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  ROME

  ROME

  AN EMPIRE’S STORY

  GREG WOOLF

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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  For my Students

  Preface

  All histories of Rome are histories of empire. Her rise to power, the long peace, and the even longer decline together form the background to every story told about the Romans. My subject, however, is empire itself. How did it grow? What enabled it to resist defeats and capitalize on victories? Why did Rome succeed when its rivals failed? How did empire survive crises, dig itself in, and replace chaotic campaigns of conquest with stability? How did empire come to coordinate the great flows of wealth and populations on which it depended? How did it evolve to face new needs and new threats? Why did it falter, regain its balance, and then shrink under a series of military blows until it was, once again, a city-state? What circumstances and technologies made the creation and maintenance of an empire possible, in just this place and just at that time? What institutions, habits, and beliefs suited Rome for the role? And what did the fact of empire do to all the beliefs, habits, and institutions with which the world had been conquered? What part did chance play in its successes and its failures?

  The long arc that stretches from a scatter of villages on the Tiber River to a medieval city on the Bosporus Straits dreaming of ancient glory takes a millennium and a half. Telling that story in a single volume is perhaps a crazy endeavour, but it has also been an exhilarating one. Perhaps Roman history has no special claim on us, among the many periods of the past we can think about, and that have shaped our world. But as a student I felt the fascination of studying something so vast, an entity that stretched over so much time and space. What could sustain a human enterprise conceived on such a vast scale? How could anything human last so long? Our own world experiences change at an extraordinary rate. Earlier generations, confident of the permanence of their own empires and of the uninterrupted march of progress, were spellbound by Rome’s decline and fall. For us it is the longevity of Rome that grasps the imagination. My own fascination has not diminished since my student days. Even now the Roman world still sometimes feels like a vast sandpit in which I can play, or else a huge historical laboratory in which all sorts of long-lived processes and entities can be studied. Roman history is like astronomy in that respect. New experiments cannot be designed and carried out. But a vast mass of distant and ancient phenomena can be observed through tiny packets of residual data, and the forces and cataclysmic events that formed the observable universe can be reconstructed. Like astronomers, ancient historians look for patterns and try to explain them. This book is an attempt to explain those that I have observed.

  The Roman Empire invites metaphor. Ancients often used a biological analogy: each empire or state had its youth, its maturity, and its old age. One modern historian has used the metaphor of the vampire bat, seeing the empire as a means through which the Romans sucked the life out of peasants and slaves upon whose labour the empire depended. The Roman Empire does not seem to me much like an organic entity, unless it is an epidemic spreading throughout a host population feeding off the energies of the infected until it burns itself out. Analogies from natural science seem to capture the pattern of empire better. The Roman Empire was like a great tidal wave sweeping up more and more water before dissipating its energy. Or it was an avalanche, starting small, accelerated by the patterns of snow and rock across which it moved, and then slowed again at the base of the slope. Either metaphor captures the sense of a grand pattern that starts small, draws in more matter and more energy, and then dissipates. That pattern—empire—moves through time, and for a while crowds out other patterns, until it dissipates or is overwritten by other great movements. Empire grows, not always smoothly, dominates for a while, and then abates. One former vice-chancellor of St Andrews suggested that I think of this in terms of resonance, the gradual establishment of a pattern of vibration across a vast mass of people and things that eventually loses coherence and breaks down into smaller patterns. That does seem to capture precisely the emergence of an imperial order and its subsequent dissipation. The essence of empire is the assertion of a great pattern at the expense of smaller ones. That pattern is typically less equal and more hierarchical than what went before. New levels of complexity mean some of the rich becoming richer, some of the poor being subjected to harsher discipline, although the social mobility that empire stirs up means there are winners and losers at every level. Materially the pattern of empire involves regular movements of people and things, great flows of taxes and of commercial goods. Those routines of movement are now reflected by traces of roads and ports, the fossilized skeleton around which the soft matter of the human empire once hung. I have tried to give attention to the hard matter. But one of the joys of Roman history is that we can also hear the voices of so many of those caught up in it. I have attempted to capture and report their perceptions of empire as well.

  Writing this book I have tried to hold in my mind this sense that empire is a movement through historical time, not a fixed set of institutions. By the end of my story, in Byzantium, everything has changed. Romans speak Greek instead of Latin, the capital is now in what was once a conquered province, and barbarians rule in the old city of Rome. It has a new god, new customs, a new sense of its past and its future. A world of cities had become (again) the world ruled by a single city. Istanbul derives ultimately, from the medieval Greek phrase eis ten Polin, ‘into the City’. Yet it was still Rome.

  All the same, some institutions were, for long periods, absolutely central to the long history of empire, and in important ways the world within which Roman power was extended and then contracted was a stable one. I have tried to capture this combination of constant evolution with long-lasting structural stability by alternating chapters that carry the story forward with chapters that allow me to stand back for a moment—out of time as it were—and point out something of enduring significance. Attentive readers will notice, as I have, that this division does not absolutely hold. But every so often historians have to make concessions to their material. Another concession to my material is the lists of key dates that precede each narrative chapter: the Romans’ journey was complex as well as long, and as
we sit in the passenger seat, the odd road map is occasionally helpful.

  Metaphors are one kind of inspiration. Comparison is another. This book is not an exercise in systematic comparative history, measuring Rome against other ancient (or for that matter modern) empires. Comparison is an interesting method, but it is fantastically difficult given the gaps in our knowledge of ancient empires, and the inconvenience that from one empire to another they are not usually the same gaps. But my argument is informed by reflecting on other empires, sometimes trying to spot a general trend, more often as a way of spotting what is unusual or even unique about the Roman case. Wide reading helps, but I am very conscious how much I have learned from participating at conferences and meetings at which experts in other disciplines have generously shared their knowledge. From many such occasions, I would like to single out a conference organized by Susan Alcock, Terry D’Altroy, Kathy Morrison, and Carla Sinopoli at Las Mijas in 1997, generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, that first gave me the idea for this project, and also an entire series of workshops devoted to the comparative study of empires, organized with extraordinary energy by Peter Fibiger Bang, with funding from the European Science Foundation under COST Action A36 ‘Tributary Empires Compared’.

  My understanding also depends, of course, on the research of numerous other historians of Rome. It is impossible to acknowledge all of those whose works have been inspirations or essential guides or both. This book is not a total history of Rome, but an exploration of the theme of empire. All the same, empire is so central to Roman history that I have drawn on a great fund of published works to write it. I have tried in the notes and suggestions for Further Reading to indicate just a few to which I owe a particular debt, and I have tried to indicate recent work above all else, since we have now such good syntheses of past scholarship and since research is moving so fast in this field. Most of this book was written in St Andrews during leave generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust. But parts of it were drafted at UNICAMP, São Paulo, where I was a Visiting Professor in early 2011 at the invitation of Pedro Paulo Funari. The first draft was completed later that same year at the Max Weber Kolleg of the University of Erfurt, where Jörg Rüpke was (once again) my host.

  Many others have contributed to making it possible to write this book. I would like to thank especially my agent Georgina Capel, for encouragement and much more; Stefan Vranka and Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press for their patience, advice, and enthusiasm; Stefan again and Nate Rosenstein for detailed comments on an earlier draft which has saved me from many errors and made this book much more readable; Emma Barber, Emmanuelle Peri, and Jackie Pritchard at Oxford for their help in the various stages of production; my family for tolerance and reality checks. This is not, of course, my first attempt to explain the larger patterns behind Rome’s imperial history. Reading and contemplation are all very well, but every teacher knows that the true test of understanding is whether or not one can explain an idea to someone else. Professional historians usually try out explanations on each other. But we know too much already, and as listeners and critics we are often too charitable. Any aptitude I have acquired in explanation, I owe to successive generations of students in Cambridge and Leicester, Oxford and St Andrews. For this reason, this book is dedicated to them, with thanks.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Notes on Further Reading

  1. The Whole Story

  2. Empires of the Mind

  3. Rulers of Italy

  4. Imperial Ecology

  5. Mediterranean Hegemony

  6. Slavery and Empire

  7. Crisis

  8. At Heaven’s Command?

  9. The Generals

  10. The Enjoyment of Empire

  11. Emperors

  12. Resourcing Empire

  13. War

  14. Imperial Identities

  15. Recovery and Collapse

  16. A Christian Empire

  17. Things Fall Apart

  18. The Roman Past and the Roman Future

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Glossary of Technical Terms

  Photographic Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1. The Prima Porta Augustus displayed in the Braccio Nuovo new wing of Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy

  2. A Mercury Dime, depicting the Roman fasces

  3. A bust of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, Roman copy after a Greek original, from the Villa of the Papyri, Ercolano (ancient Herculaneum), Campania Region, Italy

  4. The monument at Delphi that commemorated Aemilius Paullus’ victory at Pydna

  5. The sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican

  6. A slave collar (original in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano in Rome)

  7. Mithridates VI Eupator King of Pontus portrayed as Hercules

  8. Bronze statuette of Cybele on a cart drawn by lions, 2nd half of 2nd century AD

  9. Bust of Sulla in the Munich Glyptothek

  10. Bust of Julius Caesar

  11. The theatre of Pompey

  12. One of the fresco wall paintings in the cubiculum (bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale

  13. The Empress Messalina and her son Britannicus, AD 45, Roman sculpture, marble, Louvre

  14. The Roman ceremony of the Adventus depicted on a coin

  15. The tax law of Ephesus (now in Ephesus Museum)

  16. A detail of Trajan’s Column showing triumph of the emperor after the first campaign against the Dacians

  17. Hadrian’s Wall

  18. The Stabian Baths at Pompeii

  19. Porphyry statue of the Four Tetrarchs at the Basilica di San Marco, St Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy

  20. An image from the late antique Notitia Dignitatum

  21. The basilica, formerly Emperor Constantine’s throne room, now a Protestant church, Trier

  22. The head of a gigantic statue of Emperor Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the Capitoline Museum, Rome

  23. A mosaic portraying the Emperor Justinian from San Vitale, Ravenna

  24. The amphitheatre at Arles

  List of Maps

  1. The peoples of Italy around 300 BC

  2. The Mediterranean and its continental hinterlands, showing major mountain ranges and rivers

  3. The Republican empire around 100 BC

  4. The Roman empire at its greatest extent in the second century AD

  5. The third-century crisis

  6. The empire in the year 500 AD

  7. Justinian’s reconquest (AD 565)

  Notes on Further Reading

  The Roman Empire has been the object of serious research for around a century and a half and imperialism has never been off the agenda. It would be impossible to provide a complete guide to the scholarship on which this book is based, and I have not tried to do so. Each chapter is followed, however, by a few suggestions for further reading. I have recommended only work available in English and have tried to pick the most exciting and most recent works, since new research continues at an astonishing pace. I have also added a few notes to each chapter, some identifying the source of particular quotations or key passages of ancient writers, some acknowledging the source of particular ideas or acknowledging books or articles that were especially helpful when I was writing the chapter. Here too I have concentrated on the most recent work, but I have included a few really crucial items written in other languages. After all, the study of antiquity is an international venture, and the Roman Empire is bigger than any of us.

  The bibliography at the end of the volume gathers together all works cited, but cannot claim to be a comprehensive guide to the subject. Fortunately in the twenty-first century we benefit from a number of very recent and authoritative reference works on all aspects of Roman history. The best one-volume reference work to all aspects of antiquity is the Oxfo
rd Classical Dictionary (4th edn. 2011). The revised Cambridge Ancient History devotes seven volumes to Rome (1989–2005). The first volume of the New Cambridge Mediaeval History (2005) is also relevant to the end of this story, as is the Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008), the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007), and the first volume of the Cambridge History of World Slavery (2011). Harvard’s Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World (1999) combines thematic essays with a dictionary. The best multi-volume dictionary is Brill’s New Pauly (2007). All these works are available on-line, as well as in hard copy. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000) is the best guide to the topography of antiquity.

  KEY DATES IN CHAPTER I

  753 BC

  Traditional date of the foundation of Rome

  509 BC

  Traditional date of the expulsion of the kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic

  264 BC

  Pyrrhus invades Italy but fails to break Roman hegemony

  216 BC

  Battle of Cannae. Rome’s worst defeat at the hands of Hannibal

  146 BC

  Carthage and Corinth sacked by Roman armies

  88 BC

  Sulla marches on Rome and makes himself dictator

  44 BC

  Julius Caesar assassinated on the Ides of March

  31 BC

  Battle of Actium ends the civil wars of the late Republic. Conventional beginning of the early empire or Principate

  AD 14

  Death of Augustus, and accession of Tiberius

  AD 117

  Death of Trajan marks the greatest extent of the Roman Empire

  AD 212

  Caracalla extends citizenship to most inhabitants of the empire