuries, most inhabitants of the Roman empire never or rarely saw a soldier. Rome had become a civil society.
This radical shift toward depoliticising the military was (?purposefully) engineered by a whole series of evolutionary changes. The great bulk of the army was eventually dispersed along distant frontiers, in garrisons that usually held only one legion (of 5,000– 6,000 soldiers), so that cooperation between rival commanders that might threaten the centre became very difficult to achieve. Governors of provinces in which legions were stationed were typically chosen only after years of loyal service and almost never from among the top echelons of the senatorial élite; that is, army commanders by social rank were not regarded as potential claimants to the throne. They held office for only shortish terms (typically three years). Underofficers – tribunes, prefects and centurions – also either held office for short terms and/ or were shifted to different legions on promotion so that no long- term loyalty could build up between under- officers and men.
Soldiers serving in legions (about 150,000 men), on the expiry of their service of twenty- five to twenty- six years, were paid a loyalty bonus equal to thirteen years’ pay. The length of soldiers’ service was increased from an unsustainable sixteen years, first to twenty and then to twenty- five years; this extension of military service both reduced costs, because a large proportion of soldiers died during these extra years, and mitigated problems of recruitment. This new system of cash bonuses to veterans on retirement, inaugurated in AD 6, helped divert Roman legionaries from their traditional ambition to end their days owning Italian land – a process that had contributed so much to land seizures and the consequent political instability of the late Republic. Instead, veterans, increasingly of provincial origin, typically settled in the provinces, along the frontiers where they had already lived the bulk of their lives.
The depoliticisation of the army under the emperors was based on long service along distant frontiers, on the regular grant of a large bounty on retirement, on the increasingly provincial origin of the army and on the severance of the link between citizens at Rome (soon disfranchised) and their empowerment by military service. There were fewer citizen soldiers and effectively no citizen voters.
Locating the new imperial army along the distant frontiers contributed significantly to the rural depopulation of Italy, even though the imperial army was necessarily, substantially and increasingly of provincial (i.e. not Italian) origin. A simple calculation illustrates probabilities. At twenty years of service, a legionary (i.e. citizen) army of 150,000 soldiers needs on average 9,500 recruits per year; it may seem, as it has seemed to some scholars, a smallish number from a free population of 5 million people. But if soldiers were recruited at age 20, they would have equalled 20 per cent of all Italian citizen 20- year- olds (if Italy’s free citizen population equalled 5 million, then, in ancient conditions of mortality (e0 ~ 25), there were only 47,500 male survivors to age 20). If the soldiers then spent their army service in the provinces and settled there, Italy would be rapidly depopulated by emigration at this rate. I must stress that this calculation is a statement not of fact but of parametric probability. Fertility obviously depends on the females left behind as much as on the soldiers who emigrated, and about that we know nothing. But at first sight it seems that an unforeseen consequence of Augustus’ and his successors’ policy of locating citizen troops along the frontiers was an immediate and significant depopulation of Italy.
Surviving evidence of burial inscriptions, which may or may not be statistically representative, suggests that during the reign of Augustus, 68 per cent of legionaries were of Italian origin. By the middle of the first century, this proportion had fallen to less than half (48 per cent) and by the end of the century to 22 per cent; in the second century, apparently, only 2 per cent of citizen soldiers were of Italian origin. No wonder that in AD 9, after the crushing defeat of a Roman army (three legions each nominally of 6,000 soldiers were killed in north Germany), Augustus, who feared that the Germans would invade Italy, had great difficulty in raising recruits and resorted against all tradition to recruiting ex- slaves.
Military costs remained by far the largest element in the Roman state budget; in the first century AD, they accounted for more than half the total (c.450? out of a budget of more than 800 million sestertii). And, although, with hindsight, we know that the Roman army did not often intervene in central politics, Roman emperors must always have feared that it might. The army had to be placated. What is surprising, then, is that, given the army’s potential for disruption, soldiers’ pay in terms of silver never surpassed the level reached in the reign of Augustus. Put another way, every time that the nominal pay of soldiers was subsequently raised (in c. AD 83?, 193 and 212), the silver coinage was soon debased so that the cost in precious metal to the treasury was held roughly constant. Soldiers collectively did not exercise their armed might to increase their sector share of total wealth. For whatever reason, it looks as though total army costs had reached the limit of what Roman financial administrators could raise or allocate to the army within the state budget.
The dispersion of the legionary armies and their auxiliary (non- citizen) counterparts, hundreds of miles from Rome along the frontiers, left a power vacuum at the centre. It was filled partially by the palace (praetorian) guard. This palace guard was a small élite troop, a few thousand strong, of highly paid soldiers, garrisoned in Rome. It was commanded by usually two prefects, each of whose powers were designed to balance those of the other. They were considered to be extremely influential within palace politics, but they were also only knights (albeit with the rank of consuls) and so socially disbarred from becoming emperor (until Macrinus in AD 217, but he reigned for only one year). On several occasions, the palace guard played a key role in securing the throne for a particular candidate. And, for historians of Rome, ancient and modern, individual successions to the throne have often seemed to be the very stuff of politics.
[To be continued in Part 2, section 7]
The Source:
Keith Hopkins, ‘The Political Economy of the Roman Empire’, in Sociological Studies in Roman History, edited by Christopher Kelly, University of Cambridge 2018
Originally:
‘The political economy of the Roman empire’, in I. Morris and W. Scheidel (eds) The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium, Oxford Studies in Early Empires, New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.