The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall by Timothy H. Parsons Read Free Book Online

building. In a
    speech condemning an abusive governor in Sicily, Cicero warned that
    misrule would turn the world against the Rome. “Within the bounds
    of Ocean there is no longer any place so distant or so out of the way
    that the wanton and oppressive deeds of our countrymen have not
    penetrated there in recent years. Rome can no longer hold out against
    the whole world—I do not mean against its power and arms in war,
    but against its groans and tears and lamentations.”6
    Like-minded statesmen worried that unchecked imperial expansion would eventually destroy the republic. The limits of travel
    and communication in the ancient world raised serious concerns in
    the Senate about whether Roman representative institutions could
    include remote alien populations. Even the Greeks brought the threat
    of degenerative decadence through their enticing learning, arts, and
    material luxuries. Far from exalting in Rome’s triumph over Greece,
    Pliny lamented that “through conquering we have been conquered.”7
    Conversely, subjugating northern peoples brought the reverse threat
    of contamination through the adulteration and debasement of the
    superior Roman culture.
    Indeed, promiscuity in granting citizenship to useful allies eventually transformed the very nature of the empire. The Greeks defi ed
    assimilation, but in the west, where identities were more fl uid, imperial rule produced a new hybrid ruling culture. But this process of
    romanization, a modern academic concept, did not mean the metamorphosis of tribal barbarians into civilized Romans. Imperial rule
    actually transformed the Romans themselves: as the empire absorbed
    a vast array of conquered peoples and cultures, imperial institutions
    and values evolved constantly as new groups of elites became citizens.
    It is therefore better to think of the culture of the empire as mixed
    and borrowed rather than homogenously Roman.
    Romans believed that the primary basis of identity in Britain and
    the rest of the western empire was the civitas . In the Mediterranean
    world this term meant a city-state inhabited by citizens ( cives ). In
    western Europe, where there were few actual cities, the civitas became
    a tribal unit. These civitates (tribes) were small-scale nonliterate polities, sometimes anchored by an urban center or oppidum , in other
    cases not. It is tempting to refer to them as “Celts” on the assumption
    Roman
    Britain 27
    that they spoke variants of the same language and shared a common
    culture. Herodotus called the inhabitants of southern Gaul “Keltoi,”
    but archaeologically there were signifi cant variations in the material
    cultures of western Europe in the preconquest era.
    Identities were overwhelmingly local in the ancient world, and a
    tribal label was not a mark of barbarity. Even the Romans began as
    a tribal people. The original inhabitants of the city of Rome divided
    themselves into thirty-fi ve tribes, which made tribal membership a
    marker of citizenship. Noncitizens in Rome were, by defi nition, tribeless. Under the republic, the tribe became an electoral unit that
    organized citizens for military service and taxation. Romans offi cially
    inherited tribal identities from fathers and patrons, but the republic
    also had the authority to shift citizens from one tribe to another.
    In Britain and the rest of western Europe, the Romans assumed
    that “barbaric” tribal peoples in the more conventional modern sense
    represented a less advanced stage of social development. But in fact
    these tribal identities probably emerged in response to Roman imperial expansion. Conventional historical narratives often excused
    empire building as a defensive response to hostile “tribal” peoples, but
    it is more likely that culturally diverse and multilingual groups on the
    imperial frontier coalesced into more coherent political and social units
    when faced with economic domination and possible conquest by a powerful expansionist state. The