Apart from tolls and rents on public land, a large share of state revenue was obtained through plunder, later supplemented by indemnities extorted from defeated opponents. Direct taxes in money and kind only began to flow more freely once Rome acquired provinces outside Italy, a process that did not commence until the second half of the third century BCE. For quite a few generations before then, the use of military labor could steadily increase simply because it was relatively cheap: conscripts regularly supplied their own equipment and received very modest compensation for their service.19
Given high military participation rates, conscription was by far the largest share of the tax burden placed on Romans and their Italian allies. Men of property—often mere smallholders—were expected to serve for six or seven years, and even more in periods of military exigency. This estimate comes with a generous margin of error: while Roman army strength is fairly well documented, the size of the underlying population remains the subject of debate. Even so, relatively conservative assumptions about Italian population numbers convey a powerful sense of the extent to which Rome committed young and sometimes even middle-aged men to military endeavors (figure 2.3).20
FIGURE 2.3 Approximate military mobilization rates of the Roman citizenry, 346–31 BCE (in percentage of men in a particular age group). Source: Scheidel 2006: 222, fig. 8.
The resultant figures are certainly very high but not impossible: Rome’s suggested peak mobilization rate during the life-and-death struggle with Carthage in the late third century BCE matched that of the Confederate States during the American Civil War, in both cases excluding slaves from the calculation. Had the population of ancient Italy been somewhat larger than has traditionally been believed, military mobilization levels would be somewhat lower without altering the overall pattern. Even far less plausible, much higher population estimates would merely lower these levels from extravagant to extremely high. And in all this it is worth emphasizing that such mobilization rates were sustained for hundreds of years, and not merely during specific wars that lasted only years or decades.21
Why did Rome pursue this course? Several factors came into play. One is that taxing labor via conscription was a practice well suited to the economically underdeveloped environment of central Italy, especially in its mountainous interior. This favored what Charles Tilly calls a “coercion-intensive” mode of revenue extraction, in which “rulers squeezed the means of war from their own populations and others they conquered.” What makes the Roman case noteworthy is that the single-minded focus on military labor (most of it self-sustaining infantry) obviated the need for (again in Tilly’s words) concomitantly “building massive structures of extraction in the process”—an important qualification to a model designed to explain much later European state formation. Moreover, because the extent of military technology did not vary greatly across much of the Italian peninsula, there was no strong competitive demand to develop forces that were much more sophisticated than militias of peasant infantry, such as armored horsemen or large navies.22
Wealthier societies existed at the margins, in coastal Etruria and especially in the Hellenic south. From the 260s BCE onward, these polities were to provide critical support in establishing an ambitious naval program that ensured Rome’s precocious Mediterranean supremacy, which I discuss below. However, by the time Rome came to engage more seriously with most of these polities in the preceding decades of the third century BCE, its coercion-intensive expansion elsewhere in the peninsula ensured that it did not need to engage in the generous bargaining that characterizes Tilly’s “capital-intensive” mode of state-building. Instead, Rome was able to shift toward the hybrid “capitalized coercion mode” that 2,000 years later worked so well in early modern England and France, marrying coercive features with the smooth integration of rich sources of capital.
In addition to environmental conditions, Roman strategies of expansion were shaped by the existence of a tried and proven mechanism for scaling-up: the fifth-century-BCE model of military cooperation with Rome’s Latin allies. Versions of this template were subsequently applied all over Italy. From this perspective, the formal incorporation of effectively autonomous communities into the Roman citizen body was the only novel addition to an old recipe.
It has been suggested that the open-ended Roman conscription system served to drain potentially dangerous manpower away from subordinated communities, and that other forms of tribute might have been perceived as too onerous and alienating even where they were feasible in economic terms. Expanding this line of reasoning, it is worth asking whether Rome’s approach might not have been at least in part conditioned by its relative weakness vis-à-vis its competitors.23
This perspective requires some detachment from the vision of an assertive Rome that we owe to much later sources composed with the benefit of hindsight. The least invasive way of scaling up was to leave local structures intact and thereby reduce friction. Emphasis on taxing military labor maximized the honor of co-opted groups, which we may assume to have been of considerable importance in the martial environment of Iron Age Italy. It was bound to be more honorable for young men to fight (in the case of allies even under their own local commanders) and for the wealthy to pay (or lend) funds explicitly to support these young men on their campaigns than for everyone to be asked to hand over a tithe or poll tax to Roman tax collectors. The sharing out of spoils among combatants, discussed below, likewise cast them in the role of respected partners.
Finally, the Roman mode of co-optation succeeded because it enhanced capacity for collective action at the local level. Instead of disarming former enemies, Rome not only actively encouraged them to maintain their previous warlike disposition but institutionalized this quality even more solidly by routinizing it as a key obligation to a larger network of communities. It is true that this strategy was not without risk, as it augmented Rome’s military capabilities even as it preserved the option of organized armed resistance. It speaks to the system’s remarkable success that the latter did not occur on a grand scale until a number of the Italian allies revolted in 91 BCE. However, this episode also demonstrates that the option of armed resistance had remained viable even after many generations of cooperative expansionism, which in turn suggests that it must have been at least as viable before.
In mobilizing the linguistically diverse population of peninsular Italy for seemingly never-ending war-making, the Roman ruling class did in fact have the wolf by the ears. This introduced a latent risk of fission that needed to be managed in a way that turned it into a strength: the structural instability of the multilayered system of Roman control sustained dynamics that go a long way in accounting for the persistent drive for military commitments that I discuss in the following sections.24
Integration and the Nature of the Roman Commonwealth
The Roman literary tradition and much of modern scholarship that builds on it tends to view the metropolitan participatory political, social, and cultural institutions of the Roman Republic as a source of civic cohesion. In reality, war-making was by far the most potent force of integration in a very parsimoniously structured system. Among Roman citizens, military service was of vastly greater significance in fostering a shared identity and collective action than participation in the political process or public rituals and spectacles. Military participation rates greatly exceeded levels of involvement in metropolitan activities.
Popular political input, nominally critical because citizen assemblies had the last word on electing officials, passing laws, entering treaties, and declaring war, was strikingly limited in scope. From very early on, only a few percent of all eligible citizens would have fit into the space used for legislative assemblies, and the share of those who would have been physically capable of attending electoral gatherings in a much larger area (even assuming that it was in fact used instead of smaller ones) declined from less than half of the eligible citizenry in 338 BCE to maybe one-sixth in 225 BCE. Moreover, the fact that capacity constraints were
never mentioned as a cause for concern even on particularly high-profile occasions suggests that actual participation rates regularly fell well short of these theoretical maxima.25
Socialization into the (male) Roman citizenry occurred in the first instance through exposure to years of military service from muster to campaign. The muster, held in Rome, was an elaborate ritual designed to bring together men from different parts of Italy. The more the Roman domain expanded, the more Romans would never have set foot in the capital city—but those who did most commonly did so as recruits. The selection process for military units sought to intermingle men from different backgrounds by breaking up local community ties. Prolonged service inculcated a shared sense of “Roman” as opposed to local identity, as well as solidarity and social discipline.26
For the Italian allies, excluded as they were from metropolitan politics until their eventual enfranchisement in the 80s BCE, military mobilization was of even greater importance in forging ties to the Roman state. As allied polities took care of their own levies and their soldiers served in local units separate from those of the Romans, opportunities for effective integration were much more limited. Cultural assimilation would primarily have taken place among the officer corps, whose members had to learn Latin and routinely interact with Roman commanders. However, in view of the oligarchic character of these societies, this was not a negligible matter.
More generally, formal subordination to Roman command drove home the message of Roman supremacy. The practice of Roman and allied units serving side by side on joint campaigns engendered productive rivalries as they vied for success and glory. By managing Roman and allied troops as unequal but similarly important partners, this system both cemented Roman leadership and promoted cooperation against common opponents that created a sense of mutual dependence and translated to shared material benefits from plunder and land assignments.27
In fact, inasmuch as any significant amount of integration occurred outside military campaigns, it was in the closely related context of colonial foundations and land distributions, which were a direct outgrowth of continued belligerence and not only served to reward faithful service, as described below, but also created hybrid communities of Romans and Italian allies. This process had already begun in the fifth century BCE and peaked during the wars of Italian unification from the 300s to the 260s BCE. Further schemes were undertaken in the early second century BCE and once again and on a much more massive scale between the 80s and the 20s BCE when over half a million people were resettled within and beyond Italy. All of these movements unfolded as the result of major military conflicts.28
Outside central Italy, military-induced integration preceded any broader social or cultural convergence by a wide margin: the latter commenced mostly in the first century BCE. And even within central Italy itself, military participation ruled supreme. There, the enfranchisement of local populations and the establishment of numerous colonial settlements created a more homogeneous bloc that more readily adopted the Latin language and came to coalesce into the more homogeneous heart of the Roman war machine, powerful enough to keep more peripheral allies attached to the system and ultimately capable of overcoming any open resistance.29
The Roman state that arose from these arrangements was one narrowly focused on warfare and little else. It serves as an almost ideal-typical manifestation of Tilly’s four essential state activities: state-making (checking competitors within the area claimed by the state), war-making (attacking rivals outside it), protection (checking rivals of principal allies), and extraction (obtaining the means required to undertake the other three).30
In the Roman case, these activities were exercised in ways to sustain ongoing aggression directed against external targets. Low-friction co-optation of local communities reduced the need for the violent checking of internal competitors: only the southern Italian periphery of allies frayed on multiple occasions. Protection did not take much effort since local elites by and large took care of their own business: Roman interventions on their behalf are only very rarely documented.
As already noted, extraction respected local traditions and honor. In this environment, auxiliary state functions such as adjudication, distribution, and production were even less prominent: local arbitration and contracting for public services were paramount, and distribution (of land and other resources) was for a long time closely tied to war-making. Moreover, although Rome did indeed act as a “protection-selling enterprise” for its client states in Italy, it did not create anything like a monopoly on violence in Italy: the autonomy and massive military contribution of its allies alone made that goal illusory.31
The evolution of the Roman Republic exemplifies with exceptional clarity the adage that war made states and states made war. Roman political institutions arose as spin-offs of military activity, most notably the senior state offices that were principally concerned with military command and logistical support functions. The tremendous nominal powers of the most senior officials could only be reconciled with collective aristocratic control and citizen rights because these magistrates spent little time in Rome itself and so much in the field. Civilian governance was largely confined to the metropolitan core. Elsewhere, local boards took care of a growing share of the citizen population.32
Two factors rendered a larger ambitious apparatus both redundant and undesirable. One was the aforementioned concentration on the provision of violence at the expense of other governmental objectives. Oligarchic reluctance to strengthen centralized state capacity was the other. Eager to fill their own pockets and to prevent the ascent of leaders who might use state resources to seize power, aristocratic officials heavily leaned on patrimonial and clientelistic resources to fulfill their appointed tasks.33
As a result, public good provision in the form of civilian infrastructure other than temples (which had been sponsored by individual leaders) largely had to wait until provincial tribute began to flow in the second century BCE, and reached a large scale only in the first century BCE and mostly in the capital as political competition intensified and the aristocratic consensus collapsed. During the formative period and peak of the Roman war system from the fourth century BCE into the early second century BCE, by contrast, the parsimonious nature of the state was successfully maintained.
Adaptations in the Core
As far as we can tell, aristocratic families had always played a major role in running the Roman state, and were firmly in charge from the fifth century BCE onward. As Rome extended its influence into the Italian peninsula, a homogeneous ruling class of a few dozen noble houses emerged. Elected or at least confirmed by the citizenry, their members took turns holding public office. Most senior leadership positions were limited to a one-year term and were often collegial in nature in order to constrain individual ambition and ensure a degree of consensual decision-making.
For much of the Republican period, the four sources of social power—ideological, economic, military, and political—were unusually tightly bundled together: members of the same narrow elite acted as political leaders, military commanders, and priests, and controlled the largest private fortunes. The presence of a powerful deliberative body of peers, the senate, held individual aristocrats in check, and popular assemblies of adult male citizens (graduated for wealth) served as a carefully managed arbitration and legitimation device for intra-aristocratic competition and the state’s military ventures. This well-balanced system remained stable into the late second century BCE, throughout the period of primary expansion across the Mediterranean basin.34
Expansion of military activity coincided with and was arguably sustained by the abolition of debt bondage for Roman citizens in the late fourth century BCE. This is best understood as a bargaining outcome designed to mobilize more men for war. Changes in equipment also allowed poorer strata to serve. The concurrent loss of labor was offset by the growing number of slaves obtained in war. Later sources suggest that chattel slavery already played an important role as early as the fourth c
entury BCE, and records for mass enslavement during campaigns are available from the 290s BCE onward. This put Rome on a path to becoming what was by some measures the largest slave society in world history.35
In these various ways, Rome managed to combine a shared sense of identity with strong stratification: each class contributed to the war effort according to their means and standing. The influence of belief systems likewise merits notice. War-making and religion were closely conjoined. The leadership generously invested in the religious sphere: a massive boom in temple building in the city of Rome took place precisely during those decades when the Roman state gradually established control over the Italian peninsula.36
The Wages of War: Compliance and Rewards
What were the incentives for unceasing war? We need to look at this from different angles, considering the interests of leaders and commoners. The Roman aristocracy was highly militarized. While its likely origins in roving warrior clans may have been a contributing factor, the institutional setup of the mature Republican system was crucial in maintaining and reinforcing this martial disposition. In the absence of regular tribute-taking, the principal source of public elite income was leadership in war, and annual rotation of office restricted opportunities to benefit materially from these positions and to gain glory that could be instrumentalized in subsequent electioneering and the enhancement of one’s family’s status.
Over time, this gave rise to a pervasive culture of prowess in war. By the second century BCE, ten years of military service—probably in actual campaigns or in camps rather than merely pro forma—were considered a precondition for running for public office: thus, hopeful aristocrats would have spent their entire late teens and much of their twenties in the field. A strong warrior ethos permeated the ruling elite, inculcated through prolonged apprenticing, kept alive by family tradition and religious sanction, and avidly invoked in public displays: success in war was “their central criterion of achievement.” The triumphal procession granted to victorious commanders consequently represented a pinnacle of personal accomplishment.37
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