The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-c. 120 bce) famously declared the subject of his Histories to be the fifty-three year period from 220 to 167 bce, during which the Romans compelled �nearly the entirety of the inhabited world' to submit to its governance Ipoliteia))-

He subsequently extended the work from 167 to 144 bce. In his view, Roman domination or mastery (dunasteia) had reached its telos by 167. �It seems then to have been universally accepted, that all were in a state of overpowering necessity to hearken to the Romans and obey their commands'.^{[194] [195] The extension of his work to 144 bce was necessary, Polybius continued, because one should not render judgment on those who won the contest of force (ton kratesanton), or on those who were bested and diminished (ton elattothenton), merely on the basis of the outcome of the con­test.}

Polybius was an extraordinary genius, and his account of Rome's entry into the eastern Mediterranean and rapid emergence as the great power in the re­gion has exercised enormous influence on subsequent historiography, ancient and modern. As with Thucydides (the other great historian in the Greek tradi­tion before Rome), the influence of Polybius derives not from the beauty or elegance of his language, but from the ruthless organisation of a complex nar­rative in service of argument, and perhaps above all from his self-positioning

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as a deliverer of hard truths.

The shape of modern historiography continues to a remarkable degree to respond to the interpretation of Polybius, even in works written by persons who imagine themselves to dissent in one respect or another from his premis­es. This is so in an obvious way in respect of those who observe international relations in the eastern Mediterranean during the second century BCE from a realist perspective: for them, absent constraint on the exercise of force in a multi-polar world - and there could be no such constraint-, the accumulation and exercise of military power was a rational response to the desire for securi­ty. The language of force and domination is honest; all else interposes a veil between us and the world.^[197] Counterpoised to these are historians who regard the tropes of ancient rhetoric as having exercised a form of ideological power.^[198] These understand the Romans as more or less rubes and the Greeks of the eastern Mediterranean as sophisticates in both politics and interstate rela­tions. Low-level skirmishing may have been endemic to life between the death of Alexander the Great (323 bce) and arrival of Rome, but its costs in material and human suffering may be set aside in light of our admiration for the suc­cess, as it were, of major Greek powers in not eliminating one another. Within this framework, the history of Rome’s entry into the eastern Mediterranean is a story of Rome’s being schooled in the languages of Greek diplomacy, and one’s rehearsal of the story may end when Rome’s mastery of those languages was complete. Likewise, on this view, irruptions of violence must needs receive a cultural explanation: the Romans did not understand the traditional limits observed by hegemonic powers with regard to interference in domestic affairs; citizens of Greek city-states chafed at interference per se, but especially when the interference was performed by non-Greeks; and so on.^[199] Alas, imperial pow­er in the ancient world was not so much infrastructural as military, and the Romans were both technically proficient and willing to be brutal.

Naturally, no brief survey can account for the totality of scholarship. There are outliers of a range of complexity and explanatory potential. The greatest is surely Arnold Toynbee's Hannibal’s Legacy (1965), which is not so much a his­tory of interstate diplomacy as it is a history of the form and political econom­ics of the Roman state in peninsular Italy, but it has much to say about the forms of the states with which Rome interacted.^[200] Another outlier might be William Harris's War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 BC (1979), which accomplishes the very great task of making it nearly impossible to ex­tend credence to Roman claims that its wars were systematically defensive in nature, or to modern fancy that economic considerations did not weigh heav­ily in Roman deliberation.^[201]

Modern scholarship on the Roman empire in the Aegean is indebted to Po­lybius in another significant respect, though the causes of this phenomenon do not derive solely from Polybius. This is the crucial drawing of a distinction between a phase of hegemonic expansion and a phase of provincialisation. During the first phase, that of hegemonic expansion, Rome came so to domi­nate the eastern Mediterranean that no party could assert an independent foreign policy without risking Roman ire - the world became, in essence, unipolar^[202]-, and yet Rome largely refrained from annexing territory in the form of �provinces', units of rule to which it dispatched a Roman magistrate as ad­ministrative overlord. In the second phase, that of provincialisation, Rome is commonly understood as exercising something like direct rule; we are in a phase of empire rather than hegemony; and history is becoming something like a narrative of rule and rebellion, rather than one of warfare between par­ties of sovereign equality, albeit asymmetric power. The second phase therefore has its own historiography, concerned with the development of administration, structures of taxation, the appropriation and development of an infrastructure of rule, and so forth.^{[203] [204]}

This chapter is designed to cut against this historiography in two respects.

These claims may also be recast in more general terms. Traditional histori­ographies of the Roman legal tradition commence with the study of Roman private law, which is to say, they commence with the study of Roman law as it regulated intersubjective affairs in a pacified empire.^[205] To the extent that the field relies upon sources codified after the universalization of Roman citizen­ship, questions of legal pluralism and its connection to the form of ancient empire have not loomed large in the field. This chapter seeks to recuperate an important dimension of law in the formation of empire at a far earlier stage in Roman history, by virtue of a focus on international and public law. (It also seeks to write the history of two phases in Roman imperialism by reliance on legal instruments in particular as evidence.) For one thing, it seeks to reveal the role of treaty relations in directing and constraining other forms of force in international relations: realist narratives in which power and violence are de­terminative of Mediterranean hegemony are, on this account, insufficient.

Three further preliminary remarks are required: these concern, first, evi­dence; second, law and empire; and thirdly, comparison.

As regards evidence: for long stretches of the history of the Roman republic, one is heavily dependent on literary histories written long after the events. The work of the modern historian is thereby complicated by the need to recon­struct, as best one can, the evidentiary regime in which the ancients worked, and the interpretive and ideological commitments they bore. The second cen­tury BCE is the earliest period of Roman history in which one could attempt a history such this while relying largely on strictly contemporaneous documen­tary evidence. For many reasons - their fragmentary condition; ignorance of the contexts of their production at a granular level - these individual items present real challenges both to understanding and aggregation. To aid in com­parative understanding, this chapter will proceed without directly confronting many small-scale problems of interpretation in the evidence on which it draws, though some effort will be made to offer appropriate cautions as to the limits of our knowledge. Beyond the fact that surviving legal documents of the sec­ond century BCE are nearly always fragmentary, it should also be said that the vast bulk of our evidence for the operation of institutions of the Roman state in the second century BCE survives in Greek; this is a very significant historical fact whose meaning remains unresolved.

As regards law and empire: a focus on international law, and on the forms of imperial power, provides a framework within which to understand the emer­gence of the particular form of legal pluralism that is evident in the landscape of private law in the period of the imperial monarchy that commences with Augustus in 27 bce. To this issue, this chapter will return in closing.

Finally, as regards comparison: the pattern of historical action that brought Roman empire in the Aegean into being bears comparison with an earlier se­quence of events, to wit, the birth of the Athenian empire. Athenian power, too, commenced in a form of hegemony, that of Athens at the head of a multi­lateral alliance, which issued in a condition of empire. To the course of those events, and the potential that the fifth and second centuries hold out for mu­tual illumination, this chapter will now turn.

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