FIGURE 1.11 Proportion of the population of Europe and East Asia claimed by the largest polity in each region, 250 BCE–2000 CE (in percent).
KEY: See Figures 1.4 and 1.8.
Apart from Southeast Asia—a smaller and historically far less populous region—Europe has been the only genuine exception to this norm. European state formation followed a uniquely truncated trajectory marked by a one-time transition from hegemonic empire to intense and persistent polycentrism. There is a systematic difference between Europe and the other three macro-regions, and most strikingly so between Europe and East Asia (figure 1.11).
On one stylized count, the number of effectively independent polities in Latin Europe grew from about three dozen at the end of late antiquity to more than a hundred by 1300, compared to between just one and a handful in China proper, and this gap would be even larger if we included vassal states. It is this contrast that we need to explain.18
PART II
Why Rome?
CHAPTER 2
Core
EXPLAINING EMPIRE
IF POLITICAL unification on a very large scale proved to be so rare in Europe, why did the Roman empire exist at all? Were the circumstances of its creation so exceptional that no later state in this part of the world could hope to replicate Rome’s success?
Imperial state formation results from the interplay of two components: a core or metropole with the capability to expand, and a periphery that is susceptible to domination. In this chapter and in chapters 3 and 4, I argue that Rome owed its ascent to a fortuitously favorable concatenation of conditions in both core and periphery that were either unique or remained very rare in European and Mediterranean history overall.1
In developing this argument, I focus first on the properties of the core—on how it was constituted and how it managed to scale up from very modest beginnings (chapter 2). I then turn to the highly diverse regions in western Afroeurasia that gradually succumbed to Roman power: here the key question is why this became an almost universal outcome (chapter 3). Finally, I also consider counterfactuals: How much would have had to be different for Roman imperialism to be checked by any of its neighbors (chapter 4)? Each of these three approaches addresses the same questions: to what extent the rise of Rome was rooted in the structural characteristics of both core and periphery, and what role more contingent developments played in shaping this process.2
NOT BUILT IN A DAY
Getting off the Ground
Just how far back in time do we need to go to identify the roots of Rome’s eventual success? This question is in no small measure a purely theoretical one: the more we move into the early stages of Roman history, the less there is to see. The genesis of the Roman state is poorly documented. The surviving tradition was produced centuries later by writers who need not have known much more than we do now (and, as far as the archaeological record is concerned, indeed knew much less), and any modern reconstruction critically depends on how much weight we are prepared to accord to particular elements of that questionable tradition. Short of complete agnosticism—by no means an unreasonable position—the most defensible approach is one that relies as little as possible on reported specifics and seeks to produce nothing more than a bare outline of the likely trajectory of state formation, spruced up with a hearty dose of conjecture.
One thing we do know for sure is that the Roman polity emerged in an environment that was completely bereft of the type of sizable imperial tributary states that had sprung up in the Near East in the third millennium BCE. Despite long-standing economic and cultural contacts with the outside world, in terms of state formation the Italian peninsula in the first half of the first millennium BCE remained a world apart, characterized by city-states and similarly small-scale communities. Even Greek state-building along its southern fringe had not yet produced larger multicity states of the kind that first formed in the Aegean and in Sicily in the fifth century BCE (figure 2.1).
Rome was located on the river Tiber, the largest Italian river south of the Po, at the interstices of two emergent city-state cultures, the Latins to the south and the Etruscans to the north. Albeit part of a contact zone between two different language spheres, the settlement that became the city of Rome primarily belonged to the Latin side, part of a culture of politically independent communities with shared ethnic affiliation, language, material culture, and joint cultic activities and sanctuaries. The product of a process of nucleation and absorption of smaller rivals that commenced in the eighth century BCE, around twenty city-states that are known to us by name came to form the core region of Old Latium. Their boundaries were initially porous: later rights of trans-polity intermarriage, movement, and contracts may well reflect this earlier fluidity.3
FIGURE 2.1 Italy in the early fourth century BCE.
According to a recent and attractive model—which is the best we can hope for—military enterprises had originally been the prerogative of mobile clans (visible in aristocratic burials accompanied by weaponry), a hybrid Latin-Etruscan gentilicial warrior aristocracy whose members only gradually attached themselves to the emergent urban communities and their respective hinterlands in the course of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. As these clans settled and became incorporated into urban centers, control over land became more important, and traditional raiding for plunder was augmented by conquest and protection of territory. This slow process of consolidation produced the independent city-states of Latium in their mature form.4
A similar process of state-building unfolded in neighboring Tuscany in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE where the most powerful polities swallowed and often destroyed smaller ones, thereby expanding their own reach. The final outcome was a well-balanced system of a dozen polities that ranged from 500 square kilometers to 1,500 square kilometers in size.5
Embeddedness in a city-state culture was a defining feature of early Rome and of Roman state-building later on. More than two dozen city-state cultures have been identified across world history, ranging from some comprising a mere handful of members to the sprawling network of over 1,000 ancient Greek poleis.6
A city-state environment presents formidable challenges to political scaling-up: closely attuned to one another, individual parties are well positioned to balance against any of their peers that seek to expand at their expense or threaten their independence. Outright absorption of mature city-states by others thus remained a relatively rare outcome, even if it sometimes worked, most notably for late medieval Florence, Milan, and Venice.
More often than not, however, scaling-up occurred in a more subtle fashion through the formation of alliances and leagues that facilitated cooperation without formal domination. Such arrangements mitigated structural tensions between often tightly knit civic communities and the benefits of pooling resources, especially for military purposes. The Athenian empire of the fifth century BCE, initially established as an alliance against the Persian Achaemenid empire, is a classic example (and fortuitously contemporaneous with early Roman alliance-building in central Italy); the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan in 1428 CE that gave rise to the Aztec empire is another. If such leagues managed to survive long enough, they might turn into more unitary states, such as Switzerland or the Netherlands.7
Capitalizing on an early size advantage, Rome’s expansion followed the alliance template. For reasons that are lost in the mists of time, by 500 BCE Rome had already grown into one of the largest cities in central Italy and the largest city-state in Latium. Later rituals connected to borders may suggest that the nascent Roman community claimed a modest 150 to 200 square kilometers in the seventh century BCE. Yet by the late sixth century BCE, its territory appears to have grown to some 820 square kilometers, fully a third of the 2,350 square kilometers controlled by the fifteen Latin city-states that had not been taken over by outsiders. This made it more than twice as large as that of the runner-up at the time. By local standards, Rome’s putative population, estimated at around 30,000, wa
s substantial.
The much later Roman tradition ascribes this early advantage to aggressive expansion under the “kings,” and more specifically to the presence of Etruscan rulers in the sixth century BCE. In the absence of reliable evidence, this version of events is impossible to substantiate but does not seem implausible a priori: after all, Rome was not only located right at the margins of the Etruscan city-state cluster but also resembled Etruscan city-states in terms of the size of their urban centers and their territories. Moreover, foreign rule would seem a rather odd thing to invent later on, at a time when Rome was already firmly in charge.
Regardless of whether early Rome outgrew its Latin peers thanks to Etruscan leadership—reflecting the power of the ethnically hybrid central Italian warrior aristocracy of the period—or because exposure to productive tensions along a cultural frontier had boosted its capacity for collective action, its close proximity to Etruria appears to have accelerated Roman state-building. Its unique riverine location that allowed it to benefit from trade and access to coastal salt deposits may well have been another contributing factor.8
Around 500 BCE, Rome found itself in a tantalizing position—more powerful than any other Latin city-state but contained by them if they made common cause, and roughly comparable to any one of its Etruscan neighbors but greatly outmatched by them in the aggregate. In the context of this double containment, breakout could best be achieved by means of alliance-building in response to some shared threat. This incentive presented itself in the form of groups from the Apennine highlands that pushed into the fertile plains to the west. Similar developments, driven by population growth and improved cooperation, are attested for other parts of Italy as local powers put growing pressure on coastal Greek cities.
By 500 BCE, five of the twenty Latin city-states had already been taken over by the Volscians. The remaining Latin polities spent the first half of the fifth century BCE engaged in warfare against them and similar opponents. As the leading Latin polity, Rome occupied a leadership position in this coalition. We cannot tell for sure whether this had been achieved by force of arms (as later Roman sources would have it) or in a more consensual fashion, but it ultimately does not really matter.9
What does matter is the overall outcome: cooperation among independent micro-states and Roman leadership that was likely limited to the military domain. This coordination of manpower successfully checked non-Latin challengers. Although these conflicts might best be described as a raiding and counterraiding for the purpose of acquiring booty, they also resulted in shifts in the control over arable land: about a dozen joint settlements were created in areas taken over by the Latin alliance. Both movable plunder and real estate were shared out under Roman supervision.
This process is discernible only in the barest of outlines, but unless we are willing to assume that the entire tradition was merely an anachronistic back-projection of later events (which is by no means impossible but does not seem particularly plausible), it provided an early blueprint for later Roman expansion. It established a mode of moderately asymmetric cooperation in which Rome exercised a degree of military hegemony without abrogating local self-rule, and whose raison d’être was joint war-making that yielded resources that could be shared, and benefited farming commoners as well as aristocratic leaders who were competing for status by displaying martial prowess and rewarding their retinues.10
Alongside coalition warfare, from the second half of the fifth century BCE, Rome also increasingly engaged in expansionary moves on its own account. This process commenced at a time when military participation was opened up to the agricultural population and what had been a confederation of warring lords merged into a single state and army that pursued community-based objectives of territorial expansion. There is no sign, in Rome or elsewhere in Latium, of one-man rule: political and military affairs were run by groups of aristocrats who led their followers and bargained among themselves.
In the Roman case, conflict with Veii, the closest Etruscan city-state, appears to have provided a powerful incentive to further state consolidation. This prolonged struggle culminated in Veii’s defeat and the annexation of its entire territory in the 390s BCE. The surviving population was absorbed into Roman society, most likely through a variety of means from enslavement to enfranchisement.11
This episode was an important step forward because it provided Rome with resources from outside its own city-state cluster where it was locked into cooperative agreements. By then Rome controlled over 1,500 square kilometers, slightly more than all the other Latin polities combined, and whatever its earlier position had been, it was from then on effectively assured of hegemonic status. Any remaining constraints were removed sixty years later when a revolt of the Latins was suppressed in the early 330s BCE.
Rome’s advances beyond Latium were only briefly interrupted by a raid of Gallic warriors from the Po Valley who sacked Rome before moving on. Even though this setback does not seem to have caused any major damage, it arguably served as a further catalyst, had one been needed, for scaled-up military commitments: heightened Athenian militarism in the wake of the Persian sackings of Athens in the early fifth century BCE represents a plausible analogy. More generally, repeated Gallic incursions into the Italian peninsula in the fourth century BCE likely created interest in military alliance-building, especially among the Etruscans and Umbrians who were more exposed to the Celts than Rome itself.12
Overall, in the first third of the fourth century BCE, several factors converged in furnishing Rome with enhanced resources and capabilities that helped it embark on ever-widening expansion in central Italy: access to additional land and manpower, strengthened hegemony over its fellow Latins, the shock of the Celtic assault, and the successful resolution of domestic political and social conflicts.
At the same time, the incorporation of Veii pushed Rome closer to the limit of the strategy of directly absorbing defeated neighbors. City-states with participatory institutions such as popular assemblies that are focused on a single center cannot easily continue to function as such once their territories exceed a few thousand square kilometers. Historically, further growth was sometimes made possible by the shift to a more unitary territorial state that turned former rival centers into subordinate units. Alternatively, the creation of peripheral layers of control and cooperation helped preserve existing and often highly inclusive institutions at the core. Late medieval Milan, Florence, and Venice are examples of the former approach; classical Athens and Carthage of the latter. Rome adopted a formally particularly parsimonious version of the layered model that allowed it to coordinate military activity on an increasingly large scale without having to invest in extensive governmental structures.
Co-optation and Mobilization
As Rome’s expansion gathered momentum over the course of the fourth century BCE, some of the freshly subordinated communities were enfranchised—with or without the right to vote in Roman assemblies—but retained local management as self-governing municipia, while others became allies bound by bilateral treaties. Citizenship came to be concentrated in central Italy whereas allied status was more common to the north and south. By 264 BCE, Rome had concluded more than 150 treaties with individual polities across the peninsula. Their bilateral character helped preserve Roman leadership, placing it in the center of a rimless wheel from which spokes reached out to individual peripheral entities without connecting them into a coherent whole: after 338 BCE, Latin city-states that retained allied status were even forbidden from maintaining official relations with one another (figure 2.2).13
Regardless of their formal standing within this system, the one thing all involved parties had in common was the obligation to contribute military manpower under Roman leadership and to fund military operations: citizens paid a direct tax (tributum) specifically for this purpose while allied communities were expected to support their own levies.14
Scale and mobilization intensity were the two critical variables. Scaling-up was achieved by aggressiv
e co-optation. Unlike in Greek city-states, where citizenship was often viewed as a prized privilege, Rome readily bestowed citizen status on outsiders, many of whom were defeated former enemies. Also unlike among the Greeks, citizenship thus became “divorced from ethnicity or geographical location.” The effectively oligarchic nature of Roman government appears to have sufficiently devalued citizen status to ensure this unusual openness. The fact that Romans who resettled in most colonies forfeited citizenship also reflects the relatively low value of formal membership in the Roman state. Allied polities retained their existing governmental arrangements and merely contributed military resources without being incorporated into the republic.15
Ongoing advances were thus rooted in Rome’s two-pronged strategy of accessing manpower on a large scale with only minimal intervention in local affairs. But scale was only half of the story: the other was a high military participation rate that made the most of Italy’s demographic assets. The latter was achieved by a combination of low levels of taxation of material resources and intense exploitation of cheap military labor.16
FIGURE 2.2 Political statuses in Italy in the third century BCE.
Financial taxation of the Roman citizenry was light and intimately tied to warfare. Annual tax rates are very poorly known but undoubtedly very low, perhaps not more than 0.1 percent of the assessed value of personal assets, functionally equivalent to an annual income tax of not more than a few percent. The modest income tax of 3 percent the U.S. Revenue Act of 1862 imposed on middle-class citizens of the Union to help fund the Civil War may serve as a suitable if distant analogy.17
On occasion, these taxes were even refunded out of the proceeds of war booty, thus turning them into something more akin to loans. Allies owed no direct taxes to Rome, presumably relying on their own—undocumented—domestic revenues to sustain their military contingents. Low or no taxation generally benefited the local upper classes, boosting their willingness to follow Rome’s lead. Conscription also lacked any progressive dimension, and was in fact regressive insofar as it favored older and thus more affluent men who were less likely to be called up.18
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