Rome Victorious

The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire

Dexter Hoyos

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786725394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

Rome – Urbs Roma: city of patricians and plebeians, emperors and gladiators, slaves and concubines – was the epicentre of a far-flung imperium whose cultural legacy is incalculable. How a tiny settlement, founded by desperate adventurers beside the banks of the River Tiber, came to rule vast tracts of territory across the face of the known world is one of the more improbable stories of antiquity. The epic scale of the Colosseum; majestically columned temples; formidable legionaries marching in burnished steel breastplates; and capricious Caesars clad in purple robes who thought themselves gods: all these images speak of a grandeur that continues to be associated with this most celebrated of ancient capitals. The glory of Rome is further underlined by enduring monuments like Hadrian's Wall, holding the line as it did against ferocious Pictish barbarians thought to be from Hyperborea: the mythic Land Beyond the North Wind. This book vividly recounts the rags-to-riches story of Rome's unlikely triumph. Perhaps the most famous example in history of modest beginnings rising to greatness, Rome's empire was never static or uniform. Over the centuries, under the 'boundless grandeur of the Roman peace' (as the Elder Pliny put it), imperial law, civilisation and language vigorously interacted with and influenced local cultures across western and central Europe and North Africa. Provincial subjects were made Roman citizens, generals and senators. In AD 98 Trajan became the first of many Romans from outside Italy to assume supreme power as Emperor. Poets, philosophers, historians and legalists – and many others besides – all participated in the brilliant intellectual constellation secured by the pax Romana. However, as Dexter Hoyos reveals, the empire was not won cheaply or fast, and did not always succeed. The Carthaginian general Hannibal came close to destroying it. Arminius freed Germania by brutally annihilating three irreplaceable legions in the Teutoburg Forest – a disaster that broke Augustus' heart. And the Romans themselves, in expanding their empire, were often ruthless. Caesar boasted of killing a million enemy fighters in his Gallic Wars, while the accusation of a Caledonian lord became proverbial: they make a desert and call it peace. Yet at the same time the Romans strove to impose moral and legal principles for directing their subjects as much as themselves, and laid down standards of government that are still valid today. Rome Victorious is a masterful new treatment of the rise of Rome – from the viewpoints both of the city itself and the people it came to rule and make its own.

Chapter 1

Rome Before Empire: Hegemony Over Italy

The City, Urbs Roma, was founded on the northern edge of the plain of Latium and at a major crossing of the River Tiber, traditionally in 753 bc. Beginning on the broad Palatine hill, with the steep Capitoline close by as its citadel, by the fourth century bc the city extended over the other low heights of Seven Hills fame: Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian and Aventine, forming a defensible walled semicircle beside the Tiber. This was a large circuit for an ancient city, even if much of the enclosed ground was effectively rural till much later. The city’s surrounding territory, the ager Romanus, grew too: the combative Romans fought, defeated and incorporated more and more of their neighbours, including Alba Longa – the legendary birthplace of the city’s founders Romulus and Remus, on the Alban Hills 30 kilometres south-east – and, after an epic siege fondly if falsely remembered as lasting ten years, the great Etruscan city of Veii 20 kilometres to the north. Even though Rome itself was looted in a lightning summer raid by a marauding army of Gauls in 387 bc (390 in traditional chronology), the Romans’ energies continued unchecked during the fourth century. By its end they were close to dominating the entire Italian peninsula and their territory was the vastest of the peninsula’s city-states.

Rome and Latium’s other cities had been bonded from time immemorial in a religious and military association called by moderns the Latin League. Other members included Tibur, Praeneste and Tusculum in the highlands to their east, cities once powerful enough to challenge Rome for Latin supremacy. Romans and Latini enjoyed reciprocal rights of intermarriage and business dealings in one another’s cities; all spoke the same language, if with regional variations, and acted together against the many warlike peoples around them – the Aequi, Hernici and Volsci of the mountains to the east and south, the Sabines of the upper Tiber country, the powerful southern Etruscan cities, and later the stubborn Samnites of the central Apennines. The League often consolidated successes over these neighbours by placing settlers at strategic sites to form Latin colonies (coloniae Latinae). The earliest were close by and small, such as Antium on the coast; later colonies would be further and larger, such as Venusia in Apulia and, one day, Placentia and Cremona in Cisalpine Gaul. By then most settlers at Latin colonies were Roman citizens, a crucial feature that explains the colonies’ dogged loyalty in wars to come.

As the League’s largest and strongest member, Rome early on took the lead: a treaty of 493 bc (its text still on display in Cicero’s time) confirmed it. No other Italian city-state was anywhere as large in size or territory. The census figure reported for 323 bc – 150,000 male Romans over the age of 16 – is plausible enough. Crucially, wars and peacemaking were decided by Rome alone, under Roman consuls as commanders. After 387 Rome’s renewed vigour, not to mention assertiveness, goaded the discontented Latins finally to war in 340, seeking equality. They lost: in 338 Rome broke up the Latin League, incorporating its smaller cities into the res publica populi Romani but leaving some larger ones autonomous – notably Tibur and Praeneste – and also leaving intact their rights at Rome.

Even before this, in 343 Rome formed a different sort of partnership with the wealthy city of Capua and its dependent towns in Campania. Seeking protection against the assertive Samnites across the mountains, these became Roman citizens, but without the right to vote, hold public office or be senators at Rome – and vice versa. This unusual union lasted more than a century. In the end, like the old Latins before them, the Campanians’ growing irritation at being subordinate led them into joining the invader Hannibal’s side in 216. They too lost; yet after a due period of punishment the survivors were finally reincorporated in 188 into the res publica as ordinary citizens. By then Rome was a Mediterranean colossus.

Roman wars widened after 338. Over the next seven decades she fought every other powerful Italian people: Etruscans, Samnites, Umbrians, and then southern Italian Greek city-states – wars invariably due (her historical traditions insisted) to their provocations. Despite intermittent defeats such as an entrapped Roman army in Samnium having to capitulate in 321, the Romans prevailed over all. Livy’s history recounted huge, if implausible, numbers of beaten Italians captured and enslaved. Even a grand coalition in 295 of Samnites, Etruscans, Umbrians and even Gauls from Cisalpina failed. By 283 they had all been forced to become allies subordinate to the res publica, whose dominance over the peninsula was thus almost complete.

Southern Italy, notably the populous regions of Lucania and Bruttium and the many Greek cities along its coasts (a few of them already Roman allies, such as Thurii), was brought into the network by 270. The powerful and still ambitious city of Tarentum – almost certainly provoked by Rome – called over the adventurer-king Pyrrhus from Epirus in Greece in 280 to champion them, but despite his expensive ‘pyrrhic’ early victories he found the Romans too strong, tried and failed likewise in Sicily against Carthage, and in the end sailed home, leaving Tarentum to surrender to its besiegers in 272. Like all the other Italian states, Tarentum became an obedient ally of Italy’s new hegemon.

The Romans took pride in the wars that made them masters of Italy. Admired fourth-century leaders such as Camillus, Papirius Cursor and Decius Mus were above all military commanders. The emperor Augustus would give heroic generals pride of place in his great temple of Mars Ultor along with his own ancestors; Roman inscriptions and literature celebrate them as models of citizenship. War leadership was reinforced by Rome’s dynamic military system, which required every able-bodied male citizen between the ages of 16 and 46 to be liable for service and organized them, under ferocious discipline, in the flexible divisions called legions. Alongside these served similar bodies of allied troops who fought under Roman command. As the number and range of Italian allies grew, therefore, so did Rome’s military capabilities.

By 264 the territories of the Roman state itself, the ager Romanus, extended over about one-fifth of the peninsula, from Picenum and the Sabine country north of the city, across much of southern Etruria and most of Latium, to northern Campania. The rest of Italy consisted of the Latins – officially termed the Latin Name, nomen Latinum, and now including more than 20 Latin colonies – and the other Italian allied peoples, the socii Italici. Save for religious associations, all other regional unions had been dissolved. Not only did Rome’s nearer neighbours and trading partners, such as Carthage and Syracuse, take a close interest in this unparalleled rise to peninsular dominance but so did Ptolemaic Egypt, one of the three principal kingdoms that had formed from the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire. Ptolemy II in 273 exchanged friendly embassies with the republic, a friendship that was virtually Rome’s first recognition by a powerful Hellenistic Greek state – and this would have important consequences for the Ptolemies themselves later.

The Romans did not organize an Italian federation or confederation. Each allied state had its own link with Rome – former enemies usually were bound by treaties – but not with any others; there was no representative congress (such as that of Sparta’s old Peloponnesian league); and the Romans took it very badly if any allies, even Latins, dared to hold independent consultations among themselves. Foreign relations and military activities were decided solely by Rome. Allies could not opt out – when Falerii north of Rome tried this in 241, it was demolished and the inhabitants removed to a new and less defensible lowland site. The allies’ essential duties to Rome were military or naval service and supplies. Coastal cities such as Naples and Tarentum had to provide ships and sailors once Roman wars involved the sea; other states supplied fully equipped troops plus munitions. The details were specified in a list, the ‘register of toga-wearers’ (formula togatorum; the toga was the formal attire of Romans and Italians), regularly revised.

This political and military structure proved flexible, resilient and almost unbreakably tough. The benefits to the allies were limited but real: Italy’s endemic intra-state wars were over, the peninsula’s security was strengthened, and non-Roman soldiers received shares in the plunder from successful wars. Italian merchants along with Roman ones were looked after by Rome if foreign mistreatment occurred – as happened in 240 involving Carthage, and in 229 over Illyrian piracy in the Adriatic. The dominant elites in Italian, and especially Latin, cities could develop close ties of guest-friendship with their Roman counterparts (even if these were always socially grander). Some allied aristocratic families moved to Rome and became part of the Roman elite: the Fulvii and later Porcii from Tusculum, for instance, the Licinii probably from Etruria, and the Aurelii from the Sabine country.

The ager Romanus in 265 bc comprised about 24,000 square kilometres or nearly 10,000 square miles. That year Rome’s census, at least according to the late Roman writer Eutropius, registered 292,234 male citizens aged over 16. The rest of Italy had probably about twice as many, to judge from a census-survey of 224 transmitted by Polybius: 273,000 Romans and half a million Latins and other allies (the lower Roman total perhaps due to losses in the recent war with Carthage). On conservative estimates, such figures would suggest that Italy in 224 had 2½ to 3 million inhabitants, along with an unknown number of slaves. Other leading Mediterranean powers had similar or bigger populations, but few could maintain, reinforce and replace large military forces as regularly and effectively.

Later Romans liked to visualize their ancestors as sturdily unsophisticated sons of the soil, untouched by luxury, riches or the temptations of trade. Reality was different. Not only was Rome itself one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean by 264 bc but it also housed busy traders and manufacturers. Archaeological finds show that black-glazed pottery emanating from Rome and its surrounds took grain and oil to Punic Sicily, North Africa, southern Gaul, and the old Phoenician city of Gades in south-west Spain. Polybius quotes (in Greek translation) two treaties between Rome and Carthage, generally dated to around 509 and 348 bc, which regulated traders’ dealings and entitlements. The Roman side was more regulated than the Carthaginian: the second treaty, for example, banned Romans from sailing to southern Spain where Carthage had a virtual trade monopoly. By the 230s, and probably much earlier, Roman and Italian merchants were busy around the Adriatic too.^[1]

* * *

After Rome’s early monarchy was overthrown around 509 bc by the city’s powerful aristocrats, called patricians, they replaced it with elected executive offices at first largely held by themselves – but over time opened (grudgingly) to the other citizens, the plebeians, who were the great majority of the Roman population. In the same way the Senate, an already old advisory council, came to have plebeian as well as patrician members. Until expanded in the first century bc it had some 300 members, appointed for life by the five-yearly censors. Senators were recruited from former magistrates and other men judged morally and socially suitable (poor Romans need not apply). That the Romans also called their state Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome – in later times abbreviated to SPQR – and only rarely reversed the word order, marked the stature of their oldest consultative body.

SPQR was governed by ‘colleges’ of annually elected executives called magistrates, formal assemblies of citizens to elect them and enact laws, and the Senate. Needless to say, voting and all public offices (except for the Vestal virgins, Rome’s female priesthood) were closed to women. Ultimate authority rested with the People but was delegated by the People’s command to the magistrates, who in turn consulted the Senate on all matters. The Senate’s ancient and ritual status, as old as Rome herself, made it revered in spite of members’ unfailingly numerous shortcomings – and occasional crimes – which Roman and Greek critics down the ages were happy to point out. Senators could discuss any matter great or small raised by a magistrate, and could pass decrees (senatus consulta) on proposals put by him. A senatus consultum was legally only an advisory opinion needing ratification by the People in assembly, but by 264 bc it was unusual (though not unheard of) for the People not to ratify.

The Senate operated by consensus. As a debate progressed, opinion tended to gravitate towards the viewpoint most persuasively argued or to the speakers of greatest standing and influence, or to those strongly backed by the presiding magistrate. Seniority ruled, with past consuls by far the most authoritative: the most eminent men in the res publica, its principes viri, were nearly all former consuls. They did not invariably agree – in 264, for example, the Senate reached impasse over an appeal for help from Messana in Sicily and the consuls took the question to the People – but deadlock was unusual.

The complex hierarchy of annually elected magistrates at Rome had evolved down several centuries. The two consuls stood at its head. They held imperium, the power to command – a word and concept with a future – in both civil and military affairs. They led the main armies of the state, and at home co-operated with Senate and People on matters of major moment. From 326 bc a consul on campaign might, if the Senate so judged, have his imperium extended for another year (or longer) as a ‘proconsul’: a practice increasingly frequent as the empire grew, though a proconsul’s imperium was always subordinate to a nearby consul’s.

Another magistracy, the praetorship founded in 367, held a lesser imperium, dealt with judicial matters, and could also command forces (smaller ones) when needed. Of the other magistrates the most powerful were the ten plebeian tribunes, tribuni plebis, originally elected by plebeian citizens in the fifth century bc to defend plebeian rights and interests against the dominant patrician elite. A tribune was physically sacrosanct while in office – if he suffered violence, the assailant could be killed without trial by any citizen – and he had the right to veto any action proposed by a magistrate (even another tribune), by the Senate, or even by the People in assembly, if he judged it wrong. It was, fortunately, a power not often exercised. Tribunes consulted the body that elected them, the Concilium Plebis open only to plebeian citizens, and could propose resolutions to it. One striking success came in 287 bc: a law was passed that effectively made a Concilium Plebis resolution, a plebiscitum, as binding as a law enacted by the whole People (a lex). In time tribunes also gained the right to convene meetings of the Senate and seek its advice. They continued their watchdog role in public affairs and from time to time continued to irritate established interests – even though they themselves practically always came from well-to-do or elite families – for instance with proposals for distributing tracts of state-owned land to impoverished citizens, and for improving ordinary citizens’ civil rights.

Being a plebeian did not automatically mean being poor: it simply meant not being a patrician. Leading plebeians could be as well off as patrician Romans. As a result the tribunate quite early became a regular stage in a plebeian leader’s public career; a plebeian consul almost always had been a tribune earlier. Thanks in great part to tribunes, by 287 the position of plebeian Romans was legally far better than before, while in politics and social relations affluent plebeians were themselves now part of the dominant elite, even though the small (and shrinking) number of patrician houses continued to be disproportionately influential and electorally successful. Although the first plebeian consuls won their office in the mid-fourth century, not until 171 were there two in the one year, and that still remained a rare combination.

Every five years two censors were elected for 18-month terms to scrutinize the condition of the res publica. They reviewed Senate membership and senators’ performance (errant senators could be expelled), took the census of all citizens – registering income and material possessions as well as persons – and arranged for collecting the taxes and other dues that citizens had to pay. Censors also organized necessary public works projects, from temples, roads and fortifications to drainage and sewers.

One final office needs mention: in any military emergency that baffled the consuls, or for tasks such as presiding over elections if the consuls were preoccupied, a dictator holding supreme imperium would be nominated by one consul authorized by the Senate; he then chose a lieutenant called the master of horse (magister equitum). The dictatorship, in effect a momentary restoration of the old Roman kingship, was to evolve spectacularly in the last days of the Roman Republic – and point the way to a new monarchy.

* * *

Male Romans past the age of 16 had voting rights in a fairly extensive range of political assemblies. The very oldest of these survived only in fossilized forms until Augustus’ era. By contrast, since Rome’s earliest army, the ‘levy’ (legio), marshalled for training and war on the Campus Martius just outside the city, it also became Rome’s principal voting assembly: the Comitia Centuriata. This was organized according to the legion’s basic unit, the centuria originally of 100 men. In historical times this Comitia’s 193 centuriae were highly unequally arranged. The entire assembly was stratified into five main ‘classes’ plus several extra centuries: notably 18 for senators and for other wealthy citizens who were expected to serve as the army’s cavalry, called equites. Nearly half the centuries’ total (88 at least) were for citizens classified by censors as affluent, whereas Romans lacking any landed property – in Cicero’s time about half of all Romans – were assigned to a single century. Each century had one vote, decided by the majority of the members present; and voting stopped once a majority of centuries was reached in an election or in legislation. Thus the lower-class centuries rarely, if ever, had their votes counted.

A second assembly was the Comitia Tributa, whose units were based on the territorial districts or ‘tribes’ (tribus, plural) of the ager Romanus – 35 by 241 bc. After 241, new incorporated regions were ascribed to various existing tribes. Each tribe likewise voted as a unit but with no formal distinctions of status among its members, in an order determined each time by lot (the lot being the gods’ prerogative). These two assemblies elected Rome’s magistrates. The Centuriata chose the consuls, praetors and censors, the Tributa the lesser officials, notably the quaestors in charge of the Roman treasury (the aerarium), and the aediles who tended public amenities such as the temples, markets and streets. Each Comitia could enact (or reject) proposed laws put to it by a senior magistrate or a tribune; the Centuriata could also act as a judicial court.

Nevertheless, as the voice of the Roman People both were sharply limited. Both of them, in structure and in practice, favoured richer Romans. Not only was this bias obvious in the Comitia Centuriata, but in the Tributa all citizens living in the City were registered in just four ‘urban’ tribes, which meant too that Romans in the 31 ‘rural’ tribes (some of them very distant from Rome) who wanted to vote had to find time and means to travel to the City and back. In the Tributa too, voting ended as soon as a majority of tribes concurred, and it became common that the tribe chosen by lot to vote first was followed in its decision by its fellows: so that if the next 17 tribes did, the issue was resolved. In both assemblies citizens could debate only proposals put to them by the convening magistrate. He also decided who (if anyone) could speak on the question; nor could voters move amendments. The same ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Roman First Names
• Roman Emperors
• Introduction: Rome and her Imperialism
• Chapter 1: Rome Before Empire: Hegemony Over Italy
• Chapter 2: Mediterranean Hegemony and the First Provinces
• Chapter 3: The Provinces of the Republic
• Chapter 4: The Political Impoverishment of the Imperial Republic
• Chapter 5: Augustus: The Greatest Imperialist
• Chapter 6: Imperial Takings and Leavings, AD 14–212
• Chapter 7: The New Romans
• Chapter 8: Governing and Misgoverning
• Chapter 9: Judging the Empire: Romans and Others
• Chapter 10: Resistance
• Chapter 11: How Roman Was the Roman Empire?
• Conclusions
• Appendix: The Ancient Sources
• Abbreviations in the Notes and Referenced Works
• Notes
• Referenced Works
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright