Consolidation of Power: The Imperial Monarchy of the Principate

Eventually, however, one of the military leaders managed to put the genie of civil war back in the bottle of imperial government. Octavian, the posthumously adopted heir of Julius Caesar, emerged victorious.

The Army

Under the republic, the legions had, in principle, been raised for specific campaigns. The trouble that disbanding those legions caused, however, forced the new emperor to search for a less disruptive arrangement. The conquest of Egypt, the richest re­gion in the ancient Mediterranean, had filled his coffers and so increased the range of policy choices available to the autocrat.

A stable foundation had been established for imperial rule, and the risk of rival leaders emerging much reduced. Nor were there any serious foreign rivals in sight. The armies had conquered most state-like societies, effectively extending Rome's rule around the Mediterranean, and pushing forward to the Rhine, the Danube, and into the Caucasus. Slowly a network of imperial high ways, the famous Roman roads, developed to facilitate the movement of the legions.^[672] Imperium had originally signaled power and the ability to command, but increas­ingly it also came to denote territorial possession. Colony, province, empire—the vocabulary of domination settled into a form that was ready to be adopted by rulers in later ages.^[673] To be sure, Roman armies could still suffer spectacular de­feat on the more loosely populated frontiers. Beyond the Rhine, at Kalkriese in Germany, a modern onsite, archaeological museum has brilliantly recovered the massacre of three legions in 9 ce by a tribal coalition led by a former imperial ally and army officer.^[674] Yet, such setbacks were more like the sting of a needle than a serious threat. The only real remaining threat was the Parthian Empire, which controlled much of the dominion formerly held by the Achaemenid and Seleucid dynasties. One of the leaders of the civil war era, Crassus, had lost his life and his legions on a campaign into their territory, hoping to match the glory of Pompey and Caesar. When sole rule was finally his, Augustus prudently opted for a more cautious policy. After all, he was not so desperate for glory that he needed to risk a military adventure. Rattling his saber, he managed to negotiate the return of the regimental standards previously lost by Crassus.

Aristocracy

“There can be no peace among the peoples without soldiers, no soldiers without pay, and no pay without taxes.”^[676] The order of stable empire, captured in this striking adage of the historian and senator Tacitus, had required the establish­ment of a basic division of labor. A similar concept is well known in Middle Eastern history as the circle of justice.^[677] But to the cynically observed barebones need for a monarch, a military establishment, and a tax-paying population of mostly peasant subjects, the Middle Eastern version adds the crucial dimension of justice. Some have seen in the Augustan revolution a “bureaucratic” moment of empire;^[678] that is misleading. Justice, to give everyone their due, is a virtue that only aristocrats were able forcefully to demand under the stark hierarchies of em­pire. When the Qin unified “all under heaven,” shortly before the Romans did the same in the Mediterranean, their dynasty faced rebellion within the space of a generation. The Qin were reviled for their reliance on an absolutist ideology of strict command that paid only scant attention to tradition and hierarchy. Such a bureaucratic tyranny, often referred to as legalism in Chinese historiography, quickly sparked resistance.

In the Roman case, respect for tradition required the emperor to enter into di­alogue with a range of elite communities across the empire, but above all the sen­atorial class of the city of Rome itself.^[680] The time-hallowed institutions of the Roman city-state, embodied in the republican political system, had to be pre­served, or rather reconfigured. Membership of the senatorial order, the highest echelon of the Roman imperial aristocracy, was defined by the holding of the re­publican offices: quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul. Much ink has, in this connection, been spilled by historians in order to identify the constitutional character of the new monarchical regime.^[681] But the restored republic did not provide a legal frame­work that could effectively curb the ruler. He was absolute and, in practice, above the law. Yet, saddled with the political idiom of the more egalitarian aristocratic collective of past times, the imperial monarchy has caused some commentators to focus primarily on the tension between absolutist reality and republican language. The Augustan Principate has even once been proclaimed the regime most lacking in legitimacy throughout history.^[682] The Umayyads, in instituting their caliphate, were also in parallel and illuminating fashion perceived by significant segments of Muslim society as illegitimate; they had taken power away from the traditional base among the patriarchal tribal lineages of Mecca, and their monarchy rose on the back of a civil war, orfitna, to transcend an original arrangement of government that had been rooted in the norms of egalitarian Arab conquest society.^[683] Likewise stuck between traditional legitimacy and revolutionary absolutism, the Roman emperors had the republican constitution re-tailored as one element in a wider re­form of Roman society.

Courtly Government and the Politics of Distinction and Privilege

For many, it is the narrative of the senatorial historian Tacitus, with its bitter, disil­lusioned, resentful view of the emperors, that has come to define our understanding of the monarchy. Absorbed in profligate living and personal intrigue, the emperors are portrayed as falling prey to every human vice, ruling as murderous despots and undermining all that was fine in Roman society—especially aristocratic, republican virtue.^[687] However, there was more than intractable conflict in the relationship be­tween senate and caesars. The greatest celebration of the republican past, it should be noted, was penned by Livy while he enjoyed the patronage of both Augustus and Tiberius. An anecdote survives that the former had humorously remarked that the historian seemed more of an adherent of Pompey than of his adoptive father, the more regal Julius Caesar.^[688] But that was very much a joke. What Livy's cornu­copia of exemplary tales and heroic sacrifice offered in an age of monarchy was not primarily nostalgia, but rather an ideal of self-control and service, stories of aristocrats curbing their personal ambitions and desires, winning glory by putting the commonwealth ahead of their own interests. It was Norbert Elias, the great so­ciologist, who understood that the court of a ruler worked as a disciplining force on aristocracies. Wild and unruly nobles were domesticated through the formal ceremonies and ritual exchanges that took place in the ambience of the monarch. If noblemen wanted access to the benefits of power, wealth, and prestige now controlled by the ruler, they had to discipline themselves and play by the rules of his game.^[689] In setting up a court, the Roman emperors could cannibalize the old repub­lican establishment as a set of distinctions and collective myths in order to rebuild the aristocracy and channel its competitive energies into the service of monarchy and empire.^[690]

Rebuilding, in this connection, is far from a misnomer. The brutal struggles of the civil wars era had seen many of the old established branches of the Roman ar­istocracy die out. Meanwhile, as part of the conflict, the Italian allies had, sword in hand, obtained full citizenship within the Roman body politic. Their elites were con­sequently busy muscling their way into the charmed circles of power at Rome. The monarchical revolution, Ronald Syme remarked in a classic of twentieth-century historiography, represented the rise of Italy within the ruling class.^[691] At the court of the emperor, the leading members of society came together to vie for preemi­nence and compete over access to the resources of empire. Aristocratic life remained fiercely contentious, but it now took place under the watchful gaze of the caesars. Factions of nobles that became too powerful, ambitious, or overly proud—forgetting

the proper bounds of behavior—or favorites who were elevated to high posi­tion and then overplayed their hand, were at risk of sudden death and the confis­cation of their fortunes. So too were emperors who aimed at confrontation. With intrigues, conspiracies, and reigns of terror, the Roman court took a heavy toll from its players. Merely participating in the culture of conspicuous consumption expected of aristocrats placed high, potentially crippling demands on wealth. Withdrawal from the front tier was sometimes necessary. Aristocratic families responded to the stresses of court life by narrowly limiting the number of heirs, in order to avoid having to divide up their fortune. The risk, of course, was that no child would survive to carry on the line. As a group, the high aristocracy was unable to reproduce, and hereditary succession within the senate was surprisingly low. Every generation, its ranks had to be topped up with newcomers.^[692]

Luckily, there were plenty waiting in the wings, happy to leap at the opportu­nity and vicariously to bask in the glory of sublime and supreme lordship. Listen to Velleius Paterculus, a high-ranking military officer and loyal follower of Tiberius, who describes the reaction of one Germanic leader when approaching the em­peror: “By your grace and permission, Caesar, today I have seen the gods that I pre­viously only heard about and I have neither wished for nor felt a happier day in my life.”^[693] At that moment, the tribal leader was allowed to clasp the hand of the mighty Roman before retreating, all the while keeping his face turned in awe toward the numinous figure of Tiberius. The aristocracy, increasingly attuned to service as an ideal, colluded with the emperor to create and convey an image of elevated, even divine, lordship. The Imperator, Caesar Augustus, was not only commander­in-chief and leader of the senate, he rose above the individual constituencies of the empire: father of the fatherland, deity, ruler of the world. In that stratosphere, the only available model was Alexander the Great. As an emblem of kingship and world conquest, the rival courts of his Greco-Macedonian successors had forged a culture of universal monarchy around his example.^[694] Nothing, moreover, could match the splendor, opulence, and sophistication of Hellenistic civilization. When victorious Roman generals began to parade its products in triumph, the elite of Roman society were not slow to take inspiration. The Roman aristocracy began to invest its newly won wealth in the accoutrements of Greek culture. With the establishment of the imperial monarchy, this activity of cultural appropriation reached its creative cul­mination. Their sway reaching wider, their riches greater, the Roman emperors sent a host of artisans, writers, and philosophers to botanize in the garden of Greek cul­ture to surpass their predecessors.

From the court in Rome, a new resplendent model of monarchy was projected across and beyond the Mediterranean.^[695] Glistening marble, majestic columns, and soaring vaults were combined in a new architectural language of imperial gran­deur. Each reign saw its monumental additions to a steadily accumulating cityscape of lavish buildings, constantly pushing against the boundaries of the possible and the laws of gravity. The impressive setting of the capital was animated by forms of mass entertainment and public amenities. A series of vast bath complexes, athletic grounds, and libraries was gradually erected to adorn the capital and demonstrate the public-mindedness of the emperors. More famous today are the shows of pop­ular entertainment. Gladiatorial fights, staged hunts, and horse racing were pro­vided galore. In the arena, never far from the palace, the sole ruler could shower in the cheers of an adoring crowd. But the formula of caesarian largesse says “bread and circuses, panem et circenses” and so the emperor also took responsibility for the food supply of the capital and feeding the anxious urban crowd. A bread dole, pro­viding basic subsistence, perhaps for around 400,000 people, was organized out of the annual grain tribute sent each spring from Alexandria in Egypt.^[696]

Imperial Rome was maintained at a level that would have made it the largest city in the world and served as the awe-inspiring, dazzling stage of the caesars.^[697] From here they broadcast the beginning of a new golden age. Much as the Great Mughal Akbar would later announce a fresh divine dispensation for humanity at the turn of the first Muslim millennium, the imperial caesars proclaimed a rejuvenation of time and the cycles of human existence. They presided over an era of pros­perity and abundance, when peace and justice returned to bestow their bountiful blessings on humankind.^[698] This program was reflected in the imperial coinage, which was struck in quantities larger than any time previously in recorded history for the dual purpose of paying the army and receiving taxes. No other medium enjoyed such wide circulation in the empire. The coins bore the portrait of the ruler and were stamped with reassuring slogans such as “fairness,” “piety,” “gener­osity,” “virtue,” and “providence.”^[699] Subjects were invited to pin their hopes on the emperors and come to the lofty ruler with their problems. Those best placed and most intended to respond to this call were the narrow stratum of elite landowners found everywhere across the empire.

The most powerful families in imperial society gravitated to the court in Rome, where they were needed to fill ceremonial duties and government positions. Annual officeholders, commanders of legions, and provincial governors were selected from a pool of some 600 senators and perhaps as many knights. The formal establishment was miniscule compared to the size of the empire. Fewer than 200 officials were re­quired on “overseas” duty annually. To this, of course, must be added the far more numerous slave servants, soldiers, and friends who would normally accompany them. Still, it is not an exaggeration that the empire represented, as it has aptly been phrased, a form of “government without bureaucracy.”^[700] Officeholders were gen­erally recalled after only a few years of service. Efficiency was less important than preventing rebellion by keeping officials from putting down roots in provincial so­ciety and building up a power base of their own. This light structure could work only because the pull of the court extended far beyond this select group of privi­leged officials.

A steady stream of delegations from provincial communities, led by their local grandees, came to the seat of the emperor seeking to obtain privileges, have their grievances heard, or receive a ruling in legal cases.^[701] At court, the more estab­lished inner circle of the aristocracy acted as brokers who mediated the access of provincials to the supreme monarch. In the provinces, meanwhile, as the appointed representatives of Caesar, members of the same aristocratic class oversaw the oper­ation of subject society and the mediation of its conflicts.^[702] Provincial assizes, in­creasingly organized around the celebration of a cult to the emperor, served as fora where Roman governors met with provincial elites to discuss the matters of their region.^[703] Local magnates would here receive the honor of sponsoring the festivities, which in addition to generous sacrifices frequently came to include horse races and gladiatorial shows, much as in Rome, that the affairs of the province might be settled in grand and glorious circumstances. On these occasions, the most powerful and prominent would, almost ritually, be voted honors by the provincial assemblies and letters would be sent, via the governor, with news of the happy event to the ruler, who would reply back with polite appreciation of the worthy recipient.^[704] Touring their provinces, governors offered opportunities to hear cases. And while the number of petitioners on court days could be overwhelming, governors and their staff had very limited means to get to the bottom of every instance, let alone enforce their rulings. They were simply too few in number effectively to tackle the vast majority of cases. They therefore generally responded in a cautious manner, often merely asking a local official to take another look.^[705]

The Competition of Conspicuous Elite Refinement: Civilization

Such a regal, impassive style of government suited no one more than the local elites of the empire. It meant that they were left to run actual local government and, in the long run, they responded with enthusiasm. With the duty to govern came the opportunities of power. Prominent local families eagerly joined in mutual compe­tition, attempting to emulate, and at times even to outdo, the demanding standards of the imperial court in their own quest for status and privilege. The early Iron Age frontier of state-formation had spread from the Near East into the Mediterranean, taking the form of city-states. These continued to constitute the unit of Roman con­quest, and in areas where they were absent, the empire attempted to organize new subject communities according to this principle. With their position fortified, ulti­mately by the backing of the imperial army, landowning elites asserted their domi­nant position in urban government, strengthened their hold on the peasantry, and invested their gains from the Roman peace in the adornment of their cities and the adoption of conspicuous lifestyles (much as described by Lewis in Chap. 8 about the Han dynasty). Gradually, the face of provincial society was transformed as cities were increasingly decorated with monumental buildings and the countryside studded with aristocratic villa estates.^[706] The discerning modern traveler, touring the extant ruins, will not fail to note large variations in style and building types be­tween regions, as well as enormous differences in the level of wealth on display. Even so, the remains all very clearly reflect the same broad repertoire of forms that came to circulate in a competitive and creative dialogue across the imperial world.^[707]

Archaeologists used to speak of this cultural transformation as a process of Romanization. Behind this concept lay two powerful ideas of the nineteenth cen­tury —nation-building and the civilizing mission that justified overseas coloniza­tion. It must be emphasized, however, that the spread of Roman imperial culture was not inspired by a vision of bringing modernity to people whom history had seemingly left behind. Nor was it based on a program of creating national unity out of empire and integrating broad segments of the population. This was, of course, the ambition of state-builders in the nineteenth century, when peasants were de­liberately turned into national citizens. Such a thing would have required the in­troduction of general schooling. No such attempt was made (or even conceived). It would, in any case, have missed the purpose of imperial civilization.^[708] The goal was the imposition and performance of distinction, not the forging of cultural homoge­neity.^[709] Once offered a model and the chance, elites seized initiative and cultivated themselves to stand apart from the common folk, the hoi polloi as they were called pejoratively in Greek or, in Latin, vulgus, the term from which we derive “vulgar.” Modes of speech became a central dimension of elite identity. Acquiring one of the two idioms current at court, a refined version of either Latin or Greek, members of the provincial elite joined in celebration of an ornate and refined literary culture.^[710] Grand epics and lyric odes, complex philosophy and sonorous rhetoric, few of these genres would have been attuned to the realist prose of the bourgeois novelists that shaped the public image of nineteenth-century colonialism. Yet, every empire, it seems, must generate a novel of its own.^[711]

In the Roman Empire, the Metamorphoses of the North African, Latin writer, and dabbler in philosophy, Apuleius, may stand in for all the others. Driven by sheer joy of narrating and often wallowing in superstitious tales of witchcraft, the exuberant fable reads like anything but a heroic edifying story. Comic failure, in fact, is what propels the narrative. The main protagonist Lucius has an unfortu­nate interest in magic that constantly gets him into trouble. Eventually, an exper­iment goes horribly wrong and he finds himself humiliatingly transformed into a ludicrous ass. However, the text is anything but low brow. The scurrilous flow of material is punctuated, for instance, by the noble and delicate fairy tale of Cupid and Psyche (whose basic plot continues to be retold as “Beauty and the Beast”). What keeps the rampant textual growth together is a fascination with the mar­velous. The novel reads almost like a discerning collector’s cabinet of curiosities assembled from across the world of the empire and mastered in an exceedingly demanding idiom. Apuleius does not stoop to popular taste. The text is teeming with learned mythological references, airy Neo-Platonic philosophy, and arcane, studied vocabulary, all blended in a virtuoso performance. Reading Apuleius was not for everyman, but took someone who had the money and time to cultivate his tastes and acquire a command of all the registers of imperial urban and court cul­ture. ^[712] Concern about the preservation of high status is a thread that runs through the text. The stunning beauty of Psyche, for instance, attracts the envy of Venus. Disaster looms for the unfortunate girl. In the end, however, her genuine nobility will be the thing that carries her safely through the various trials prepared for her by the hostile goddess. In spite of much suffering and humiliation, the upright dig­nity of her character is vindicated and paves the way for a happy end: marriage to the god Amor. In like fashion, Lucius, himself of a good landowning family, is fi­nally freed from his asinine form when he seeks rebirth in the Neo-Platonically in­spired mysteries of the goddess Isis. Unruly magic is, in the end, tamed by reason, hierarchy, and divine truth.

Erecting an imposing barrier to entry, the luster of the literary culture, of which the Metamorphoses is an exemplary expression, facilitated elites with an attractive medium, both exclusive and universal, that enabled their integration into a wider ruling society stretching across local communities.^[713] Apuleius, although hailing from North Africa, could write himself into an empire-wide community of the se­lect few, the best men—in short, the aristocrats. Imperial Latin and Greek belong to a group of cosmopolitan Old World elite languages that the Indologist Sheldon Pollock has analyzed in relation to Sanskrit.^[714] This group, however, would also include Arabic or Persian, for instance. Sometimes denigrated as dead, these lan­guages depended on distancing themselves from the fluid everyday practices of spoken dialect. Their linguistic expression was fixed by a complex grammar and a demanding canon of classical works, being held up as a universal standard. For Latin, the commanding classics included Cicero and the poets of the Augustan Court—Virgil, Horace, Ovid. These and a few other authors came to set the tone for proper Latin, and their works continue to this day to provide the textual material through which students receive their basic instruction in the language. A studied idiom, the high languages were severed from immediate time and place. They could not be mastered spontaneously, but had to be acquired. With access to the right books and a capable grammarian, however, they could be learned anywhere and adopted by social elites from all over the empire, no matter their local language environment.^[715]

Administration and the Process of Light Taxation

If the consolidation of monarchy, then, begat the dissemination of a courtly and urban style of elite rule, rather than the rise of a bureaucracy, the languages of power nevertheless required more than the register of prestige, in particular that of ad­ministrative account; lands had to be surveyed and registered, taxes recorded.^[716] Sanskrit, on the other hand, seems mostly to have been divorced from such mun­dane matters, leaving this domain to other languages. The Umayyad caliphs, in consolidating their court and model of universal monarchy, went in the opposite direction, prescribing the use of Arabic in scribal offices around their empire. In Egypt, whose dry conditions have blessed the ancient historian by preserving vast amounts of discarded documentary records, provincial administration began to switch from Greek to Arabic, even though the former had been in use for most of the previous millennium.^[717] Latin may be located somewhere between these two alternatives. Where there was already a literary and administrative language in place, those societies continued to work through this medium, especially if it was Greek (as in Egypt). This was generally the case in the Eastern half of the empire. Since the conquests of Alexander, Hellenistic courts had established Greek as the predominant language of power and record-keeping in the region and its hold, if anything, widened and deepened under the Romans.^[718] In the Western part of the empire, the situation was very different. No literary language held a similarly strong position, and Latin could claim hegemony. In many areas, the introduction of Latin simply coincided with the first imposition of written records and taxation. Across the empire, the stable rule of the emperors saw the introduction of a more exten­sive regime of measuring provincial lands. It was no coincidence that Luke, in the New Testament, imputed an order to Caesar Augustus “that the whole world should be registered.”^[719] Nonetheless, the observation was apocryphal, mythologizing the powers of the distant, elevated lord: no census was ever conducted on an empire­wide basis. From province to province, the frequency and rigor with which it was undertaken varied considerably. Some areas were perhaps never even touched by it. There were, in any case, very few attempts to raise the rate of taxation and many communities would have expected to deliver the same, more or less customary amount, year after year. The level of taxation actually required to fund the appa­ratus of empire was fairly moderate; estimates fluctuate around 5 percent of gross production.^[720]

The imperial government, therefore, was less substantial than it might seem at a first glance. Merely looking at the formal capacity of the imperial state to order heads to be counted and property registered may mislead. A historian weaned on Foucault, and his theories of the panoptic regulatory powers of the state, might see proof of a strong Leviathan capable of penetrating to the lowest levels of society.^[721] But the imperial state had neither the capacity, nor the need, to impose such forms of direct supervision on the subject population. Instead, it was the local landowning elites who, from their dominant position in the city-councils around the empire, ac­tually controlled and organized, or, as they might have preferred to phrase it to im­perial officials, bore the burden of collecting the tribute. They passed on the taxes, but also constituted a screen between imperial authorities and the population, a filter that rendered the underlying society less transparent to central government, whatever its formal capacities. This situation was generally characteristic of vast agrarian empires and is well described for late imperial China and the Qing dy­nasty.^[722] Students of that society, however, will also teach the ancient historian that the endemic corruption of local power-holders and their siphoning of part of the revenues might not necessarily pose a grave problem so long as the imperial coffers received enough to cover their expenses.^[723] Indeed, the system depended on these local elites ^[724] and, in the Roman case, the emperors took steps to strengthen their position. The role of Roman tax-farming corporations—which, under the Republic had bought the right to collect the taxes in some of the most affluent provinces and caused considerable conflict—was much reduced. The all-important land tax was taken away from them, and subsequently local elites had only to deal with impe­rial officials sent to the province. That, however, remained a source of conflict, as in the time of Cicero. Aristocrats, local as well as regional, often in collusion with one another, expected to be able to use their position to tap into the province’s revenue flows. The conflicts and rivalries arising from these activities continued to provoke trials of governors accused of misconduct in Rome. But at least the local elite could now expect to hold on to much of the profits that had previously been monopolized by Roman corporations.^[725]

The Stability of Ecumenic Hegenomy

These, then, were the building-blocks of the consolidated peace of empire: a net­work of local elites connected to the imperial court and backed by what, at the time, was the largest standing army in history. Spanning an area from modern Scotland in the northwest to the Sudan in the southeast, the titanic dimensions of the realm seemed to defy logistical constraints and make impossible demands on transport technologies that were based on wind energy and muscle power. Yet, in the ab­sence of intense external competition and strong pressures to increase resource extraction, the Roman order proved surprisingly stable. The constancy of impe­rial requirements meant that negotiations with local power-holders did not have to be continuously reopened over the introduction of new claims. Emperors would sometimes make a show of auctioning off the riches that kept piling up in their palaces, rather than fill gaps in their finances through new tax demands. It even became customary for the ruler to prove his benevolence intermittently by a ge­neral cancellation of tax arrears that had accumulated over decades.^[726] Fiscal ease of that kind was helped by an expanding economy. The reduction of warfare inside the empire had relaxed one of the key brakes on the size of ancient populations and spawned a period of growth. More people meant more peasant producers and a larger economy. The share of gross production required by the imperial apparatus for its annual operations, in fact, very likely declined during the first centuries of the Common Era.^[727] Most conflicts, therefore, stayed manageable and within bounds. Nevertheless, the Roman order was an order based on violent subjection, and every generation saw discontent and uprising.^[728] However tenacious, rebels could nor­mally be snuffed out because they remained locally confined. The imperial army, by contrast, was able to rely on the seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of mobilized soldiers stationed around the realm and, if need be, could patiently grind down re­sistance (as we saw it happen in the prologue of Chap. 1 in Volume 1).

Under these conditions, the forces of integration slowly drew the different re­gions closer together. Increasing numbers of people gradually oriented themselves toward Roman modes of government; these held the advantage of both prestige and supreme authority. Roman law, for instance, began to be used by some in the provinces so that they might appeal to or enjoy the sanction of the caesars and their governors.^[729] Some among the peasant population would also have acquired a limited, practical capacity in either of the imperial languages, through their own time ofservice in the army or in order to be able to deal with the urban tax collecting authorities. It has even been suggested that the political and cultural integration of the empire is best understood as the development of a broad consensus uniting the populations of the far-flung realm.^[730] But if so, it was thin and loose in char­acter. Presiding over the imperial peace in the eastern Mediterranean were urban elites who tended to think of themselves more as Hellenes than Romans. However, there was nothing inherently subversive about the persistence of such loyalties. The conspicuous celebration of local identity in literary compositions and reli­gious festivals took place under the patronage of the emperors.^[731] Integration, in short, was far from uniform, and the pressure to conform had clear boundaries. One did not have to become Roman to stay a loyal subject; it was more a status than an exclusive identity.^[732] Significant diversity remained the norm under the cosmopolitan veneer of imperial power, and those differences were reinforced by hierarchical discrimination. Italy, the imperial heartland, along with a number of especially privileged communities, was free from the land tax. Meanwhile the rate and form of payment of this tax varied considerably between provinces, each of which had very different customs and agricultural regimes. The cultural inte­gration achieved by the empire, in that case, is best likened to a loose ecumene, much akin to that which developed under the Islamic caliphate. Several centuries were to pass before a majority of the population had switched to the privileged faith of the rulers.^[733] This, too, was the state of affairs in the Roman world. The province of Egypt, which has left better documentation than any other, reveals a society in which a little Latin was used by the Roman authorities, but Greek dominated as the argot of government. Nevertheless, a form of Egyptian con­tinued to be the main language of everyday peasant life, even as a significant segment became functionally bilingual. The great literary tradition of the rulers coexisted in creative and hierarchical dialogue with the myriad little traditions of local communities.^[734]