An empire of obedience

Polybius was in no doubt that Rome’s stable ‘constitution’ provided an important foundation for its success abroad. But he had experienced the sharp end of Roman warfare, and he also saw Rome as an aggressive power, with imperialist aims to take over the whole world. ‘They made a daring bid,’ he insists at the end of his account of the First Punic War, ‘for universal domination and control – and they succeeded in their purpose.’ Not everyone agreed. There were even some Greeks, he acknowledged, who suggested that Rome’s conquests came about ‘by chance or unintentionally’. Many Romans insisted that their overseas expansion resulted from a series of just wars, in the sense of wars undertaken with the necessary support of the gods, in self-defence or in the defence of allies, who had often solicited Rome’s help. It was not aggression at all.

If Polybius had lived to see, less than a hundred years after his death, the larger-than-life-sized statues of Roman generals holding a globe in their hands, he would no doubt have felt vindicated. A vision of world mastery certainly lay behind many expressions of Roman power in the first century BCE and later (‘an empire without limit’, as Jupiter is made to prophesy in Virgil’s Aeneid). But Polybius was wrong, as his own narrative of events clearly shows, to imagine that at this earlier period the Romans were driven by that kind of acquisitive imperialist ideology or some sense of manifest destiny. There was thirst for glory, desire for conquest, and sheer greed for the economic profits of victory at all levels of Roman society. It was not for nothing that the prospect of rich booty was dangled before the people when they were asked to vote on entering the First Punic War. But whatever fantasies might have been exchanged at the Scipios’ parties, none of this adds up to a plan for world domination.

Much like the extension of Roman control within Italy, this expansion overseas in the third and second centuries BCE was more complicated than the familiar myth of the Roman legions marching in, conquering and taking over foreign territory. First, the Romans were not the only agents in the process. They did not invade a world of peace-loving peoples, who were just minding their own business until these voracious thugs came along. However cynical we might rightly be about Roman claims that they went to war only in response to requests for assistance from friends and allies (that has been the excuse for some of the most aggressive wars in history), part of the pressure for Rome to intervene did come from outside.

The world of the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to modern Turkey and beyond, was the context for most of Rome’s military activity at this period. It was a world of political conflict, shifting alliances and continuous, brutal interstate violence, not unlike early Italy, but on a much vaster scale. This was the legacy of the smash-and-grab conquests of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BCE, before he had to face what to do with those he had defeated. His successors formed rival dynasties, which became involved in a more or less unbroken series of wars and disputes with one another and with the smaller states and coalitions on their margins. Pyrrhus was one of these dynasts. Antiochus Epiphanes was another: after his detention at Rome and attempts at popular politics at home, he managed in his ten-year reign between 175 and 164 BCE to invade Egypt (twice), Cyprus, Judaea (also provoking the Maccabean Revolt), Parthia and Armenia.

The more powerful Rome was perceived to be, the more these warring parties looked on the Romans as useful allies in local power struggles and courted their influence. Representatives from the East repeatedly came to Rome in the hope of winning moral support or military intervention. That is a running theme in the historical accounts of the period: there are plenty of envoys reported, for example, in the run-up to Aemilius Paullus’ campaign against Perseus, trying to persuade the Romans to do something about the ambitions of Macedon. But the most vivid picture of how this ‘courting’ worked in practice comes from Teos, a town on the western coast of modern Turkey. It is a mid-second-century BCE inscription recording the attempts made to draw the Romans into a minor dispute, about which nothing else is known, over some land rights between the city of Abdera in northern Greece and a local king, Kotys.

The text is a ‘thank-you letter’ carved on stone, addressed to the town of Teos by the people of Abdera. For the Teans had apparently agreed to send two men to Rome, almost lobbyists in a modern sense, to drum up Roman support for Abdera’s case against the king. The Abderans describe exactly how this pair operated, right down to their regular house calls on key members of the senate. The delegates apparently worked so hard that ‘they wore themselves out physically and mentally, and they met the leading Romans and won them over by paying obeisance to them every day’; and when some of the people they visited appeared to be on Kotys’ side (for he had also sent envoys to Rome), ‘they won their friendship by laying out the facts and paying daily calls at their atria’, that is at the main central hall of their Roman houses.

The silence of our text on the outcome of these approaches hints that things did not go the Abderans’ way. But the snapshot here of rival representatives not merely beating a path to the senate but pressing their case daily on individual senators gives an idea of just how actively and persistently Roman assistance could be sought. And the literally hundreds of statues of individual Romans – as ‘saviours and benefactors’ – put up in the cities of the Greek world show how that intervention, if successful, could be celebrated. We cannot now identify every piece of doublethink behind such words: there was no doubt as much fear and flattery involved as sincere gratitude. But they are a useful reminder that the simple shorthand ‘Roman conquest’ can obscure a wide range of perspectives, motivations and aspirations on every side of the encounter.

Besides, the Romans did not attempt to annex overseas territory systematically or to impose standard mechanisms of control. That partly explains why the process of expansion could be so quick: they were not establishing any infrastructure of government. They certainly extracted material rewards from those they defeated, but in different, ad hoc ways. They imposed vast cash indemnities on some states, a total of more than 600 tonnes of silver bullion in the first half of the second century BCE alone. Elsewhere they took over the ready-made regular taxation regimes set up by earlier rulers. Occasionally they devised new ways of raking off rich revenues. The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap. And Polybius, who visited Spain in the mid second century BCE, wrote of 40,000 miners, mostly slaves no doubt, working just one region of mining territory alone (not literally, perhaps: ‘40,000’ was a common ancient shorthand for ‘a very large number’, like our ‘millions’). The Romans’ forms of political control were equally varied, ranging from hands-off treaties of ‘friendship’, through the taking of hostages as a guarantee of good behaviour, to the more or less permanent presence of Roman troops and Roman officials. What happened after Aemilius Paullus defeated King Perseus is just one example of how such a package of arrangements might look. Macedon was broken up into four independent, self-governing states; they paid tax to Rome, at half the rate that Perseus had levied it; and, in this case, the Macedonian mines were shut down, to prevent their resources from being used to build up a new power base in the region.

It was a coercive empire in the sense that the Romans took the profits and tried to ensure that they got their own way when they wanted, with the threat of force always in the background. It was not an empire of annexation in the sense that later Romans would understand it. There was no detailed legal framework of control, rules or regulations – or, for that matter, visionary aspirations. At this period, even the Latin word imperium, which by the end of the first century BCE could mean ‘empire’, in the sense of the whole area under direct Roman government, meant something much closer to ‘the power to issue orders that are obeyed’. And provincia (or ‘province’), which became the standard term for a carefully defined subdivision of empire under the control of a governor, was not a geographical term but meant a responsibility assigned to Roman officials. That could be, and often was, an assignment of military activity or administration in a particular place. From the later third century BCE, Sicily and Sardinia were regularly designated as provinciae, and from the early second century BCE two military provinciae in Spain were a standard fixture, though their boundaries were fluid. But it could equally well be a responsibility for, say, the Roman treasury – and, around the turn of the third and second centuries BCE, Plautus in his comedies uses the word provincia as a joke to refer to the duties of slaves. At this point, no Roman was sent out to be the ‘governor of a province’, as they later were.

What was at stake for the Romans was whether they could win in battle and then whether – by persuasion, bullying or force – they could impose their will where, when and if they chose. The style of this imperium is vividly summed up in the story of the last encounter between Antiochus Epiphanes and the Romans. The king was invading Egypt for the second time, and the Egyptians had asked the Romans for help. A Roman envoy, Gaius Popilius Laenas, was dispatched and met Antiochus outside Alexandria. After his long familiarity with the Romans, the king no doubt expected a rather civil meeting. Instead, Laenas handed him a decree of the senate instructing him to withdraw from Egypt immediately. When Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisors, Laenas picked up a stick and drew a circle in the dust around him. There was to be no stepping out of that circle before he had given his answer. Stunned, Antiochus meekly agreed to the senate’s demands. This was an empire of obedience.