Rome: An Empire's Story (18 page)

The Last Superpower

Polybius’ eyewitness account of Scipio weeping to see Carthage burn is a nice anecdote, but it expresses a sense of Rome’s historic destiny, not a genuine consciousness of risk. There is no sign that either Roman generals or Greek historians really understood the volatile condition to which the Mediterranean world had been reduced by the middle of the second century
BC
. The neglect of the seas that had allowed piracy to flourish was just one symptom of a much wider problem. Throughout the middle Republic, Roman armies had demonstrated their capacity to smash rival power blocks. But almost nothing had been put in their place. Rome was still much more of a conquest state—a society whose ideologies, economies, and political institutions were geared to constant expansion—than a tributary empire with stable fiscal, governmental, and security systems. Conquest states are common enough in world history, but most have been short-lived and failed to institutionalize their power. Rome nearly joined them.

At the time (167
BC
) when Polybius declared Rome ruler of the inhabited world, its
directly
administered territory consisted of a scatter of colonies and public lands up and down Italy; the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; and a strip of territory along the Mediterranean coast of Spain. By 146
BC
there had been some modest expansion in the Iberian peninsula; otherwise the only additions were a province replacing the former kingdom of Macedon in the central Balkans, and another cut out of the immediate hinterland of Carthage. Rome’s
informal
authority extended beyond these territories, but quite how far no one knew for sure. Even within areas that were certainly under Roman hegemony, such as the allied communities in Italy, the Greek cities of the Aegean world, and the minor kingdoms of
western Asia Minor and North Africa, it was unclear precisely what level of control Romans wished to exercise. Perhaps Romans themselves had not agreed on this question.

That uncertainty was an unfamiliar feature of international relations in the ancient world. Politically pluralist systems, like the world of the classical Greek city-states or the mosaic of Macedonian kingdoms that succeeded them, had tended to develop common rules of engagement. Rome’s first decades in the eastern Mediterranean were marked by attempts to observe some of the diplomatic protocols developed between Graeco-Macedonian kingdoms.
¹
A city-state could never deal with kings entirely on an equal footing. Cato the Elder was said to have defined a king as ‘a creature that ate flesh’: he put it in Greek, so it might not be misunderstood. Offers of crowns to Roman senators—and reputedly the occasional marriage offer made by a king to an aristocratic Roman woman—caused more tension than help. But Romans learned the slogans and the critical terms of Greek diplomacy, such as the special nuances of terms like
autonomia
(the right to use one’s own laws), and they learned Greek.
²
During the early second century, some senators became quite skilled in the complex diplomatic world of the Greeks, just as some Greeks made themselves experts on Roman habits. But progressively, Rome seemed to depart from the rules, or perhaps to revert to her own. For Greeks, a treaty that concluded a war—like the Peace of Apamea signed with Antiochus III of Syria in 188—recognized the independence of the two parties. The Roman presumption that they could still order around his successors—like Antiochus IV en route to conquer Egypt—must have seemed very odd. Romans, perhaps, were simply treating kings the way they treated Italian allies. Cultural misunderstanding only explains so much, however, given how well some Greeks and Romans knew each other. This sort of treatment was humiliating for kings, and perhaps that was the point. But the behaviour that caused the greatest difficulties was probably not intentional. This was the fact that Rome’s interventions in the east were inconsistent and unpredictable. A number of allies increased their power by stages with no reaction from Rome, only to find that some final expansion provoked a savage response. Rhodes had been an ally against Philip V and Antiochus III and gained territory and influence after their defeats, but fell spectacularly from grace in 167. Delos’s infamous rise was the result of the Romans deliberately deciding to limit Rhodian naval influence by creating a free port in the middle of the Aegean. I have already described how even Polybius,
who knew Roman decision-making better than most, was astonished at the treatment meted out to the Achaean League.

One cause of Roman unpredictability was the volatility of domestic politics. A characteristic of all imperial systems is that disputes in the centre of power—the metropole—have disproportionate ramifications in the imperial peripheries.
³
Cities, kings, and tribes around the Mediterranean were now peripheral to Rome. It is too simple to say that the Roman Senate was divided into advocates of expansion and those who opposed it. It seems to have been common ground that the expansion of Roman power, of the rule or majesty of the Roman people, was a good thing. But on specific issues there were disagreements. Some were generated by personal rivalries. The enemies of Fulvius Nobilior and Manlius Vulso claimed that their campaigns against the Ambraciots and the Galatians respectively, both waged in the 180s in the aftermath of the great wars against Macedon and Syria, were opportunistic and unnecessary wars carried out for personal glory and gain. They were probably right. Other disagreements may have been on more fundamental principles. Cato campaigned for years before persuading the Senate that the city of Carthage, already twice defeated and subjected to crippling terms, should be destroyed. Eventually he won, but the obliteration of an ancient city shocked others besides Scipio. There was a particular reluctance to expand the areas under direct rule, perhaps from apprehension of the new costs and responsibilities that might follow annexation. Many of those reluctant were apparently senators on whom those responsibilities might fall, while some of the advocates of expansion were those who hoped to benefit from the public contracts that new provinces tended to generate. Tension began to rise between the senatorial aristocracy and the equestrian order from which many of the richer contractors, the
publicani
, were drawn.

Pressures for expansion were not always internally generated. For a variety of reasons, most to do with their short-term interest, a number of kings made Rome or the Roman people their heirs.
⁴
When Attalus III of Pergamum died in 133, leaving his royal lands and prerogatives to Rome, many senators did not wish to accept the legacy. But the tribune Tiberius Gracchus, desperate for additional revenue to fund his populist programme of land reform, took the issue to the assembly. As a result Rome acquired first a rebellion, and then a province in western Asia Minor. A decade later Rome acquired permanent responsibilities in southern France after a series of wars to protect her ally Marseilles and the land route to Spain. It is not
clear whether a province was set up in 125 or a little later. Republican provinces are easier for us to spot when they were created by absorbing a preexisting kingdom like that of Syracuse or Pergamum: in the west it is more a matter of noticing that the presence of pro-magistrates and armies had become regular instead of periodic.

Even when Romans did take overseas territory into direct rule, they were very selective in doing so. The kings of Pergamum had made their name defending Greek cities from Galatian attacks, and became powerful when Rome excluded the Seleucid kings of Syria from Asia Minor. Their kingdom included a number of ancient Greek cities grown rich on the wealth of the fertile river valleys that flow west from the Anatolian plateau into the Aegean, and also some much poorer highland marches, their defensive line against aggressors from the Anatolian interior. These border territories Rome had no interest in, and promptly handed them over to the minor kings to which she was allied. The security consequences should have been predictable. Yet similar decisions were taking place at the other end of the Mediterranean. Rome administered directly what had been the rich agricultural hinterland of Carthage. But the rest of Carthage’s African empire, the defensive hinterlands, was handed over to the lesser kings of the Numidians and the Moors. The policy, in both spheres, was short-sighted. By the end of the second century, some of Rome’s fiercest enemies were to be drawn from the petty monarchs that she had strengthened in Asia and Africa. The parallels with recent events are depressingly obvious: Manuel Noriega in Panama, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq all began their rise to power as allies of the West.

The career of Jugurtha, King of Numidia, provides a case in point. The Numidians were a federation of peoples living south and west of Carthage’s territory. On the destruction of Carthage in 146
BC
these allies were not just given territory and booty, but as Roman allies were also expected to provide troops for Roman wars. Jugurtha enters history in 133
BC
as a leader of an allied Numidian detachment supporting Scipio Aemilianus’ eight-month-long siege of the Celtiberian fortress of Numantia in northern Spain. The Roman historian Sallust tells the story of how, immediately after the victory, Scipio took Jugurtha aside, praised his ability, but then advised him to cultivate the friendship of the Roman people as a whole, not of individual Romans. Jugurtha proceeded to do the opposite. The lack of political consensus in Rome meant that it was always possible for him to find some supporters among the Senate, and as he murdered
and intrigued his way into a more and more powerful position at home, he protected himself from the complaints to the Senate by bribing prominent figures. Sallust puts into Jugurtha’s mouth the famous description of Rome as ‘A city for sale and ready for destruction just as soon as it finds a buyer’.
⁵

By 118 Jugurtha had murdered one heir to the throne and was at war with another, in 112 he ignored a senatorially mediated partition of the kingdom and two Roman embassies, killed his brother (massacring a group of Italian merchants in the final siege of Cirta), and survived both a Roman invasion and a summons to Rome. Eventually Rome could ignore the situation no longer: a half-hearted war was fought by a succession of senatorial generals until the arrival of Gaius Marius. Jugurtha’s capture in 107 and execution in 104 marked the end of a very long defiance of Rome.

Others watched and learned. Mithridates V of Pontus was one of those minor kings of Asia Minor whose power grew in the power vacuum created by Rome’s defeat of Seleucid Syria. Anatolia had been within the sphere of influence of the Seleucid monarchs, even if not always very firmly under their control, until Rome’s defeat of Antiochus III first at Thermopylae in Greece and then at Magnesia in what is now western Turkey. The Treaty of Apamea signed in 188
BC
effectively excluded the Seleucids from any further involvement in Asia Minor. A series of minor kingdoms grew up, some looking more Macedonian in style, some more Persian, all revolving around Rome. Pontus, which stretched along the southern coast of the Black Sea, formed its own hybrid identity, combining Greek titles with Iranian dynastic names. The King of Pontus too sent troops to help Rome against Carthage. When Attalus III of Pergamum, the most important of the Anatolian kingdoms, left his royal lands and prerogatives to Rome in 133, Pontic troops were among the allies helping Rome claim her inheritance, and the king was rewarded with some of the territory Rome did not want. Like Jugurtha, Mithridates V also exploited Roman friendship to expand his power at the expense of his rivals, in particular the kings of Cappadocia. On his death in 120
BC
his son, Mithridates VI, used this territory as the basis for an empire that included much of the Black Sea coast and more territory in Anatolia. Soon he too was a threat to Rome’s interests, ignoring diplomatic warnings and gradually accumulating power. But the Romans were unable to confront him, for by then their hegemony was under threat from other directions.

Fig 7.
Mithridates VI Eupator King of Pontus portrayed as Hercules

The Limitations of Mediterranean Hegemony

Roman hegemony created problems across the Mediterranean. A few historians have imagined a great conspiracy emerging between Mithridates, rebel slaves, and pirates. But the root cause was an imperialism that generated few structures of security to replace those it destroyed, and responded in an inconsistent way to challenges to its authority. This was not the only structural weakness of the Republican empire. Even if the Senate and people had been able to agree on how to exercise their power, had compelled generals on the ground to toe the line, and had conveyed a clear set of expectations to the cities, kings, and peoples under their
indirect authority, Roman rule faced another fundamental weakness, this time geographical.