The Dragon and the Eagle

The Rise and Fall of the Chinese and Roman Empires

Sunny Auyang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317516873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This stimulating, uniquely organized, and wonderfully readable comparison of ancient Rome and China offers provocative insights to students and general readers of world history. The book's narrative is clear, completely jargon-free, strikingly independent, and addresses the complete cycles of two world empires. The topics explored include nation formation, state building, empire building, arts of government, strategies of superpowers, and decline and fall.

PART I

THE ROMAN REPUBLIC AND PRE-IMPERIAL CHINA

	CHAPTER 1
NATION FORMATION

1.1 The Old World of Civilization

The names Asia and Europe—derived from the Assyrian Asu and Ereb and meaning “land of the rising sun” and “land of the setting sun”—have referred to various places in their long history; Asia was once a Roman province in now western Turkey. Their present referents, as continents, are Eurocentric constructs; Europe is actually a large peninsula of a continent. The physical water-surrounded landmass is Eurasia, which with neighboring Africa constitutes the Old World of human civilization.

Four empires—the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han—spanned the mid-latitude Old World at the beginning of the Common Era (Map 1). In the great Eurasian steppe to their north, the nomadic empire of the Xiongnu was disintegrating under Han pressure. Much of Parthia and Kushan, now the Middle East and Central Asia, fell under Alexander’s empire in the late fourth century BCE. The Hellenistic rule was brief, however, especially in the eastern regions. When the first Han envoy reached Central Asia in 128 BCE, the nomads with whom he sought an anti-Xiongnu alliance were on the verge of ousting the Greek remnants in now northern Afghanistan to create the Kushan.¹ By the second century CE, the Greeks and Romans were so starved of information about the east that the travel of one merchant from the Mediterranean to the Parmir, short of China, became the key data for debate between two prominent geographers.²

More than 3,000 kilometers of rugged terrain separated the Han and Roman Empires at their peak expansions. The Han sent an emissary to Rome, but the mission was aborted somewhere in Mesopotamia for unclear reasons. Someone claiming to be a herald of the Roman Emperor landed in the part of Han Empire that is now Vietnam, but his authenticity was doubted by historians ancient and modern. Rome, which had no habit of sending diplomats, left no hint for it.³ After surveying extensive research, a scholar concludes: “In sum, the absence of archeological or textual evidence suggests surprisingly little contact between ancient Rome and the Han dynasty.”⁴

Nothing in the world is completely isolated. Imperial peace and consumption encouraged patchworks of long-distance trade, overland and maritime, which would develop over subsequent centuries into the Silk Routes (Map 2).⁵ Chinese silk was a coveted luxury in Rome. Magicians, probably Roman slaves, were gifts sent by Parthian kings to perform in the Han court. However, those who traveled the Silk Routes from end to end were rare indeed. Almost all commerce and communication were relay efforts, mediated by the Kushans and Parthians, by peoples of oases and the steppe along the caravan routes, or by inhabitants of ports that hosted voyagers. Goods may survive intact after passing through a hundred hands, but information deteriorated after repeated passages from mouths to ears and translations via many tongues. Consequently, Rome and Han had little knowledge about each other beyond the fact of the other’s existence. The action of one may have affected the other, but only indirectly, such as through the movements of nomads in the northern steppe. If the other reacted, it was only to the secondary or tertiary effects, as Rome responded only to the agitation of barbarians at its frontier, heedless of whether the unrest was caused by pressure from nomads used to fighting the Han.⁶ Rome and Han China were interrelated but did not interact.

In view of the weak interrelation compared to strong internal dynamics, I am content to relegate mutual perception and trade to Appendices 1 and 2. The main text treats the Roman and early Chinese Empires as essentially isolated entities in a comparative study.

“There are 12,233,062 common households and 59,594,978 mouths. The Han is at peak prosperity”; thus Ban Gu summarized the Han Dynasty’s 2 CE census of the imperial realm, after recording analytic census data for 103 province-level jurisdictions.⁷ His Book of Han is the second of twenty-six Standard Histories that continuously cover almost three millennia of Chinese history down to the end of the imperial era, with each dynasty dutifully writing the history of its predecessor.⁸ The Han territory was about 4.7 million square kilometers.⁹ On today’s political map, it occupies parts of China, Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Its sparsely populated Protectorate of Xiyu or Western Territory adds more than 1.3 million square kilometers, which covers China’s Xinjiang province and spills into Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled,” according to Luke’s Gospel.¹⁰ “Those days” should be about 1 CE; Jesus was born during Joseph and Mary’s journey home for the enrollment. Historians of Rome, however, are skeptical. In no other source can they find a decree for empire-wide enrollment, then or anytime during Augustus’s reign.¹¹ A census in 8 BCE recorded 4,233,000 Roman citizens, privileged conquerors.¹² For the subject populace, the provinces individually registered inhabitants for tax purposes, as Judaea did after it became a province in 6 CE. Few data survive, however. Historians’ estimations of the Roman Empire’s population vary widely, but a peak value of 54 to 75 million seems reasonable.¹³ The Empire’s 5 million square kilometers of territory¹⁴ covered, wholly or partly, at least thirty-nine nation-states of today: Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Britain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Monaco, Morocco, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey.

For comparison, the People’s Republic of China has a population of 1.35 billion in a territory of 9.6 million square kilometers. The United States of America has a population of 314 million in a territory of 9.4 million square kilometers. Both figures are for 2011.¹⁵

In terms of latitude, the city of Rome is 7.3 degrees north of Han’s capital Changan (today Xian), which is about as far north as Chicago is of Los Angeles. Being north, however, does not necessarily imply being colder; the opposite obtains in this case. The Mediterranean region is under the sway of the Saharan pressure system, which brings it hot dry summers, mild winters, and rains falling mainly in the autumns and winters. The climate of Rome, similar to that of California, favors outdoor activities such as civic gatherings. North China is under the sway of the Siberian pressure system, which gives it a mainly continental climate moderated by the last leg of the monsoon rains. It has warm summers and cold windy winters, not unlike those of Illinois and the Midwest. Its rainfall, mainly in the summer, is plentiful enough to support dry agriculture and scarce enough to put a premium on irrigation.

China is a solid land realm, to which its inhabitants refer as hainei, within the seas. “Around the sea” is an apt description for the Roman Empire, whose territories clung to the rim of the Mediterranean. However, the sea at its heart did not make Rome a maritime empire akin to the nineteenth-century British Empire. It enjoyed naval supremacy shortly after it built a war fleet, but its power rested mainly on its marching legions. In the predominance of infantry, Rome was closer to the Han than the Athenian Empire, which dominated the eastern Mediterranean with its ramming galleys in the fifth century BCE. The arduous process of conquering Italy had shaped Rome’s character as essentially a land power.

Geography is important in shaping the character of an empire, but so are its history, people, and many other factors that through their interaction amount to more than the sum of their parts. To understand the empires, we start by examining their sprawling roots.

1.2 The Advantage of Openness to Diversity

The people are the foundation of a state. At the beginning of our period of study, not one people but a multitude of diverse peoples inhabited Italy and China. Their amalgamation into a majority people under a united polity was a long process that continued into the era of the Roman and Qin-Han Empire. It revealed the relatively open and absorbent character of the major group in each region, the Romans and the forerunners of the Han-Chinese, then named Huaxia.

A modern historian remarks, “It is thus extraordinarily hard to grasp the enormous diversity in ethnic formation, social and economic structure, political organization, religion, language, and material culture of the different peoples of Italy. Rome succeeded in conquering and assimilating not only peoples like the neighboring and related Latins, but peoples who were as like to herself as chalk to cheese.”¹⁶ Greater scale and complexity make the case for China even harder to grasp. From afar, today’s Chinese present a homogeneous image, with the ethnic Han-Chinese constituting a 92 percent majority and the remaining populace divided among fifty-five ethnic minorities. Up close, great variations appear among the ethnic Han-Chinese, who got their name after the Han Dynasty. Their apparent homogeneity, hardly existent in the beginning, was the result of a historical process that fused peoples ranging from fur wearers to tattoo wearers, from eaters of raw fish to eaters of no grain.¹⁷

For some idea of the original diversity, we can crudely divide the peoples of each region into two overlapping groups according to their economy and culture. The first group included in Italy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Guide to Pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin
• Introduction: Mirrors from the Deep Past
• Part I The Roman Republic and Pre-Imperial China
• Part II The Roman and Early Chinese Empires
• Appendices
• Timelines
• Maps
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author