Imperium Romanum

Politics and Administration

Andrew Lintott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135859794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

The Roman Empire at its height encompassed the majority of the world known to the Romans. This important synthesis of recent findings and scholarship demonstrates how the Romans acquired, kept and controlled their Empire. Lintott goes beyond the preconceptions formed in the period of British Imperial rule and provides a contemporary post-imperial approach to the Roman exercise of power.

Part I

1
THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE¹

At the time of the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus and the beginning of the Republic (c. 500 BC) Rome was merely one city, albeit a powerful one, among those who formed the Latin League in the plain east of the Tiber and on its surrounding hills. Her military achievements in the next 160 years were of three main kinds: first, cooperative enterprises with other Latins to protect their frontiers against the neighbouring hill-peoples such as the Volsci and Aequi (these involved the joint founding of colonies as strong posts on or outside the Latin borders); second, wars with her own Latin neighbours which no doubt had various pretexts but were essentially to determine primacy in the League; third, wars with her Etruscan neighbours immediately to the north and west of Rome through rivalry and the need for self-protection. In spite of a major set-back at the time for the Gallic capture of Rome in 386 (or 390) BC the Romans had some forty years later become the dominant power in the Latin League. In the meantime they had eliminated their dangerous Etruscan rivals Fidenae and Veii, annexing their territory, while Caere, another Etruscan city nearby, had become their ally. Furthermore, fourteen colonies had been created, the majority of which ringed Latium to the south-east, while two provided strong points west of the Tiber in south Etruria. About this time Rome began to reach beyond her immediate hinterland through alliances with the Samnites and Campanians. These proved incompatible, and when the Campanians turned against the Romans, some of the Latins joined them. Victory in this war (338) allowed Rome to consolidate her hold not only over Latin territory but over much Campanian and Volscian territory as well, and their organisation of these conquests was to provide the foundation for their future success through the territorial buffer and the financial and militry resources it afforded.

In the half-century that followed the Romans extended their power by a combination of campaigning and alliances throughout peninsular Italy. A quarrel with the Greek city of Tarentum led to the arrival in 280 of their first opponent from overseas – Pyrrhus, king of Epirus and former claimant to the Macedonian throne. He and his superb army, modelled on that of Alexander the Great, were initially victorious and he sought Roman recognition of his hegemony in Italy. Rome rejected his diplomatic overtures and he had not the resources to press home his advantage. He diverted into Sicily, but his operations there were unsuccessful militarily and politically clumsy. On his return to Italy he was defeated and forced to retire to Greece. This allowed the Romans to take control of southern Italy (Tarentum eventually fell in 272) and to confirm their position in Etruria, Umbria and on the Adriatic coast as far north as Ariminum. The victory over an overseas opponent marked the end of one epoch in Roman expansion and pointed the way to a new one.

Eleven years after Pyrrhus’ withdrawal the Romans deliberately involved themselves in Sicilian affairs, provoking a conflict with Carthage, the Phoenician-founded city in north Africa which had dominated the seas in the western Mediterranean for at least three centuries. This set in motion a struggle, which over two wars and an uneasy peace between brought first Sicily, then Sardinia and Corsica and finally the more accessible parts of the Iberian peninsula into the Roman orbit. Victory in the first war in 241 allowed Rome not only to secure Sicily but to exploit Punic weakness in the following years so as to acquire the other islands. Moreover, victories over the Gauls (especially in 225 at Telamon) led to the occupation of their land on the Adriatic coast and later in the Lombardy plain: the first Latin and Roman colonies in Gallia Cisalpina, the Po basin, were founded in 218. Hannibal did not require much Roman provocation in Spain to launch a revanchist war the same year, invading Italy with the aid of the Gauls in order to break the foundation of Roman power, her network of Italian allies. His ultimate failure and the subsequent defeat of Carthage on African soil left Rome master of the western Mediterranean. It was this victory, according to Polybius, that gave the Romans the strength and confidence to embark on what was for him world-conquest.²

Between the Punic Wars they had campaigned across the Adriatic in Illyricum, securing allies there. Hannibal’s alliance with Philip V of Macedon in 215 led them to acquire allies in Greece, such as Sparta, Messene and the Aetolian League, and in the eastern Mediterranean, Rhodes and Attalus I of Pergamum. Individual Romans and Italians had already for some time been in contact with the east. It was a Roman ship bound for Syria that rescued the Achaean statesman Aratus (c. 250) and carried him to Asia; the Rammii family from Brundisium are attested in Thessaly from the mid-third century BC. Diplomatically, the Romans began relations with Egypt in 273.³

Rome’s war with Philip was renewed after Hannibal’s defeat in response to appeals from Rome’s allies. After defeating Macedon in Thessaly, Rome proclaimed herself the following year (196) the liberator of the Greek cities from the Hellenistic kings. This liberty was originally on the whole freer than the autonomy that the cities had been allowed to exercise under the kings of Macedon, Syria and Egypt, but this was more de facto than de iure (it was expressed in terms borrowed from the diplomacy of the kings). Even if formal alliances (foedera) were rarely concluded, the Greeks were regarded as friends and allies of Rome⁴ and this involved the Roman expectation that, when it mattered, they would conform to Rome’s will.⁵

The Aetolians’ resentment of the implications of the settlement of 196 led them to appeal to Rome’s most dangerous rival, the Seleucid Antiochus III of Syria, whose kingdom covered much of Alexander the Great’s oriental empire. However, not only were the forces that the king landed in Greece defeated in 191, but also his fleet and a more formidable army the following year, this time on Asiatic soil. Rome was now in a position to dictate terms to Antiochus, which eliminated his influence from Europe and most of Asia Minor. In consequence, Greece itself fell more securely under Roman influence. When Macedon under king Perseus began to reassert her power. Rome picked a quarrel in 171 and after some reverses defeated the king at Pydna (168). In the same year she asserted her influence further east when an ambassador expelled a Syrian army from Egypt by the threat of reprisals.

The extent of the belief in Roman power beyond the Mediterranean itself was shown by the terms of the treaty between Pharnaces II of Pontus and the city of Chersonesos in the Crimea, made in 179 or 155 – ‘on condition that they maintained their friendship with the Romans and did nothing contrary to it’.⁶ It was this image of Rome too which led the Jewish rebels against Seleucid Syria to ally with Rome in 161.

Now Judas had heard of the fame of the Romans, that they were mighty and valiant men, and such as would lovingly accept all that joined themselves unto them, and make a league of amity with all that came unto them … how they destroyed and brought under their dominion all other kingdoms and isles that at any time resisted them, but with their friends and such as relied upon them they kept amity … also that, whom they would help to a kingdom, those reign, and, whom again they would, they displace.

Some of the statements about the Romans by the author of I Maccabees, writing perhaps some forty years later, are inaccurate in detail, some are pointed and shrewd (‘what they had done in the country of Spain for the winning of the mines of the silver and gold which is there’), but the overall impression left by the chapter must mirror the sentiments of the Jews and other peoples of the Near East at the time.⁷

Nevertheless, the exercise of Roman physical power was intermittent in most regions and in the most remote areas Roman activity was merely diplomatic. Before 150 BC they only undertook to rule directly as provinciae (for the meaning of this term see pp. 28–9) Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and Spain. No Roman magistrates were regularly installed in the eastern Mediterranean until 148–7. Instead, commanders were sent, when and where necessary, to fight wars and to organise peoples who had voluntarily become allies or succumbed to Roman power. A characteristic pattern of behaviour developed. Foreign embassies would come to Rome to spend the winter lobbying magistrates and senators: ‘they met the leading men and by greeting them at their levées won them over and they made their own patrons look after the interests of Abdera’ – so runs a text in which Abdera honoured the diplomats of its mother-city Teos.⁸ In response the following spring embassies would set out from Rome to publicise Roman policy, reconcile friends and spy on potential enemies.

Such indirect control was possible because the Romans were dealing either with monarchs or with well-established local institutions in the form of a city (polis) or a non-urban political community (ethnos), which they could on the whole manipulate to achieve stability in their own interests (they preferred to deal with oligarchic groups of powerful men). However, while the public presence of Rome was often minimal, there seems to have been a significant, if unquantifiable, increase in the number of Romans and Italians who held property and undertook business enterprises abroad (men called in Latin negotiatores). These men could be used as channels of political influence as well as sources of information. The Roman negotiators, both residents and visitors, on the island of Chios about 200 BC are attested in an inscription, which honours a man who put on an entertainment for them and set up a monument to Rome, which commemorated the descent of the Romans from Romulus and Remus. I have already mentioned the family of the Rammii established in Thessaly in the mid-third century BC. It was without doubt a connection of theirs whom we find entertaining Roman magistrates and Greek embassies to Rome at Brundisium in 172.⁹ The Roman decision to make Delos a free port after it was transferred to the jurisdiction of Athens in 165 led to a great increase in the number of Romans and Italians attested there, who seem to a considerable extent to have been involved with the slave-trade. It has been plausibly argued that the ‘agora of the Italians’ there is in fact a slave-market.¹⁰ Such emigration also helped to confirm Roman influence in Sicily and Spain.

According to Polybius,¹¹ before the Third Macedonian War Rome was regarded as comparatively tolerant of rival powers whom she had defeated: she allowed them to exist and prosper, provided that they posed no serious threat to her security. The Third Macedonian War and the final elimination of the kingdom there marked a change in this policy, and the new hard line came even more into evidence about 150 BC. Carthage, which had remained a free city, though stripped of much of her territory, after considerable provocation attacked the neighbouring king of Numidia, Masinissa, contrary to her treaty with Rome. The attack was a failure. Moreover, the Romans who had become suspicious of Carthage’s economic recovery in the last fifty years, required them to make an unconditional surrender, if they wished to avoid a new war with Rome. Although originally prepared to submit, the Carthaginians refused to obey when instructed to abandon their city and after a siege lasting three years were overwhelmed in 146, their city being razed to the ground and their territory confiscated to become a province. In Macedonia a pretender to the throne, Andriscus, led an uprising in 148 and his defeat led to the Macedonians, previously organised in four self-governing regions with their constituent cities, receiving a Roman governor for the first time. In 147 BC the Achaean League, which had helped to protect Thessaly against Andriscus, was required by the Romans after a dispute with Sparta not only to release Sparta from the League but to strip itself of other members of the federation, including Corinth and Argos. It refused to give up hostilities against Sparta or to obey other Roman commands and was defeated after a short campaign in 146. Corinth was razed to the ground; other cities who had opposed Rome lost at least temporarily their liberty; territory, including that belonging to Corinth and the island of Euboea, was confiscated and parts of Greee became an adjunct of the province of Macedonia.¹²

Rome thus acquired new provinces in Af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of iliastrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index