The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (8 page)

fi nanciers and businessmen. Both classes used their status to acquire

substantial wealth and land holdings in the provinces.

These elites took on compliant kings and chiefs in Spain, Gaul, and

Britain as clients, sponsoring their entry into imperial society. Most

of these former chieftains and war leaders gradually became landed

Roman gentlemen. Roman citizenship did not release them from the

obligation of paying direct taxes, but it brought limited immunity

from local laws and an exemption from tribute and forced labor. NonRomans eventually accounted for a signifi cant portion of the imperial

aristocracy of the later principate. Native-born Italians constituted

90 percent of the Senate under Augustus, but by the beginning of

the second century a.d. only 40 percent of all senators were from

the inner provinces. There was a backlash against ennoblement of so

many provincials under the Julio-Claudians, but Tacitus recorded a

potent speech by Claudius defending the admission of Gallic nobles

to the Senate in a.d. 48:

What else was the downfall of Sparta and Athens, than that they held

the conquered in contempt as foreigners? But our founder Romulus’s wisdom made him on several occasions both fi ght against and

naturalize a people on the same day! . . . If you examine the whole

of our wars, none was fi nished in a shorter time than that against

the Gauls; from then on there has been continuous and loyal peace.

Now that customs, culture, and marriage ties have blended them

with us, let them also bring their gold and riches instead of holding

them apart.14

Later empire builders, who found it essential to keep their subjects

at arm’s length, would have found this unthinkable. Identity was far

Roman

Britain 37

more fl exible in the classical era, and Roman conquerors freely borrowed from subject cultures. They unashamedly worshipped a host

of cults from Germany, Syria, Egypt, and Persia alongside their own

Greco-Roman gods and the divine emperor himself. These syncretic

practices allowed subject elites to embrace an imperial identity without

entirely abandoning their own cultures. Emperor Caracalla’s decision

to make every free resident of the empire a citizen in the early third

century a.d. was most likely a tacit admission that the assimilative

process had gone so far that the formal distinction between citizen

and subject underpinning the crudest forms of imperial exploitation

had become largely meaningless.

Historians of empire often equated this romanization with the

twentieth-century concepts of modernization and westernization on

the assumption that it entailed the progression from barbarism to

civilization. At the elite level Rome’s subjects learned Latin, adopted

Roman manners, copied Greco-Roman architecture, and purchased

Roman products. Yet romanization did not mean the domination

of one culture over another. Imperial society was never uniform

at the grassroots, and the term really meant only an acceptance of

Roman authority. Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians never became Romans,

although to varying degrees they acknowledged Roman rule. If there

was a common imperial identity at the heart of the romanization process, it emerged through cultural exchanges with the subject peoples

of the empire. Romanization thus described the spread of a hybrid

culture that emerged as Romans adopted local norms to govern conquered populations and conquered populations encountered Roman

functionaries, celebrations, monuments, and commerce.

The scope of romanization was relatively limited in the wealthy

and culturally coherent eastern provinces where Alexander the

Great’s empire left a Hellenic counterweight to Roman culture. It had

a greater impact in the west, where less coherent tribal communities

were more open to Rome’s ideas and material culture. Spaniards and

Gauls became senators, but romanization and token citizenship after

Caracalla’s decree probably meant relatively little beyond the provincial level. The evidence is scanty, but it appears that there were no British senators and few auxiliary commanders in the fi rst century a.d.

This convenient lacuna allowed later generations to bend the

Roman imperial record to suit their needs. Debates over the scope

38 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and infl uence of romanization predictably refl ected the national,

class, and methodological biases of the observer. Insisting that preconquest identities survived under Roman rule, nationalistic British

historians and archaeologists point to the survival of popular Celtic

forms in jewelry and religious shrines in arguing that romanization

infl uenced only a thin layer of Roman British society.15 Alternatively,

just as apologists for the empires of the twentieth century adopted a

balance sheet standard in counting railways, hospitals, and schools as

imperial achievements, those who imagined a civilizing Rome paid

the most attention to roads, aqueducts, villas, art, and literature. By

their reckoning, the high material culture of the empire suggested

that Roman rule was benevolent and uplifting. Depicting preconquest

Britain as affl icted with Hobbesian “endemic warfare,” one sympathetic scholar credited Roman rule with giving Britons the “freedom

to live the good life.”16

This may have been true for the
civitas
rulers who became imperial

gentlemen, but the initial stages of Roman rule brought signifi cant

hardship for subject majorities. Roman conquerors plundered and

disrupted local economies, seized land, and requisitioned labor. As

with most imperial projects, the real wealth of the Roman Empire

came from the exploitation of its subjects. Monumental construction

projects and the enormous surpluses needed to sustain the imperial bureaucracy, military, and artistic classes most likely consumed

wealth produced by huge amounts of coerced labor. Leading citizens

such as Cicero occasionally urged administrators to respect the interests of provincial populations, but defeated peoples were entirely at

the mercy of Roman soldiers, magistrates, and politically connected

metropolitan aristocrats.

Although they may appear cultured and urbane by contemporary

standards, Roman empire builders enslaved conquered populations in

enormous numbers. This was fairly typical behavior in the ancient

world, for victorious armies had the assumed right to dispose of their

captives as they wished. Republican Romans took tens of thousands, if

not hundreds of thousands, of slaves from Carthage, Spain, Gaul, and

captured eastern cities. Rebels continued to meet this fate under the

principate, and Emperor Vespasian enslaved ninety-seven thousand

residents of Jerusalem after razing the city during the Jewish Revolt.

He sent most of them to hard labor in Egypt, but the healthiest and

Roman

Britain 39

best-looking entertained the Roman mob by dying at the hands of

gladiators and wild animals in arenas throughout the empire.17

Imperial apologists point out that educated slaves and freedmen

held signifi cant positions of authority in the emperor’s household and

that owners often manumitted slaves. Admittedly, enslavement did

not mean permanent stigmatization in the modern sense, and Pertinax, who became emperor in the late second century a.d., was the son

of a freedman. Yet these were exceptional cases, for the vast majority

of Roman slaves were the meanest type of manual laborers.

Much of the empire’s wealth between the second century b.c. and

the second century a.d. came from slaves working on great rural

estates in Italy. Slaves constituted approximately 35 percent of the

population of the Italian peninsula under Augustus. An expert on

Roman slavery calculated that the Romans needed to acquire up to

half a million new slaves each year to maintain these levels during

the late republic and early principate.18 A great many of these slaves

faced a grim fate. Their owners worked them like animals, and slaves

could be tortured as a matter of procedure in criminal trials. Tellingly,

massive revolts were common under the late republic. The ability

of the ex-gladiator Spartacus to rally ninety thousand slaves to his

rebellion in 73 b.c. testifi ed to their hopeless and desperate condition,

given that the penalty for revolt was torture and crucifi xion.

The Romans treated slave revolts and provincial rebellions with

such brutality because, like all empire builders, they worried that their

control over their subjects was never completely secure. Defeated

peoples in the Roman Empire tended to rebel in the fi rst generation after the initial conquest, when Roman demands for labor and

taxes were most severe. Organized resistance became less common

late in the fi rst century a.d. after imperial expansion came to an end.

Nevertheless, the Romans still showed no mercy to those who challenged them. On learning that his generals had crushed a revolt by

the Nasamones in the African province of Numidia, Emperor Domitian proudly declared to the Senate: “I have forbidden the Nasamones

to exist.” Similarly, Emperor Severus ordered his forces to be equally

ruthless with enemies who threatened the northern frontier of Roman

Britain in the third century a.d.: “Let no-one escape utter destruction

at our hands; let not the infant still carried in its mother’s womb, if it

be male, escape from its fate.”19 Despite their military supremacy, the

40 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Romans were ever mindful of their security, and these measures were

usually suffi cient to deter potential rebels.

Britons most certainly learned this lesson, but their experience

of Roman imperial rule was not typical. One of the least romanized

provinces in the western empire, it paid meager returns. Yet Roman

Britain fi gures prominently in the imaginations of English-speakers,

for it allows them to pretend that Great Britain is the direct heir of

a grand and majestic Roman Empire. Nonetheless, the Roman era in

British history was not as uplifting or infl uential as contemporary

imperial enthusiasts might imagine.

Classical sources referred to the primary island in the British Isles

as Britannia, thus the inhabitants of this island were Britons. Greek

and Roman sources depict them as prototypical candidates for imperial subjugation. Casting them as giant forest-dwelling barbarians,

Strabo asserted that they had “no experience in gardening or other

agricultural pursuits.” Caesar, who actually visited Britain, granted

that the southern “tribes” were civilized through contacts with more

advanced continental Gauls, but he borrowed from Strabo in describing northern Britons as ferocious tribesmen who lived solely on milk

and meat, dyed themselves blue for war, and shared wives. Tacitus,

who wrote well after the Claudian conquest, continued to depict

northerners as wild and militaristic but added the qualifi cation that

the peace and stability of Roman rule had made them decadent.

For Roman authors and readers, Britain was an alien, exotic land

that was literally beyond the known world. The English Channel was no mere maritime body. It was “Ocean,” a watery boundary that marked the limits of civilization. Life in this remote, cold,

inhospitable, and mist-shrouded land turned Britons into wild men.

In Roman eyes they were a different order of humanity that deserved

conquest.20

These accounts actually tell us very little about the people we now

describe generically as Britons. There were strong continuities in the

material culture of Iron Age southern Britain, but preconquest Britons had distinct and separate identities based on their means of subsistence, political and social organization, and perhaps even language.

Regardless, classical authors invariably portrayed all barbarians—

including Britons—as nomadic, cannibalistic, and sexually immoral.21

These historians provide most of the narrative detail of the Roman

Roman

Britain 41

conquest of Britain, but we need to read them with caution, for most

used Britannia as a backdrop for debates about society and politics

in metropolitan Rome. Evidence demonstrates that Britons, particularly southern Britons, were not isolated and shared a material culture with their Iron Age neighbors across Ocean in Gaul, Belgica, and

Germania.

Contrary to Strabo and Caesar, late pre-Roman Iron Age communities practiced specialized agriculture; mined copper, iron, and tin;

and produced wheel-thrown pottery and fi nished metal goods. The

British Isles most likely experienced signifi cant population growth in

the fi rst century b.c., and competition for resources probably led to

friction and warfare. Britons in the more mountainous northern and

western highland zones had fewer commercial and cultural contacts

with continental Europe, but they produced a suffi cient agricultural

surplus to sustain settled communities. The agrarian lowland regions

of southern Britain supported much higher population densities. In

the rugged regions of Wales and southwest England, populations

clustered around hill forts, while
oppida
, large semiurban settlements