Rome

Every ancient state attempted conquest. Rome’s distinctive contribution to the history of power was the habit of conducting conquest, rule and belonging as legal procedure. The instinct is visible from the beginning. The Twelve Tables, set up in the Forum around 450 BC, were extracted from the patricians by plebeian pressure, and what the plebeians wanted was visible law, rules that could be read and cited instead of administered from the private knowledge of a priestly class.

The construction of those rules matters as much as their content. The characteristic formula is si quis, “if anyone”, a universal conditional addressed to no one in particular and stated plainly, without subordination. A rule whose subject is a variable rather than a named person already presupposes interchangeable legal persons, which is a strange assumption for a small city on a river to make. Rome spent seven centuries discovering how far it would stretch.

The stretching happened sideways rather than upwards. Each year the incoming praetor published an edict announcing the remedies he intended to grant, framed in the first person as I shall grant an action. Successive praetors inherited and adjusted it, and the accumulated result was a second body of law, the ius honorarium, running alongside the older civil law and quietly correcting it. The jurist Papinian’s classic formulation is that praetorian law exists to aid, supplement and correct the civil law. Replacing it is not on the list. Roman law almost never repealed. It built alongside and left the old structure standing, which is why legal fiction is so characteristic of the Roman mind. Where the rules did not reach a case, the praetor granted an action as if the qualifying fact were true.

Hadrian ended the experiment around AD 129, commissioning Salvius Iulianus to consolidate the edict into a fixed text. Creative authority moved out of the magistracies and into one person. And in AD 212 Caracalla’s Constitutio Antoniniana extended citizenship to virtually every free inhabitant of the empire. It was the endpoint of a process that had run from the Social War onwards, and it was possible only because Roman had always been a legal status rather than an ethnic one.

The Roman army changed shape three times, and each change was a response to a problem the previous shape had created. The manipular legion of the early and middle Republic was a citizen militia of property-owning men who armed themselves and went home after campaigning. It worked while wars were fought within reach of the harvest. It did not survive the transition to permanent overseas commitments.

By the first century BC the army had become a professional standing force recruited from men with no property to return to, a change traditionally credited to Marius, which solved the manpower problem and created a political one. Soldiers now depended on their commander for land at discharge, and commanders discovered they had armies with a personal interest in their success. The late Republic is largely the working-out of that discovery.

Under the Principate the army settled into frontier deployment, and here the interesting question is what a frontier was for. Hadrian’s Wall is the best-studied case: 117 kilometres across northern Britain, with a gate at every Roman mile, watchtowers between them, forts behind, and a second earthwork, the Vallum, running parallel on the Roman side. Nobody building a barrier to keep people out puts eighty doors in it. The design fits regulation rather than exclusion: controlling, taxing and observing movement, and announcing where Rome ended.

The larger argument about frontier strategy remains open. Edward Luttwak proposed a coherent Roman grand strategy evolving through client states, preclusive security and defence in depth. Benjamin Isaac and C. R. Whittaker replied that this imports a modern concept into a state showing little sign of having one, and that the limes was a system of control rather than a defensive perimeter. The balance has moved toward the sceptics. The Wall itself supplies a small piece of evidence. It was begun at ten Roman feet wide and narrowed to eight mid-construction, and the sixteen forts were not in the original plan.

One detail deserves more attention than it gets. The Wall was held by auxiliaries rather than legionaries, non-citizens recruited across the empire: Hamian archers from Syria, Tungrians from what is now Belgium, Dacian cavalry. The northern edge of the Roman world was patrolled by men who were not Roman citizens, watching for the approach of other people who were not Romans.

The Roman economy was Mediterranean before it was anything else. The sea was the cheap transport network, and the empire’s economic geography follows from that, with coastal and riverine cities tied into long-distance exchange and inland regions largely outside it. Grain moved from Egypt and North Africa to feed a capital that could not feed itself, and oil, wine and fish sauce moved in amphorae whose distribution maps the trade.

Coinage did work beyond exchange. A denarius carried an image and a legend, which made it the most widely distributed political statement the state produced, a message that reached people no monument could. Debasement, correspondingly, was legible to everyone.

Slavery was built into this economy. The Republic’s conquests supplied captives at a scale that made slave labour the foundation of agriculture, mining and manufacture, and the character of the institution shifted under the Empire as the flow of war captives slowed and reproduction and trade took over. The distinction matters, because a slave society is not the same thing as a society with slaves.

And the empire ran a persistent imbalance eastwards. Pepper from the Malabar coast, silk transshipped through Sri Lanka, gemstones and fine cotton all came west, while wine, glass, coral and a great deal of precious metal went east. Roman moralists complained about the bullion drain, and hoards of Roman gold coin in southern India show they were describing something real. The Muziris papyrus, a second-century contract from Roman Egypt, records the financing of a single Indian cargo at a value that could underwrite an estate, with formal credit and insurance behind it. This was not a trade in curiosities.

Roman society was organised by gradation, and the gradations were meant to be seen. Order, class and office were marked in dress, seating, the width of a stripe on a tunic, the order of precedence at dinner. The cursus honorum laid out a sequence of offices with minimum ages, so that a career was legible as a position on a track. Status in Rome was a public display, and a great deal of Roman social behaviour only makes sense once that is granted.

The household was the unit that mattered. The paterfamilias held formal authority over an estate that included people, and Roman law spent centuries elaborating the consequences. Marriage, inheritance, guardianship and manumission are all, from the law’s point of view, questions about the household’s boundary, who is inside it, on what terms, and what happens when they leave.

Enslaved people were inside it. Urban slavery in Rome covered domestic service, craft production, banking, medicine and teaching, and manumission was common enough that freedmen and their descendants formed a substantial part of the citizen body. This is a real difference from later plantation systems, and it should not be mistaken for mildness. The same law that permitted manumission also permitted the torture of enslaved witnesses as routine procedure.

Public entertainment was where the gradations were rehearsed in front of everyone. The arena and the circus seated the city by rank, displayed the emperor’s relationship to the crowd, and turned execution into a civic occasion. Gladiators occupied a position that resists modern categories entirely: legally degraded, sometimes wealthy, publicly admired, and socially untouchable.

Roman religion was a matter of practice rather than belief, and the distinction is not a technicality. What the gods required was correct performance: the right words, in the right order, on the right day, by the right person. A rite performed with a mistake in it was void and had to be repeated. Nobody was required to believe anything in particular, and no institution existed to police what people privately thought.

The apparatus was correspondingly procedural. Priestly colleges maintained the calendar and the formulae. Augurs read the divine will through prescribed signs, so the state consulted the gods before public business as a matter of administrative routine, and the pontiffs kept the record. Even war was conducted through it. The fetial priests demanded restitution before hostilities and declared war by hurling a spear into enemy territory, and when the enemy became too distant for that, Rome had a captured soldier buy a plot of land near the temple of Bellona so the spear could be thrown into legally enemy ground without leaving the city.

Roman religion absorbed rather than excluded. Interpretatio Romana identified foreign gods with Roman ones as a matter of course, which made the pantheon expandable and made religious conflict rare. Mithraism, an initiatory cult with no public temples, spread through the army. The imperial cult gave provincials a language in which to express loyalty, and gave the Senate an instrument of posthumous judgement. A dead emperor could be made a god, or condemned to have his name chiselled from the monuments.

Christianity broke the arrangement because it refused the absorption. A religion that would not identify its god with anyone else’s, and would not perform the civic rites, refused the procedure itself, and that, more than its doctrine, is what made it a problem.

Roman building is usually praised for its engineering, which is fair and slightly beside the point. The technical achievements are real. Roman concrete sets underwater, the arch and the vault carried loads rather than decorating, and aqueducts held a gradient over tens of kilometres. Their significance is what they made possible socially. Concrete meant interior space at scale, and interior space at scale meant buildings that could hold a population.

The Pantheon is the clearest case, an unreinforced concrete dome of 43 metres, still the largest of its kind, enclosing a volume that affects anyone who walks into it. The Colosseum is the same logic applied to crowd management, with entrances and stairways designed to seat and clear tens of thousands by rank. These are arguments about what a state can do for and to its population, made in a medium that outlasts the argument.

The road network and the aqueducts are the same instinct at territorial scale. A road is a claim about where authority reaches, and an aqueduct is a claim about what the city can compel from its hinterland. Both were built to a standard that made them legible as Roman anywhere they appeared.

And some structures are straightforwardly rhetorical. Trajan’s Column narrates a war in a spiral relief that cannot be read from the ground, which tells you the audience was never the passer-by. The Forum accumulated monuments until walking through it meant walking through a curated version of the Roman past. Every one of those was a decision about what would still be visible in a century.

The Roman Empire was bilingual for its entire existence, and the division of labour between its two languages is the most revealing fact about Roman intellectual life. Latin was the language of the army, the Senate and the law. Greek was the language of philosophy, medicine, science and commerce, and of the eastern cities where most of the empire’s population and wealth were.

Roman elite education was systematically Greek-first. Quintilian recommends beginning with Greek on the reasoning that Latin will be absorbed anyway. The content was Greek too: Homer and the tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, Euclid, Hippocrates and Galen. Cicero switches between the languages inside single letters. Marcus Aurelius, ruling a Latin empire, wrote his private philosophy in Greek.

So Rome never won the language contest for thought, and did not much try. What it won was procedure. Latin was where law happened, and law is what proved exportable, through Justinian’s codification and the medieval canonists into the civil law of most of the world. The Roman intellectual legacy is less a body of ideas than a set of instruments for handling them.

Rhetoric was the discipline that mattered, because it was the one with a career attached. Roman education aimed at public speech, and Cicero’s technical works remained the standard for centuries. Encyclopaedism was the other characteristic Roman mode. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History gathers everything its author could find, valuable because he preserved sources that have otherwise vanished and unreliable for the same reason, since he was collecting rather than judging.

Almost everything written about Rome by Romans was written by a very small number of men, drawn from a narrow social band, mostly about themselves and their peers. That is the first fact to hold onto, and it conditions everything else.

Livy wrote a history of Rome from the foundation, working largely from earlier annalists rather than documents, and is at his least reliable exactly where he is most quoted: the regal period and early Republic, which reach him through centuries of family tradition and patriotic elaboration. Tacitus is a far better historian and a far more dangerous one. His method is insinuation, presenting a damaging interpretation as something merely reported, and a reader who misses the technique will absorb his judgements as facts. Suetonius wrote biography rather than history, organised by category instead of chronology, with access to imperial archives and an appetite for gossip that makes him invaluable and unstable in the same paragraph.

Against that, the documentary record. Inscriptions run to hundreds of thousands, and freedmen, soldiers, tradespeople and women far outside the senatorial order produced many of them, recording what they wanted recorded about themselves. Papyri from Egypt preserve the paperwork of provincial life. The Vindolanda tablets, thin slivers of wood written in ink because papyrus was too expensive on the northern frontier, give the ordinary correspondence of a garrison.

The general rule is that literary sources tell you what the Roman elite thought was worth saying, and documentary sources tell you what everyone else was doing. Where the two disagree, the documents are usually the better guide, because they were not composed to persuade anybody.