IMPERIUM: The Roman Empire

The Roman Republic had evolved from and been designed to run a small city-state. It was extended successfully over Italy through alliances and conquests. But the Provinces presented a problem to the Republic. The right to control foreign affairs and hence these Roman conquests defaulted to the Senate, through an accident of history and religious custom. The Senate appointed members of the nobility and upper classes to manage the provinces in the interests of Rome. The wealth that these positions brought to the men and families involved was often unbelievably vast, and without precedent in Republican history. Provinces were fleeced for everything they were worth.

As the normal citizenry of Rome grew somewhat wealthier, the elite's wealth and power exploded beyond all experience. It may have unbalanced the social relationships between the Plebians (commoners) and Patricians (elite families) by giving far too much power to the rich. As well, as the Roman armies grew in size and number, they were staffed largely by non-Romans and ceased to be citizen armies, becoming professional and having less and less connection to civil society.

The nobility no longer had to deal fairly with their own fellow-citizens, because their wealth outstripped any such local needs. The foreign-staffed Roman armies required huge sums of money for maintenance, which meant that the wealthy could start to take state functions into their own hands and claim they were benefitting the state by paying the expenses of the armies. Of course, once they had assumed private control of previously public issues, they claimed the right to maintain order and enforce laws. Some reformers fought valiantly against this personal takeover of power by the rich families and commercial conglomerates, and even introduced a law that forbade lawyers from charging for their services so that more people would have fair access to the justice system. Of course, the rich always found ways around the laws, despite attempts to prosecute them; even this minor measure was defeated by giving advocates lavish presents and family favours.

Wealth and influence essentially colluded to deprive the Republican state of its authority and usurp its power. When it was convenient, of course, the elite supported and used state mechanisms for their own purposes, giving the illusion that the Republic was functioning properly. They promoted law and order in efforts to protect their own interests, property and wealth. Elections were routinely bought and the people's concerns were ignored in favour of the interests of the wealthy. What public power they could not influence or control they undermined. The Tribunate tried to restrict this abuse, but the system had come under the almost complete power of the Senatorial and wealthy families, and even the Tribunes eventually succumbed to corruption and bribery.

The Republican elite and large commercial and family interests were allowed to grow too powerful. Cartels grew in size and became massive, self-serving monopolies. Bankers charged usurious interest rates, and the small-scale farmers, the backbone of Rome's agricultural economy, were forced into grinding poverty. Debts were never forgiven, and the population was forced more and more into propertyless poverty.

Artificially cheap grain imports, exacted by force from enslaved and conquered nations, undercut the viability of Roman citizen-farmers. The import of slaves from conquered territories to serve the rich undermined the labour of free citizens and foreigners, impoverishing everyone but the rich who owned large households of slaves.

Institutions of political power-sharing were abused. Powerful commercial interests, clans and families fought for influence among themselves. Arrogant generals vied with each other for power, using the divided people against themselves. Corruption was rampant. Ethnic tensions rose. Simplistic solutions to complicated problems were debated. The sense of common needs and the common good was almost entirely abandoned, and people lost their sense of duty to each other. Factions developed.

The elite were greedy for more wealth and power. Economic and, as a result, political power finally lay in the hands of a few large families and commercial conglomerates. Soon, the Roman Republic and its far-flung "Empire" was too unwieldy to continue without major reform. Freedom-loving plebians longed for the days of greater personal freedom and either sought refuge in idealized versions of the past and the old traditions and institutions or placed their hopes in radical reform and enfranchisement.

The Roman people resented the political machinations of the elite, they hated the senate, and the situation grew dire. Poverty and rioting spread everywhere. Rome itself became a hotbed of intrigue, conspiracy, counter-conspiracy, social upheaval, mass violence, gangland thuggery and endemic poverty. Without a true police force answerable to a civilian authority, the state and the state authorities had no way to bring order to the situation. Nobles were eventually empowered to bring order to the city, which did not help the cause of reform, and may have worsened the situation for the common citizens.

The wealthy and powerful manipulated the situation as best they could, in their own interests. The commoners grew desperate. The timing was perfect for the arrival of a charismatic leader who claimed to be able to solve the Republic's problems if only the people would give him absolute power. Civil war was the inevitable result, as factionalism developed.

But the rich had miscalculated. The dying Republic, with its feuding clans of wealthy families, was replaced not with rule by their own individual concerns and interests but with one-man rule. The Emperor Augustus had successfully manipulated both the masses and the elite. The Roman Principate, or Empire, was born.

If people thought that having a monarch and a large class of elite leaders would save the Empire from constant economic problems and civil wars, they were terribly wrong.

Augustus (Octavian) Caesar
Photograph from "Rome: A State In Arms", by John Ricker and John Saywell, page 27

On the wreckage of the Republic, the Principate was founded. It was a motley collection of political reforms. Its major characteristic was the placing of great power in the hands of a single man, Augustus Caesar, who was in direct charge of the armies and any provinces which were in states of danger or volatile unrest. His rule came right after the conquest of much of the Mediterranean world and many brutal social problems, so it was seen as something of a golden age for Rome and Italy, if not for the conquered nations.

At first, the new Principate (Empire) was efficient and well-meaning. Augustus corrected many of the injustices common during the dying days of the Republic. He started massive public works projects. He boasted, "URBEM LATERICIUM INVENIT, MARMOREAM RELIQUIT": "I found a city of brick and left it a city of marble". He promoted poorer citizens into the ranks of the new civil service, and generated a new, comprehensive, rational bureaucracy designed to facilitate trade and commerce. He maintained the facade and appearance of the Republic and its institutions, trying to reclaim something of Rome's past glory. In reality, he centralized power into the hands of his family, his friends, the elite and himself.

Augustus made a show of maintaining the old Republican forms of government and freedoms. In actuality, he was using them to do little more than legitimize his own policies. All pretense of Republican tendencies were gradually abandoned, and the Roman state became autocratic and more repressive than it had ever been. He flirted with returning to Republican government, and may have been assasinated through family intrigue because of his intentions; it's impossible to know. He had poor health for most of his later life.

A quick series of occasionally competent but almost always brutal Emperors followed. In the nature of their position, they were obliged to look after their own power first, before they concerned themselves with the fate of their subjects.

The Roman Emperors governed a multi-cultural, poly-glot state relentlessly spreading its crushing bootheel across three continents and most of the classical Mediterranean world.

PAX ROMANA: The "Roman Peace"
(Source unknown)

The Roman economy survived for a while on the exploitation of foreign labour, slavery, pillage and new conquest. Price fixing, monopoly regulation and corporate conglomeration were tried. This corrupt system controlled by limited interests was impossible to maintain. Like all authoritarian, corrupt and basically unproductive systems, it collapsed in on itself. In many ways, it bore a remarkable resemblance to what modern economists call "corporate capitalism".

Absolute rule and the cult of leadership didn't bring peace and stability for long. Constant wars of succession, civil wars and social strife became the rule, not the exception, for much of the Empire's history; many historians at the time sought to find some inspiration from the centuries Rome had enjoyed as a Republic.

Exploited and oppressed subject nations revolted, some of them more than once, and they had to be violently put down. The constant human cost of the Empire was vast. Far from being the great panacea for social ills, the Pax Romana ("Roman Peace", or enforced order) was, in many ways, little better and possibly worse than the "chaos" of the Republican Mediterranean. Countless people, families and nations were slaughtered without remorse. Mass death, torture, starvation, pillage and slavery were suffered by millions.

The moribund economy eventually fell apart because economic freedom was sacrificed to provide the elite with temporary power and prestige. People chafed under the rule of oppressive officials, the military and the Imperial overlords.

By the early A.D. 200's, the Roman Empire was a terrifying police state riddled with spies and informers, a state of brutal rule and constant fear. Order, in the service of the powerful, was imposed with savage force. The rich frittered away their time on endless amusements, and the interests of the people of the Roman Empire were abandoned. The elites, incompetent and corrupt, were incapable of doing even the limited work required of them by their social position.

In A.D. 410, the Western Roman Empire's political order fell to Germanic invaders, and rich and poor alike suffered. The foundations for feudal mediaevil Europe were laid.

As the poor and the slaves and the outcast huddled around local elites and landlords, exchanging their freedom for protection from the political and military chaos engulfing their world, a feudal system of peasant or serf and lord developed, with complex hierarchies of loyalties, wherein each member owed service to the person of higher rank immediately above him, and not to any collective state or community. Formal slavery ceased to be of general importance because the situation of most peasants and serfs was dire enough. Slavery did continue, though, in a limited form, right into the late middle ages.

In the end, the political order of the Western Roman Empire metamorphosed into the inefficient, violent, brutal aristocratic Feudal Europe which western writers foolishly romanticize. Life in an enslaved Europe was little better than slavery for almost the entire population.

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