25

The archetypal imperial city: the rise

of Rome and the burdens of empire
nicola terrenato

The city of Rome was the center of a vast territorial empire for over five
centuries. Not-too-dissimilar phenomena took place in different forms a
number of times in human history, and yet it could be argued that the
specific instance of Rome has often received far more than its share of
attention, at least in the context of Eurocentric culture as it has developed in
the last millennium and a half. Even before the actual collapse of the
western Roman Empire, Rome at its heyday was unquestioningly taken
for granted as an icon and as a role model by aspiring expansionists. From
then on, the historiographic tradition in Europe and beyond grew inextric-
ably linked with what was termed, with an absolute value judgment, “the
classical period.” As a consequence, no schooling was complete without a
fairly extensive knowledge of Rome, its history, its laws, and its language.
In no contemporary political conjuncture or challenge could the example of
Rome be considered irrelevant. The larger-than-life presence of what was
dubbed (with a revealing moniker) the Eternal City towered in the social
sciences from their origin at least until the end of European colonialism and
it is arguably still very central today.
It would be natural to consider such unparalleled name recognition as an
enviable, if undeserved, privilege. Undoubtedly, the sheer quantity of books,
movies, university chairs, and research funds devoted the world over to
ancient Rome might be mouthwatering for other scholars. These did, how-
ever, come at a heavy intellectual price. From the court of Charlemagne to
that of Mussolini, Rome has, more often than not, been brutally pressed into
the service of the dominant discourse, or, worse, of blatant regime propa-
ganda. While most today would agree that there cannot be an unbiased view
of any past, it could be argued that the Roman one has been distorted further
than most others and so many times that certain fictitious perceptions have
become established facts that are still accepted today. A Google Image search
on “Roman” will produce a screenful of reenacting legionaries with the

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occasional toga-clad senator, and little else. After centuries of political use
and abuse of Rome, mostly in aid of various forms of militarism and
dictatorship, it has become very hard not to assume, at least implicitly, that
its empire was rooted almost exclusively in violence and threat.1
Another unwelcome consequence of the high visibility of Rome is its
incomparability. Because the Roman Empire was so often painted as the
most powerful, disciplined, and well organized of all, providing an example
that should always be emulated but could never be attained, there has been
a marked scholarly reluctance to put it on the same dissecting table along-
side other empires. Roman historians have typically confined themselves to
the “classical” world, naturally finding little in the Mediterranean that could
equal the span and the durability of Rome’s domination. The scholarly
discourse has stayed very specialized and terminologically discrete, with
extensive use of Latin and of Roman institutional concepts. The irony is
of course that some of the most commonly used comparative terms in
English, such as city or empire, are derived from Latin words that the
Romans themselves used to describe political abstractions. On that basis, a
wealth of cross-cultural state formation theories were produced over the last
century, but they hardly ever included a consideration of Rome, where,
arguably, the very concept of state had originated.
A victim to its own celebrity and fame, Rome cannot easily be considered
separately from the intellectual concretions that have accumulated on it in the
course of centuries of visibility in anything from blockbusters and documentar-
ies to historical novels and theater plays. The embeddedness of Rome in
Eurocentric culture has produced a delay in rethinking and updating our
historical analysis of it. In the study of other periods, there is far less need to
contend with strong assumptions and biases that were crystallized by Romantic
scholars in the nineteenth century and are still floating around today. As a result,
a pressing item in our agenda must be a realignment of Rome with current
sociopolitical thinking as well as the restoration of this particular instance of
empire within the broader fold of the history of complex societies anywhere.

From city to empire

Rome was first settled, like most other primary urban sites in Italy, in the
late Bronze Age, at the end of the second millennium bce, and it developed
into a city-state during the first few centuries of the following millennium.

1
R. Hingley (ed.) Images of Rome (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001).

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Map 25.1 Italy in around 600 bce.

Many similar centers emerged at the same time up and down the western
coast of central Italy, while Greek and Carthaginian colonies were being
founded further south and on the islands (Map 25.1).2 Rome found itself
within a particularly tight cluster of these polities, which often had their
nearest neighbor only 20–40 kilometers away and ranged in walled size
between 50 and 150 hectares. Located on the banks of the Tiber, the main
river of the region, Rome was also straddling a deepening cultural boundary
between Etruscan cities to the north and Latin and Greek ones to the south.
From early on, the Romans probably cultivated a distinctive self-image of
ethnic and cultural hybridity, explicitly acknowledging the contribution of a
variety of elements that characterized their neighbors with more defined
identities.3 Also unusual for the region was the environmental setting of
Rome, sprawled across several steep-sided hills separated by wide alluvial
valleys that were seasonally flooded. Unlike other peer communities, which
typically occupied vast and naturally defended volcanic plateaus, the
Romans had to engage in massive land reclamation projects that involved

2
H. D. Andersen (ed.) Urbanization in the Mediterranean in the 9th to 6th Centuries BC
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997).
3
E. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of
Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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dumping soil over vast drains to create land bridges (one of which became
the Forum) that could connect the hills and that kept being expanded for
centuries.4 It is significant that Rome acquired fortification walls only at a
relatively late date, around the mid-sixth century bce. Remarkably, the
fortified area (c. 285 hectares) was much bigger than that of any other central
Italian city, but it included vast amounts of unreclaimed floodlands as well
as many unusable steep ravines around the individual hills.
In the late sixth–early fifth century bce, the political systems in Rome and
in neighboring city-states went through a phase of high instability, charac-
terized by tyrannical coups and intense inter-city elite horizontal mobility.
Great works were undertaken in the city, such as the creation of the first
great state temple on the Capitoline and the drainage of the Forum Valley.
Warfare was endemic, but mainly involved seasonal raids that had limited
consequences and never led to the annexation or destruction of one of the
major polities. Dominance spanning more than one city (typically achieved
through the installation of friendly rulers) seems to have been unusual and
short-lived. Similar phenomena occurred in Greek, Etruscan, and other
states in peninsular Italy and Sicily. By the late fifth century, a republican
system was certainly in place in Rome and in many other peer cities, in
which elites competed for yearly elective military and civil commands,
often, however, clearly furthering a factional and family agenda while in
office.5 This is when the global dynamics in the whole central Mediterranean
underwent a radical change: Carthaginians and Syracusans in Sicily (quickly
followed by some peninsular states) began engaging in a territorial expan-
sionism that aimed at lumping together entire states and at the creation of
directly controlled colonies (unlike the politically independent colonies they
founded in the ninth–sixth centuries bce).6
In this period, Rome attacked head on a major Etruscan state, Veii, which
was its closest neighbor across the Tiber. Veii fell after years of war (in
which Rome for the first time kept its army in the field year round and paid
it a salary) and it was eliminated as an independent polity, an unprecedented
act in central Italy. Many of its citizens were relocated to Rome, where they
soon, however, received equal rights as the original Romans. This precipi-
tated profound structural changes as the resulting new state needed to adapt

4
A. J. Ammerman, “On the Origins of the Forum Romanum,” American Journal of
Archaeology 104 (1990), 627–45.
5
T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome (London: Routledge, 1995).
6
A. M. Eckstein, Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).

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 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

quickly to a dramatic increase in its territory. Indeed, the archaeological

record shows a sharp increase in the number and density of small farms in
the period after the conquest, traditionally interpreted as those of Roman
colonists. We now know, however, that the spread of small-scale farming
is a broad central Mediterranean trend, not limited to the small areas of
initial imperial expansion,7 but rather connected with a sharp increase
of specialized crafts and with the growth of urbanized areas everywhere,
two processes that required a greater food surplus. It can even be posited
that the high-energy transformation involved in imperial expansion was
only made possible by the agricultural intensification that immediately
preceded it.
From the start, Roman policy in the conquered human landscapes seems
to have been an inclusive one, leaving existing local power structures in
place and broadening the base that was subject to taxation and to the army
draft. Rome’s expansion quickly picked up its pace after Veii’s destruction, a
harsh treatment that was only repeated in strategic locations like Carthage
or Corinth. At the other end of the spectrum is the policy toward Gabii, a
Latin state as close to Rome as Veii, with which Rome struck an “equal”
(that is, balanced) treaty that would later become a model informing
hundreds of similar agreements with city-states around the Mediterranean.
Essentially, during the fourth and third centuries bce, the Roman Empire
extended rapidly in peninsular Italy by means of a vast number of separate
one-to-one treaties with the other cities, without the creation of an explicit
confederation or of a clear imperial political infrastructure. Significantly,
Romans kept referring to them as allies. They had been induced to enter
into agreements through a combination of means such as negotiation,
military threat, actual war, offers of protection against a common enemy
and interference in their internal affairs. The Roman senate and the army
commanders displayed a remarkable flexibility and flair for ad hoc diplo-
matic solutions with each separate polity, resulting in a highly complex
mosaic of reciprocal obligations between Rome and each of its allied states.
Therefore, the received idea of a mighty war machine making mincemeat of
everything in its path is largely a Romantic-century fantasy that finds little
confirmation in the ethnohistorical sources and even less in the archaeo-
logical record.

7
P. A. R. van Dommelen and N. Terrenato (eds.), Articulating Local Cultures: Power
and Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman
Archaeology, 2007).

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What is true instead is that all the main foci of expansion in the central
Mediterranean at this time (Rome, Syracuse, Carthage, Macedonia) were
benefiting from a snowball effect that made the next conquest more likely
after each annexation, thanks to increased taxation, tribute, army draft, and
to general economies of scale in the growing empires. However, expansion
fed expansion in different ways, and the growing competition among
empires played out in their efficiency in pooling imperial resources, much
more than in pure military confrontations. Here, Rome had a distinctive
advantage in its deeply rooted policy of admitting foreigners into its citizen
body, as contemporary Greek rulers themselves had to concede. The
population estimates for this period show an exponential growth that vastly
exceeds the potential of fertility in pre-modern societies. Thus, rather than
imagining ethnically pure Romans taking over Italy, it is clear that, with
political nimbleness and no ethnic exclusiveness, urbanized communities
were quickly co-opted and persuaded to identify with the conveniently
vague and flexible concept of expanding Roman rule.
A consideration of Rome’s expansion pattern in peninsular Italy is also
revealing of the deep logic of the process. Far from concentrically expanding
like an oil slick, Rome reached out to other major cities within 50 kilometers
of the western coast, that is, the cradle of Iron Age Italian urbanism, along
existing lines of communication. Its priority was clearly to have the other
peer polities brought into its expansionistic bid as soon as possible. Non-
urbanized, upland areas toward the spine of the peninsula were left to be
dealt with later. As early as the fourth century bce, Rome was far more
worried with 1,000-kilometer-distant Carthage (with whom it had political
and commercial treaties) than with the central Apennines, which were only
100 kilometers away but were mountainous and rural. Even the eastern
coast of Italy, which was only very sporadically urbanized, although not far
by way of sea (and only 200 kilometers away as the crow flies) figured much
less prominently in the early narratives and in the archaeologically attested
circulation or prestige goods than far-flung southeastern Spain or even the
Nile Delta, which were important international commercial nodes.
In the rush to link together the main states of the central Mediterranean,
Rome had a significant geographic advantage over its competitors. Being in
a dense concentration of cities reduced the land surface costs in the early
stages of the expansion, and meant that the empire did not have to rely
exclusively on maritime routes like Carthage. For centuries, the core of the
Roman state would be represented by a stretch of c. 300 kilometers of the
western coast, extending 50 kilometers inland and with Rome at its center.

518
 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

The extent of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in

218 BCE CE 14
133 BCE after CE 14
44 BCE CE 115–117
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Map 25.2 Rome’s expansion.

Other states scattered around the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea (bounded by
Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and southern France) would be progressively tied to
that core in a relatively compact assemblage. Desert-bordered Carthage
necessarily had to put together a much more disjointed and far-flung empire
(albeit commercially a very productive one), while expanding Greek cities
like Syracuse had never invested enough in the Italian hinterland and its
inhabitants to be able to integrate it effectively (Map 25.2).
While Rome evidently prioritized existing cities, it also spread urbanism
with the creation of colonies, which had the primary function of bringing
into existence a new state that, from its birth and by definition, was a
member of the alliance, rather than that of military outposts manned by
ethnic Romans. A large number of Roman colonies of this period were
founded in poorly urbanized areas of inland and eastern Italy. Quite a few,
however, were placed inside existing urban systems (and even sometimes on
top of existing cities), thus increasing even further the density of the urban
network in western central Italy. Wherever they happened to be, they were
also connected with a reorganization of the landscape around the new city.
Each colonist family was connected with a parcel of land of a certain size to
qualify for political rights, and cadastral systems were put in place to keep
much better track of land ownership than before. Recent studies have
shown that locals (as well as members of other allied communities) were

519
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routinely invited to be a part of the new polity and it is likely that land
confiscation and dispossession were not as widespread as traditionally main-
tained.8 Farm buildings and agricultural practices have been archaeologically
shown not to present much change before and after the foundation of a
colony, and local burial customs and cults often persist too.
A distinctive feature of Rome’s colonies was that their inhabitants, besides
being full citizens of the new city, also received some form of intermediate
(or more rarely full) citizenship of Rome. Similar grants were also routinely
made to allied communities to reward their continued loyalty to the
federation. These rights typically included the ability to relocate to Rome,
to marry and inherit from Romans, and to trade with Romans under the
protection of Roman law. Voting rights were eventually given as a recogni-
tion of full membership in the budding empire. Unusually, freed slaves
(a fast-growing social group in Rome and one almost entirely composed
of non-Romans) were treated essentially in the same fashion. In this way,
Rome’s stakeholder base constantly expanded, offering to new allies tangible
examples of the benefits of integration, which were much better than those
offered by any competing Carthaginian or Greek imperialist. Another key
trait of Rome’s expansionist offer was that the political order it promoted
was guaranteed to be slanted in favor of landed elites, whatever their
ethnicity or background. Access to the senate was restricted to land-owners,
and upward social mobility seems to have been much less common than
horizontal elite mobility (a phenomenon that existed already from the early
first millennium bce). Non-Roman nobility from across the peninsula moved
to (or had a foothold in) Rome with apparent ease and often reached the
highest offices and the senatorial rank. The Roman army, led by the same
people, was ready to come to the rescue of elites in allied communities and
squelch social unrest and uprisings, which significantly happened more often
than rebellions or secessions of entire incorporated cities against Rome.
In the late third and especially in the second century bce, the expansion of
Rome increasingly pushed up against other competing territorial empires.
This prompted a series of prolonged wars that were different in their nature
from the ones Rome had fought in Italy. They often escalated into desperate
struggles for supremacy and always resulted, sooner or later, with the utter
defeat of Rome’s opponent. This was the fate of all the states that had
arisen from the break-up of the empire of Alexander the Great, but also of

8
G. Bradley and J. P. Wilson (eds.), Parallels and Contrasts in Greek and Roman Colonisa-
tion: Origins, Ideologies and Interactions (London: Duckworth, 2005).

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 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

emerging central Mediterranean powers like Syracuse or Carthage. By the

140s bce, Rome controlled most Mediterranean coastal cities, whose political
and economic structures were easier to integrate and win over with offers of
citizenship and other benefits, resulting in a far-flung empire that had
avoided and leapfrogged over the less digestible parts. At the same time,
the reach of urbanism kept growing thanks to colonial foundations in
areas like the Po Plain, which would become (and still are) among the
most densely settled in Europe, paving their way for a fuller participation
in the political life of the empire. Outside Italy too, once a city became
part of the alliance it would typically maintain much of its local power
arrangements and therefore adapt to the changed circumstances with
relatively little turbulence, but it would be within a province. These
administrative districts were assigned to yearly governors who were in
charge of taxation, keeping the order, arbitrating between cities, and
monitoring the frontier.
As earlier in Italy, for this phase too there is little archaeological
evidence that the Roman conquest caused wholesale relocation of agri-
cultural populations or land distribution to ethnic Romans. By far the
most blatant symptom of the changed situation is represented by the vast
infrastructural investment made by the central government (and to a
lesser extent by provincial ones) in the countryside. An extensive network
of roads was painstakingly built, not all going to Rome. The new lines of
communication sometimes followed and improved existing routes but
often cleared natural obstacles, such as the Apennines or the Alps,
opening up brand-new opportunities for trade and contact. The magni-
tude of these projects contrasts sharply with the relative modesty of the
public construction inside contemporary Rome. Other infrastructures
included aqueducts (primarily to supply Rome, but also other cities),
drainage channels, land reclamation, and much else. Piracy and brigand-
age were actively repressed and eventually eliminated, with the same goal
as the road improvements. All these efforts characterizing the new Roman
state from an early stage of its development clearly impacted a number of
areas that were typically beyond the reach of individual cities, almost as if
the aim was to offer a tangible proof of the advantages deriving from
membership in the empire. As a general strategy, Rome let things be
inside existing cities and in their immediate hinterland, and intervened
instead at the interstices between city-states, connecting, integrating,
facilitating, servicing, and arbitrating between them in exchange for the
taxation that it extracted.

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Moving toward a continental empire

Once the Mediterranean urban world had been almost completely unified
under Rome (with the exception of Egypt and other bits of the African
coast), it collectively turned its renewed attention to the vast continental
expanses of western and central Europe and of western Asia. For centuries,
Mediterranean traders and travelers had ventured up river valleys and across
plains and plateaus to exchange finely crafted products and exotic delicacies
such as wine with raw materials, slaves, and rare resources such as amber. It
was a system that worked well, but it constrained the volume of trade and
subjected it to outside variables. In addition to that, many pre-urban polities
in these areas were finally moving toward statehood as a result of an
endogenous process that had undoubtedly been helped along by the pro-
longed interaction with the Mediterranean. Fortified hilltop nucleated settle-
ments in central France and Spain, for instance, were significantly growing
in numbers, size, and internal stratification in the course of the late second
and early first century bce. These changes were long believed to have been
directly produced by the Roman conquest, but finer chronological reso-
lution now shows that they instead pre-dated the arrival of the Roman
army, sometimes by just a few decades.9 It appears that the Mediterranean
urban alliance saw an opportunity for further expansion in the develop-
ments that were bringing new regions closer, making them “ripe” for a
tighter form of integration. At the same time, there is no doubt that as they
came in contact with these evolving polities, the Romans and their Mediter-
ranean allies met more resistance and had to face much more post-
annexation instability. Areas of central Spain (but also of France and even
Liguria in Italy) had to be militarily dealt with again and again, suggesting
strongly that for these people participation in a territorial empire was not
the obvious option that it had been earlier on for the city-states.
In military terms, the push inland of the Roman Empire required a very
different strategy from the ones used along the seaboard. Moving the army
(and especially supplying it) could not be done by sea, thus slowing down
the pace and the frequency of the campaigns. These tended to become
multi-year affairs in distant parts of the world, where the yearly rotation of
the elected military leaders (which usually involved a reorganization of the
army and of its staff) was eminently impractical. Commands had therefore

9
G. Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).

522
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to be extended and provincial governors often played an important role,

staying in the field with the same army for long periods, essentially free from
senatorial supervision, at least until they returned to Rome. The very
structure of the army was radically changed, eliminating the last vestiges
of the original stratification of soldiers by social class, emphasizing instead
veterancy and military rank acquired in the field. The conquest, which had
proceeded along the coasts at a sustained and constant pace so that few
years had seen no gains, now became much more unpredictable, alternating
massive leaps and bounds with long periods of stable boundaries. Necessar-
ily, expansion could only come from long expeditions that had to be planned
well in advance and that, when successful, often led to the incorporation of
areas many times the size of the whole of peninsular Italy (see Map 25.2).
Rome’s administrative strategy in the continental regions always built,
at least initially, on networks established earlier by other city-states. Thus
they clearly benefited from the inroads that the Carthaginians had made in
Andalusia along the Guadalquivir Valley and that the Greek city of
Massalia (Marseilles) had made up the Rhone Valley. There too, the
foundation of new cities and the reorganization of the rural landscapes
had been fundamental tools to interact with the local communities and to
make them more compatible with and interested in the Mediterranean
world. The Roman effort, however, was much more sustained and,
crucially, made space both for local agency (which was in a very dynamic
phase anyway) and for the participation of individuals from all the cities
around the empire. Again, infrastructural investments were not spared,
and they sped up the process of integration and economic development.
New provinces set up in this phase, like Provence or Hispania Citerior
in eastern Spain, quickly became a full part of the global imperial machin-
ery, effectively and permanently pushing out the boundaries of the
Mediterranean world.
As the first century bce progressed, the empire underwent even deeper
changes in many areas. The political republican system collapsed, crushed
by the emergence of large professional armies that were firmly loyal to
the commanders under whom they had served for long periods. Clearly, the
geographic and cultural mass of the alliance had become too big to be
guided by officials elected every year in Rome, especially since there was a
fast-expanding proportion of people around the empire that had voting
rights but were de facto disenfranchised by their distance from the elections
held in the capital. Rome’s policy of political inclusiveness had reached its
intrinsic spatial limitations. From then on, Rome was ruled by military

523
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dictators, called emperors, whose primary power base was within the army,
and especially in the troops stationed near the capital. While military glory
had certainly been instrumental in the ascent of the earliest of these
condottieri, such as Marius, Pompey, or Caesar, from the first century ce
onwards triumphs were no longer indispensable to obtain or maintain
power, as the relevance of civilian public opinion declined. Military achieve-
ment did occasionally help usurpers, such as Vespasian or Septimius
Severus, but as a powerful drive for new campaigns it lost much of its
appeal. After 100 bce, the Roman army and its generals were engaged
in intestine and inglorious wars more often than they were deployed in
external ones, and certainly with far greater casualties. Civil strife and
factionalism had always featured in the history of the empire to a remark-
able extent, but once these changes took place they largely dominated the
political life (with the exception of some eighty years in the second century
ce), often relegating foreign affairs to the distant background. Even the
conquest of Egypt, the last incorporation of a major Mediterranean state,
was merely a by-product of a protracted civil war between competing
Roman dictators and their semi-private armies.
In spite of its status as the capital of the largest Mediterranean empire of
its time, down to about 100 bce the urban infrastructure of Rome remained
relatively unchanged. The same city walls were maintained, the Forum was
not yet monumentalized, and most of the investment seems to have gone in
the foundation of a number of subsidiary temples around the city (Map 25.3).
Individual prominent clans promoted these rivaling projects, in keeping with
Rome’s nature as a factionalized oligarchy at the time. It was only when
power became concentrated in the hands of military commanders that
massive urban amenities were undertaken. Piazzas, theaters, and even more
temples arose at the expense of private quarters, eventually turning the
whole center of the city into a mosaic of public spaces and monuments by
the late first century ce.10 The Palatine Hill emerged as the site of a vast
imperial palace that served as a model for many royal residences in medieval
and Renaissance Europe (Map 25.4).
Throughout the first and early second centuries ce, the imperialist
machinery lurched into expansive action at irregular intervals and for
different reasons. Early on, advances were made in the Rhineland, along
the Danube, and in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula, ostensibly to

10
J. C. Coulston and H. Dodge (eds.), Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City
(Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2000).

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Via Aur L AT I N E Via S
acra
Temple of Hercules
AN
L I
CAE
Circus Republican
LUM

er Maximus Wall
ib
rT AV
ive EN
m

R T IN
CU

riu

E
po
NI

Em

Via

Via
O
IA

Ap
stie

pia
nsi
s

Map 25.3 Rome around 150 bce.

reach more easily defensible frontiers. All these areas tended to be less
compatible with the rest of the empire than any other previous province
and offered much stronger resistance, occasionally causing heavy defeats.
Decades later Rome suddenly invaded Britain, possibly as a result of
developing political complexity in the southeast of the island as well as
for its own internal political reasons. Again, areas that were culturally
and structurally very different ended up within the empire and they
showed a much greater propensity for instability and outright rebellion.
Conquests of this kind were the exception rather than the rule: the
empire would not have survived long if all the provinces had been as
troublesome as Britain or Germany proved to be. The last great push
took place around the 100s ce, with the rapid annexation of Romania and
Mesopotamia. The former was culturally not unlike Germany and it was
probably coveted mostly for its mineral resources, while the latter was
fully urbanized and was wrested from the Parthians, a vast territorial
empire that had grown out of Persia and whose western boundary with

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 nicola terrenato

0 500 1000 meters Barracks

Aqua Virgo of the
Praetorian Guard

Baths of
Mausoleum Diocletian
2
of Hadrian

1 Aq
3 ua
Ma
rci
Basilica Aq

a
of ua
R iv

4 5
St Peter An
er T

io
ib e
r

Forum
Romanum
Aqua Alsietina dia
lau
uaC
Cir Aq
cu
sM
ax Sessorian
im Palace
us

Lateran
Basilica

na
ninia
Anto
1 Altar of Augustan Peace Aqua
2 Temple of Sun (Sol Invictus) s Baths of
3 Column of Marcus Aurelius all Caracalla
nW
Rive

4 Pantheon li a
u re
r Tib

5 Baths of Constantine A
6 Licinian Pavilion
er

Map 25.4 Rome around 330 ce.

Rome moved back and forth many times. After this, there was no more
expansion and Rome’s foreign policy was almost exclusively limited to
the defense of its frontiers and the repression of secession attempts,
especially in the west. The city itself lost much of its centrality after
about 200 ce, as alternative capitals were created by emperors who
needed to be closer to the frontiers or to their competitors, and it was
disastrously sacked in 410 ce.

Rome on the ground

Assessing the impact of the prolonged imperial expansion of Rome on the
human landscapes it came to occupy has become harder in recent decades.
For centuries, historians, politicians, schoolmasters, and Grand Tourists
equated the diffusion of traits such as official inscriptions in stone,

526
 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

air-heated bathhouses, or legionary camps with a profoundly transformative

experience. Idealists may have exalted Rome’s civilizing mission, materialists
measured a shift in the modes of production, and postcolonialists deplor-
ingly charted the demise of local traditions, but they all implicitly agreed
that Rome had, for better or worse, effected a cultural revolution. In these
reconstructions, the instances that were considered paradigmatic were the
latter continental conquests (which often geographically overlapped with
the modern nations where this scholarship was being created), rather than
the more crucial Mediterranean ones. Now, mostly thanks to archaeological
data of a finer quality, the picture has become much more nuanced, making
it impossible to explain cases as disparate as those of central Italy, Morocco,
and Austria with the same model. At the very least, a fundamental distinc-
tion must be drawn between the parts of the empire that were already
urbanized before the conquest and those that became urbanized after it, or
not at all. While they may show outward similarities, if one focuses on
indicators like public architecture or inscriptions, the underlying cultural
dynamics are profoundly different. Where cities already existed, they seam-
lessly continued to function as such, building on the commonalities that
Mediterranean urban culture had developed throughout the first millen-
nium bce. In the rest of the empire, from the Apennine and Alpine ridges to
the British Fens and Libya, cities or city-like local governments had to be
founded, resulting in a much greater overall impact.11
Production and economy have been recently highlighted as an area where
Roman expansion would have caused massive changes. In the agricultural
sphere, for instance, large plantation estates called villas spread virtually
everywhere across the empire, supposedly revolutionizing productive struc-
tures and agrarian power relationships by colonizing land seized from local
small farmers. A closer examination of the villa phenomenon, however,
shows that it originated in central Italy at the end of the second century
bce, centuries after the Roman conquest, and it was often linked to the status
display of local aristocrats more than to investment cash-cropping. The latter
appeared eventually and only in highly special areas connected with the
supply of large cities, such as the immediate hinterland of Rome or the
Mediterranean bread and oil baskets. Elsewhere, and especially in the outer

11
S. J. Keay and N. Terrenato (eds.), Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization
(Oxford: Oxbow, 2001); N. Terrenato, “The Cultural Implications of the Roman
Conquest,” in E. Bispham (ed.), Roman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp. 234–64.

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 nicola terrenato

provinces, the existing peasant society was not replaced by gangs of chattel
slaves, and data supporting agricultural intensification after the great expan-
sion of the third century bce are generally scarce. In terms of trade and
mining, there is macroscopic evidence of economic development between
the second century bce and the second century ce. The frequency of Medi-
terranean shipwrecks peaked in this period and arctic ice cores indicate a vast
increase in the smelting of lead-associated metals. Average height was
apparently on the rise, suggesting better diet. Commercial hubs, such as
Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, reached a size and complexity that would
not be seen again until the Industrial Revolution. These findings, however,
need to be contrasted with the multitude of local contexts, which show little
or no economic development. This is true of many continental areas but also
of large parts of the urbanized East, such as continental Greece, where there
is even a decline compared to the pre-conquest levels.12
The infrastructural network clearly continued to be a priority for the
central government. Roads, bridges, aqueducts, drainage channels, dams,
and water mills were built at a fast rate and with much improved engineer-
ing and building techniques. They certainly played the same role in the
outer provinces as they did in Italy of offering tangible proof of the benefits
of annexation. But their success naturally was a direct function of the need
that the locals had for them, which was not everywhere as pronounced as in
the Mediterranean. This was especially true where taxation was particularly
unwelcome, for example, in areas that had no prior experience of it and that
had little access to the coinage needed to pay it. Thus the same centrally
instigated policies could have very different outcomes across the span of the
empire. Another factor contributing to the heterogeneity of the empire is
represented by its standing army. Once the constant expansion petered out,
large contingents tended to be permanently stationed, typically along the
frontier. The presence of thousands of people drawn from all over the
empire and beyond, paid in cash, centrally housed, fed, and equipped
obviously had a very significant local impact that would often exceed the
one felt by less peripheral regions, away from the frontier.
To the spatial dishomogeneity of the empire, one must add the complex
changes that took place once it had more or less stabilized, during the
second through fourth centuries ce. After a long stint, the Italian Peninsula
all but lost its centrality, along with treasured perks, such as its tax

12
W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the
Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

BRITANNIAE
Londinium BRUC TE RI G OT H S
Ca

Rh e n
sp
F R A N KS ia

us
Augusta
Treverorum n
AT L A N T I C GALLIAE Da
nu b

S
e Carnuntum

ea
OCEAN

PA
B lack S ea

HIA
N
Sirmium

SCYT
N
Lugdunum Mediolanum
Burdigala

O
Verona e
IA Da n u b

N
VI ENNENSI S A
Padus I E CI

RA
Arelate T Salona Byzantium/
Serdica

TH
A Constantinople
L Adrianople P O N T I C A

M
E Nicomedia Edessa
Roma I Thessalonica Caesarea
A Tig
A

Tarraco (Mazaca) Carrhae

O
Callinicum

ris
I

Emerita Augusta A S I A N A

E
N

Eu

i a na
Antioch p hrates

S
Corduba
A

le t
Palmyra

c
Dio
P

I
A

at a
I S

Str
Tingi E
Iol Caesarea Carthago
Caesarea SAR ACENS
H

I n t e r n u m M a r e
Q U I NQ U EG ENTI ANI
A S
F Alexandria
R Lepcis Magna N
I Cyrene
C E
A I
R
O Nile R
e
Ptolemais d
0 250 500 750 1000 km S A

S
H A

e
R A D E

a
0 250 500 miles S E R T NOBATAE

Many stretches of the boundaries shown are only approximate. The provincial boundaries within Britain are unknown.
Diocese of Britanniae comprises 4 provinces, Galliae 8, Viennensis 7, Hispaniae 6, Africa 7, Italia 12, Pannoniae 7, Moesiae 11, Thracia 6, Asiana 9, Pontica 7 and Oriens 16.

Map 25.5 The later Roman Empire.

exemption or demilitarization. Rome was only one of the many cities where
short-lived emperors could set up their court. The eastern, Greek-speaking
half of the empire, destined to outlive the western one by about a thousand
years, experienced renewed development and went on improving its urban
and extra-urban infrastructure, which elsewhere had started to decline.
Italian wine and oil stopped being widely exported overseas, replaced by
Spanish, African, and Oriental exports. Byzantium and Alexandria emerged
as the new political, economic, and cultural hubs of the Mediterranean
world. In short, the center of gravity slowly shifted back East, bringing the
experience of Rome to a close and leaving continental Europe to its own
distinctive historical trajectory (Map 25.5).

The distinctiveness and paradigmatic

value of Rome
Stepping back to consider ancient Rome in its broader historical context
and among other empires immediately reveals an apparent paradox. On
the one hand, few political formations have had the same name recognition
in our consciousness, or have figured so prominently in our political
discourse, in our cultural imagery, and in the architecture of our cities.
And yet, the scholarship on Rome has remained largely insulated from the

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 nicola terrenato

great intellectual syntheses on complex societies. For instance, state forma-

tion studies hardly ever consider Italy in its near universal comparisons, and
the same is true for historical anthropology and sociology. Perhaps because
of its exceptional value as a paradigm of imperial discipline and organization,
the Roman Empire could not be analyzed with the help of general theories
prevailing in the social sciences, nor brought to bear on them. The few
times that this has happened, the results have made as little impression in
the specialist literature as in the broader one. In light of this, it is essential to
evaluate how unusual Rome actually was, once it is freed from its
nineteenth-century encrustations and it is measured on the same scale
as other comparable entities. To be sure, some defining elements appear
to be rather common. Urban centrality, land-based taxation, army draft,
provincial administration, specialized palace bureaucracy, performance of
power, imperial cult, to name just a few, can all be found in many large
territorial states. Other features, as it is to be expected, are less typical but far
from unique, such as the primacy that was given, at least formally, to land-
based wealth or the role that legal litigation had in elite transactions.
Surprisingly, one trait that is not a part of its stock image but may set
Rome apart from many other empires is its ethnic and cultural inclusiveness.
Having fashioned a very hazy concept of their own identity, the expanding
Romans focused primarily on sociopolitical and citizenship status to deter-
mine who had a stake in the empire. Largely ignoring background, lan-
guage, skin color (or other physical traits), religion or customs, the
newcomers to the empire were only assessed in terms of their local rank,
their land ownership, their urbaneness (urbanus meant civilized in Latin),
and their willingness to participate in the imperial venture. By admitting
millions of people into its citizenship over the course of five centuries, Rome
ceased to exist as an ancient city in the proper sense of the word and became
an exploded political entity whose local administration overlapped with the
imperial one, whose electorate extended to the ends of the world, whose
culture was conflated with a hybrid patchwork of ideas woven across
millions of square kilometers. There is little doubt that those who were
changed the most by the conquest were the Romans themselves.

further readings
Aldrete, G. S., Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007).
Ammerman, A. J., “Environmental Archaeology in the Velabrum, Rome: Interim
Report,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 11 (1998), 213–23.

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 Rome: the archetypal imperial city

Badian, E., Foreign Clientelae, 264–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
Champion, C. B., Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Pubblishers, 2004).
Coarelli, F., Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007).
Dyson, S. L., The Roman Countryside (London: Duckworth, 2003).
Giardina, A., and A. Vauchez, Rome, l’idée et le mythe: du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris:
Fayard, 2000).
Harris, W. V., War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979).
Laurence, R., The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (London: Routledge,
1999).
Millett, M., The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Osborne, R., and B. Cunliffe (eds.), Mediterranean Urbanization 800–600 BC (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
Potter, D. S., The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180–395 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Schiavone, A., The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000).
Torelli, M., Studies in the Romanization of Italy (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
1995).
Wallace-Hadrill, A., Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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