Conquering Republic, Revolutionary Politics

Rome originated as a city-state located on the river Tiber in west-central Italy in the landscape of Latium. Only one among the hundreds, mostly small, city-states of Hellenic, Phoenician, Etruscan, and Latin extraction that dotted the littoral regions of the ancient Mediterranean, it would go on to an unusual career.

Military Mobilization

As an explanation, however, the imperialist ethos of Roman society is of limited value, just as the later Muslim conquest cannot be explained solely by reference to the particular values cultivated by Islam as a religion. After all, their contempo­rary Christian Roman or Zoroastrian Sassanian opponents were no less oriented toward conquest. The truth is that imperialist ambitions of this sort were widely shared among ancient societies and that war was a regular feature.^[638] Even so, most states remained stuck in their expansionist tracks; they were unable to muster suffi­cient manpower resources, either because they could not recruit sufficient numbers from the peasant majority or because they were too locally confined and lacked a big enough catchment area.

The city-states of the Mediterranean represented a sedentary solution to the problem of mobilization. Most of population lived within a day or two's walk from the urban center, and full citizenship came with an obligation to take part in wars fought by the community. The ability to call to arms a large part of the citizenry makes the ancient city-state appear to be parallel to the war-making capacity of no­madic tribes.^[639] In the former case, though, high military participation rates were achieved on the basis of a peasant society. Historically, peasants have often been under obligations of various kinds to aristocratic landlords, and were therefore un­available for military service. When these controls were lowered, a considerable military potential was freed up. The success of the Qin dynasty in absorbing its neighboring monarchic rivals and creating the first unified empire in Chinese his­tory was achieved by curtailing the rights of the aristocracy and making the peas­antry available for military service.

Something similar obtained in the roughly contemporary Roman city-state. Like the Qin monarchy, it also benefited from size.

The Rise to Mediterranean Hegemony

The strength of the coalition was tested in the third century, weathering a series of grave and protracted wars.

By the end of the so-called Second Punic War in 201 bce, the balance of power had decisively shifted in the Mediterranean. The truth was quickly and painfully brought home to the two remaining great powers of the region—the Antigonid and Seleucid monarchies of Macedon and Persia. Within a decade, the wings of both powers had been robustly clipped and Roman armies had won brilliant victories in distant Thessaly and Anatolia. Soon after, any hope for recovery was nipped in the bud. In 168 bce, the kingdom of Macedon suffered an instant death on the battle­field, while Seleucid attempts to compensate for their losses through the conquest of Egypt were vetoed by Rome.^[646] Nothing, it seemed, could challenge the position of the hegemon, which acted with impunity and tolerated no lingering threats. In 146 bce, finally, a graphic lesson was administered to the whole Mediterranean. Both Corinth and Carthage, prominent and flourishing cities, were horribly sacked and razed to the ground—the former in retaliation for rebellion, the latter, just to be on the safe side. Mediterranean power politics now gravitated decisively around Rome. Kings even began to nominate the republic as heir to their dominions, while a substantial number of wars fought by Rome from then on would be against way­ward client rulers, be they in North Africa, Anatolia, Gaul, or Egypt. Rome had imposed itself as the arbiter of state power and order in the world.

The Character of Imperialism

Yet, some have seen the imperialism of Rome in this period to be essentially de­fensive and reactive.^[647] To be sure, their formal annexation of territories did not quite keep pace with increasing predominance. It did not necessarily have to, how­ever. Following the final victory over Macedon, the res publica was able to forgo the collection of tribute (i.e., the property tax periodically asked from the citi­zenry in times of need), since plunder and wealth generated by the empire could more than substitute for internal taxation. In the future, tribute would be paid by the provincials.^[648] In general, the political leaders of Rome were eager to keep the administration of the empire lean.

Under these circumstances, it is noticeable that, compared to the later Arab empire-builders, the Romans were relatively slow in establishing garrisons outside of Italy. This reflects an underlying difference, both in their territorial conquests and in the orientations of the two societies, one mobile and tribal and the other sed­entary and peasant. The Arabs took over substantial portions of two existing, large empires that could be secured through strategically placed garrisons.^[651] By contrast, Rome had to build her empire from the bottom up, piecing it together from a bigger and more diverse range of often smaller polities. Consolidating and amalgamating these territories ought to have been, as it would be in the later cases of Ottoman and Mughal imperialism, more of an incremental process. Even more importantly, the city-state paradigm continued to frame responses to empire. First, the army was a citizen militia, and was called up for individual campaigns. Upon the conclusion of fighting, infantry soldiers expected to be demobilized and returned to their old lives on their farms.^[652] Second, although wide sections of the population had been enfranchised, political life had been structured to ensure the control of the land­owning aristocracy. The wider population was mainly called upon to voice its con­sent for decisions made by this group and to choose among members of the elite to staff the offices of government. Third, political offices were generally based on a principle both of collegiality and short-term tenure, limited mostly to a year, to ensure that power was shared among the aristocracy rather than monopolized by a single powerful clan. Any concentration of power was watched with jealousy and suspicion within the aristocratic peer group. In combination, these institutional mechanisms served as a collective brake on individual ambition and prevented the proliferation of more permanent imperial installations and bases.^[653] None of these arrangements, however, could hold under the pressure of the social forces unleashed by the acquisition of empire.

Revolutionary Empire

In his analysis of Muslim history, Ibn Khaldun had emphasized how the conquests began to undermine the cohesive force of the conquering society, asabiyah as he called it, and resulted in civil war orfitna.^[654] Conquest changed the victors as much as the subjugated. To Roman observers of the late second and first centuries bce, the acquisition of empire began to have much the same effect. Sallust, the retired poli­tician turned historian, conjured an image of a pristine social order that had been undermined by the corruption and allure of empire. Client rulers were able to bribe the political leaders of Rome, who had become more interested in individual gain and a luxurious lifestyle than the welfare of the commonwealth.^[655] Cicero, as we saw, could wax lyrical over the ills of provincial exploitation, rapacious governors, and a general decline in the sense of patriotic duty. Others bewailed the plight of the Italian peasant who was asked to serve on long campaigns, far away from Italy, only, upon his return, to see his farm taken over by rich landowners and worked by their slaves.^[656] Ibn Khaldun had been struck by the transformation of a mobile tribal society into a group of sedentary rulers. In the Roman case, society was already sedentarized, yet its political organization was changed no less radically by its transformation into an imperial people. The general sense of dissolution voiced by contemporaries was not the product of a weakened society. Quite the reverse, development was extraor­dinarily dynamic. The wealth flowing into Italy from the empire financed Rome's growth into a true mega-city, the first in world history to reach probably a million inhabitants, and fostered urban prosperity in many parts ofthe peninsula.^[657] Pompeii, the city that famously later fell victim to a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, got its massive stone-built amphitheater long before Rome itself. At the same time, the Italian countryside was far from depopulated. The demographic situation has occu­pied generations of Roman historians, struggling to make sense of the meager evi­dence that exists, but the most plausible interpretation holds that the free peasantry kept growing even while hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported.^[658] As for the military, Rome in the first century could muster massive armies that even surpassed those that had been required to overcome Carthage. Pompey, the great general but ill-fated rival of Caesar, was able to “assemble an immense army by summoning the legions, the auxiliaries of horse and foot, and the troops of kings, tetrarchs and the like dynasts from all the overseas provinces.”^[659] But it was to fight a fellow Roman, not a foreign enemy, that this world army was assembled. The great contests were no longer with foreign opponents, but over which Roman was to rule the empire; the most formidable enemy a Roman army could meet on the battlefield was another Roman army. In the competition for power, it had become impossible to formulate a solution within the parameters of the republican city-state. With no way out under the established constitutional order, regular politics became stuck in a “Krise ohne Alternative” This phrase was coined by the German historian Christian Meier in the 1960s to explain the collapse of the Roman republican system, but seems fashioned almost as a comment on the sense of impasse that has gripped political life across many of the leading (republican) democraties in the world at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.^[660]

Across some two generations during the first century bce, wars that have tradition­ally been termed civil, but ought more appropriately to be described as intra-imperial, periodically raged even as Roman armies continued to expand the territories under Roman control at an ever increasing speed. The organizational networks mobilized by the empire went wide beyond the confines of the old city-state itself. Other elites were also to have a say, most notably the Italian allies.^[661] In what used to be interpreted as a move toward proto-national unification of the peninsula, they may simply have attempted to take over the empire.^[662] Peasant soldiers, faced with growing population and therefore with increasingly narrow prospects of owning their own farm, fought in the hope of receiving a plot of land at the end of their service. Occasionally in the past, the res publica had distributed some of the territory it won in Italy to a land- hungry peasantry. But such distributions were increasingly rare. Short on alterna­tive options to safely invest the gains from empire, the aristocracy had increased its landholdings enormously. In effect, distributions of land could now only be accom­plished by confiscating some of the Italian properties of the governing class. This was a non-starter. The opposition of the aristocracy was unyielding and so the political process reached deadlock. The situation was untenable and became revolutionary as every year putative political leaders competed openly for the control of the state. As the wealth of the empire grew, the stakes only got higher. Participating in the game of high politics increasingly required massive borrowing. For the leading protagonists, failure ceased being an option. The army was soon politicized and available as a deci­sive instrument in the struggle for power. Soldiers expected their victorious leader to get them the land which regular politics could not.^[663] Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antonius, Octavian—it seemed as though every decade had to see the rise of its own military strongman to dominate the politics of the republic. Much to the dismay of the tra­ditional ruling elite, monarchy was in the cards. The only question remaining was whether a stable solution might be found before the empire tore itself apart in brutal infighting.^[664]