Download The Empire

HIST 112, The Medieval World
Winter, 2007
Lecture 3, The Achievements of Rome
The Romans were pround of their achievements, and they were not shy about
celebrating them. They were also aware of their limitations, and of the price that their
extraordinary military achievements exacted from them. There is an interesting and
moving self-consciousness about the Romans, which is particularly clear in the Aeneid.
Quote Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, lines 856-7 (p. 190 in Fitzgerald transl.)
To pacify, to impose the rule of law
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
I want to consider these arts in order: first, the techniques of pacification; then the rule of
government and law.
The Empire
The Romans had no doubts that the gods had marked them out to pacify and bring
under subjection the entire world, not so much so that they could exploit it, but rather so
that they could pacify and civilize it, and teach it the arts of government which were
Rome’s peculiar genius. The providentialism of the Roman empire was accepted even by
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the empire’s critics: the author of Luke’s Gospel, for example, and Augustine in his great
work, The City of God.
The idea of empire was not new under the Romans. The Assyrians, the Persians,
the Athenians, Alexander the Great – all had built empires before the Romans. But the
extent and longevity of the Roman empire was unprecedented. At its height, Roman rule
extended from Scotland to Spain and then to the Rhine, along the Danube, across Greece
and the Balkans into Asia Minor, and then back across the entire Mediterranean world to
the western tip of North Africa. These borders would remain basically the same until the
5th century collapse of Roman’s western defenses, when the Western Roman Empire
effectively ceased to exist.
The Romans, then, were imperialists – but they were not bloodthirsty. They were
a military society, but they were not militaristic. The prefered peace to war, and saw
peace as the object of war. Augustus (d. 14 CE) was the greatest single conqueror of new
lands in the history of Rome. His favorite title, however, was princeps pacis – the prince
of peace, the creator of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace – a title that Christians would
later pick up and apply to Jesus of Nazareth.
The arts of accomodation were therefore even more characteristic of the Romans
than were the arts of war. As we discussed yesterday, we can see this adaptive quality
particularly clearly in Roman religion. Like Roman religion, the Roman art of
government was based upon the art of accomodation to local differences. This was one
one key to the extraordinary stability of the Roman empire – and marks a significant
contrast to the 5th century BCE Athenian empire, for example, which sought to impose
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Athenian political principles by force upon its subject peoples, and so, inevitably, sparked
a series of revolts against Athenian rule.
This is not to deny, however, that the Empire’s creation and continuance rested
ultimately upon the backs of the Roman Army. The army itself was a curious mixture of
the professional and the amateur. Interestingly, there is no work in either Latin or Greek
for “civilian” – a fact that reflects the expectation that all male citizens were expected to
be soldiers as needed. Now this was ok so long as Rome’s armies were fighting near
Rome itself. But it was no good when the fighting was in Scotland or Yemen.
Augustus therefore reorganized the army into 30 legions, comprising about
165,000 men in all – all of whom were required to be Roman citizens. These were the
crack fighting troops, the backbone of the Roman army. The legions were highly mobile,
at least in theory, although they tended to remain within the same province. They were
also highly professional. Legionaries served for 20 to 25 years, and for so long as they
were in the army they were forbidden to marry. If they survived, however, they were
granted land and a pension at the end of their terms of service.
The auxiliaries were more local. These soldiers were expected to stay within their
own fairly local areas. They were not required to be citizens, but would gain citizenship
on discharge. They were also permitted to marry. The auxiliaries were useful for local
defense and peace-keeping, and in an emergency could be thrown into battle in support of
the legionaries. But almost as important as their military role, the auxiliary troops were
an important way to Romanize newly conquered people, especially because service in the
auxiliaries offered a sure route to Roman citizenship. At their peak, there were probably
around 300,000 auxiliary troops stationed around the empire.
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Legions, then, were highly professional; auxiliaries somewhat less so. But the
generals who commanded the legions and the auxiliaries were rank amateurs, constantly
shifted from command to command, rarely appointed for more than a few years at most,
and usually drawn from the senatorial aristocracy. This may seem a strange way to run
an army, and perhaps it is. But in designing this system, Augustus had political
calculations principally in mind. He was anxious not to give senators a powerbase in the
army from which they could attack him, as they had attacked his adoptive father, Julius
Caesar. At the same time, however, Augustus could not deny altogether the aristocracy’s
traditional right to command Rome’s armies. Augustus’s solution – professional armies,
with amateur generals – may have been militarily inefficient, but it was politically wise:
a fact revealed clearly in the 3rd century, when the army fell into the hands of longserving professional generals, who began to use it to make and unmake Roman emperors.
The result, in the 3rd century, was chaos: 17 emperors in 18 years, a group known as “the
Barracks emperors”, because they were all creatures of one faction or another of the
Roman army.
The Roman army’s duties were various. Its role in conquest and defense will be
obvious, but these were very short term responsibilities. Much more of the army’s time
was spent in garrison duty, sometimes on the frontiers, but often in the interior of the
empire, where their presence was clearly intended to overawe civilian populations in the
conquered territories. At the same time, however, we should not imagine the Roman
empire as if it were held together primarily by military occupation. It wasn’t. Rome did
not have nearly enough troops to hold down an actively rebellious populace for any
length of time. To give you a concrete sense of this: Rome controlled its entire empire
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with a force of 165,000 legionary troops – an army just slightly larger than the force the
United States has currently in Iraq. For the most part, the primary business of the Roman
imperial army was not actually fighting. The activities of the Roman army in 1st century
CE Palestine were much more typical, and are well-described in the Christian gospels.
We see the Roman army suppressing disorder, judging malefactors, and executing
trouble-makers. That is much of what they did throughout the Roman world.
The army also enforced tax collection of all sorts. Collecting taxes, customs
duties, tribute payments, etc. was one of the fundamental occupations of ancient
govenments. In Rome, until the mid-3rd century CE, much of this tax collecting was done
privately, through a system known as “tax farming”. [EXPLAIN; note the absence of a
“bureaucracy” to perform such tasks] Thereafter, however, tax collection became
increasingly a direct military responsibility. On one level, this made sense, since the
army was the principal recipient of the revenues produced through taxation. But in the
long run, the army’s increasing role in the civilian administration of the empire
undoubtedly weakened it as a military force.
Finally, the army had important police duties. Banditry in the Roman empire –
indeed, in the ancient world generally – was a perennial problem, that fell to the army to
deal with. So too were slave revolts.
The army was one way, then, that Rome held its far-flung empire together. But
Peace, in Virgil’s eyes (and Augustus’s eyes also) was only the precondition for the real
Roman arts of government and law. Let us turn, then, to Government.
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II. Government
How then did Rome govern its enormous empire?
The first thing we must reckon with here is the surprising informality of Roman
governance. There was no real civil service in the early Roman empire, and almost no
“administration” as we would understand this term. A bureaucracy did begin to develop
from the late 3rd century on; but the sort of tight administrative control we associate with
a bureaucratic state only really became possible in western Europe at the end of the 19th
century, with the advent of the modern communications and transportation systems.
For indeed, what was there in early imperial Rome to administer? Governmental
responsibilities were very basic: protection, exaction, and jurisdiction. The army took
care of protection, and increasingly, of exacting taxes. And private tax farmers did the
rest; or, on the emperor’s private lands, his own estate officials handled it. Jurisdiction
means “judging according to law”; and in Rome, such judging was largely done by
magistrates: local aristocrats, either appointed by the emperor, or else elected by local
councils. Such magistrates were almost always unsalaried.
Now a great deal of building and general organizing was of course needed to keep
a city like Rome functioning. At its height, Rome may have had a population of more
than 1 million people. To feed such a massive population, food had to be imported from
as far away as Sicily and North Africa; understandably, securing food imports was a
major concern for every Roman government. But so too were building and maintaining
acqueducts to bring water into the city; ampitheaters to host games; temples to honor the
gods; harbor improvements; wharves, baths, etc. Remarkably, however, almost all of this
building was done privately. Spending lavishly on public works was considered essential
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to aristocratic social advancement. So too was sponsoring public entertainments, like
gladiatorial games. Emperors, of course, did a great deal of this sort of thing (the baths
built by the emperor Caracalla are still a tourist attraction in Rome today); but even when
baths or theaters were built as imperially-sponsored projects, they were built by the
emperor acting as a private citizen. In Rome the “public things” – in Latin, the rei
publicae, literally the Republic – were in fact nearly all “private”.
Such publically funded building projects as there were, were almost all military in
purpose. The most obvious examples of such military construction projects were the
massive fortification projects like Hadrian’s Wall in northern England: a 75 mile long,
stone and turf wall, some 20 feet high, stretching from the North Sea to the Atlantic
Ocean, running right across the entirety of England. But Roman roads and bridges were
no less military constructions than were fortifications. The famous paved roads of the
Roman empire, stretching in impractically straight lines across miles of country, straight
up hills and across rivers, were not engineered for the transport of goods. They were not
really even particularly well-suited to such uses. They were too narrow, and in a cart
without springs, they were too rough. They were designed for moving troops, most of
whom marched on foot, and for speedy communications on foot or on horseback. When,
in the middle ages, people began to try to use Roman roads to move bulk goods, what
generally happened is that a softer, more practice dirt road would develop running
alongside the paved Roman road.
Military significance also predominated even in that most characteristic of all
Roman achievements – the building of cities. The Eastern half of the Roman empire was
already a land of cities when the Romans conquered it. But in the West, there is no doubt
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at all that the Romans were responsible for the urbanization of Europe. These western
cities began, for the most part, as military camps, a fact still evident today from their
street plans, which reflect the Roman mania for straight lines, 90 degree angles, and
chains of command. As a civilian population gathered around the army, these western
cities began to develop into local markets and outposts for long distance trade; and
eventually they took on roles as cult centers and as centers of government also.
But fundamentally, the Roman cities of western Europe existed as administrative
centers for the Roman army and the emperor’s officials. And as the emperors of the 3rd
and 4th centuries shifted more of the costs of the army onto the localities they served, the
western cities began to decine both economically and demographically. In the 5th
century, when the army in the western half of the empire either ceased to be paid or
withdrew entirely, the decline of these western cities became precipitous. But it was
rarely total, and even today many of the cities of western Europe can trace their
beginnings from an initial Roman foundation.
III. Law
Government and law were almost synonymous for the Romans. Government, as
we have seen, was not primarily about administration. This was handled privately, or
else by the army. The main duties of governmental officials were jurisdictional – that is
to say, to act as judges in legal cases, much as we see Pontius Pilate doing in the
Christian gospels. Pilate wasn’t very good at it. His main job was to keep his restive
province quiet, and when he failed to do this, he was recalled to Rome and replaced. But
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what we see him doing in Jerusalem is pretty typical of what Roman officials throughout
the empire were expected to do. It is just that they were supposed to do it better.
This brings us to the realm of law, in Virgil’s eyes the greatest of all Rome’s
contributions to civilization. And Virgil was right. Of all the contributions which Rome
has made to the West, Roman law is probably the most enduring. Almost all of the basic
legal concepts which we take for granted today derive ultimately from Roman law. For
example, the distinction between civil and criminal law, the notion, that is, that a crime is
first and foremost an offense against the law and the state, not the victim, and therefore
that a crime must be prosecuted by the state rather than by the victim himself - this is a
distinction from Roman law. The importance of evidence in civil and criminal trials; the
right to confront your accusers and reply to their charges against you; the insistence that
equity must be part of the law, and that it is the spirit rather than the letter of the law
which should determine its interpretation; even our basic processes of legal reasoning by
analogy from one legal case to another, indeed, our entire case system approach to the
law itself - all this we owe to the influence of Roman law upon our developing western
European legal systems. Even the provision of the United States constitution which
prohibits Congress from declaring any ex post facto legislation [EXPLAIN] - even this
provision of our consitution we derive from Cicero's second speech against Verres in the
1st century B.C. [IRS as only federal agency not bound by this provision]
Today, we take this Roman law inheritance for granted - it is very hard for us to
imagine how a legal system could operate on any other basis than evidence, testimony,
and analogy. But in fact, it is quite possible and in some ways even more sensible for a
legal system to operate on a completely different conceptual basis. Germanic law in the
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early middle ages drew no distinction between civil and criminal cases, seeing both as
essentially torts, ie, as conflicts between one individual and another resulting from an
injury. [EXPLAIN, IF TIME] And Germanic law relied upon methods of proof in
deciding cases which had little to do with hard evidence, but which depended instead
upon the pressures of community disapproval to prevent perjury and restore social
harmony. In America, our federal law and most of our states' laws derive from English
common law, which is itself an odd combination of Roman and Germanic elements all
scrambled up together in a way only the English could probably manage. But in France,
Spain, and in the state of Louisiana, Roman law continues today to form the basis of their
legal systems, and the legal decisions of 3rd century Roman judges therefore remain valid
precedents in the determination of contemporary verdicts.
The impact of Roman law on western Europe is enormous – we will come back to
it again and again in this course. I need, therefore, to say a few words here about the way
it developed. Roman law began as the customary law of the city of Rome itself.
Throughout the Republican period, this is largely what it remained. As a result, Roman
law was judge-made law, not statute law for the most part. The Senate (and then, later,
emperors) could and did issue edicts; but it is very difficult to tell how often those edicts
were obeyed by the local magistrates who actually heard and determined legal cases in
the Roman provinces.
But starting in the early imperial period, we find professional jurists working
under the emperors’ patronage around the Roman court; and gradually, these jurists
developed a notion of law as emanating from the will of the emperor himself rather than
from customary practice. Ultimately, these jurists were responsible for the two most
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important attempts to codify the laws of Rome (both customary laws and imperial edicts)
into a single body of “statute” law: the Theodosian Code, created under the emperor
Theodosius II in the 440s; and the Justinianic Code, done under the Emperor Justinian in
the 520s.
The result of this imperial “overlay” upon the Republican legal tradition of Rome
was real confusion in as to the nature and source of the law contained in these new legal
Codes..
1) Recall myth of Diarchy. Similar confusion re law.
a)Republican period - Senate and popular assembly make law – SPQR
[Senatus populusque Romanorum]. Law rests on consent and custom.
b)Imperial period - law as declaration of sovereign emperor. Law as will.
2) Result is both a "constitutionalist" and an "autocratic" strand in Roman law
a)"Statutes are binding on us only because they have been accepted by the
judgement of the people" (Lewis and Reinhold II, 537) – the “constitutionalist” strand
b) Quod principi placuit legis habuit vigorem (What pleases the prince has
the force of law – the autocratic strand)
The practical facts of power in imperial Rome are such that the "constitutionalist" strand
bore less and less relationship to reality as time wnet on, and the emperors became more
and more autocratic. In the provinces, however, and especially in the western provinces,
republican, "constitutionalist" patterns of local consultation, debate and governance by
local aristocrats continue, albeit under the watchful eye of imperial officials.
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Result is that both strands in Roman Law are handed down to the West. Both will
be very influential in the West for centuries thereafter. From the 12th century on,
medieval western jurists would struggle to reconcile the conflicting theories of law
(autocratic and constitutionalist) that they found in their Roman law inheritance.
Ultimately, however, for reasons we will try to explain in this course, it was the older,
constitutionalist strand that would triumph.
Conclusion
I've been speaking yesterday and today about the culture and the achievements of
Rome. Under that heading, I've discussed such diverse subjects as law, government,
administration, engineering, the sciences, technology, religion, and the position of
women. This may strike you as a rather motley collection of "achievements". You are
probably right to think so. But I do think there is a kind of unity to all these disparate
subjects. And what unites them, I think, is the concern for the State which all of them
reflect. And it is with this vision of the State that I shall close today.
The ideal of Greek political life had been the polis, the small, self-sufficient citystate. Most Greek political theorists were convinced that once the polis got too big for all
the citizens to meet together at the same time, then the polis would fail. Political life had
to be local for it to have meaning. A citizen was by definition a man who participated
directly in his own government, who governed himself. A man governed by others was a
slave, even if in some sense those who governed him claimed to "represent" him. The
traditions of representative government which characterize our present world were
invented in the middle ages. They would have made no sense to a Greek.
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The Romans were the first people to successfully transfer these ancient ideals of
local civic loyalty to an entire Empire. In so doing, they created a concept of the State
which in one form or another has remained with us in the West until the present day.
Rome was of course a city - but by the 2nd century AD, it had also become a kind of
overarching cultural and political ideal, which people were beginning to call Romanitas,
Romanness. The far-flung citizens of the Roman Empire did not all live in Rome;
indeed, after 212 AD when citizenship was extended to all residents of the Empire, it was
unlikely that most Roman citizens would ever even visit the city in which they now
claimed citizenship. But they were Romans nonetheless, because they shared a
perception that whatever the differences of language and custom which divided the
people of York from those of North Africa or Egypt or Athens, these differences did not
matter. As Michael Wallace-Hadrill has written, "They were united by something higher,
grander than themselves and their localities. If pressed to say what it was precisely that
united them, their answers varied. In truth, they were probably not so united as they
thought they were, and when the empire finally fractured under the pressure of barbarian
armies, it split apart along ancient fissure lines of tribe and language which four centuries
of Romanitas had not been able to eradicte. But the ideal of Romanitas, of Romanness,
of a common cultural and political ideal which would transcend the divisions which
would henceforth mark the history of the West - that ideal of Romanitas remained.” [The
Barbarian West, 3rd ed.] The history of the West is many things, but in part it is a history
of this changing ideal of Romanness. Revived, resurrected, transformed, the vision of
Rome as a transcendent source of unity which needed to be restored would lie at the heart
of western history for almost 1500 years after Rome itself fell to the barbarian peoples
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who overwhelmed it. It is worth reminding ourselves in this regard that the last Roman
emperor in the West was Napoleon - and that his vision of a united Europe is more alive
today than at any time since the Roman empire itself breathed its last. We may yet come
to see it in our lives.