From Republic to Empire

3.4.1 An Extraordinary Territorial Expansion

Rome’s subjugation of Italy, which can be considered to have been achieved in the year 265 bc,^[74] and its victory over Carthage, culminating in the wars against Hannibal (219-201 bc), made it one of the greatest powers of all Antiquity.

3.4.2 From Conquest to Stable Dominion

The Romans were successful at occupying these lands because, besides their military power, they had the ability to divide, weaken and conquer their enemies. In the end, Roman rule was based on an extraordinarily varied and complicated system of alliances and situations of dependence, all revolving around the city-state of Rome. The most singular fact of all, however, was not that Rome was able to conquer so much territory, but that it managed to continue to rule it in a stable manner, creating provinces and naming governors,^[75] and that they did not hesitate to destroy the indigenous political communities they encountered, whose existence posed a threat to their rule; they did not tolerate alliances or pacts between Rome’s allies and subjects, assuring in this way that each one of the communities they annexed had legal relationships only with Rome itself, all other connections being barred. The establishment of a progressive administrative network in the provinces, consolidated as time elapsed, the control which the metropolis exerted over Rome’s provincial dominions (Ando 2010). This is particularly extraordinary when we consider how relatively few administrators were charged with overseeing the territories integrated into the Roman civitas.^[76]

The resistance of the conquered populations was also mitigated as another operating principle of Rome’s imperial policy was to let its subjects, as far as was possible, maintain their religion and customs, in addition to an autonomous admin­istration.

Rome also consolidated its rule through an intelligent policy of reinforcing the Empire’s borders and building a network of strategic roads and fortified posts in Italy, during the first republican era and later, at the time of the Principate, in the Empire’s frontier provinces. Thanks to all of these circumstances, Rome city-state was able to become an Empire.^[78]

3.4.3 The Consequences of Rome's Territorial Expansion:

The Crisis of the Republican System

The Roman state model did not evolve from aristocracy towards democracy, as happened in Athens, but from aristocracy to monarchy. This transformation was the result of a gradual process that began at the time of Julius Caesar (100-44 bc), and did not end until the reform of Diocletian (284-311 ad), when the emperors became absolute monarchs (dominus). Triggering this transformation were the civil wars (86-31 bc), whose root cause can be traced to a republican system of government and administration, which was not effectively adapted to accommodate Rome’s extraordinary territorial expansion.^[79]

The most extraordinary aspect of the process described is that the incorporation of new territories into the Roman orbit, not only led the occupied peoples to accept their integration into the Roman model of civilization, but transformed the Roman political constitution itself (Boatwright et al.

This imbalance meant that, little by little, the protagonists of Roman political life ceased to be the magistrates or the assemblies, or even the Senate. Rather, power was increasingly held by the army, and particularly by the great generals, whose prestige, consideration and wealth, depended upon them incorporating new terri­tories. The price to pay for this new state of things was the outbreak of the “civil wars”, which raged from 86 bc, with the dictatorship of Sulla, until 31 bc, when Octavian defeated Mark Antony at Actium.^[81]

After Octavian’s (later to be named “Augustus”) victory, however, the Roman public system of law would never be the same, as Rome’s new leader was politically adept enough to tailor the Roman constitution to the needs of its burgeoning borders, without provoking a radical rupture with the republican regime (Flaig 2011, 67-84).

The most interesting aspect of Rome’s political and legal configuration was not its theoretical formulation, but how it pragmatically adapted to each time and its situation. Rome was initially a polis, featuring institutions characteristic of an Indo-European society, though certainly concretized in a sui generis manner by the Republic’s regime. Later, because of Rome’s massive expansion following its victory over Carthage in 209 bc, the republican model was flexible enough to allow for the integration of the new territories conquered. Republican institutions, how­ever, were conceived primarily to govern the territorial scope of the civitas, and not to handle such dramatic territorial expansion. This precipitated the crisis of the republican regime in the first century bc, only resolved when Augustus laid the bases of a large centralized state (Raaflaub 2011, 62-66).

3.5