The Roman Empire in Context

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444390209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

Through a series of original essays by leading international scholars, The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives offers a comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire's role and achievement and, more broadly, establishes Rome's significance within comparative studies.

• Fills a gap in comparative historical analysis of the Roman empire's role and achievement
• Features contributions from more than a dozen distinguished scholars from around the world
• Explores the relevance of important comparativist themes of state, empire, and civilization to ancient Rome

1

Introduction

JOHANN P. ARNASON

Seventy years ago, José Ortega y Gasset began his reflections on the Roman Empire with a very strong claim on behalf of his chosen subject: “The history of Rome, by virtue of its content and of the comprehensiveness of our knowledge of it, may well be called a model history” (Ortega y Gasset 1946: 11; the essay was written in 1940, in exile in Argentina, and reflects a strong inclination to draw parallels between the crisis of the Roman Empire and Europe’s twentieth-century predicament). In fact, the original formulations were even stronger: Ortega declares “es paradigma,” where the English translator suggests a model, and he refers to “madurez” rather than comprehensiveness, thus clearly indicating ripe insight rather than merely extensive knowledge. He was taking a widely held but diffuse view of the Roman record to extreme lengths. It must be added that, as he then saw it, the picture had only just been completed: Rostovtzeff had done for the Principate what Mommsen had done for the Republic, and thus made the period that began with the Augustan settlement and ended with the third-century crisis an integral part of the paradigm. The reassessment of late antiquity was not yet on the agenda. An interpretation in Ortega’s spirit, built on Mommsen and Rostovtzeff, would not necessarily be undermined by this most recent addition to our knowledge of the Roman world: late antiquity could be seen as a phase of resurgence coming after the crisis so memorably portrayed (and, as scholarly consensus now has it, over-interpreted) by Rostovtzeff. But no such approaches are represented in current scholarship; no historical sociologist would subscribe to the claims quoted at the beginning. In fact, the pendulum has swung very far indeed in the opposite direction: there are, as will be shown at greater length below, good grounds to suggest that the Roman experience is one of the relatively neglected areas of comparative history, and that specific themes to be explored must be cleared of assumptions and connotations that have blocked broader perspectives. From that point of view, the most obvious reason for going back to Ortega would be the contrast that highlights present failure to give Rome its due. There is, however (as I will try to show), more to the abandoned view than that. Although there can be no question of reestablishing Roman history as a “paradigm,” a closer look at the key issues will confirm its quite exceptional significance for comparative studies, and thus in the end allow us to extract a grain of truth from Ortega’s overstatement.

A more focused discussion of Rome’s place in comparative history may begin with three conspicuously relevant categories: states, empires, and civilizations. All are recurrent themes of comparative studies, and intuitively applicable to the Roman case. One of the chapters in this book will discuss the Roman pattern of relations between the three historical frameworks at greater length, and thus approach comparative questions from within the specific configuration that is our main topic; here the aim is, rather, to summarize the evidence and clarify the reasons for inadequate accounts of the Roman record. Each of the three perspectives suggests particular lessons to be noted.

Seeing Rome as a State: Flaws and Achievements

The scholarly literature on statehood and state formation is very rich, but a few particularly broadly conceived surveys stand out, and a brief glance at their problems with the Romans will be useful. To understand the difficulties, basic ambiguities besetting the very concept of the state should be borne in mind. As Mogens Herman Hansen argues in his discussion of city-state cultures (Hansen 2000: 11–34), multiple and mutually incompatible definitions of statehood dispute the field of comparative political history, and the question of city-states brings the disagreement to a head; in fact, those who prefer a modernistic conception of the state will never settle for a general category of city-state, but try to replace it with emic terms borrowed from each particular tradition. However, Hansen’s attempt to solve the problem by allocating divergent notions of statehood to different disciplines is less convincing. It is not the case that historians and social scientists agree on a broad concept of the state, applying to a long premodern history, while legal scholars and political scientists stick to the modern criteria first theorized by Machiavelli and Hobbes. The opinions of historians, including authorities on Greek and Roman antiquity, are divided; a strong current still supports the view that the state, as an impersonal apparatus of domination, is a late medieval and/or early modern European invention. When this ongoing dispute is confronted with the record of the Roman Republic, the ambiguity of the evidence goes beyond the general problematic of city-states. On the one hand, Roman political thought – and the political imaginary behind it – is commonly credited with taking the notion of res publica to a higher level of abstraction than the Greek tradition had done. On the other hand, the Roman political regime was to a very high degree embedded in social hierarchies of status and power. The key role of aristocratic families and their networks of clientelae, formal as well as informal, is the most visible aspect of a general pattern that is often seen as the very opposite of statehood. There are, in other words, obvious reasons for divergent views, and even for changes to conceptual frameworks. Christian Meier’s second thoughts about the crisis of the Republic are a striking example of the latter: in his Res publica amissa, he referred to a “Roman unity of state and society” (Meier 1980: 156), but the introduction to a later edition (1997) expresses radical doubt about this modernizing terminology and argues for an explicit shift from state-centered interpretations to a more general understanding of the political.

As has long been seen, the Principate was a compromise. It established a new political center, with correspondingly different relations to its social basis, but in doing so it added new ambiguities. On the one hand, the whole governmental apparatus was adapted to the demands of imperial rule on a vastly expanded scale, and for some historians, this represents progress toward a more advanced level of statehood; Claude Nicolet (1990), for example, has described the Principate as a significant but inconclusive stage on the road to the modern state. On the other hand, several features that mark the new version of the imperial order seem to undermine this claim. The autocratic power center was adapted to the republican institutions in ingenious and effective ways but, by the same token, suffered from a certain under-institutionalization of its more innovative aspects; hence the overpowering emphasis on the person of the ruler and a corresponding weakness of the foundations for continuous and impersonal statehood; hence, too, a permanent temptation to redefine the terms of the compromise and move toward a stronger version of rulership. The emperors who pursued such aims in particularly upsetting ways (Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and perhaps even Commodus) were demonized by historians coming from a senatorial background, but are now portrayed in a more balanced fashion by modern scholarship. None of them achieved lasting results. On the other hand, the strategies and arrangements devised to compensate for shortcomings of the center included the exercise of power through urban communities with local autonomy, but also – another side of the same coin – an empire-wide delegation of power to oligarchies embedded in sociocultural configurations of honor and status. These features of the regime raise further doubts about the application of state-centered models.

In view of this record, it is not surprising that the Roman achievement has, for all its intuitive appeal, been a difficult case for comparative work on state structures and state formation. The most seminal inquiry of this kind, Norbert Elias’s study of the civilizing process (Elias 2000), begins with the fragmented post-Roman condition of early Western Christendom; the Roman trajectory, including the disintegrative dynamic of its Western finale, is a part of the historical background that is tacitly taken for granted. Neither the persistence of Roman traditions in the Church nor the reactivation of Roman law at a later stage are recognized as factors contributing to state formation. A whole school of thought has taken off from Elias’s work and expanded the original framework in different directions, but, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no serious attempt to bring Roman themes into this broader picture. Neither comparisons of the long-term Roman and European trajectories, nor genealogical links between them, nor European rediscoveries and reappropriations of the Roman legacy have been given their due in enlarged versions of the Eliasian program. And the most focused attempt to challenge the Eliasian assumptions, Charles Tilly’s work on coercion and capital (Tilly 1990), does not raise questions about Roman connections.

Another interesting example is S. E. Finer’s history of government, undoubtedly the most ambitious work of its kind, and eminently thought-provoking even when it fails to convince. Here the emphasis is on the typology of state forms rather than on the dynamics of state formation, and the approach to Roman political history is determined by that context. A striking aspect of Finer’s account is a sharp distinction between the Republic and the Principate. As Finer saw it, the Republican order was a very strange case of cultural strengths saving an incoherent political regime from itself. The constitution as such was “preposterous” (Finer 1997: I.440), an outcome of a long sequence of improvised maneuvers and compromises invariably designed to preserve the core of oligarchic power while conceding some of the accessories and appearances. If it worked for a long time, it did so “in spite of itself, … because of unwritten conventions that its provisions should, effectively, be side-stepped” (ibid.). And although Finer does not make the point in so many words, it would be in the spirit of his argument to add that when this fundamentally fraudulent order began to fall apart, the same conventions – and the whole complex of cultural traditions behind them – aggravated the crisis: they blocked thinking about an alternative. What they did not do was to confer any kind of dignity on the unfolding political process. During the last century of the Republic, “the practice of politics in Rome was thoroughly degenerate,” marked by “no more sophistication, disinterestedness, or nobility than in a Latin American banana republic” (ibid.). Only the exceptional geopolitical dimensions of the struggle and the scope they gave to a few outstandingly able individuals could to some extent sustain illusions about this rotten core of the regime.

One reason for taking note of Finer’s views is that no modern analyst seems to have come closer to standing Polybius on his head. The superior rationality of the mixed constitution is dismissed as a myth, hiding the reality of incoherent arrangements that depended on extra-political resources for survival; and although the cultural traits of the Republic are acknowledged as military assets, the overall perspective on the republican empire – including the protracted period of crisis that set in soon after the triumphs observed by Polybius – stresses imperial success as a source of illusions about the regime at home, rather than a testimony to its virtues. The Principate is a different story, and it is only because of its achievements that we can credit the Romans with a distinctive input into the history of government. Even if some of the developments in question go back to Republican beginnings, their potential was more fully realized in the Principate. Once again, it is tempting to read the argument as a counterpoint to Polybius: the real achievement of the Romans was not so much the conquest as the maintenance and perpetuation of empire, and it took the Principate to establish the connection between political regime and imperial reach that Polybius had erroneously attributed to the Republic. The innovations thus coming to fruition were meta-constitutional rather than constitutional.

For Finer, it is important to distinguish these Roman inventions from a much older set of imperial traditions and techniques with which they were combined. Historians have sometimes failed to grasp this distinction. A polyglot empire ruled in part by bureaucratic methods (however rudimentary by later standards) and in part through semi-autonomous urban communities was nothing new: such formations had a long history in the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. The real innovations had more to do with statehood as such than with forms of imperial rule, even if they were implemented on an imperial scale. Finer lists four of them, and they are all worth closer examination. The first is the creation of a “consocial state” (1997: I.601); in fact, this term covers two different trends. On the one hand, it refers to the unification of oligarchy, “a ruling stratum throughout the empire which took no account of race, nation, language, colour, religion or culture, but looked only to wealth and local influence” (ibid.). This is a new variation on the theme most famously developed by Ronald Syme: Rome as a paradigm of oligarchic rule (and since the permanence of oligarchy was, for Syme, the most basic fact of political life, that raises Rome to the level also claimed by Ortega, although not for quite the same reasons). Oligarchy was certainly real and pervasive enough to impress itself on historians with otherwise different thematic foci; Finer’s particular twist has to do with a supposedly unprecedented standardization of oligarchic status across the huge imperial domain. This view is open to various objections. German historians (especially Rilinger 2007) have drawn attention to the coexistence of incongruent stratification patterns within the empire; there was no consistent overarching system with a unified elite at the top. The persistence of key republican institutions under the Principate meant, above all, that the Senate as the apex of the aristocratic order continued to occupy a preeminent place, never submerged in the “empire-network of oligarchs” which Finer sees as the real core of the consocial state. The autocratic ruler – and the power structure that took shape around him – was also an incommensurably superior part of the imperial hierarchy, and with ramifications at more symbolic levels. If it is true that the empire was to a considerable extent integrated through a ranking order of honor (Lendon 1990), it should also be noted that a specific version of this order, not necessarily congruent with all others, crystallized around the emperor.

In short, Finer’s description of a uniform oligarchy seems vastly overstated. The other aspect of his consocial state is the development from a ruling city to a ruling province (Italy), then to “Romania” as an integrated imperial realm, and thus beyond the “narrowly specific meaning of empire” (1997: I.602). Here the argument seems to shift from social structure to collective identity. The most obvious objection is that the ruling city remained central to the imperial imaginary – so much so that when the capital had to be shifted, it could only be envisaged as a new Rome. If historians talk about the “incomplete identity” of the ruling province (Giardina 1997), one major reason is the enduring and overwhelming presence of Rome as an eternal center. That applies, a fortiori, to “Romania”; moreover, the latter identity could only progress at the expense of a very wide spectrum of older ones, more or less resilient, and had to be superimposed on a Greco-Roman division. The very existence of “Romania,” or rather the degree of reality which it attained, is a matter of debate and ongoing historical research, rather than an established fact to be listed among Roman achievements.

Finer’s second point is the most decisive one, and it touches upon a permanently contested issue. His view is that the Romans were the “first to conceive of a res publica, a nexus of goods, activities and institutions which belonged at large”; he even adds that Roman “constitutional development embodies the idea of political authority as something abstract and not personal” (1997: I.602; this suggests a more benign judgment on the Republic than the one quoted above). It seems impossible to claim that the Greeks had no idea of a public sphere “belonging at large.” It can, as noted above, be argued that the Roman res publica represented a higher level of abstraction; the piecemeal solutions to the conflict between patricians and plebeians pointed in that direction; and the most advanced expressions of political thought during the crisis of the Republic took this trend one step further. But Finer’s interpretation goes beyond these criteria and seems to portray the Roman notion of government as a unique approximation to modern ideas of statehood. Some basic problems with this claim have already been indicated. The res publica was made up of very unequally weighted social components, and that set limits to its structural autonomy. In the political sphere, the “de facto normative, if not strictly legislative authority of the senate” (Beard 1990: 43) was a major counterweight to what Finer calls the abstraction of authority. When the republican order was adapted to an autocratic center, the traditional qualifications of the res publica lost ground, but new ones were added. To cut a long story short, the developments that Finer construes as a breakthrough are better understood as a complex of relative trends, circumscribed and modified by counter-trends. His analysis decontextualizes certain aspects of the Roman experience, and it is linked to another move of the same kind. In his view “the Roman legacy disappeared” (1997: I.604) in the West, and it was only several centuries later that some parts of it were rediscovered. Here the decontextualizing approach leads to an unwarranted separation of tradition from history: the continuity of the former is reestablished after a long historical break. Recent scholarship on the transformation of the Roman world – this notion has to all intents and purposes replaced the traditional paradigm of imperial decline and fall – suggests a different perspective. There was no wholesale disappearance of the Roman legacy; various aspects of it entered into the making of medieval kingdoms from the outset.

Finer’s two last points are best discussed together. They have to do with the “ubiquity of the law in both the public and the private sector,” and with the “nature of this law” which “exists in a purely human dimension” (1997: I.603). To put it another way, the Romans pioneered the rationalization and secularization of law, defining it as a “set of general principles, plus a juridical technique for applying these to concrete cases in all their singularity”; a logical corollary of this rationalizing process was the establishment of a “juridical world of free-willing and equal individuals” (1997: I.604). There is no doubt that these statements express – in a particularly forceful way – a widely shared understanding of the Roman achievement in one of its most central fields. It is all the more appropriate to add that recent work has brought some correctives to bear on that view, and in so doing suggested a more nuanced comparative approach. A far-reaching secularization of legal norms and legal expertise accompanied the political development of the Roman Republic, and this made both the intrinsic character and the sociocultural status of Roman law very different from the sacred law that prevailed in Jewish, Islamic, or – in yet another way – Hindu traditions. These well-established facts are not being contested, but it can be argued that they constitute only one side of the story. The other side is that a specific “nexus of law and religion” (Ando and Rüpke 2006: 12) remained in force and influenced the later shift to Christian conceptions of legal order. A religious context is, on this view, important to the understanding of Roman religion and its place in comparative history: “Republican law, then, erected boundaries around religion even as it recognized its centrality. Human institutions were recognized for what they were, and limits were established that respected the agency of the gods”; the same authors add that “we come to know Roman law at a time when it had already been laicized, and what we witness in the classical period is the recursive inscription of religion both within the law and as a form of law” (2006: 12–13). This line of argument has far-reaching implications. Here we can only note in passing that it adds force to an older analysis which stresses the common and enduring limits of Greek and Roman ideas about law, and more particularly the dominant assumption that a legislative order concerns the citizens of a given political community. Within this model, there could be specific norms concerning interaction in a more global arena, but they should not be mistaken for notions of a transcending legal order (Wolff 1971).

Between Empire and Civilization

As we have seen, questions about Roman statehood lead to considerations on the empire. But when it comes to a comparative focus on the empire as such, the situation is very different from the one we have just surveyed. On the one hand, it is much easier and more intuitively convincing to think of Rome as an empire than as a state. The Roman example has, on two different levels, become an inbuilt premise of discourses on empire. Rome was the acknowledged ancestor and model of all aspiring Western empires, those with continental European ambitions as well as those that expanded overseas (the rivalry and the succession of imperial projects have to a great extent shaped the course of Western history, even if the failure to achieve lasting imperial unity is also one of its most significant features). The Roman precedent also entered into all attempts to understand and compare empires on a more global scale; cultural memories of Rome affected the perception and interpretation of analogous phenomena in other parts of the world. But this Roman bias of the historical im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Expansion and Transformation
• Part II Late Antiquity: Division, Transformation, and Continuity
• Part III Destinies of the Roman Legacy
• Part IV Comparative Perspectives
• Part V Conceptual and Theoretical Reflections
• General Index
• Index of Sources (selective)