This page intentionally left blank the language of empire The Roman Empire has been an object of fascination for the past two millennia, and the story of how a small city in central Italy came to dominate the whole of the Mediterranean basin, most of modern Europe and the lands of Asia Minor and the Middle East has often been told. It has provided the model for European empires from Charlemagne to Queen Victoria and beyond, and it is still the basis of comparison for investigators of modern imperialisms. By an exhaustive investigation of the changing meanings of certain key words and their use in the substantial remains of Roman writings and in the structures of Roman political life, this book seeks to discover what the Romans themselves thought about their imperial power in the centuries in which they conquered the known world and formed the Empire of the first and second centuries ad. John Richardson is Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Edinburgh. He has written on Roman Spain: Hispaniae: Spain and the Development of Roman Imperialism 218–82 bc (1986); The Romans in Spain (1996)andAppian: Wars of the Romans in Iberia (2000); and he has contributed articles on Roman imperialism and Roman provincial admin- istration to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition, 1996) and the Cambridge Ancient History, volume ix (2nd edition, 1994). THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD JOHN RICHARDSON CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK First published in print format ISBN-13 978-0-521-81501-7 ISBN-13 978-0-511-46381-5 © John Richardson 2008 2008 Information on this title: www.cambrid g e.or g /9780521815017 This publication is in copyright. 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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org eBook ( EBL ) hardback Contents Preface page vii List of abbreviations ix 1 Ideas of empire 1 2 The beginnings: Hannibal to Sulla 10 3 Cicero’s empire: imperium populi Romani 63 4 The Augustan empire: imperium Romanum 117 5 After Augustus 146 6 Conclusion: imperial presuppositions and patterns of empire 182 Appendix 1 Cicero analysis 195 Appendix 2 Livy 204 Appendix 3 Imperium and provincia in legal writers 206 Bibliography 211 Index 218 v Preface The process which has resulted in this book began many decades ago when, as an undergraduate student, I found myself asking the question, ‘What did the Romans think they were doing when they created the Roman Empire?’ For many years this q uestion lurked in the background of my thoughts as I worked on Roman history more generally and on Roman Spain in particular, not least because it was not clear to me how such a question might be answered. What follows is, I hope, if not an answer, at least a contribution towards one. It emerged not least from a remark made in passing by Fergus Millar, that to understand what imperium meant it would be necessary to read the whole of Latin literature. I have not quite done that, but the development of accessible digital texts has made possible the next best thing, the scanning of large quantities of texts to discover the passages in which both imperium and its stablemate, provincia, appeared. I should give due recognition to the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project of the University of California, without whose excellent productions the work of this book would have taken several lifetimes. I also mention, honoris causa, two pieces of software which have been indispensable: the search program Musaios, developed since 1992 by Darl J. Dumont and Randall M. Smith; and the database program, Idealist. These two enabled me to assemble a database of several thousands of passages from ancient authors, which were further analysed with the help of an Excel spreadsheet. This made possible a fuller and more contextualised examination of the words I was investigating than those to be found in such excellent lexica as the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae or the Oxford Latin Dictionary. (For a fuller account of the methods used, see Richardson (2005).) It hardly needs to be said that all could not be achieved even by the most useful software. Over the many years that this book has taken to come to fruition I have had much assistance, not least from the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, where I held a Visiting Fellowship in 1998 , and the Carnegie Fund for the Universities of Scotland, which funded me at thattime.Many,manyfriendsand colleagueshaverendered assistance,often, I suspect, more than they realised. I cannot name them all, but wish to record vii viii Preface especial thanks to Clifford Ando, David Breeze, T. Corey Brennan, Michael Crawford, the late Peter Derow, Carlotta Dionisotti, Jean-Louis Ferrary, Fritz-Gregor Herrmann, Jill Harries, Lawrence Keppie, the late Geoffrey Lewis, Andrew Lintott, Claude Nicolet, Jonathan Prag, Roy Pinkerton, Keith Rutter; to my two sons, Thomas and Martin, for assistance on matters statistical, legal and historical; to my late wife, Patricia, who encouraged me even through her last illness; and to my wife, Joan, without whose unflagging support it would never have been completed. I am also grateful for permission to quote from Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) in the epigraph to chapter 6. In the long process of writing this book, parts have been presented to audiences in the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (especially chapter 3), the Impact of Empire group (especially chapter 4), the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Universities of Leiden and Manchester, Nijmegen and St Andrews, and many others, to all of whom I give my heartiest thanks. [...]... and the northern strip of the African continent The problems with this search are twofold, one of which makes the process difficult and the second apparently impossible Both must be stated at the outset, because it is these two factors which shape the process of this investigation and its possible outcome 1 2 The Language of Empire i The first is the notion of empire itself The idea of what an empire. .. of Empire Romans thought they were doing as well as what they did The best, perhaps the only way of doing this is to examine the language that they used to describe that empire One important element within this set of ideas is the notion of empire as a territorial entity, and whether (and when) the Romans saw the extension of their power in terms of acquiring and controlling landmasses: in terms of the. .. Ideas of empire 9 and import of particular uses, close attention must be paid to the content and context of the passages in which the words are used Through a careful consideration of such uses, the life-history of the words and the ideas that they carried through this crucial period of the growth and development of the Roman Empire will be traced.19 The intention of this book is to explore, through the. .. of the ideas of the Roman ruling classes can be gained across the period that is being examined iii It is the contention of this book that, in order to understand Roman imperialism and the Roman Empire, it is necessary to grasp what the 16 A remark of Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then Professor of Physics at the Open University, on Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 22 September 1997 8 The Language of. .. but the basic shape of the deliberations and decisions of the senate was that which, in Livy’s accounts, were undertaken year by year at the beginning of the terms of office of the new magistrates It is clear that (at least as Livy presents it) the senate took the initiative in the selection of which provinciae were to be allocated, and that they had the major role, in the case of the consular provinciae,... it, imperialism is the process of establishing and maintaining an empire, 3 the nature of any particular example of imperialism will be as different from others as the resulting empires are different This combination of simplicity and complexity in the notion of empire has led modern social scientists to attempt the construction of what might be called taxonomies of empire One of the most common distinguishes... which imposed the burdens of incorporation into the Roman state without the concomitant political rights This mosaic of imperial modes provided Rome with the control over its neighbours and the military manpower it needed to undertake the subjugation of the rest of Italy by the middle of the third century.7 Given the adaptability of structure that the Romans displayed in the conquest of Italy, it is... that the institutions which were to shape the government of the empire and its provinces in the imperial period, during and after the reign of Augustus, began to appear So far as linguistic usage is concerned, there is much less contemporary Latin available from which to judge the ideas which the Romans of the time had of their growing control of the Mediterranean, but there is at least some The comedies... between either of these and the Portuguese and Spanish empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their various commercial and religious motivations, or the colonial empires of Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not to mention the military rather than territorial control which marked the imperial policies of the United States in the later twentieth, make the same... oversee the process of distribution of the various portfolios In the second part of this task, as we have seen, there were differences between the allocation of praetorian provinciae and of those held by the consuls It is less clear whether this was also true of the first part, the selection of the provinciae to be allocated In a recent book T Corey Brennan has argued that for the praetorian allocation there . it is these two factors which shape the process of this investigation and its possible outcome. 1 2 The Language of Empire i The first is the notion of empire itself. The idea of what an empire consists. is the work of Peter Brunt (Brunt (1978)and(1990), 433–80). 6 The Language of Empire The reasons for the lack of such attention to the ideas of the Romans are reasonably clear. The attention of. blank the language of empire The Roman Empire has been an object of fascination for the past two millennia, and the story of how a small city in central Italy came to dominate the whole of the