by Kevin Reilly
The Worlds of Rome and China
The differences between classical Rome and China were far greater than the differences between India and Greece. China was much older, having created a Bronze Age culture at least 1,000 years before the legendary foundation of Rome, with little or no contact with the Bronze Age societies of the Middle East, Africa, and India. Chinese language families were different from the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Chinese written characters, which signified words, were not primarily phonetic or sound based, and Chinese foods, housing, and religion developed independently of the other great civilizations.
There were similarities between these great empires, however. Both were large territorial states in which a central government controlled numerous subject peoples. The unification of China and the expansion of Rome occurred simultaneously during the classical Iron Age, between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Each empire ruled at least 50 million people in an area of over 12 million square miles. The Chinese Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) probably supported a larger population, partly because Chinese agriculture was more intensive than Roman. Both regimes managed to fund and field enormous armies, tax and control competitors for power in their own aristocracies, and convert millions to their cultural ideas. After the second century CE, however, both became increasingly vulnerable to the nomadic people of the steppe whom both called “barbarians.”
Rome
Greco-Roman Society and Hellenism . In its early centuries, from the fourth to the first century BCE, Roman society followed many of the ways of Greece. Romans imbibed Greek culture, imitated its literature and art, and prided themselves on their institutions of self-government. Citizenship was even more widespread in Rome during the Roman republic (fourth to first century BCE) than it had been in Greece.
Greece, in turn, had both defeated itself and converted its neighbors. The Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta defeated Athens, exhausted the Greek city-states and made them easy prey to the armies of Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great. Alexander, trained by Aristotle, brought Greek culture as far as India before he died in Babylon in 323 BCE. The huge empire of Greek learning that Alexander forged and left to his generals after his death has been called Hellenistic to describe the continuing importance of Greek political and cultural models.
Rome expanded in the third and second centuries BCE in the shadow of that Hellenistic world. Initially a city-state, Rome annexed other city-states in Italy, many former Greek colonies, so that it controlled the whole Italian peninsula by 235 BCE, thus confronting Carthage in Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. In three wars (264-146 BCE) Rome defeated Carthage, securing important silver mines in Spain and a western Mediterranean empire. The conquest of the Hellenistic kingdoms of Greece and Asia followed. But with the conquest of Macedonia in 196 BCE, the Roman Senate presented Roman troops as liberators, bringing the “freedom of the Greeks” against Asian kings and tyrants, a propaganda move that reflected Roman identification with Greek ideas of freedom, constitutionalism, and the rule of law.
Republic Not a Democracy . The Roman republic (which lasted until 27 BCE) was not a democracy, however. Although citizenship was widespread since all citizens bore arms, political power was shared by a class of selfselected nobility who governed as senators. The senatorial class was an exclusive club of men from large landowning families who devoted their time to public affairs and were not involved in business. The Romans prided themselves on their constitution, an unwritten tradition of governmental institutions and procedures.
Armies, Lands, and Citizens . Like Greece, the strength of Roman society was in its citizen army of independent landowners. In 391 BCE, when Rome was not much more than the city, an army of aristocrats was defeated by a force of nomadic Gauls who proceeded to burn down the city. When the Gauls left, ruling patricians called for vast constitutional changes in Rome. They extended citizenship and accompanying military service to small landowners (plebeians), distributed land to landless farmers (proletarians) so that they too could become citizen-soldiers, and granted the plebian assembly the power to pass laws. Plebeians could become consuls, the “presidents” and future senators of the republic, and plebian leaders, called tribunes, were granted extraordinary veto powers. The new constitution gave an extensive Roman citizenry a sense of common purpose and a common dedication to defend the state with their lives.
In time, patrician commitment to commonality waned as memories of the crisis dimmed. And as Roman armies spent more planting seasons conquering Italy and invading Carthage (in the First Punic War, 264-241 BCE), many Romans were forced to choose between farming and fighting. But even in the Second Punic War against Carthage (218-202 BCE) the threat of Hannibal’s armies approaching Rome was enough to revive the old sense of common responsibility. In arguing the need of patrician women to give up some of their luxuries for the war effort, the historian Livy tells us that many of the men had already done so.
Praetors and Publicans . Romans applied their republican traditions of self-government to others as well as themselves. Greeks, as well as some conservative Romans, were shocked to hear the announcement at the Isthmian Games in 168 BCE, after the quick Roman defeat of Macedon, that Romans had come not to conquer but to liberate Greek cities. “Freedom for the Greeks” echoed Greco-Roman values. The conquered kingdoms of Greece and Asia (Turkey, Egypt, and Syria) were incorporated as Roman provinces and largely left to their own traditions although administered by Roman magistrates drawn from the city government of Rome.
Roman administration would have struck even a twenty-first-century American as highly privatized. All public economic functions, including tax collecting, were subcontracted by the Roman Senate to private entrepreneurs called publicani. These businessmen (later companies) bought the right to collect taxes in conquered provinces. To the modern eye, even in a society that has privatized some prisons, schools, postal services, and military functions, the possibilities of corruption in private tax collecting (in addition to all of these) would seem enormous. But the Romans at the top, the senatorial class, thought of themselves (almost like Indian Brahmins) as a class apart from the world of business. Publicani were excluded from political office and professed no interest in politics. Senators did not socialize with publicani. When the Senate sent out a provincial governor or praetor, he was expected to ensure that business was carried out honestly and without favoritism.
Cicero on Provincial Government . In 60 BCE, the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero wrote a letter to his brother Quintus, governor of Asia, that conveys both the noble ideal and the array of temptations awaiting a provincial governor:
It is a splendid thing to have been three years in supreme power in Asia without allowing statue, picture, [silver] plate, na-pery, slave, anyone’s good looks, or any offer of money—all of which are plentiful in your province—to cause you to swerve from the most absolute honesty and purity of life.9
The job of a governor, Cicero reminded his brother, might routinely involve suppressing “some fraudulent banker or some rather over-extortionate tax-collector.” These tax collectors were the publicans. You could not do without them, but you had to watch them like a hawk.
Civil War and Empire . Cicero’s era was disappearing as he wrote. A series of civil wars in the second and first centuries BCE had already undermined the independence of the Roman citizen-soldier. By Cicero’s time, standing armies of camp followers and paid professionals followed the ambitions of their generals. Most could no longer afford family farms and seasons of peace. Full-time soldiers needed full-time wars. A new breed of generals built careers on imperial campaigns. Rich men purchased armies: no one was truly wealthy unless he could afford to pay for a legion, the truly wealthy Marcus Crassus advised. After a victory in Asia or Gaul, a victorious general could make any claim, holding his loyal troops as collateral. Pompey returned victorious from his Asian campaign as the richest and most powerful person in Rome. His arrangements with Asian kings and Roman friends in senatorial and busine
ss classes made him for all practical purposes the “owner” of the Roman provinces in Asia. The verdict of a modern historian reads, “No administration in history has ever devoted itself so whole-heartedly to fleecing its subjects for the private benefit of the ruling class as Rome of the last ages of the Republic.”10
By the 50s and 40s BCE, it had become possible for a particularly ambitious Roman aristocrat, like Julius Caesar, to initiate a foreign and a civil war for his own glory and profit. In his triumphal celebration of 46 BCE, after conquering Gaul, defeating the Roman armies of his rival Pompey, and capturing Egypt, Caesar distributed a huge bonus to his soldiers, paraded captured treasures and 10 tons of gold crowns in a victory procession, and put on the largest gladiatorial games anyone had ever seen.
Caesar’s death in 44 BCE plunged Rome into a civil war between his adopted son and great nephew, Octavian, and Mark Anthony, respectively. It completely erased any boundaries between private interest and res publica. One case in point: in 36 BCE, Mark Anthony gave Cleopatra, his lover and ally as queen of Egypt, the island of Cyprus, the Cilician coast (of Turkey), Phoenicia, Western Syria, Judea, and Arabia. Whole countries were no longer provinces of the Roman people; they were the personal possessions of those who ruled.
Empire and Law . Octavian defeated Mark Anthony in 31 BCE and became the most powerful Roman ever. Then, in 27 BCE, as “Augustus,” he presented the new political order as a restoration of the republic. He later wrote, “I was in absolute control of everything, I transferred the res publica from my own charge to the Senate and the Roman people. For this I was given the title Augustus by the decree of the Senate.”11 He styled himself Princeps, merely first man, of the Roman state. There would be nothing like the title of permanent dictator that Julius Caesar had secured just before his death.
All the powers of Augustus were sanctioned by law. He simply put together more titles and offices than had any single individual before the decades of civil war. From the Senate and people, he received military command (imperium) over certain recently conquered provinces (Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Egypt) that contained the bulk of the Roman armies. In addition, he had himself repeatedly elected consul or tribune of the people, offices traditionally limited to a year but also frequently extended in the age of Pompey and Caesar.
Certainly, Augustus did not intend to restore the republic, and in that he probably had the support of most Romans, whose principal desire was peace and order after years of anarchy. Yet Augustus, like many Romans, was schooled in a 500-year tradition of rule by law stemming from the city-states of Greece. Therefore, if new powers were necessary, they had to be tailored to tradition and legal precedent. Augustus attempted, without success, to reduce the size of the Senate in order to make it a more effective body. He refused titles of divinity and “master” of the Senate and people. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted lifetime offices, superior powers and the building of temples to the “divine Augustus” in Roman provinces like Egypt, where divine rulers were traditional.
Romans did not lose the idea of the rule of law. Whether it was a guide or an unattainable ideal, it was always part of Roman expectations, even when least realized. Later emperors looked back to the principate of Augustus as their model. In 54 CE, the young emperor Nero declared his desire to return to Augustan principals: “Nothing in his household would be bought by money or open to intrigue; his private self and public self would be kept quite separate from each other. The Senate would keep its traditional prerogatives.”12 Such ideals were often far from the realities of rule, not least in the case of Nero, but even among the most autocratic of emperors, the rule of law reared its head. When, for instance, the emperor Claudius wanted to marry his niece despite the fact that it was specifically prohibited by law, he did not assume that he was above the law; rather, he went to the trouble of having the law changed.
Administering the Roman Empire . Augustus reformed the administration of the empire, making the provinces more uniform and government supervision more regular, but Roman rule remained indirect, decentralized, and entrepreneurial for another 200 years. In Italy and Greece, the empire was a federation of city-states, each of which enjoyed considerable local autonomy except in foreign policy. In Asia, the empire consisted of cities and kingdoms, most of which were ruled by local royalty and nobility with minimum Roman oversight. The brunt of imperial power—the Roman legions—was felt in recently conquered areas and on the borders where Roman power was still challenged. In the middle of the second century, 10 of 28 Roman legions were stationed in England and northern Europe, controlling recently subjected tribes, as well as those across the border. Another 10 legions controlled the new imperial provinces of Egypt and Spain.
Augustus also reformed the military system in a way that lasted until the third century. In addition to the regular army of citizen soldiers commanded by senatorial officers, he created an auxiliary army of foreigners who received Roman citizenship when discharged. They were commanded by middle-class Romans who were eager to climb the Roman social and political ladder. In this way, the Romans retained the model of citizen-soldiers and spread their culture and values to new citizens, but the military had become a full-time job. No longer could a farmer like the legendary Cincinnatus leave his field for emergency public service. The new legions were settled in distant areas of the empire where they were conscripted for numerous peacetime chores as well as soldiering. They spent their military years in forts, camps, and border towns where their presence was often harshly felt by civilians. “Don’t bother to call the authorities if a soldier beats you up,”13 Juvenal advised. Soldiers were subject only to military courts, which, according to the poet, always took their side.
No Bureaucracy . For all this, the Roman Empire was remarkably unbureaucratic. Compared to modern political administrations or, as we shall see, the Chinese Empire of the same period, Roman administration seemed spontaneous, haphazard, and arbitrary. In part, the reason was the tradition of local urban autonomy. Each city in the empire, like a miniature Roman republic, was ruled by the leading local noble families. Whether or not they held an office, these families tripped over each other to build public monuments, baths, arenas, theaters, and temples to honor their ancestors and their city. The cities of the Roman Empire devoted abundant space to public life as a result. City fathers competed for the acclaim of the lower classes with gifts of gladiatorial games, festivals, zoos, and even free bath oil. In return, the city would celebrate the generosity of the donor with a title that the “patron of the city” or “glorious benefactor” could take to his tombstone.
The empire was run for profit, although the publicans of the republic were no longer a separate class under the empire. Nobles, consuls, senators, and even emperors bought shares in the new corporate contractors who collected taxes, built aqueducts and roads, and administered whole countries. Bribes, kick-backs, and payoffs greased the machinery of empire without a Ciceronian raised eyebrow.
Laws still mattered to the Romans, but the growing body of Roman law regulated property and civil disputes, which were largely private matters. Matters of administration were mainly local, and they varied from one jurisdiction to another. Roman law was more judge made than legislative since magistrates were the leading officials of most cities. For imperial administration, the Romans preferred roads to laws, publicani to praetors, and business to bureaucracy.
Army, local notables, and corporate publicani created an ad hoc empire, making it up as they went along. As a result, emperors often found themselves involved in the minute detail of administration. In a series of letters between Pliny, governor of Bithnia in modern Turkey, and the emperor Trajan, Pliny asks the emperor about such minor matters of administration as how to treat accused Christians and whether he could form a firefighting brigade in the town of Nicomedia. There was evidently no official policy, department of state, or administrative handbook—at least none that worked as well as a letter to the emperor. Nor does policy emerge from individual cases. On
e suspects that the next governor concerned about Christians or the need for a fire brigade would also have to write to the emperor.
The Pax Romana . The emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 CE) streamlined Roman administration and created a new “Augustan Age” of peace and cultural flowering in the second century. Edward Gibbon, the great eighteenth-century historian of Rome, wrote that if one were to pick the most happy and prosperous time in the history of the world, it would clearly be the period from 96 to 180 CE. The second-century emperors rebuilt the city of Rome in a new cosmopolitan splendor, and many provincial notables followed suit. The boundaries of the empire reached their furthest limits under Trajan and his successor, Hadrian (117-138 CE).
The Pax Romana that began with Augustus continued, despite interruptions, through the age of the “Good Emperors” until the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180 CE), the “philosopher-emperor” whose philosophical Stoicism expressed both the vulnerabilities and the detachment of the new age. After a series of wars in Europe and Asia and a virulent plague spread by his returning legions, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his notebook The Meditations,
