In 400 B.C., while the Athenians were in the midst of their century of cultural glory, economic enterprise, and all too short-lived political and military power, Rome was still a relatively obscure city on the hills of central Italy. Its population then, including surrounding farms, could not have been more than a hundred thousand.
But four centuries later, Rome was the capital of a vast empire embracing all of the Mediterranean and major parts of what is today Western Europe. When the Roman Empire reached its fullest extent around 100 A.D., it stretched from London to Jerusalem, from Vienna to Tunis. It was another four hundred years before this peerless imperial structure cracked and disintegrated. Yet in the old Greek city of Byzantium, at the eastern extremity of the European part of today’s Turkey, on the Hellespont, an entity still calling itself the Roman Empire endured until the Turkish Muslim conquest in 1453.
How did this obscure hill city of 400 B.C. become the Roman Empire of the first century A.D.? This is one of the great dramas in human history, with huge consequences for every aspect of social, political, and cultural life.
The Romans had two myths about the founding of their Eternal City. In the first one, the founders were twin orphans called Romulus and Remus, who were nourished as infants by a she-wolf. In the second one, the founder of Rome, wrote the poet Virgil around 10 A.D., was a Trojan prince named Aeneas, who founded a new imperial city destined to “crush the proud and raise up the humble.”
In actuality, Rome in 400 B.C. (three and a half centuries after the alleged founding of the city by whatever myth one chose to believe in) was one of the hill towns of central Italy struggling for hegemony in Latium, as this rocky part of central Italy was called. The Romans, who had a century earlier divested themselves of their kings, and functioned as an unwieldy constitutional republic, triumphed over their neighbors and then incorporated them into their army. This was the first stage in the emergence of Roman political power.
The next stage involved subjugating all of mainland Italy from the Po Valley in the north to the heel of Italy in the south. This brought the Romans to fight for control of Sicily, with its lush grainfields and beautiful Greek cities, and against the African seafaring power of Carthage, which existed a short distance from the modern location of Tunis. Carthage had originally been founded by Phoenician sailors and merchants from the eastern Mediterranean. For 150 years, during three conflicts (the Punic Wars), Rome and Carthage contended for domination of the central and western Mediterranean and North Africa. In the first war against Carthage, the hitherto landlubbing Romans built a navy from scratch to enable their conquest of Sicily.
In the second Punic War, the Carthaginians under the great general Hannibal, after crossing Spain and the Alps, counterattacked and invaded Italy from the north. In 216 B.C., Hannibal inflicted a massive military defeat on the Romans in central Italy, but he lacked the resources, or perhaps audacity, to assault Rome itself. The Romans built a new army and drove Hannibal and his soldiers and elephants from Italy.
In the third Punic War, the Romans under the leadership of one of their greatest generals, the aristocrat Scipio Africanus, invaded North Africa, defeated the Carthaginians, and razed their great city to the ground.
Rome was now free to conquer Greece, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean, taking over from the Hellenistic monarchies that succeeded Alexander the Great, as well as incorporating some independent kingdoms, such as Judea.
The secret of Rome’s military success was the organization and composition of its army, its peculiar republican government that endured until the end of the first century B.C., and its liberal treatment of the peoples it conquered.
The first-century historian of early Rome, Livy, gives a highly sentimental picture of the Roman army as the city commenced its Italian conquests. According to Livy, the original Roman army was a congeries of citizens who temporarily left the plough, the villa, or spacious urban residences—but especially agricultural pursuits—and joined together under nobly born amateur generals to fight for the fatherland.
In fact, by 200 B.C., the ranks of the Roman army were filled with professional mercenaries recruited from all over Italy. They entered service on lengthy contracts at around eighteen years of age. The soldiers were uniformly of peasant stock. They were well-trained, well-fed, and well-rewarded, not only with cash wages but also with a land settlement at the end of their designated years of service.
Normally, the soldiers were unmarried and started families after their contracts ended, but by the first century A.D., as the empire comprised many thousands of frontier miles that had to be garrisoned, some military companies were encouraged to marry and settle down in domestic situations along the borders.
The soldiers were organized in groups of a hundred, and, like all good armies, they bonded together and protected each other. The soldiers wore leather-and-metal helmets and tunics. Their normal weapons were javelins and short swords. They were very skillful and endlessly drilled in using these instruments of war. It was an infantry army; until the fourth century A.D., there was no cavalry to speak of. The paved Roman roads were built more for long and rapid infantry marches than as an aid to commerce.
The two heads of each legion (battalion), comprising five thousand to twenty thousand men, were consuls from the aristocracy. Some were very experienced; many were amateurs, politicians rather than soldiers. These consular generals were supposed to share the supreme power over the legions and to serve normally for only one year. Yet, by the first century B.C., generals of proven skill and good leadership had come to serve, by one legal mechanism or another, as grandiose field marshals exercising continuous power in the field for several years and enjoying the die-hard loyalty of the well-trained and well-rewarded peasants in the ranks.
Contemporary writers did not hesitate to claim that, for three quarters of a millennium, the constant success of the Roman armies was due to their being free men who chose to serve, compared to armies of the Hellenistic kingdoms, which consisted of conscripts and slaves. Of course, there was something to this contrast, so important to modern sentiment, but the Roman armies won wars—even after defeats in particular battles—mainly because they were hardened, well-rewarded veterans led by experienced commanders.
The Roman republican constitution was a very complicated document, designed to share power among classes and groups, and to avoid dictatorships. Cumbersome and unwieldy as it was, it worked effectively until the middle of the first century B.C. There were two legislatures—a senate drawn from the landed aristocracy, from whose ranks came the military consuls and provincial governors (proconsuls), and an assembly of middle-class people called equites (knights), who chose two tribunes each year to speak on their behalf to the senate. Important legislation required the approval of both representative houses, but initiative in legislation normally came from the senate. The tribunes and the assembly functioned more as a restraining force on the senatorial aristocracy than as an independent legislative house.
During the last two-thirds of the first century B.C., this political system underwent severe strains that finally resulted in the setting up of a thinly disguised military dictatorship under an emperor, the holder of imperium, or power. First, the friendly Italian cities that contributed importantly to the army and to agricultural and commercial wealth rebelled against being treated as second-class citizens. They got the equality they wanted.
Then the Gracchi brothers—tribunes of the people, although from a noble family—fomented various kinds of political unrest to get a land redistribution from the holdings of the senatorial aristocracy for peasants dispossessed by the expanding great estates of the nobility and for army veterans unsatisfied with their rewards. This Gracchi maneuver led to fierce debates, turmoil, street fighting, and the eventual assassination of both brothers.
At this point, in the middle of the first century B.C., naked civil war broke out over which noble families and social groups would control the legions, dominate Rome, and allot very lucrative provincial governorships to their friends, relatives, and followers. The Roman Empire inspired insatiable greed among a handful of aristocratic families and their supporters in the middle class. Greed led to conflict and civil war.
The civil war’s tide turned in favor of the great general (and a good writer) Julius Caesar whose imperial ambitions led to his assassination by a senatorial cabal in 44 B.C. When the smoke finally cleared, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, systematically eliminated his rivals and stood on top of the Roman world as Augustus Caesar, the emperor. The senate still functioned, but mainly as a social club and a pretentious façade behind which Augustus wielded full political power and controlled the army.
Bloody happenings occurred in Rome then and later, but by the first century A.D. the Roman Empire was at peace, the fabled Pax Romana. The city of Rome numbered a million people—a third of them slaves or unemployed, living on handouts from the government. Given the primitive communication system—it took four to six weeks to get a letter from Rome to London—vast authority had to be vested in the provincial governors drawn from the senatorial aristocracy. They engaged in corruption and plunder, for which they were rarely held to account. But the multiethnic societies they ruled tolerated their hegemony, because peace and security was provided and taxation was low.
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The Roman Empire, comprising fifty million, came to resemble the old Hellenistic empires, in which the nodules of commerce and culture resided in cities and the emperor took on a divine aura.
The central government was a despotism tempered by military rebellion and assassination and replacement of one scurvy lot of ruling dynasts by another. But the high politics of the city of Rome little affected the lives of the masses or even of the provincial nobility. It was the wonderful army that provided the continuity and peace that this vast population enjoyed. After about 180 A.D., the security was breached; the later Roman Empire suffered intermittent instability and invasion.
The brilliant historian Tacitus, who came from the politically displaced aristocracy and wrote around 100 A.D., hated the Caesarian system with a passion. Of Augustus and his successors he said: “They made a desert and called it peace.” But it was not as bad as all that. There were many good things about the Roman Empire at its height, 30 B.C. to 180 A.D.
First, it was a peaceful, multiethnic, multilingual society, with Greek as the common language in the east and Latin in the west, but with many national dialects surviving. It was tolerant about religion. The state temples demanded very little of the population, and a variety of faith-healing and savior-centered cults flourished and blended into each other. There was unprecedented commercial and agricultural prosperity. Freedom to travel, to seek new habitats, and enter crafts and professions made the Roman Empire a relatively open society. Very few provincials would have cause to note the death of the emperor or even the emergence of a new ruling dynasty.
But there was a dark cloud overhanging the Roman world: the cloud of slavery. As much as forty percent of the population was in legal servitude. The slaves were mostly drawn from peoples subjugated by the Romans during the imperial expansion of the last two centuries B.C. The huge agricultural estates in Italy, Sicily, and North Africa were worked by gangs of slaves, providing food for the cities. Slaves also worked the mines and propelled the oar-driven commercial galleys. They were pressed into labor for the construction of huge buildings and memorials in the cities. They built roads and aqueducts and amphitheaters.
An economy built on slave labor is vulnerable in two ways. One, availability of forced labor discourages technical innovation. The very wealthy empire experienced no industrial revolution. Two—even more crucial—slaves do not reproduce their own numbers. As Rome’s wars of conquest ended, the slave population began to shrink, leading to a shortage of agricultural laborers by 200 A.D. Although the army consisted of freemen mercenaries, here too a manpower shortage was prevalent in the third century. Partly because of disease, the population of the empire began to decline. The frontiers of the empire, attacked by Germans on the Rhine-Danube border and by Persians to the east along the Syrian border, were too extensive and too fragile, requiring constant replenishment of military manpower while the total population was diminishing. In the long run, as more and more free citizens had to be recruited and pressed into military service, there developed a shortage of soldiers needed to defend the immensely long frontiers. By 250 A.D., the empire needed two million soldiers to defend its frontiers at the same time as the economy suffered from a shrinkage of the slave population.
Yet the Roman Empire of 150 A.D. was a glorious thing, to be long remembered as a golden age. Deriving ideas from the Greeks, literature and philosophy flourished. Among the upper- and middle-class males, there was a high degree of literacy. A legal system was in place by 100 A.D., which became the basis of the legal systems of all but England’s, and even England’s evolved under Roman influence. The cleanliness and beauty of Roman cities, their architecture derived from the Athenian Acropolis, still commands great respect and frequent imitation.
The society became steadily more cosmopolitan. By 212 A.D., all inhabitants of the empire, except for slaves, were deemed to be citizens. The old Roman aristocracy was not fixated upon race and color. Wealth and literacy were what opened the doors of their urban mansions and country villas.
Finally, the Roman Empire was very far from imposing sexual repression. Divorce was easy. Prostitution flourished without controls. Homosexuality was commonplace. Even bestiality was practiced and received little censure. And, in spite of this sexual freedom, until the end of the second century the empire was as yet little harmed by venereal disease. The Roman Empire was a religious cauldron and a sexual paradise.
Along with high rates of consumption, and a high degree of intellectual and political freedom, the empire was distinguished by sexual promiscuity perhaps unmatched until the late-twentieth-century United States. The Fathers of the American Constitution, well-versed in the classical heritage, consciously constructed an awkward governmental system like republican Rome’s: much better at blocking change than facilitating it. By the early twenty-first century, the ambience of American urban life resembled that of the Roman Empire’s cities, with lavish displays of wealth standing alongside cruel poverty, although average life expectancy in the Roman Empire never rose above forty years, while in 2003 United States it’s in the mid-seventies.