In normal historiography, the Roman Empire begins in 27 BC with the conclusion of the Republican Civil Wars and the granting of the victorious Octavian the name Augustus. The Empire would endure in the Western Europe and the Mediterranean until 476 AD, while in the Balkans and East Mediterranean she would not perish until 1453. Central to the narrative is the form of government, its operations and mechanics. It ignores the underlying ethos and purpose. An empire exists to extract resources from subject peoples and territories for the primary benefit of an overlord. Since the time of the Kings, Rome had been an empire.
Soon after Romulus founded the city, he found himself unable to attract any women to his new city and resolved to steal them from his neighbors. When the surrounding cities declared war for the crime of stealing and raping their daughters, Romulus would march his army and lay waste to three cities in retribution. He would annex their territories and send colonizers to the lands of two. When a fourth city, the Sabines came to seek vengeance, Romulus’ bloodlust was stopped only by the outpouring of his people’s new wives, who demanded peace so that they might see both their husbands and fathers live. Romulus would acquiesce, but not without price. By treaty, the Sabines would cease to be an independent polity. Though granted pride of place in the nascent Roman state, they were subjugated for the benefit of Rome.
Romulus would continue with his unbridled aggression throughout the rest of his reign. Such was his desire for conquest, he would refuse to establish formal borders for the territory of Rome. To Romulus, borders were a hinderance to lawless expansion and served only weaken his new Empire.
As the Monarchy passed into the Republic, little would change. The Romans would come to subjugate all Italia by sword point. Conquered cities would have portions of their territory stripped from them and passed into Roman hands, often to be given to colonists. Italian cities would be stripped of their independence in foreign affairs, bound to Rome in perpetual ‘alliance,’ forever forced to raise men and arms for whatever cause Rome saw fit. In the great wars of the Republican era, nearly half of all soldiers fielded by “Rome,” in truth came from subject cities.
Cities with proud histories of their own chafed under the Roman yoke. The fragility of Rome’s Italian Empire was foreshadowed first by Pyrrhus and then by Hannibal. These two generals would invade Italy separately in different time periods, but both had as a point in their strategy the mass defection of Roman subjects. Every city that went over to Pyrrhus or Hannibal would deny Rome critical manpower reserves.
In both wars, however, despite widespread defection of Southern Italy, the Romans still commanded enough loyalty and respect in Central and Northern Italy to requisition huge amounts of manpower to face down their enemies. Against Hannibal, Rome was able to mobilize upwards of 210,000 men from a fractured empire with ease. Without wholesale defection of the Italian peninsula, no power could hope to outlast Rome.
By choosing to tax in men instead of gold, the Romans were able to maintain a fighting force far larger than any other power in the Mediterranean. The city of Rome would realize this themselves at the conclusion of the Second Punic War and instead of demobilizing, simply turned their imperial army, composed of Romans, Latins, Samnites, Etruscans and all the other Italian peoples against the rest of the Mediterranean.
These new wars, however, were fundamentally different than what came before. Secure in the Italian peninsula and confident in their ability to field armies to fight multiple wars, Roman conquest now no longer sought to subdue enemies for the purpose of land and manpower. It sought wholesale looting and plundering. Huge quantities of silver, both from booty taken during wartime and excruciating indemnities levied by treaty, flooded into the city of Rome. Huge sums of this silver accumulated to Roman elites: consuls, generals, senators and a burgeoning equite class. Scipio Africanus and his brother Lucius by one report may have managed to pilfer 18 million denarii from the Seleucids after the Battle of Magnesia.
Such a sudden injection of wealth, along with the explosion of slaves (also taken from the defeated) transformed Roman society. A once gruff and rustic people, defined by the honesty of the small holder, transformed into an uxorious and cosmopolitan one whose defining feature was the latifundia. Small houses gave way to great villas. Dirt floors to cement. Plain walls to those of painted plaster.
The essence of Roman civilization was won with the blood of subjugated Italians, built off the backs of foreign slaves and paid for with looted silver. Even the urban poor of Rome would come receive some share of the Imperial dividend. In 123 BC the reformer Gaius Sempronius Gracchus would institute the famous grain dole and first organized shipments from North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia. This grain would be paid for via the public treasury and stored in newly built state owned granaries. The money to pay for this exorbitant privilege came from the newly acquired eastern province of Asia.
It is here where the city of Rome and its empire reaches its zenith. The descendants of Romulus and his first settlers had come to exercise sole hegemony over the whole Mediterranean. It seemed as if a single city truly could rule the whole world.
But the center could not hold.
The incredible success of Rome in the second century BC was largely built off the blood and sweat of Italian levies. In some armies, 2/3rds of all men were non-Roman. Rome’s erstwhile “allies,” did as much or more of the fighting while receiving none of the benefit. Even the poorest Roman, dispossessed of his farm from years of campaigning, could take meager comfort in the grain dole. There was no such benefit for the other Italians.
Italian anger over being second class citizens in an empire they helped build exploded in 91 BC with a separatist revolt of most of the central and southern Italy cities. The Social Wars had begun. Here where Pyrrhus and Hannibal failed, it looked like the local Italians had succeeded. The revolt spread quickly and within a year they had doubled the size of their rebellion and were able to field a 100,000 man army. And it was growing. Northern Italian cities who had remained steadfast against Pyrrhus and Hannibal saw the writing on the wall. Rome could not hope to defeat an alliance composed of all Italy and began mobilizing.
The Romans knew they had no choice. In 90 BC, after a year of open rebellion, full Roman citizenship was granted to all loyalist cities and to any rebels who voluntarily laid down arms. While diehard separatists would continue the fight for a few more years, by war’s end the Italians would join the Romans in the governance of the empire and reap the benefits in full.
The city of Rome had gone from sole ruler of a vast empire, to the capital of an Italian commonwealth. This commonwealth would inherit the city’s empire, but it too would be forced to share power. Bit by bit, the commonwealth would expand at the expense of empire, until the whole empire was united as one.
Long forgotten, the true purpose of ruling so many a disparate peoples.