The management of empire
In practice, if not in the Roman imagination, the empire of the first two centuries CE became less a field of conquest and pacification and more a territory to be managed, policed and taxed. Scipio Aemilianus and Mummius would have been amazed to discover that the cities of Carthage and Corinth that they devastated in 146 BCE had been refounded, on Julius Caesar’s initiative, as settlements of veteran soldiers and by the end of the first century CE were two of the most prosperous towns in a very different sort of Roman world.
This was the result not of any imperial grand plan but of a gradual process of change, a series of minor adjustments and shifts. So far as we can tell, even under the rule of the emperors there was hardly any such thing as a general policy for running the empire or an overarching strategy of military deployment. The directive of Augustus against further conquest in general was a rare intervention of that sort. Although major construction projects such as Hadrian’s Wall must have been the result of some decision at a high level, for the most part the emperor’s involvement was on the pattern of Trajan’s in Bithynia, dealing with issues as and when they came up. The emperor did represent a new tier in the structure of command, but his role was largely a reactive one; he was not a strategist or forward planner. Pliny, in other words, was not the nervous fusspot that he sometimes seems to modern readers of his letters, bombarding the boss with questions on all kinds of trivia. He was following the logic of Roman imperial administration, that you got no decision from the emperor unless you asked him for one.
Whether or not the government of the provinces was better or fairer in the first two centuries CE than it had been in the last century of the Republic depended on who or where you were. It is too easy to compare the diligent Pliny with Cicero or, even more obviously, the extortionate Verres and to claim, on the basis of some entirely unrepresentative (or misrepresented) individuals, a vast improvement. Some things no doubt did improve. There was a gradual move away from the big companies of tax collectors, whose incentive had always been to extract as much cash from the provincials as possible. The system remained very mixed and the publicani continued to play a part, but much more of the collecting was made the responsibility of the locals, which was also the cheapest option. In most provinces too, a specialist financial officer, or procurator, appointed by the emperor looked after the imperial estates and had a watching brief over the tax collection. He and his staff of slaves and ex-slaves from the imperial household (the familia Caesaris, as it was known) could also keep an eye on what the governor was up to and are known sometimes to have blown the whistle back in Rome. But the truth is that, on the ground, the standard of government was as varied as it ever had been.
Trials for extortion and malpractice in the provinces continued, which may equally well be a sign of the persistent flouting of the law as of its proper enforcement. Many kinds of day-to-day exploitation of the provincials were simply taken for granted. The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’. It was out of the question that provincial fleeces should be left as they were. One regular irritant was the need to provide transport and lodgings for Roman officials. The governor’s staff did not have their own fleet of official vehicles. The courier taking the post to Rome or the governor travelling from city to city was expected to requisition transport on the spot: horses, mules and carts. A small fee was payable, but the locals had no choice but to provide what was asked. Unsurprisingly, a large number of Roman hangers-on tried to take advantage of this rather than make their own costly and inconvenient arrangements. Pliny gave his wife an official travel voucher so that she could get back to Italy quickly when her grandfather died. He felt the need after the event to confess this bending of the rules to Trajan, but he did it all the same.
The new method of appointing governors might have led to some more responsible candidates. This was now directly, or indirectly, in the hands of the emperor rather than the result of a mixture of drawing lots and political chicanery in the senate. But the emperor’s criteria for choice were not only, and maybe not often, the ability of the candidate or the interests of the provincials. If Trajan really had wanted a careful administrator to look into the problems of local government in Bithynia, then in Pliny he got his man. But it was a common joke, and possibly true, that Nero had appointed his friend Marcus Salvius Otho, a man who shared many of the emperor’s enthusiasms, to be the governor of the province of Lusitania, in modern Portugal and Spain, simply so that he could more easily enjoy his affair in Rome with Otho’s ex-wife, Poppaea. Even if appointments were usually made on less whimsical grounds, there is no sign of any training or briefing for the job, beyond a few instructions (mandata) given by the emperor. We can only wonder how on earth a new governor managed, when he had been sent to some remote northern province he had never visited, whose native language he did not understand, whose strange customs he had heard rumours of, where he knew no one but a wary procurator – and which he was supposed to manage for anything up to five years or so. From his point of view, it must have seemed a journey into the dark unknown.
What is certain is that the Romans made hardly any attempts, even during this more leisurely phase of imperial control, to impose their cultural norms or to eradicate local traditions. They did try to stamp out the Druids in Britain. The reports of the human sacrifice they practised may have been hugely exaggerated, and in any case it was a ritual not entirely unknown in Rome, but it was not something the Roman authorities were prepared to tolerate in these strange foreign priests. There was also the special case of the Christians. But those were exceptions. The eastern half of the empire continued largely to operate in Greek, not Latin. Local calendars were not much adjusted, apart from occasionally realigning to the life cycle of the emperor or celebrating his achievements. Travelling around the empire meant not just crossing time zones in our sense but moving between entirely different ways of calculating dates or hours of the day (how anyone managed their diary is a mystery). Local traditions flourished in everything from clothing (trousers and Greek cloaks) to religion. It was a world full of gods and of festivals in a vast variety, whose strangeness lost nothing in the telling. The oracular snake with a human head does not look quite so odd when seen against the Egyptian Anubis, part jackal and part human, or the so-called Syrian Goddess, also satirised by Lucian, whose rituals were supposed to have involved participants climbing up huge stone phalluses at the goddess’s sanctuary.
Romans may well not have wanted to impose any such norms. But even if that had been their aim, they did not have the manpower to achieve it. A reasonable estimate is that across the empire at any one time there were fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators, plus maybe a few thousand slaves of the emperor, who had been sent out from the imperial centre to govern an empire of more than 50 million people. Pliny refers just to his deputy (legatus) and the procurator. So how did they do it?
The army was one answer. Over the first few decades of the rule of the emperors, soldiers were recruited increasingly from outside Italy (the provincials were in practice guarding the empire), were more and more stationed towards the edges of the Roman world (safely away from Rome, on the Augustan model) and became heavily involved in administrative as well as front-line jobs. This is vividly illustrated by the letters and documents, recovered over the past forty years, from excavations at the small army base of Vindolanda, just south of Hadrian’s Wall, which housed one unit of the wall’s Roman garrison. Originally scratched on wax, and preserved by the still faint traces on the surviving wood underneath, they date to the early second century CE. This is the other side of the Roman world, but they are roughly contemporary with the correspondence of Pliny and Trajan.
The documents give a very different impression of Roman barracks life from the usual image of an exclusively male, highly militarised regime. To be sure, they include hints at armed skirmishes and some dismissive comments about the natives. Where Trajan referred to ‘Greeklings [Graeculi] loving their gymnasia’, some soldier from the wall referred to ‘Little Brits [Brittunculi, a similarly patronising diminutive] throwing their javelins without getting on horseback’. But it is the everyday domestic and the housekeeping side of Vindolanda that is especially interesting. One letter is an invitation to a birthday party from the camp commandant’s wife to a female friend, and – despite legal prohibitions on marriages for serving soldiers in the ranks – the discovery in the excavations of a significant number of women’s and children’s leather shoes confirms the presence of women on the base. Of course, shoes cannot tell us what exactly their wearers were doing or how permanent a fixture they were. But it looks very much as if family life was going on here.
Equally telling is a ‘strength report’, a register of the soldiers on the base and those off on other duties. More than half of the 752 were absent or unavailable for work. Of those, 337 were at a neighbouring camp, 31 were sick (eye inflammation being a bigger problem than wounds) and almost 100 were busy with other responsibilities: 46 were 300 miles away in London as the governor’s bodyguard; one or more had been assigned to an unspecified ‘office’; and several centurions (NCOs) were on business in other parts of the country. This fits perfectly with one of Trajan’s worries in his letters to Pliny: too many soldiers were off doing other things and were absent from their units.
The other answer to how the Romans managed is that the local populations played a big part in running the empire, through the towns and cities across the Roman world that Rome either supported or founded. The city (polis) had been the defining institution in Greece and the East long before the coming of Rome, and it remained so afterwards, sometimes with a considerable injection of Roman cash. The emperor Hadrian, for example, sponsored massive building programmes in Athens. In the north and west of the empire, where this had not been the case, the foundation of towns from scratch, on a Roman model, was the most significant impact of Roman conquest on the provincial landscape.
This was exactly what Augustus’ forces had been doing at Waldgirmes before the emperor gave the orders for retreat. And many of the towns of modern Britain, including London, owe their sites to Roman choices and planning. Some were more successful than others. There must be a sad story behind the Mediterranean-style, outdoor swimming pool in the Roman baths at Viriconium (modern Wroxeter, near the English–Welsh border), which did not survive many frosty winters and soon became the town’s rubbish dump. And the habits of urban life would have meant little or nothing to the majority of the population, who continued to live, as they always had done, in the country. But in the West, as well as the East, a network of more or less self-governing towns came to be the foundation of Roman administration. Only when things were thought to be going wrong did someone like Pliny interfere in them. It was urbanisation on an unprecedented scale.
The provincial – or ‘native’ – elites living in these towns acted as the crucial middlemen between the Roman governor, with his tiny staff, and the provincial population at large. It was through them that much taxation was raised and that an acceptable degree of loyalty, or at least absence of trouble, was ensured. It was probably some of them too who met that nervous new governor as he took his first steps in the province. The details of these arrangements and encounters would have been very different in different parts of the empire. The literary salons of Roman Athens had almost nothing in common with the beer gardens of Roman Colchester. But the same underlying logic operated across the empire: pre-existing local hierarchies were transformed into hierarchies that served Rome, and the power of local leaders was harnessed to the needs of the imperial ruler.
In Britain, a native ruler by the name of Togidubnus was a classic case of this. He had been on the Roman side when the Claudian forces invaded in 43 CE and was likely some sort of ally before that, for remote and rural as Britain was, there had been links between its aristocracy and mainland Europe since at least the time of Caesar’s invasions in the 50s BCE. Togidubnus may or may not have been the owner of the large villa near Chichester now known rather grandly as Fishbourne Roman Palace; the connection is pure guesswork. But he was certainly given Roman citizenship and with it the new Roman name of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus. And there is clear evidence that he continued to act as a local source of authority in the pacified areas of the new province.
92. This first-century CE inscription from Chichester, in southern England, records the dedication of a temple to Neptune and Minerva, ‘for the welfare of the imperial house’ (literally the ‘divine house’). The temple was erected under the authority of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, here restored as Cogidubnus (the spelling is uncertain).
What originally lay behind this system of government was at least as much simple necessity as ideological vision. Outside the areas of active fighting, Romans were simply too few in number to govern in any other way. But the character of imperial rule was increasingly defined by its collaboration with the elite of the subject peoples. They in turn increasingly identified their interests with the Romans, both culturally and politically; they came to feel that they had a stake in the Roman project, as insiders rather than outsiders; and some of the most successful in due course took a place, as Roman citizens, in the central government of Rome. For these men and their families, the experience of Roman rule was partly the experience of becoming Roman.