The archetypal imperial city: the rise of Rome

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Chapter

25 - The archetypal imperial city: the rise of Rome and the burdens of

empire pp. 513-531

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139035606.032

Cambridge University Press

25

The archetypal imperial city: the riseof Rome and the burdens of empire

nicola terrenato

The city of Rome was the center of a vast territorial empire for over five

centuries. Not-too-dissimilar phenomena took place in different forms a

number of times in human history, and yet it could be argued that the

specific instance of Rome has often received far more than its share of

attention, at least in the context of Eurocentric culture as it has developed in

the last millennium and a half. Even before the actual collapse of the

western Roman Empire, Rome at its heyday was unquestioningly taken

for granted as an icon and as a role model by aspiring expansionists. From

then on, the historiographic tradition in Europe and beyond grew inextric-

ably linked with what was termed, with an absolute value judgment, “the

classical period.” As a consequence, no schooling was complete without a

fairly extensive knowledge of Rome, its history, its laws, and its language.

In no contemporary political conjuncture or challenge could the example of

Rome be considered irrelevant. The larger-than-life presence of what was

dubbed (with a revealing moniker) the Eternal City towered in the social

sciences from their origin at least until the end of European colonialism and

it is arguably still very central today.

It would be natural to consider such unparalleled name recognition as an

enviable, if undeserved, privilege. Undoubtedly, the sheer quantity of books,

movies, university chairs, and research funds devoted the world over to

ancient Rome might be mouthwatering for other scholars. These did, how-

ever, come at a heavy intellectual price. From the court of Charlemagne to

that of Mussolini, Rome has, more often than not, been brutally pressed into

the service of the dominant discourse, or, worse, of blatant regime propa-

ganda. While most today would agree that there cannot be an unbiased view

of any past, it could be argued that the Roman one has been distorted further

than most others and so many times that certain fictitious perceptions have

become established facts that are still accepted today. A Google Image search

on “Roman” will produce a screenful of reenacting legionaries with the

513

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occasional toga-clad senator, and little else. After centuries of political use

and abuse of Rome, mostly in aid of various forms of militarism and

dictatorship, it has become very hard not to assume, at least implicitly, that

its empire was rooted almost exclusively in violence and threat.1

Another unwelcome consequence of the high visibility of Rome is its

incomparability. Because the Roman Empire was so often painted as the

most powerful, disciplined, and well organized of all, providing an example

that should always be emulated but could never be attained, there has been

a marked scholarly reluctance to put it on the same dissecting table along-

side other empires. Roman historians have typically confined themselves to

the “classical” world, naturally finding little in the Mediterranean that could

equal the span and the durability of Rome’s domination. The scholarly

discourse has stayed very specialized and terminologically discrete, with

extensive use of Latin and of Roman institutional concepts. The irony is

of course that some of the most commonly used comparative terms in

English, such as city or empire, are derived from Latin words that the

Romans themselves used to describe political abstractions. On that basis, a

wealth of cross-cultural state formation theories were produced over the last

century, but they hardly ever included a consideration of Rome, where,

arguably, the very concept of state had originated.

A victim to its own celebrity and fame, Rome cannot easily be considered

separately from the intellectual concretions that have accumulated on it in the

course of centuries of visibility in anything from blockbusters and documentar-

ies to historical novels and theater plays. The embeddedness of Rome in

Eurocentric culture has produced a delay in rethinking and updating our

historical analysis of it. In the study of other periods, there is far less need to

contend with strong assumptions and biases that were crystallized by Romantic

scholars in the nineteenth century and are still floating around today. As a result,

a pressing item in our agenda must be a realignment of Rome with current

sociopolitical thinking as well as the restoration of this particular instance of

empire within the broader fold of the history of complex societies anywhere.

From city to empire

Rome was first settled, like most other primary urban sites in Italy, in the

late Bronze Age, at the end of the second millennium bce, and it developed

into a city-state during the first few centuries of the following millennium.

1 R. Hingley (ed.) Images of Rome (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001).

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Many similar centers emerged at the same time up and down the western

coast of central Italy, while Greek and Carthaginian colonies were being

founded further south and on the islands (Map 25.1).2 Rome found itself

within a particularly tight cluster of these polities, which often had their

nearest neighbor only 20–40 kilometers away and ranged in walled size

between 50 and 150 hectares. Located on the banks of the Tiber, the main

river of the region, Rome was also straddling a deepening cultural boundary

between Etruscan cities to the north and Latin and Greek ones to the south.

From early on, the Romans probably cultivated a distinctive self-image of

ethnic and cultural hybridity, explicitly acknowledging the contribution of a

variety of elements that characterized their neighbors with more defined

identities.3 Also unusual for the region was the environmental setting of

Rome, sprawled across several steep-sided hills separated by wide alluvial

valleys that were seasonally flooded. Unlike other peer communities, which

typically occupied vast and naturally defended volcanic plateaus, the

Romans had to engage in massive land reclamation projects that involved

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Map 25.1 Italy in around 600 bce.

2 H. D. Andersen (ed.) Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the 9th to 6th Centuries BC(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997).

3 E. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age ofHadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Rome: the archetypal imperial city

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dumping soil over vast drains to create land bridges (one of which became

the Forum) that could connect the hills and that kept being expanded for

centuries.4 It is significant that Rome acquired fortification walls only at a

relatively late date, around the mid-sixth century bce. Remarkably, the

fortified area (c. 285 hectares) was much bigger than that of any other central

Italian city, but it included vast amounts of unreclaimed floodlands as well

as many unusable steep ravines around the individual hills.

In the late sixth–early fifth century bce, the political systems in Rome and

in neighboring city-states went through a phase of high instability, charac-

terized by tyrannical coups and intense inter-city elite horizontal mobility.

Great works were undertaken in the city, such as the creation of the first

great state temple on the Capitoline and the drainage of the Forum Valley.

Warfare was endemic, but mainly involved seasonal raids that had limited

consequences and never led to the annexation or destruction of one of the

major polities. Dominance spanning more than one city (typically achieved

through the installation of friendly rulers) seems to have been unusual and

short-lived. Similar phenomena occurred in Greek, Etruscan, and other

states in peninsular Italy and Sicily. By the late fifth century, a republican

system was certainly in place in Rome and in many other peer cities, in

which elites competed for yearly elective military and civil commands,

often, however, clearly furthering a factional and family agenda while in

office.5 This is when the global dynamics in the whole central Mediterranean

underwent a radical change: Carthaginians and Syracusans in Sicily (quickly

followed by some peninsular states) began engaging in a territorial expan-

sionism that aimed at lumping together entire states and at the creation of

directly controlled colonies (unlike the politically independent colonies they

founded in the ninth–sixth centuries bce).6

In this period, Rome attacked head on a major Etruscan state, Veii, which

was its closest neighbor across the Tiber. Veii fell after years of war (in

which Rome for the first time kept its army in the field year round and paid

it a salary) and it was eliminated as an independent polity, an unprecedented

act in central Italy. Many of its citizens were relocated to Rome, where they

soon, however, received equal rights as the original Romans. This precipi-

tated profound structural changes as the resulting new state needed to adapt

4 A. J. Ammerman, “On the Origins of the Forum Romanum,” American Journal ofArchaeology 104 (1990), 627–45.

5 T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome (London: Routledge, 1995).6 A. M. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2006).

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quickly to a dramatic increase in its territory. Indeed, the archaeological

record shows a sharp increase in the number and density of small farms in

the period after the conquest, traditionally interpreted as those of Roman

colonists. We now know, however, that the spread of small-scale farming

is a broad central Mediterranean trend, not limited to the small areas of

initial imperial expansion,7 but rather connected with a sharp increase

of specialized crafts and with the growth of urbanized areas everywhere,

two processes that required a greater food surplus. It can even be posited

that the high-energy transformation involved in imperial expansion was

only made possible by the agricultural intensification that immediately

preceded it.

From the start, Roman policy in the conquered human landscapes seems

to have been an inclusive one, leaving existing local power structures in

place and broadening the base that was subject to taxation and to the army

draft. Rome’s expansion quickly picked up its pace after Veii’s destruction, a

harsh treatment that was only repeated in strategic locations like Carthage

or Corinth. At the other end of the spectrum is the policy toward Gabii, a

Latin state as close to Rome as Veii, with which Rome struck an “equal”

(that is, balanced) treaty that would later become a model informing

hundreds of similar agreements with city-states around the Mediterranean.

Essentially, during the fourth and third centuries bce, the Roman Empire

extended rapidly in peninsular Italy by means of a vast number of separate

one-to-one treaties with the other cities, without the creation of an explicit

confederation or of a clear imperial political infrastructure. Significantly,

Romans kept referring to them as allies. They had been induced to enter

into agreements through a combination of means such as negotiation,

military threat, actual war, offers of protection against a common enemy

and interference in their internal affairs. The Roman senate and the army

commanders displayed a remarkable flexibility and flair for ad hoc diplo-

matic solutions with each separate polity, resulting in a highly complex

mosaic of reciprocal obligations between Rome and each of its allied states.

Therefore, the received idea of a mighty war machine making mincemeat of

everything in its path is largely a Romantic-century fantasy that finds little

confirmation in the ethnohistorical sources and even less in the archaeo-

logical record.

7 P. A. R. van Dommelen and N. Terrenato (eds.), Articulating Local Cultures: Powerand Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of RomanArchaeology, 2007).


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What is true instead is that all the main foci of expansion in the central

Mediterranean at this time (Rome, Syracuse, Carthage, Macedonia) were

benefiting from a snowball effect that made the next conquest more likely

after each annexation, thanks to increased taxation, tribute, army draft, and

to general economies of scale in the growing empires. However, expansion

fed expansion in different ways, and the growing competition among

empires played out in their efficiency in pooling imperial resources, much

more than in pure military confrontations. Here, Rome had a distinctive

advantage in its deeply rooted policy of admitting foreigners into its citizen

body, as contemporary Greek rulers themselves had to concede. The

population estimates for this period show an exponential growth that vastly

exceeds the potential of fertility in pre-modern societies. Thus, rather than

imagining ethnically pure Romans taking over Italy, it is clear that, with

political nimbleness and no ethnic exclusiveness, urbanized communities

were quickly co-opted and persuaded to identify with the conveniently

vague and flexible concept of expanding Roman rule.

A consideration of Rome’s expansion pattern in peninsular Italy is also

revealing of the deep logic of the process. Far from concentrically expanding

like an oil slick, Rome reached out to other major cities within 50 kilometers

of the western coast, that is, the cradle of Iron Age Italian urbanism, along

existing lines of communication. Its priority was clearly to have the other

peer polities brought into its expansionistic bid as soon as possible. Non-

urbanized, upland areas toward the spine of the peninsula were left to be

dealt with later. As early as the fourth century bce, Rome was far more

worried with 1,000-kilometer-distant Carthage (with whom it had political

and commercial treaties) than with the central Apennines, which were only

100 kilometers away but were mountainous and rural. Even the eastern

coast of Italy, which was only very sporadically urbanized, although not far

by way of sea (and only 200 kilometers away as the crow flies) figured much

less prominently in the early narratives and in the archaeologically attested

circulation or prestige goods than far-flung southeastern Spain or even the

Nile Delta, which were important international commercial nodes.

In the rush to link together the main states of the central Mediterranean,

Rome had a significant geographic advantage over its competitors. Being in

a dense concentration of cities reduced the land surface costs in the early

stages of the expansion, and meant that the empire did not have to rely

exclusively on maritime routes like Carthage. For centuries, the core of the

Roman state would be represented by a stretch of c. 300 kilometers of the

western coast, extending 50 kilometers inland and with Rome at its center.

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Other states scattered around the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea (bounded by

Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and southern France) would be progressively tied to

that core in a relatively compact assemblage. Desert-bordered Carthage

necessarily had to put together a much more disjointed and far-flung empire

(albeit commercially a very productive one), while expanding Greek cities

like Syracuse had never invested enough in the Italian hinterland and its

inhabitants to be able to integrate it effectively (Map 25.2).

While Rome evidently prioritized existing cities, it also spread urbanism

with the creation of colonies, which had the primary function of bringing

into existence a new state that, from its birth and by definition, was a

member of the alliance, rather than that of military outposts manned by

ethnic Romans. A large number of Roman colonies of this period were

founded in poorly urbanized areas of inland and eastern Italy. Quite a few,

however, were placed inside existing urban systems (and even sometimes on

top of existing cities), thus increasing even further the density of the urban

network in western central Italy. Wherever they happened to be, they were

also connected with a reorganization of the landscape around the new city.

Each colonist family was connected with a parcel of land of a certain size to

qualify for political rights, and cadastral systems were put in place to keep

much better track of land ownership than before. Recent studies have

shown that locals (as well as members of other allied communities) were

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Map 25.2 Rome’s expansion.

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routinely invited to be a part of the new polity and it is likely that land

confiscation and dispossession were not as widespread as traditionally main-

tained.8 Farm buildings and agricultural practices have been archaeologically

shown not to present much change before and after the foundation of a

colony, and local burial customs and cults often persist too.

A distinctive feature of Rome’s colonies was that their inhabitants, besides

being full citizens of the new city, also received some form of intermediate

(or more rarely full) citizenship of Rome. Similar grants were also routinely

made to allied communities to reward their continued loyalty to the

federation. These rights typically included the ability to relocate to Rome,

to marry and inherit from Romans, and to trade with Romans under the

protection of Roman law. Voting rights were eventually given as a recogni-

tion of full membership in the budding empire. Unusually, freed slaves

(a fast-growing social group in Rome and one almost entirely composed

of non-Romans) were treated essentially in the same fashion. In this way,

Rome’s stakeholder base constantly expanded, offering to new allies tangible

examples of the benefits of integration, which were much better than those

offered by any competing Carthaginian or Greek imperialist. Another key

trait of Rome’s expansionist offer was that the political order it promoted

was guaranteed to be slanted in favor of landed elites, whatever their

ethnicity or background. Access to the senate was restricted to land-owners,

and upward social mobility seems to have been much less common than

horizontal elite mobility (a phenomenon that existed already from the early

first millennium bce). Non-Roman nobility from across the peninsula moved

to (or had a foothold in) Rome with apparent ease and often reached the

highest offices and the senatorial rank. The Roman army, led by the same

people, was ready to come to the rescue of elites in allied communities and

squelch social unrest and uprisings, which significantly happened more often

than rebellions or secessions of entire incorporated cities against Rome.

In the late third and especially in the second century bce, the expansion of

Rome increasingly pushed up against other competing territorial empires.

This prompted a series of prolonged wars that were different in their nature

from the ones Rome had fought in Italy. They often escalated into desperate

struggles for supremacy and always resulted, sooner or later, with the utter

defeat of Rome’s opponent. This was the fate of all the states that had

arisen from the break-up of the empire of Alexander the Great, but also of

8 G. Bradley and J. P. Wilson (eds.), Parallels and Contrasts in Greek and Roman Colonisa-tion: Origins, Ideologies and Interactions (London: Duckworth, 2005).

520

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emerging central Mediterranean powers like Syracuse or Carthage. By the

140s bce, Rome controlled most Mediterranean coastal cities, whose political

and economic structures were easier to integrate and win over with offers of

citizenship and other benefits, resulting in a far-flung empire that had

avoided and leapfrogged over the less digestible parts. At the same time,

the reach of urbanism kept growing thanks to colonial foundations in

areas like the Po Plain, which would become (and still are) among the

most densely settled in Europe, paving their way for a fuller participation

in the political life of the empire. Outside Italy too, once a city became

part of the alliance it would typically maintain much of its local power

arrangements and therefore adapt to the changed circumstances with

relatively little turbulence, but it would be within a province. These

administrative districts were assigned to yearly governors who were in

charge of taxation, keeping the order, arbitrating between cities, and

monitoring the frontier.

As earlier in Italy, for this phase too there is little archaeological

evidence that the Roman conquest caused wholesale relocation of agri-

cultural populations or land distribution to ethnic Romans. By far the

most blatant symptom of the changed situation is represented by the vast

infrastructural investment made by the central government (and to a

lesser extent by provincial ones) in the countryside. An extensive network

of roads was painstakingly built, not all going to Rome. The new lines of

communication sometimes followed and improved existing routes but

often cleared natural obstacles, such as the Apennines or the Alps,

opening up brand-new opportunities for trade and contact. The magni-

tude of these projects contrasts sharply with the relative modesty of the

public construction inside contemporary Rome. Other infrastructures

included aqueducts (primarily to supply Rome, but also other cities),

drainage channels, land reclamation, and much else. Piracy and brigand-

age were actively repressed and eventually eliminated, with the same goal

as the road improvements. All these efforts characterizing the new Roman

state from an early stage of its development clearly impacted a number of

areas that were typically beyond the reach of individual cities, almost as if

the aim was to offer a tangible proof of the advantages deriving from

membership in the empire. As a general strategy, Rome let things be

inside existing cities and in their immediate hinterland, and intervened

instead at the interstices between city-states, connecting, integrating,

facilitating, servicing, and arbitrating between them in exchange for the

taxation that it extracted.


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Moving toward a continental empire

Once the Mediterranean urban world had been almost completely unified

under Rome (with the exception of Egypt and other bits of the African

coast), it collectively turned its renewed attention to the vast continental

expanses of western and central Europe and of western Asia. For centuries,

Mediterranean traders and travelers had ventured up river valleys and across

plains and plateaus to exchange finely crafted products and exotic delicacies

such as wine with raw materials, slaves, and rare resources such as amber. It

was a system that worked well, but it constrained the volume of trade and

subjected it to outside variables. In addition to that, many pre-urban polities

in these areas were finally moving toward statehood as a result of an

endogenous process that had undoubtedly been helped along by the pro-

longed interaction with the Mediterranean. Fortified hilltop nucleated settle-

ments in central France and Spain, for instance, were significantly growing

in numbers, size, and internal stratification in the course of the late second

and early first century bce. These changes were long believed to have been

directly produced by the Roman conquest, but finer chronological reso-

lution now shows that they instead pre-dated the arrival of the Roman

army, sometimes by just a few decades.9 It appears that the Mediterranean

urban alliance saw an opportunity for further expansion in the develop-

ments that were bringing new regions closer, making them “ripe” for a

tighter form of integration. At the same time, there is no doubt that as they

came in contact with these evolving polities, the Romans and their Mediter-

ranean allies met more resistance and had to face much more post-

annexation instability. Areas of central Spain (but also of France and even

Liguria in Italy) had to be militarily dealt with again and again, suggesting

strongly that for these people participation in a territorial empire was not

the obvious option that it had been earlier on for the city-states.

In military terms, the push inland of the Roman Empire required a very

different strategy from the ones used along the seaboard. Moving the army

(and especially supplying it) could not be done by sea, thus slowing down

the pace and the frequency of the campaigns. These tended to become

multi-year affairs in distant parts of the world, where the yearly rotation of

the elected military leaders (which usually involved a reorganization of the

army and of its staff) was eminently impractical. Commands had therefore

9 G. Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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to be extended and provincial governors often played an important role,

staying in the field with the same army for long periods, essentially free from

senatorial supervision, at least until they returned to Rome. The very

structure of the army was radically changed, eliminating the last vestiges

of the original stratification of soldiers by social class, emphasizing instead

veterancy and military rank acquired in the field. The conquest, which had

proceeded along the coasts at a sustained and constant pace so that few

years had seen no gains, now became much more unpredictable, alternating

massive leaps and bounds with long periods of stable boundaries. Necessar-

ily, expansion could only come from long expeditions that had to be planned

well in advance and that, when successful, often led to the incorporation of

areas many times the size of the whole of peninsular Italy (see Map 25.2).

Rome’s administrative strategy in the continental regions always built,

at least initially, on networks established earlier by other city-states. Thus

they clearly benefited from the inroads that the Carthaginians had made in

Andalusia along the Guadalquivir Valley and that the Greek city of

Massalia (Marseilles) had made up the Rhone Valley. There too, the

foundation of new cities and the reorganization of the rural landscapes

had been fundamental tools to interact with the local communities and to

make them more compatible with and interested in the Mediterranean

world. The Roman effort, however, was much more sustained and,

crucially, made space both for local agency (which was in a very dynamic

phase anyway) and for the participation of individuals from all the cities

around the empire. Again, infrastructural investments were not spared,

and they sped up the process of integration and economic development.

New provinces set up in this phase, like Provence or Hispania Citerior

in eastern Spain, quickly became a full part of the global imperial machin-

ery, effectively and permanently pushing out the boundaries of the

Mediterranean world.

As the first century bce progressed, the empire underwent even deeper

changes in many areas. The political republican system collapsed, crushed

by the emergence of large professional armies that were firmly loyal to

the commanders under whom they had served for long periods. Clearly, the

geographic and cultural mass of the alliance had become too big to be

guided by officials elected every year in Rome, especially since there was a

fast-expanding proportion of people around the empire that had voting

rights but were de facto disenfranchised by their distance from the elections

held in the capital. Rome’s policy of political inclusiveness had reached its

intrinsic spatial limitations. From then on, Rome was ruled by military


523



dictators, called emperors, whose primary power base was within the army,

and especially in the troops stationed near the capital. While military glory

had certainly been instrumental in the ascent of the earliest of these

condottieri, such as Marius, Pompey, or Caesar, from the first century ce

onwards triumphs were no longer indispensable to obtain or maintain

power, as the relevance of civilian public opinion declined. Military achieve-

ment did occasionally help usurpers, such as Vespasian or Septimius

Severus, but as a powerful drive for new campaigns it lost much of its

appeal. After 100 bce, the Roman army and its generals were engaged

in intestine and inglorious wars more often than they were deployed in

external ones, and certainly with far greater casualties. Civil strife and

factionalism had always featured in the history of the empire to a remark-

able extent, but once these changes took place they largely dominated the

political life (with the exception of some eighty years in the second century

ce), often relegating foreign affairs to the distant background. Even the

conquest of Egypt, the last incorporation of a major Mediterranean state,

was merely a by-product of a protracted civil war between competing

Roman dictators and their semi-private armies.

In spite of its status as the capital of the largest Mediterranean empire of

its time, down to about 100 bce the urban infrastructure of Rome remained

relatively unchanged. The same city walls were maintained, the Forum was

not yet monumentalized, and most of the investment seems to have gone in

the foundation of a number of subsidiary temples around the city (Map 25.3).

Individual prominent clans promoted these rivaling projects, in keeping with

Rome’s nature as a factionalized oligarchy at the time. It was only when

power became concentrated in the hands of military commanders that

massive urban amenities were undertaken. Piazzas, theaters, and even more

temples arose at the expense of private quarters, eventually turning the

whole center of the city into a mosaic of public spaces and monuments by

the late first century ce.10 The Palatine Hill emerged as the site of a vast

imperial palace that served as a model for many royal residences in medieval

and Renaissance Europe (Map 25.4).

Throughout the first and early second centuries ce, the imperialist

machinery lurched into expansive action at irregular intervals and for

different reasons. Early on, advances were made in the Rhineland, along

the Danube, and in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula, ostensibly to

10 J. C. Coulston and H. Dodge (eds.), Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City(Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2000).

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reach more easily defensible frontiers. All these areas tended to be less

compatible with the rest of the empire than any other previous province

and offered much stronger resistance, occasionally causing heavy defeats.

Decades later Rome suddenly invaded Britain, possibly as a result of

developing political complexity in the southeast of the island as well as

for its own internal political reasons. Again, areas that were culturally

and structurally very different ended up within the empire and they

showed a much greater propensity for instability and outright rebellion.

Conquests of this kind were the exception rather than the rule: the

empire would not have survived long if all the provinces had been as

troublesome as Britain or Germany proved to be. The last great push

took place around the 100s ce, with the rapid annexation of Romania and

Mesopotamia. The former was culturally not unlike Germany and it was

probably coveted mostly for its mineral resources, while the latter was

fully urbanized and was wrested from the Parthians, a vast territorial

empire that had grown out of Persia and whose western boundary with

0 400 800 meters to Milvian Bridge

Via Flam

inia

RepublicanWall

Colline Gate

C A M P U S

M A R T I U SCircus

Flaminius

Temple ofJupiter

Via Aurelia

Temple of Hercules

Emporiu

m

Via O

stiensis

A V E N T I N E

P A L A T I N E

Regia

CircusMaximus

RepublicanWall

Via Sacra

Via Appia

Temple of Vesta

C A E L I A N

ES

QU

IL

IN

E

Forum

SenateHouse Via Subura

VI

MI

NA

L

QU

IR

IN

A

L

River T

iber

River Tiber

CA

PIT

OL

IN

E

IA

NI

CU

LU

M

Map 25.3 Rome around 150 bce.


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Rome moved back and forth many times. After this, there was no more

expansion and Rome’s foreign policy was almost exclusively limited to

the defense of its frontiers and the repression of secession attempts,

especially in the west. The city itself lost much of its centrality after

about 200 ce, as alternative capitals were created by emperors who

needed to be closer to the frontiers or to their competitors, and it was

disastrously sacked in 410 ce.

Rome on the ground

Assessing the impact of the prolonged imperial expansion of Rome on the

human landscapes it came to occupy has become harder in recent decades.

For centuries, historians, politicians, schoolmasters, and Grand Tourists

equated the diffusion of traits such as official inscriptions in stone,

0 500 1000 meters

Mausoleumof Hadrian

Basilicaof

St Peter

1 Altar of Augustan Peace2 Temple of Sun (Sol Invictus)3 Column of Marcus Aurelius4 Pantheon5 Baths of Constantine6 Licinian Pavilion

Barracksof the

Praetorian GuardAqua Virgo

Circus Maxim

us

LateranBasilica

Aqua Claudia

Aqua Antoniniana

Aqua Alsietina

1

2

3

4 5

6

Sessorian Palace

Baths ofDiocletian

Baths of Caracalla

River Tiber

River Tib

er

Aurelian W

alls

Aqua Anio

Aqua Marcia

ForumRomanum

Map 25.4 Rome around 330 ce.

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526



air-heated bathhouses, or legionary camps with a profoundly transformative

experience. Idealists may have exalted Rome’s civilizing mission, materialists

measured a shift in the modes of production, and postcolonialists deplor-

ingly charted the demise of local traditions, but they all implicitly agreed

that Rome had, for better or worse, effected a cultural revolution. In these

reconstructions, the instances that were considered paradigmatic were the

latter continental conquests (which often geographically overlapped with

the modern nations where this scholarship was being created), rather than

the more crucial Mediterranean ones. Now, mostly thanks to archaeological

data of a finer quality, the picture has become much more nuanced, making

it impossible to explain cases as disparate as those of central Italy, Morocco,

and Austria with the same model. At the very least, a fundamental distinc-

tion must be drawn between the parts of the empire that were already

urbanized before the conquest and those that became urbanized after it, or

not at all. While they may show outward similarities, if one focuses on

indicators like public architecture or inscriptions, the underlying cultural

dynamics are profoundly different. Where cities already existed, they seam-

lessly continued to function as such, building on the commonalities that

Mediterranean urban culture had developed throughout the first millen-

nium bce. In the rest of the empire, from the Apennine and Alpine ridges to

the British Fens and Libya, cities or city-like local governments had to be

founded, resulting in a much greater overall impact.11

Production and economy have been recently highlighted as an area where

Roman expansion would have caused massive changes. In the agricultural

sphere, for instance, large plantation estates called villas spread virtually

everywhere across the empire, supposedly revolutionizing productive struc-

tures and agrarian power relationships by colonizing land seized from local

small farmers. A closer examination of the villa phenomenon, however,

shows that it originated in central Italy at the end of the second century

bce, centuries after the Roman conquest, and it was often linked to the status

display of local aristocrats more than to investment cash-cropping. The latter

appeared eventually and only in highly special areas connected with the

supply of large cities, such as the immediate hinterland of Rome or the

Mediterranean bread and oil baskets. Elsewhere, and especially in the outer

11 S. J. Keay and N. Terrenato (eds.), Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization(Oxford: Oxbow, 2001); N. Terrenato, “The Cultural Implications of the RomanConquest,” in E. Bispham (ed.), Roman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2008), pp. 234–64.


527



provinces, the existing peasant society was not replaced by gangs of chattel

slaves, and data supporting agricultural intensification after the great expan-

sion of the third century bce are generally scarce. In terms of trade and

mining, there is macroscopic evidence of economic development between

the second century bce and the second century ce. The frequency of Medi-

terranean shipwrecks peaked in this period and arctic ice cores indicate a vast

increase in the smelting of lead-associated metals. Average height was

apparently on the rise, suggesting better diet. Commercial hubs, such as

Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, reached a size and complexity that would

not be seen again until the Industrial Revolution. These findings, however,

need to be contrasted with the multitude of local contexts, which show little

or no economic development. This is true of many continental areas but also

of large parts of the urbanized East, such as continental Greece, where there

is even a decline compared to the pre-conquest levels.12

The infrastructural network clearly continued to be a priority for the

central government. Roads, bridges, aqueducts, drainage channels, dams,

and water mills were built at a fast rate and with much improved engineer-

ing and building techniques. They certainly played the same role in the

outer provinces as they did in Italy of offering tangible proof of the benefits

of annexation. But their success naturally was a direct function of the need

that the locals had for them, which was not everywhere as pronounced as in

the Mediterranean. This was especially true where taxation was particularly

unwelcome, for example, in areas that had no prior experience of it and that

had little access to the coinage needed to pay it. Thus the same centrally

instigated policies could have very different outcomes across the span of the

empire. Another factor contributing to the heterogeneity of the empire is

represented by its standing army. Once the constant expansion petered out,

large contingents tended to be permanently stationed, typically along the

frontier. The presence of thousands of people drawn from all over the

empire and beyond, paid in cash, centrally housed, fed, and equipped

obviously had a very significant local impact that would often exceed the

one felt by less peripheral regions, away from the frontier.

To the spatial dishomogeneity of the empire, one must add the complex

changes that took place once it had more or less stabilized, during the

second through fourth centuries ce. After a long stint, the Italian Peninsula

all but lost its centrality, along with treasured perks, such as its tax

12 W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of theGreco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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528



exemption or demilitarization. Rome was only one of the many cities where

short-lived emperors could set up their court. The eastern, Greek-speaking

half of the empire, destined to outlive the western one by about a thousand

years, experienced renewed development and went on improving its urban

and extra-urban infrastructure, which elsewhere had started to decline.

Italian wine and oil stopped being widely exported overseas, replaced by

Spanish, African, and Oriental exports. Byzantium and Alexandria emerged

as the new political, economic, and cultural hubs of the Mediterranean

world. In short, the center of gravity slowly shifted back East, bringing the

experience of Rome to a close and leaving continental Europe to its own

distinctive historical trajectory (Map 25.5).

The distinctiveness and paradigmaticvalue of Rome

Stepping back to consider ancient Rome in its broader historical context

and among other empires immediately reveals an apparent paradox. On

the one hand, few political formations have had the same name recognition

in our consciousness, or have figured so prominently in our political

discourse, in our cultural imagery, and in the architecture of our cities.

And yet, the scholarship on Rome has remained largely insulated from the

0 250 500 750 1000 km

0 250 500 miles

Londinium

Burdigala

Tarraco

Iol Caesarea CarthagoTingi

Corduba

Emerita Augusta

Lepcis Magna CyreneAlexandria

Ptolemais

Caesarea

Palmyra

Antioch

Carrhae

Edessa

Callinicum

Caesarea(Mazaca)

Nicomedia

Byzantium/Constantinople

Adrianople

SerdicaSalona

Sirmium

Roma

Verona

Carnuntum

Arelate

B l a c k S e a

I n t e r n u m M a r e

Ca

s pi a

n S

ea

Re

d

Se

a

OR

IE

N

S

Nile

NOBATAE

S A R AC E N S

E uphrates

Tigris

Stra

ta D

iocl

etia

na

Thessalonica

Danube

Rh

en

us

Padus

Lugdunum Mediolanum

QUINQUEGENTIANI

HI

SP

AN

IA

E

VIENNENSIS

G A L L I A E

PANNON

IAE

G OT H SF R A N K S

BRUC TERI

Danub e SC

YTH

IA

IT

AL

IA

AF

RI

CA

BRITANNIAE

AugustaTreverorum

A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

MO

E

S

I

A

E

A S I A N A

P O N T I C A

THRA

CIA

S A H A R A D E S E R T

Many stretches of the boundaries shown are only approximate. The provincial boundaries within Britain are unknown.

Diocese of Britanniae comprises 4 provinces, Galliae 8, Viennensis 7, Hispaniae 6, Africa 7, Italia 12, Pannoniae 7, Moesiae 11, Thracia 6, Asiana 9, Pontica 7 and Oriens 16.

Map 25.5 The later Roman Empire.


529



great intellectual syntheses on complex societies. For instance, state forma-

tion studies hardly ever consider Italy in its near universal comparisons, and

the same is true for historical anthropology and sociology. Perhaps because

of its exceptional value as a paradigm of imperial discipline and organization,

the Roman Empire could not be analyzed with the help of general theories

prevailing in the social sciences, nor brought to bear on them. The few

times that this has happened, the results have made as little impression in

the specialist literature as in the broader one. In light of this, it is essential to

evaluate how unusual Rome actually was, once it is freed from its

nineteenth-century encrustations and it is measured on the same scale

as other comparable entities. To be sure, some defining elements appear

to be rather common. Urban centrality, land-based taxation, army draft,

provincial administration, specialized palace bureaucracy, performance of

power, imperial cult, to name just a few, can all be found in many large

territorial states. Other features, as it is to be expected, are less typical but far

from unique, such as the primacy that was given, at least formally, to land-

based wealth or the role that legal litigation had in elite transactions.

Surprisingly, one trait that is not a part of its stock image but may set

Rome apart from many other empires is its ethnic and cultural inclusiveness.

Having fashioned a very hazy concept of their own identity, the expanding

Romans focused primarily on sociopolitical and citizenship status to deter-

mine who had a stake in the empire. Largely ignoring background, lan-

guage, skin color (or other physical traits), religion or customs, the

newcomers to the empire were only assessed in terms of their local rank,

their land ownership, their urbaneness (urbanus meant civilized in Latin),

and their willingness to participate in the imperial venture. By admitting

millions of people into its citizenship over the course of five centuries, Rome

ceased to exist as an ancient city in the proper sense of the word and became

an exploded political entity whose local administration overlapped with the

imperial one, whose electorate extended to the ends of the world, whose

culture was conflated with a hybrid patchwork of ideas woven across

millions of square kilometers. There is little doubt that those who were

changed the most by the conquest were the Romans themselves.

further readings

Aldrete, G. S., Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2007).

Ammerman, A. J., “Environmental Archaeology in the Velabrum, Rome: Interim

Report,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 11 (1998), 213–23.

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Badian, E., Foreign Clientelae, 264–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

Champion, C. B., Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources (Malden, MA: Blackwell

Pubblishers, 2004).

Coarelli, F., Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2007).

Dyson, S. L., The Roman Countryside (London: Duckworth, 2003).

Giardina, A., and A. Vauchez, Rome, l’idee et le mythe: du Moyen Age a nos jours (Paris:

Fayard, 2000).

Harris, W. V., War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1979).

Laurence, R., The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (London: Routledge,

1999).

Millett, M., The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Osborne, R., and B. Cunliffe (eds.), Mediterranean Urbanization 800–600 BC (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005).

Potter, D. S., The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180–395 (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Schiavone, A., The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2000).

Torelli, M., Studies in the Romanization of Italy (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,

1995).

Wallace-Hadrill, A.,Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008).


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Documents

The archetypal imperial city: the rise of Rome