The archetypal imperial city: the rise of Rome and the burdens of empire

NICOLA TERRENATO

The city of Rome was the center of a vast territorial empire for over five centuries. Not-too-dissimilar phenomena took place in different forms a number of times in human history, and yet it could be argued that the specific instance of Rome has often received far more than its share of attention, at least in the context of Eurocentric culture as it has developed in the last millennium and a half.

It would be natural to consider such unparalleled name recognition as an enviable, if undeserved, privilege. Undoubtedly, the sheer quantity of books, movies, university chairs, and research funds devoted the world over to ancient Rome might be mouthwatering for other scholars. These did, how­ever, come at a heavy intellectual price. From the court of Charlemagne to that of Mussolini, Rome has, more often than not, been brutally pressed into the service of the dominant discourse, or, worse, of blatant regime propa­ganda. While most today would agree that there cannot be an unbiased view of any past, it could be argued that the Roman one has been distorted further than most others and so many times that certain fictitious perceptions have become established facts that are still accepted today.

Another unwelcome consequence of the high visibility of Rome is its incomparability. Because the Roman Empire was so often painted as the most powerful, disciplined, and well organized of all, providing an example that should always be emulated but could never be attained, there has been a marked scholarly reluctance to put it on the same dissecting table along­side other empires. Roman historians have typically confined themselves to the “classical” world, naturally finding little in the Mediterranean that could equal the span and the durability of Rome's domination. The scholarly discourse has stayed very specialized and terminologically discrete, with extensive use of Latin and of Roman institutional concepts. The irony is of course that some of the most commonly used comparative terms in English, such as city or empire, are derived from Latin words that the Romans themselves used to describe political abstractions. On that basis, a wealth of cross-cultural state formation theories were produced over the last century, but they hardly ever included a consideration of Rome, where, arguably, the very concept of state had originated.

A victim to its own celebrity and fame, Rome cannot easily be considered separately from the intellectual concretions that have accumulated on it in the course of centuries of visibility in anything from blockbusters and documentar­ies to historical novels and theater plays. The embeddedness of Rome in Eurocentric culture has produced a delay in rethinking and updating our historical analysis of it. In the study of other periods, there is far less need to contend with strong assumptions and biases that were crystallized by Romantic scholars in the nineteenth century and are still floating around today.

From city to empire

Rome was first settled, like most other primary urban sites in Italy, in the late Bronze Age, at the end of the second millennium bce, and it developed into a city-state during the first few centuries of the following millennium.

Map 25.i Italy in around 600 bce.

Many similar centers emerged at the same time up and down the western coast of central Italy, while Greek and Carthaginian colonies were being founded further south and on the islands (Map 25.ι).^[471] Rome found itself within a particularly tight cluster of these polities, which often had their nearest neighbor only 20-40 kilometers away and ranged in walled size between 50 and 150 hectares. Located on the banks of the Tiber, the main river of the region, Rome was also straddling a deepening cultural boundary between Etruscan cities to the north and Latin and Greek ones to the south. From early on, the Romans probably cultivated a distinctive self-image of ethnic and cultural hybridity, explicitly acknowledging the contribution of a variety of elements that characterized their neighbors with more defined identities.^[472] Also unusual for the region was the environmental setting of Rome, sprawled across several steep-sided hills separated by wide alluvial valleys that were seasonally flooded. Unlike other peer communities, which typically occupied vast and naturally defended volcanic plateaus, the Romans had to engage in massive land reclamation projects that involved dumping soil over vast drains to create land bridges (one of which became the Forum) that could connect the hills and that kept being expanded for centuries.^[473] It is significant that Rome acquired fortification walls only at a relatively late date, around the mid-sixth century bce.

In the late sixth-early fifth century bce, the political systems in Rome and in neighboring city-states went through a phase of high instability, charac­terized by tyrannical coups and intense inter-city elite horizontal mobility. Great works were undertaken in the city, such as the creation of the first great state temple on the Capitoline and the drainage of the Forum Valley. Warfare was endemic, but mainly involved seasonal raids that had limited consequences and never led to the annexation or destruction of one of the major polities. Dominance spanning more than one city (typically achieved through the installation of friendly rulers) seems to have been unusual and short-lived. Similar phenomena occurred in Greek, Etruscan, and other states in peninsular Italy and Sicily. By the late fifth century, a republican system was certainly in place in Rome and in many other peer cities, in which elites competed for yearly elective military and civil commands, often, however, clearly furthering a factional and family agenda while in office.^[474] This is when the global dynamics in the whole central Mediterranean underwent a radical change: Carthaginians and Syracusans in Sicily (quickly followed by some peninsular states) began engaging in a territorial expan­sionism that aimed at lumping together entire states and at the creation of directly controlled colonies (unlike the politically independent colonies they founded in the ninth-sixth centuries bce).^[475]

In this period, Rome attacked head on a major Etruscan state, Veii, which was its closest neighbor across the Tiber. Veii fell after years of war (in which Rome for the first time kept its army in the field year round and paid it a salary) and it was eliminated as an independent polity, an unprecedented act in central Italy.

From the start, Roman policy in the conquered human landscapes seems to have been an inclusive one, leaving existing local power structures in place and broadening the base that was subject to taxation and to the army draft. Rome's expansion quickly picked up its pace after Veii's destruction, a harsh treatment that was only repeated in strategic locations like Carthage or Corinth. At the other end of the spectrum is the policy toward Gabii, a Latin state as close to Rome as Veii, with which Rome struck an “equal” (that is, balanced) treaty that would later become a model informing hundreds of similar agreements with city-states around the Mediterranean. Essentially, during the fourth and third centuries bce, the Roman Empire extended rapidly in peninsular Italy by means of a vast number of separate one-to-one treaties with the other cities, without the creation of an explicit confederation or of a clear imperial political infrastructure. Significantly, Romans kept referring to them as allies. They had been induced to enter into agreements through a combination of means such as negotiation, military threat, actual war, offers of protection against a common enemy and interference in their internal affairs.

What is true instead is that all the main foci of expansion in the central Mediterranean at this time (Rome, Syracuse, Carthage, Macedonia) were benefiting from a snowball effect that made the next conquest more likely after each annexation, thanks to increased taxation, tribute, army draft, and to general economies of scale in the growing empires. However, expansion fed expansion in different ways, and the growing competition among empires played out in their efficiency in pooling imperial resources, much more than in pure military confrontations. Here, Rome had a distinctive advantage in its deeply rooted policy of admitting foreigners into its citizen body, as contemporary Greek rulers themselves had to concede. The population estimates for this period show an exponential growth that vastly exceeds the potential of fertility in pre-modern societies. Thus, rather than imagining ethnically pure Romans taking over Italy, it is clear that, with political nimbleness and no ethnic exclusiveness, urbanized communities were quickly co-opted and persuaded to identify with the conveniently vague and flexible concept of expanding Roman rule.

A consideration of Rome's expansion pattern in peninsular Italy is also revealing of the deep logic of the process. Far from concentrically expanding like an oil slick, Rome reached out to other major cities within 50 kilometers of the western coast, that is, the cradle of Iron Age Italian urbanism, along existing lines of communication. Its priority was clearly to have the other peer polities brought into its expansionistic bid as soon as possible. Non­urbanized, upland areas toward the spine of the peninsula were left to be dealt with later. As early as the fourth century bce, Rome was far more worried with ι,ooo-kilometer-distant Carthage (with whom it had political and commercial treaties) than with the central Apennines, which were only 100 kilometers away but were mountainous and rural. Even the eastern coast of Italy, which was only very sporadically urbanized, although not far by way of sea (and only 200 kilometers away as the crow flies) figured much less prominently in the early narratives and in the archaeologically attested circulation or prestige goods than far-flung southeastern Spain or even the Nile Delta, which were important international commercial nodes.

In the rush to link together the main states of the central Mediterranean, Rome had a significant geographic advantage over its competitors. Being in a dense concentration of cities reduced the land surface costs in the early stages of the expansion, and meant that the empire did not have to rely exclusively on maritime routes like Carthage. For centuries, the core of the Roman state would be represented by a stretch of c. 300 kilometers of the western coast, extending 50 kilometers inland and with Rome at its center.

Map 25.2 Rome's expansion.

Other states scattered around the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea (bounded by Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and southern France) would be progressively tied to that core in a relatively compact assemblage. Desert-bordered Carthage necessarily had to put together a much more disjointed and far-flung empire (albeit commercially a very productive one), while expanding Greek cities like Syracuse had never invested enough in the Italian hinterland and its inhabitants to be able to integrate it effectively (Map 25.2).

While Rome evidently prioritized existing cities, it also spread urbanism with the creation of colonies, which had the primary function of bringing into existence a new state that, from its birth and by definition, was a member of the alliance, rather than that of military outposts manned by ethnic Romans. A large number of Roman colonies of this period were founded in poorly urbanized areas of inland and eastern Italy. Quite a few, however, were placed inside existing urban systems (and even sometimes on top of existing cities), thus increasing even further the density of the urban network in western central Italy. Wherever they happened to be, they were also connected with a reorganization of the landscape around the new city. Each colonist family was connected with a parcel of land of a certain size to qualify for political rights, and cadastral systems were put in place to keep much better track of land ownership than before. Recent studies have shown that locals (as well as members of other allied communities) were routinely invited to be a part of the new polity and it is likely that land confiscation and dispossession were not as widespread as traditionally main­tained.^[477] Farm buildings and agricultural practices have been archaeologically shown not to present much change before and after the foundation of a colony, and local burial customs and cults often persist too.

A distinctive feature of Rome's colonies was that their inhabitants, besides being full citizens of the new city, also received some form of intermediate (or more rarely full) citizenship of Rome. Similar grants were also routinely made to allied communities to reward their continued loyalty to the federation. These rights typically included the ability to relocate to Rome, to marry and inherit from Romans, and to trade with Romans under the protection of Roman law. Voting rights were eventually given as a recogni­tion of full membership in the budding empire. Unusually, freed slaves (a fast-growing social group in Rome and one almost entirely composed of non-Romans) were treated essentially in the same fashion. In this way, Rome's stakeholder base constantly expanded, offering to new allies tangible examples of the benefits of integration, which were much better than those offered by any competing Carthaginian or Greek imperialist. Another key trait of Rome's expansionist offer was that the political order it promoted was guaranteed to be slanted in favor of landed elites, whatever their ethnicity or background. Access to the senate was restricted to land-owners, and upward social mobility seems to have been much less common than horizontal elite mobility (a phenomenon that existed already from the early first millennium bce). Non-Roman nobility from across the peninsula moved to (or had a foothold in) Rome with apparent ease and often reached the highest offices and the senatorial rank. The Roman army, led by the same people, was ready to come to the rescue of elites in allied communities and squelch social unrest and uprisings, which significantly happened more often than rebellions or secessions of entire incorporated cities against Rome.

In the late third and especially in the second century bce, the expansion of Rome increasingly pushed up against other competing territorial empires. This prompted a series of prolonged wars that were different in their nature from the ones Rome had fought in Italy. They often escalated into desperate struggles for supremacy and always resulted, sooner or later, with the utter defeat of Rome's opponent. This was the fate of all the states that had arisen from the break-up of the empire of Alexander the Great, but also of emerging central Mediterranean powers like Syracuse or Carthage. By the 140s bce, Rome controlled most Mediterranean coastal cities, whose political and economic structures were easier to integrate and win over with offers of citizenship and other benefits, resulting in a far-flung empire that had avoided and leapfrogged over the less digestible parts. At the same time, the reach of urbanism kept growing thanks to colonial foundations in areas like the Po Plain, which would become (and still are) among the most densely settled in Europe, paving their way for a fuller participation in the political life of the empire. Outside Italy too, once a city became part of the alliance it would typically maintain much of its local power arrangements and therefore adapt to the changed circumstances with relatively little turbulence, but it would be within a province. These administrative districts were assigned to yearly governors who were in charge of taxation, keeping the order, arbitrating between cities, and monitoring the frontier.

As earlier in Italy, for this phase too there is little archaeological evidence that the Roman conquest caused wholesale relocation of agri­cultural populations or land distribution to ethnic Romans. By far the most blatant symptom of the changed situation is represented by the vast infrastructural investment made by the central government (and to a lesser extent by provincial ones) in the countryside. An extensive network of roads was painstakingly built, not all going to Rome. The new lines of communication sometimes followed and improved existing routes but often cleared natural obstacles, such as the Apennines or the Alps, opening up brand-new opportunities for trade and contact. The magni­tude of these projects contrasts sharply with the relative modesty of the public construction inside contemporary Rome. Other infrastructures included aqueducts (primarily to supply Rome, but also other cities), drainage channels, land reclamation, and much else. Piracy and brigand­age were actively repressed and eventually eliminated, with the same goal as the road improvements. All these efforts characterizing the new Roman state from an early stage of its development clearly impacted a number of areas that were typically beyond the reach of individual cities, almost as if the aim was to offer a tangible proof of the advantages deriving from membership in the empire. As a general strategy, Rome let things be inside existing cities and in their immediate hinterland, and intervened instead at the interstices between city-states, connecting, integrating, facilitating, servicing, and arbitrating between them in exchange for the taxation that it extracted.

Moving toward a continental empire

Once the Mediterranean urban world had been almost completely unified under Rome (with the exception of Egypt and other bits of the African coast), it collectively turned its renewed attention to the vast continental expanses of western and central Europe and of western Asia. For centuries, Mediterranean traders and travelers had ventured up river valleys and across plains and plateaus to exchange finely crafted products and exotic delicacies such as wine with raw materials, slaves, and rare resources such as amber. It was a system that worked well, but it constrained the volume of trade and subjected it to outside variables. In addition to that, many pre-urban polities in these areas were finally moving toward statehood as a result of an endogenous process that had undoubtedly been helped along by the pro­longed interaction with the Mediterranean. Fortified hilltop nucleated settle­ments in central France and Spain, for instance, were significantly growing in numbers, size, and internal stratification in the course of the late second and early first century bce. These changes were long believed to have been directly produced by the Roman conquest, but finer chronological reso­lution now shows that they instead pre-dated the arrival of the Roman army, sometimes by just a few decades.^[478] It appears that the Mediterranean urban alliance saw an opportunity for further expansion in the develop­ments that were bringing new regions closer, making them “ripe” for a tighter form of integration. At the same time, there is no doubt that as they came in contact with these evolving polities, the Romans and their Mediter­ranean allies met more resistance and had to face much more post­annexation instability. Areas of central Spain (but also of France and even Liguria in Italy) had to be militarily dealt with again and again, suggesting strongly that for these people participation in a territorial empire was not the obvious option that it had been earlier on for the city-states.

In military terms, the push inland of the Roman Empire required a very different strategy from the ones used along the seaboard. Moving the army (and especially supplying it) could not be done by sea, thus slowing down the pace and the frequency of the campaigns. These tended to become multi-year affairs in distant parts of the world, where the yearly rotation of the elected military leaders (which usually involved a reorganization of the army and of its staff) was eminently impractical. Commands had therefore

to be extended and provincial governors often played an important role, staying in the field with the same army for long periods, essentially free from senatorial supervision, at least until they returned to Rome. The very structure of the army was radically changed, eliminating the last vestiges of the original stratification of soldiers by social class, emphasizing instead veterancy and military rank acquired in the field. The conquest, which had proceeded along the coasts at a sustained and constant pace so that few years had seen no gains, now became much more unpredictable, alternating massive leaps and bounds with long periods of stable boundaries. Necessar­ily, expansion could only come from long expeditions that had to be planned well in advance and that, when successful, often led to the incorporation of areas many times the size of the whole of peninsular Italy (see Map 25.2).

Rome's administrative strategy in the continental regions always built, at least initially, on networks established earlier by other city-states. Thus they clearly benefited from the inroads that the Carthaginians had made in Andalusia along the Guadalquivir Valley and that the Greek city of Massalia (Marseilles) had made up the Rhone Valley. There too, the foundation of new cities and the reorganization of the rural landscapes had been fundamental tools to interact with the local communities and to make them more compatible with and interested in the Mediterranean world. The Roman effort, however, was much more sustained and, crucially, made space both for local agency (which was in a very dynamic phase anyway) and for the participation of individuals from all the cities around the empire. Again, infrastructural investments were not spared, and they sped up the process of integration and economic development. New provinces set up in this phase, like Provence or Hispania Citerior in eastern Spain, quickly became a full part of the global imperial machin­ery, effectively and permanently pushing out the boundaries of the Mediterranean world.

As the first century bce progressed, the empire underwent even deeper changes in many areas. The political republican system collapsed, crushed by the emergence of large professional armies that were firmly loyal to the commanders under whom they had served for long periods. Clearly, the geographic and cultural mass of the alliance had become too big to be guided by officials elected every year in Rome, especially since there was a fast-expanding proportion of people around the empire that had voting rights but were de facto disenfranchised by their distance from the elections held in the capital. Rome's policy of political inclusiveness had reached its intrinsic spatial limitations. From then on, Rome was ruled by military dictators, called emperors, whose primary power base was within the army, and especially in the troops stationed near the capital. While military glory had certainly been instrumental in the ascent of the earliest of these condottieri, such as Marius, Pompey, or Caesar, from the first century ce onwards triumphs were no longer indispensable to obtain or maintain power, as the relevance of civilian public opinion declined. Military achieve­ment did occasionally help usurpers, such as Vespasian or Septimius Severus, but as a powerful drive for new campaigns it lost much of its appeal. After ιoo bce, the Roman army and its generals were engaged in intestine and inglorious wars more often than they were deployed in external ones, and certainly with far greater casualties. Civil strife and factionalism had always featured in the history of the empire to a remark­able extent, but once these changes took place they largely dominated the political life (with the exception of some eighty years in the second century ce), often relegating foreign affairs to the distant background. Even the conquest of Egypt, the last incorporation of a major Mediterranean state, was merely a by-product of a protracted civil war between competing Roman dictators and their semi-private armies.

In spite of its status as the capital of the largest Mediterranean empire of its time, down to about ιoo bce the urban infrastructure of Rome remained relatively unchanged. The same city walls were maintained, the Forum was not yet monumentalized, and most of the investment seems to have gone in the foundation of a number of subsidiary temples around the city (Map 25.3). Individual prominent clans promoted these rivaling projects, in keeping with Rome's nature as a factionalized oligarchy at the time. It was only when power became concentrated in the hands of military commanders that massive urban amenities were undertaken. Piazzas, theaters, and even more temples arose at the expense of private quarters, eventually turning the whole center of the city into a mosaic of public spaces and monuments by the late first century ce.^[479] The Palatine Hill emerged as the site of a vast imperial palace that served as a model for many royal residences in medieval and Renaissance Europe (Map 25.4).

Throughout the first and early second centuries ce, the imperialist machinery lurched into expansive action at irregular intervals and for different reasons. Early on, advances were made in the Rhineland, along the Danube, and in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula, ostensibly to

Map 25.3 Rome around 150 bce.

reach more easily defensible frontiers. All these areas tended to be less compatible with the rest of the empire than any other previous province and offered much stronger resistance, occasionally causing heavy defeats. Decades later Rome suddenly invaded Britain, possibly as a result of developing political complexity in the southeast of the island as well as for its own internal political reasons. Again, areas that were culturally and structurally very different ended up within the empire and they showed a much greater propensity for instability and outright rebellion. Conquests of this kind were the exception rather than the rule: the empire would not have survived long if all the provinces had been as troublesome as Britain or Germany proved to be. The last great push took place around the 100s ce, with the rapid annexation of Romania and Mesopotamia. The former was culturally not unlike Germany and it was probably coveted mostly for its mineral resources, while the latter was fully urbanized and was wrested from the Parthians, a vast territorial empire that had grown out of Persia and whose western boundary with

Map 25.4 Rome around 330 ce.

Rome moved back and forth many times. After this, there was no more expansion and Rome's foreign policy was almost exclusively limited to the defense of its frontiers and the repression of secession attempts, especially in the west. The city itself lost much of its centrality after about 200 ce, as alternative capitals were created by emperors who needed to be closer to the frontiers or to their competitors, and it was disastrously sacked in 410 ce.

Rome on the ground

Assessing the impact of the prolonged imperial expansion of Rome on the human landscapes it came to occupy has become harder in recent decades. For centuries, historians, politicians, schoolmasters, and Grand Tourists equated the diffusion of traits such as official inscriptions in stone, air-heated bathhouses, or legionary camps with a profoundly transformative experience. Idealists may have exalted Rome's civilizing mission, materialists measured a shift in the modes of production, and postcolonialists deplor- ingly charted the demise of local traditions, but they all implicitly agreed that Rome had, for better or worse, effected a cultural revolution. In these reconstructions, the instances that were considered paradigmatic were the latter continental conquests (which often geographically overlapped with the modern nations where this scholarship was being created), rather than the more crucial Mediterranean ones. Now, mostly thanks to archaeological data of a finer quality, the picture has become much more nuanced, making it impossible to explain cases as disparate as those of central Italy, Morocco, and Austria with the same model. At the very least, a fundamental distinc­tion must be drawn between the parts of the empire that were already urbanized before the conquest and those that became urbanized after it, or not at all. While they may show outward similarities, if one focuses on indicators like public architecture or inscriptions, the underlying cultural dynamics are profoundly different. Where cities already existed, they seam­lessly continued to function as such, building on the commonalities that Mediterranean urban culture had developed throughout the first millen­nium bce. In the rest of the empire, from the Apennine and Alpine ridges to the British Fens and Libya, cities or city-like local governments had to be founded, resulting in a much greater overall impact.^[480]

Production and economy have been recently highlighted as an area where Roman expansion would have caused massive changes. In the agricultural sphere, for instance, large plantation estates called villas spread virtually everywhere across the empire, supposedly revolutionizing productive struc­tures and agrarian power relationships by colonizing land seized from local small farmers. A closer examination of the villa phenomenon, however, shows that it originated in central Italy at the end of the second century bce, centuries after the Roman conquest, and it was often linked to the status display of local aristocrats more than to investment cash-cropping. The latter appeared eventually and only in highly special areas connected with the supply of large cities, such as the immediate hinterland of Rome or the Mediterranean bread and oil baskets. Elsewhere, and especially in the outer provinces, the existing peasant society was not replaced by gangs of chattel slaves, and data supporting agricultural intensification after the great expan­sion of the third century bce are generally scarce. In terms of trade and mining, there is macroscopic evidence of economic development between the second century bce and the second century ce. The frequency of Medi­terranean shipwrecks peaked in this period and arctic ice cores indicate a vast increase in the smelting of lead-associated metals. Average height was apparently on the rise, suggesting better diet. Commercial hubs, such as Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, reached a size and complexity that would not be seen again until the Industrial Revolution. These findings, however, need to be contrasted with the multitude of local contexts, which show little or no economic development. This is true of many continental areas but also of large parts of the urbanized East, such as continental Greece, where there is even a decline compared to the pre-conquest levels.^[481]

The infrastructural network clearly continued to be a priority for the central government. Roads, bridges, aqueducts, drainage channels, dams, and water mills were built at a fast rate and with much improved engineer­ing and building techniques. They certainly played the same role in the outer provinces as they did in Italy of offering tangible proof of the benefits of annexation. But their success naturally was a direct function of the need that the locals had for them, which was not everywhere as pronounced as in the Mediterranean. This was especially true where taxation was particularly unwelcome, for example, in areas that had no prior experience of it and that had little access to the coinage needed to pay it. Thus the same centrally instigated policies could have very different outcomes across the span of the empire. Another factor contributing to the heterogeneity of the empire is represented by its standing army. Once the constant expansion petered out, large contingents tended to be permanently stationed, typically along the frontier. The presence of thousands of people drawn from all over the empire and beyond, paid in cash, centrally housed, fed, and equipped obviously had a very significant local impact that would often exceed the one felt by less peripheral regions, away from the frontier.

To the spatial dishomogeneity of the empire, one must add the complex changes that took place once it had more or less stabilized, during the second through fourth centuries ce. After a long stint, the Italian Peninsula all but lost its centrality, along with treasured perks, such as its tax

Many stretches of the boundaries shown are only approximate. The provincial boundaries within Britain are unknown.

Diocese of Britanniae comprises 4 provinces, Galliae 8, Viennensis 7, Hispaniae 6, Africa 7, Italia 12, Pannoniae 7, Moesiae 11, Thracia 6, Asiana 9, Pontica 7 and Oriens 16.

Map 25.5 The later Roman Empire.

exemption or demilitarization. Rome was only one of the many cities where short-lived emperors could set up their court. The eastern, Greek-speaking half of the empire, destined to outlive the western one by about a thousand years, experienced renewed development and went on improving its urban and extra-urban infrastructure, which elsewhere had started to decline. Italian wine and oil stopped being widely exported overseas, replaced by Spanish, African, and Oriental exports. Byzantium and Alexandria emerged as the new political, economic, and cultural hubs of the Mediterranean world. In short, the center of gravity slowly shifted back East, bringing the experience of Rome to a close and leaving continental Europe to its own distinctive historical trajectory (Map 25.5).

The distinctiveness and paradigmatic value of Rome

Stepping back to consider ancient Rome in its broader historical context and among other empires immediately reveals an apparent paradox. On the one hand, few political formations have had the same name recognition in our consciousness, or have figured so prominently in our political discourse, in our cultural imagery, and in the architecture of our cities. And yet, the scholarship on Rome has remained largely insulated from the great intellectual syntheses on complex societies. For instance, state forma­tion studies hardly ever consider Italy in its near universal comparisons, and the same is true for historical anthropology and sociology. Perhaps because of its exceptional value as a paradigm of imperial discipline and organization, the Roman Empire could not be analyzed with the help of general theories prevailing in the social sciences, nor brought to bear on them. The few times that this has happened, the results have made as little impression in the specialist literature as in the broader one. In light of this, it is essential to evaluate how unusual Rome actually was, once it is freed from its nineteenth-century encrustations and it is measured on the same scale as other comparable entities. To be sure, some defining elements appear to be rather common. Urban centrality, land-based taxation, army draft, provincial administration, specialized palace bureaucracy, performance of power, imperial cult, to name just a few, can all be found in many large territorial states. Other features, as it is to be expected, are less typical but far from unique, such as the primacy that was given, at least formally, to land­based wealth or the role that legal litigation had in elite transactions.

Surprisingly, one trait that is not a part of its stock image but may set Rome apart from many other empires is its ethnic and cultural inclusiveness. Having fashioned a very hazy concept of their own identity, the expanding Romans focused primarily on sociopolitical and citizenship status to deter­mine who had a stake in the empire. Largely ignoring background, lan­guage, skin color (or other physical traits), religion or customs, the newcomers to the empire were only assessed in terms of their local rank, their land ownership, their urbaneness (urbanus meant civilized in Latin), and their willingness to participate in the imperial venture. By admitting millions of people into its citizenship over the course of five centuries, Rome ceased to exist as an ancient city in the proper sense of the word and became an exploded political entity whose local administration overlapped with the imperial one, whose electorate extended to the ends of the world, whose culture was conflated with a hybrid patchwork of ideas woven across millions of square kilometers. There is little doubt that those who were changed the most by the conquest were the Romans themselves.

further readings

Aldrete, G. S., Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Ammerman, A. J., “Environmental Archaeology in the Velabrum, Rome: Interim Report,” Journal of Roman Archaeology ιι (1998), 213-23.

Badian, E., Foreign Clientelae, 264-70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

Champion, C. B., Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pubblishers, 2004).

Coarelli, F., Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Dyson, S. L., The Roman Countryside (London: Duckworth, 2003).

Giardina, A., and A. Vauchez, Rome, l’idee et le mythe: du Moyen Age a nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 2000).

Harris, W. V., War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Laurence, R., The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1999).

Millett, M., The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Osborne, R., and B. Cunliffe (eds.), Mediterranean Urbanization 800-600 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Potter, D. S., The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Schiavone, A., The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Torelli, M., Studies in the Romanization of Italy (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1995).

Wallace-Hadrill, A., Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).