the genesis of roman imperialism 23

The Genesis of Roman Imperialism*

martin stone

1. Writing Roman Imperialism

It is necessary to distinguish the phenomenon of imperialism from the mere expansion of the Roman city-state. Expansion, an historical fact, can be traced largely from the first ten books of the Augustan historian Livy. These books cover the years from Rome’s foundation in the nominal year 753 down to 292, shortly before Rome’s takeover of Italy. by 270 the re- sources and military manpower of Italia were at Rome’s disposal. The con- cept ‘Italy’ was more than a summary of wars fought, triumphs celebrated, treaties entered into, war-leaders chosen, censuses taken, and settlements founded (res gestae populi Romani), listed year by year in Livy’s narrative: it represents the intention of the rulers of a city-state. The formation of that intention begins the history of Roman imperialism. Ideology is pervasive in Livy’s text, a rhetorical elaboration of the skel- etal structure indicated above. It is designed to celebrate the virtues of the Roman People and their leaders and specifically the resolute wisdom of their governing council (senatus), a tale of the pragmatic supremacy of concord over discord and the relevance of the virtues that win empires to the government of empires. It is not an accident that other elaborated Ro- man histories of Rome vanished before the end of antiquity. Livy did it best. A Greek equivalent of Livy’s first fifteen books partly survives in the (also Augustan) Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Edifying biog- raphies of some famous Romans of early times are to hand in Plutarch’s Lives. And there are numerous short works abridging the longer; others are non-chronological compilations of moral examples; and all serve the same ideology. Among surviving ancient historians only the Greek Polybius analyses Roman expansion as a process of imperialism, explicitly seeing the rele- vant period as 220–167 (Hist. 1.1), later extended to 146, while encapsulating

* Dates before 300 bc are the conventional ones and are up to four years out going back. 24 martin stone in a prefatory book the period from 264 on. So he problematises Rome’s relations with Carthage but takes expansion within Italy as a natural response to Rome’s defeat by the Gauls in 390. He goes on to list summar- ily Roman conquests there, and their encounter with Pyrrhus of Epirus. Yet Roman supremacy over all Italy he dismisses as a ‘surprise’ (paradoxōs: 1.6). He simply does not focus on it. Polybius like other ancient writers saw no problem worth addressing in Rome’s advance from a moderately sized city-state on the Tiber to hegemon of Italy. The modern interpreter of Ro- man imperialism must work against the ideological grain of writers who saw the non-existence of the empire as unthinkable. And yet enough sur- vives to provoke inquiry behind it. For historical inquiry, therefore, the real question must be how one city- state, however well resourced or virtuous or simply large, could acquire control over the whole peninsula. Geographically ‘Italy’ had once applied to its toe as ‘cattle country’. The Late Republican catchcry Tota Italia (‘All Italy’, ‘United Italy’) affirms a dialectical construct by Roman and non- Roman statesmen who in the 290s to the 270s saw the peninsula as a hege- mony that ought or ought not to exist. So vast an area under the leadership and control of one republican city-state had never been seen. No Greek state or even Carthage had ever in their primes achieved a comparable solid zone of control. Within this Roman Italy can be seen glimpses later of the ongoing con- ceptual struggle to enact mentally and legally a unified idea. Cato the Cen- sor wrote a history of Rome’s past under the title Origines, i.e. the origins of all the cities of Italy; Cicero formulated the ‘two fatherlands’ principle— one by ancestry, the other by Roman citizenship (Leg. 2.5); from the Grac- chi and the younger Livius Drusus down to Augustus statesmen wrestled with the problem of Rome in Italy. It has been no easier for statesmen since 1945 to bring ‘Europe’ into being or to reconcile it with a military alliance led by the United States. Livy himself has little confidence in the record from 753(?) to around 390. After the Gallic sack of Rome in this year he contrasts the next stage of his account with the earlier period (6.1): ‘From now on clearer and more certain reports of events at home and abroad will be unfolded from the second origin of the reborn city as from roots renewed more abundantly and fruitfully.’ But well after this he proclaims his despair (8.40) à propos the events of 322: ‘It is not easy to prefer item to item or one authority to another. I think the record has been corrupted by funeral eulogies and false notices attached to portraits, as families draw the historical record each to