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 Page A

opportunities and risks that came with
    closer political and commercial ties to Rome disrupted local patronage
    and authority, and the resulting political centralization was thus both a
    defensive response and an opportunistic one. This is most likely what
    produced the “tribes” in southern Britain in the era between Julius Caesar’s raids and the Claudian occupation. Having conquered a territory,
    the Romans explicitly encouraged the codifi cation of tribal identities to
    make better sense of alien and fl uid societies. Drawing on the eastern
    practice of governing through the leading citizens of Greek city-states,
    the Romans treated tribes as urban civitates .
    The leaders of these new tribes became romanized as they shared
    in the benefi ts of the Roman imperial project, but it is much harder
    to judge the impact of romanization on conquered majorities. Coopted tribal aristocrats contributed to the evolving imperial culture,
    but almost certainly most common people continued to identify more
    strongly with their localities than with distant Rome. Assimilation did
    28 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    not turn entire populations into Romans and probably did not bring
    much relief from demands for tribute, labor, and taxes. The empire’s
    aristocratic classes exploited their lower classes without regard as to
    whether they were Roman or not. For the vast majority of people,
    the Roman conquest did not bring assimilation and a chance to live a
    better life. While it exposed subject peoples to new ideas and cultures,
    imperial rule primarily brought greater tribute demands and more
    effi cient extraction.
    Ironically, Rome’s great imperial expansion took place under the
    republic, making it a de facto empire before it actually had an emperor.
    Rome began as a small city-state in the eighth century b.c., and its
    fi rst subjects were its neighbors in the Latin League. The league, a
    coalition of culturally related cities, was a mutual defense alliance,
    but by the early fourth century b.c. it was fi rmly under the sway
    of Rome. The Romans then imposed their will on central Italy and
    drove the Greeks from the south. By the mid-third century b.c. they
    had become a dominant power in the Mediterranean by defeating
    Carthage in the First Punic War. In the last years of the republic,
    Rome acquired Greece, most of Spain, Gaul, Libya, Numidia, Egypt,
    Syria, and substantial stretches of Asia Minor and the Balkans.
    Where the early republican leaders were initially reluctant to make
    their annexations permanent, after the civil war of 81 b.c., ambitious
    senators and military men often seized territory to further personal
    ambitions.
    At fi rst the Romans were not conscious empire builders. Sometimes Rome acquired territory at the behest of weak states that
    sought its protection; in other instances Romans fought stronger,
    threatening powers. In Asia Minor, Rome added Pergamum to the
    empire when its rulers made the Roman people their legal heirs. The
    Romans usually claimed that they fought to defend themselves, but
    as their empire grew, they became increasingly confi dent that it was
    their destiny to become a great power. As Cicero declared in 56 b.c.:
    “It was by piety and religious scruples and our sagacious understanding of a single truth, that all things are directed and ruled by the gods’
    will, that we have conquered all peoples and nations.”8
    While popular history lauds the egalitarian virtues of the Roman
    Republic, the republic was almost constantly at war. Fighting and
    rapacious plunder were facts of life. Victorious generals who killed
    Roman
    Britain 29
    more than fi ve thousand foreigners were entitled to a grand parade
    in Rome. The Romans held more than three hundred of these
    “triumphs” between 509 and 19 b.c., which means that the republic
    dispatched roughly 1.5 million of its enemies during this period.9
    These triumphs also demonstrate the naked avarice that lay behind
    Rome’s conquests. Livy