Hegemony to Empire21

Historical analysis requires beginnings and endings, as well as turning points. It once was traditional to write as though Rome had long persisted as a rising imperial power with narrowly parochial interests, restricted to its neighbours in the Italian peninsula.

It is therefore important to commence with a long view of Roman practice, by way of being clear about the nature of the claims this chapter proposes to make for the formation of empire in the Aegean. The Roman state had ob­served a variety of practices in its expansion within peninsular Italy between the fifth and third centuries bce, and again in its overseas entanglements with Carthage in the third and early second centuries BCE. These practices had in­cluded, early on, the wholesale incorporation of conquered peoples into the Roman community (retrospectively remembered as occurring via grants or even the imposition of full citizenship); the sending-out of colonies of both Roman citizens and also citizens of defective status; the annexation of territo­ry as property of the Roman people as well as the release of territory back to the control of conquered peoples; and the extension of significant networks of multiple forms of alliance in which nominal allies were required to contribute manpower to notionally-defensive military ventures.

From all this, several conclusions might be drawn of relevance to the pre­sent argument. (i) The repertoire of Roman techniques for extending power and influence was complex and developed over time. (ii) As a related matter, the type of power that Rome sought and exploited itself changed from context to context, and within contexts from time to time. (iii) These processes of de­velopment were not linear across all regions; rather, in each region, Roman techniques responded to cultural, political, ecological and infrastructural con­ditions. (iv) Nor was this simply a process of Rome's learning, responding to and exploiting local conditions. We should not eroticise Roman might, as though the magnitude of Roman power made it the only state with true agen­cy, and once Rome decided on the form of its intervention in any given region or context, it had the capacity to bring new worlds into being. Far from it: Rome itself was changed by the contests it undertook, and the political-economic conditions it brought into being. This was the insight of Machiavelli, and the genius of Toynbee.

With these caveats in mind, consider two moments in the extension of Ro­man power in the Aegean, in each case through citation of the form of legal instrument by which it is best known.

In the second century bce, the primary instrument by which Rome (and other parties) shaped the contexts of their action was the treaty.^{[216] [217] [218] These might be bilateral and made in the context of an envisioned or ongoing war, in which case the content was directed to issues of responsibility, command, and, above all, disposition of booty: such is the case with the treaty between Rome and Aetolians c. 210 BCE.24 But the more important and more common form was the treaty of �friendship and alliance' in common defence, such as the bilateral treaties between Rome and Kibyra, struck at some point after 167 bce, or be­tween Rome and Maroneia, of similar date, or between Rome and Methymna, in the 120s BCE?5 The terms and language were unremarkably stable, and whatever the realities of power, they construed the parties to the treaty as equivalent in respect of sovereignty. The language of the treaty with Maroneia is thus largely replicated in a later treaty between Rome and Astypalaia:}

[...] between the People of the Romans and the People of the Astypala- ians let there be peace and friendship and alliance both on land and on sea for all time; let there be no war.

- The People of the Astypalaians shall not grant passage to the ene­mies and opponents of the People of the Romans through their own land and the land that the People of the Astypalaians controls, with public sanction, so that upon the Romans and those ruled by the Romans they might wage war.

- The People of the Romans shall not grant passage to the enemies and opponents of the People of the Astypalaians [...]^{[219] [220]}

The language attributed to the Romans is abbreviated in this quotation be­cause the form of the document induces the expectation that each party binds itself to the same obligations as its counterparty does, and such was in fact the case. Put another way, the text is situated among notional equals, and their equality finds expression in the exact symmetry of the stipulations that bind each party. By means of such treaties, an avowedly multilateral world was sim­plified, and its multiple actors constrained, via a sequence of purely bilateral actions. These negotiations can legitimately be analysed in light of the short­term interests pursued by any given party: for example, Rome often sought to forestall the participation of regional powers in forthcoming wars, or con­strained them to forbid their citizens to enroll as mercenaries in the armies of Rome's enemies?⁷ But instrumental stabilisations of the landscape in pursuit of momentary strategic interest had important long-term effects: in signing, Rome committed itself to principles of legality that counterparties could de­mand that it should vindicate in future negotiations. In particular, bilateral treaties of this era - both in the form of the text and in the processes of recog­nition that produced the text - affirmed the foundational importance of a principle of sovereignty, in preference to a commitment to physical power and a right of conquest, which would have granted to the stronger party greater freedom of action.

Change is continuous, and the world constructed by late Hellenistic treaties was no exception to this rule. (This was so despite the forms of stabilisation that treaties were intended to achieve.) Although Rome had largely achieved supremacy over its major rivals in the Aegean in the first two decades of the second century BCE, it had done so with significant aid from the enemies of those rivals - and its magistrates then withdrew, imposing no garrison and an­nexing no territory in the area.

and varied states in peninsular Greece in the early 140s, which terminated in the Roman sack of the city of Corinth in 146 BCE and the annexation of the whole of Greece as a Roman province. Then, in 133 bce, Attalus Ill, the ruler of the Attalid kingdom centered in Pergamum in southwest Asia Minor, died young and left his kingdom to the Roman people, with the stipulation that Pergamum itself should remain free. Direct Roman supervisions of territorial units of rule in the eastern Mediterranean had begun.

The development of Roman administration in these territories itself has an enormously complex history, which should be told in the first instance through contemporary legislation and decrees of the Roman senate: above all, this means the law regulating customs on the movement of goods into the province of Asia, which inter alia tells a tale of the Roman appropriation of the taxation infrastructure of the pre-Roman Attalid government; and the law on land di­rectly owned by the Roman people.^[221] Each text is in its way enormously diffi­cult of access, but has the virtue of speaking directly to the period of its com­position. We also possess a range of civic decrees from cities in the east, seeking to negotiate their status in the new order, under conditions of deep ignorance regarding the structures of politics and public power at Rome.

From these years comes the earliest surviving law written at Rome, a text of 123 BCE, mapping the world for Romans at Rome?^[222] This is a law on magisterial malfeasance - crucially, it is a law on malfeasant conduct among and directed towards non-Romans, and the text opens by specifying the types of commu­nity whose members are eligible to bring a charge under the law:

[- quoi socium no]minisue Latini exter∕∕ararumue nationum, quoiue in arbitratu dicione potestate amicitiau[e populi Romani]

Anyone of the allies or those of the Latin name or from a foreign nation, or anyone of those who are under the influence or authority or power or in the friendship of the Roman people [...]^[223]

The structure of the Latin text proposes a higher-order distribution of the relevant communities into two classes: one group consists in juridically- constituted communities with a specific legal relation to the Roman people (allies, Latins, or foreigners); the second consists of communities in a relation­ship of moral dependence (influence, authority, power, or friendship).

A subsequent stage in the formation of the empire as a territorial state, with a clear picture of who was in and who was out, is revealed by a statute on the powers of provincial governors from 101 BCE.^[224] The text is preserved in Greek translation in a number of highly damaged fragments that derive from multi­ple locations; in consequence, neither the full scope nor the name of the legis­lation can be recovered. What is notable is that the text preserves a sense that the wider world contains sovereign powers friendly to Rome and still others whose relation is not defined, and some of them exist in networks of treaty relations or domination with still further parties. It is formally a complex and multipolar world^{[225] [226] At the same time, there also exist provinces, which are non-contiguous; and new provinces are being formed by conquest and annex­ation, faster, perhaps than the still-primitive structures of Roman imperial su­pervision can be reduplicated across units of rule.33 Furthermore, these prov­inces are supervised by Roman governors, who must be reminded that their powers are no longer those of a traditional Roman imperator, achieving glory for themselves and riches for Rome through imperialist action. They have re­sponsibilities of jurisdiction, and constraints of action, in respect of popula­tions who are neither Roman nor alien, but subject, in a form of relation for which the Romans have, as yet, no name.[227]}

What takes the place of the treaty in the emerging world of empire? As it happens, treaties abide, and the reasons have much to say about the role of law in negotiating the gap between military and state infrastructural power in the premodern world. Even within territorial units annexed, organised, and ad­ministered by Rome, Rome continued to recognise some parties as �free’ and thereforejuridically �outside’ the space of empire^[228] One such party was the twin city of Plarasa-Aphrodisias in southwestern Asia Minor, whose status in respect of Rome and whose powers in respect of its neighbours were laid out in a decree of the Roman senate of 38 bce:

...and (it is agreed) that the community, and the citizens of Plarasa and Aphrodisias are to have, hold, use and enjoy all those lands, places, build­ings, villages, estates, strongpoints, pastures, revenues that they had when they entered the friendship of the Roman People, and are to be free, and immune from taxation and the presence of tax-contractors. Nei­ther are any of them obliged on any account to give or contribute (any­thing) but they are to be free in all respects and immune from taxation and are to enjoy their own traditional laws and those which they pass among themselves hereafter^[229]

On the surface, the text suggests that the Roman province of Asia Minor (and other provinces wherein certain peoples were recognised as �free’) was some­thing like a Swiss cheese, with pockets of territory, containing several popula­tions, over whom Roman power did not extend. And there is surely a sense in which this is correct. It is surely also correct to understand the power that Rome grants to such �free’ cities as existing in fractal relationship to the power of Rome itself: Roman domination of subject peoples likewise extended to �lands, places, buildings, villages, estates, strongpoints, pastures and revenues’, and Rome was no more concerned with the feelings of peoples that it �had’ than it felt the need to spell out for the villagers in the hinterland of Aphro­disias the consequences for them, of Rome’s handing over to the poliadic elite of Plarasa-Aphrodisias the land, buildings and revenues used and generated by the villages for its �use and enjoyment’.

But there is an essential third interpretive point to be elicited from this pas­sage, which concerns the limits of Roman infrastructural power, its instrumen- talisation of existing structures of local power and social dependency, and the alignments of interest that Rome was able to achieve between itself and select populations in the landscape of empire. Like virtually all premodern states, Rome had neither the personnel nor the technology to penetrate throughout its territories or deeply into their populations. To this end, it selected popula­tions whom it elevated to a position of dominance over the peoples in their hinterlands: the friends of Rome were classified as city-states, juridically- constituted political formations recognised as kindred unto Rome, while the communities in their hinterlands were henceforth classified as �villages’, to wit, non-juridically-constituted units of population, without the capacity for politics.^[230] The dominant populations were made responsible by Rome for the payment of taxes for the totality of the area and peoples whom they ruled, in exchange for which they were granted control over the incidence of taxation in their territory - and a monopoly on law-creating and law-applying institutions. This is the meaning of the grant to Plarasa-Aphrodisias, that they �are to enjoy their own traditional laws and those which they pass among themselves here­after’. And all this was itself achieved and recorded via a legal instrument that recognised only two parties as eligible to speak.

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