Roman Empire

and reshaping
of the global
order in
antiquity

• Rome was a warrior state . In 4th century an unremarkable city - secured its
survival
through a complex network of alliances with surrounding peoples.

• A series of victories allowed the Romans to establish their own territory along
the
Tiber valley and to expand their sphere pf influence southwards into
campania( around
the bay of Naples). This is a slow process of gradual advance and steady
consolidation.

• This consolidation was a result of the defeat of Samnites in 295 BC ( leading to

the
extension of Roman control into Central Italy )and the thwarted invasion of
Pyrrhus,
the ruler of Epirus, a kingdom in the Adriatic coast of Greece. By the middle of
the 3rd
century BC, most of the Italian peninsula was under Roman control. In the next
hundred years the Romans and their allies challenged the North African city of
Carthage, the dominant power in the western Mediterranean.

• What followed were three Punic wars between Rome and Carthage ending in Rome’s
complete rout of the Carthaginian influence in the Mediterranean.
Sources of Roman History
• A very important source for the period Pliny the Younger’s correspondence with
Emperor Trajan when he was sent to
govern the province of Bithynia - Pontus on the southern shore of the black Sea.
It offers an unparalleled insight into the
activities of one high- ranking Roman administrator. Over a period of two years
he contacted Trajan 61 times on a wide
range of issues, in 39 cases submitting matters for decision or approval.

• Suetonius, a scholar and able administrator who held series of important court
posts under Trajan and his successor
Hadrian. His work Lives of Caesars was explicit in his moral judgements. He
offered both praise and condemnation,
the latter possible at a suitable distance.

• Cornelius Tacitus- contemporary of both Pliny and Suetonius- is one o the most
subtle historians and sophisticated political
commentators whose works survive from antiquity. His Annals are an unremitting
exposé of an imperial system which not
only corrupts the powerful, but poisons the very processes of government itself.
Here there were no heroes.

• In the first two decades of the 2nd century ( across the reign of Trajan and
Hadrian ) Plutarch completed 46 biographies of
famous Greeks and Romans. These were arranged in pairs; so, for example,
Alexander the Great partnered Julius Caesar,
the Pericles joined Maximus Cunctator, ‘the delayer’ ; and Thesus ( the founder
of Athens) was coupled with Romulus (the
founder of Rome). Hi sword, Parallel lIves, offered a series of historical
scenarios which would encourage readers to
consider the ethical issues involved, firmly believing that their characters were
most clearly revealed in their actions.

• Falvius Josephus, a historian and Titus’ adviser who was a rebel Jewish commander
who had defected to the Romans and
who is the sole source for the account of the sack of Jerusalem by Romans.

Rome: Foundations and Empire in a global context

• Rome’s rise as the dominant force of the Mediterranean and later the global
world of the period was an
unprecedented event. A small town in an uncompromising location form a
provincial backwater into a
regional power and eventually an empire.

• It was intensely competitive state, one that glorified the military and
acclaimed violence and killing.
Gladiatorial games were etch bedrock of public entertainments, a place where
mastery over foreign
people s and over nature was brutally celebrated.

• Militarism, fearlessness and the love of glory were carefully cultivated as the
key characteristics of an
ambitious city whose reach was stretching forever.

• Marriage was frowned upon but specifically prohibited in order o keep recruits
bonded to each other.
 Corps of highly trained , fit and intense young men who had been Brough up
confident in their ability
ad assured of tenor destiny were the rock on which Rome was built.

• In Aenied , the epic poem, Virgil lays down the foundation of Rome’s ‘divine
purpose’ in a
metaphor laden with the Greek epics, following the fate of the Trojan prince
Aeneas, fleeing the
destruction of his home town at the hands of the Greeks, who on Ulysses’ shrewd
advice had
cunningly concealed themselves in the belly of a wooden horse.
• A major influence on Roman thought and culture were the Greeks. In 130s AD, when
the Roman
emperor Hadrian invaded Athens, it was a war without bloodshed as he relied not
on crack
legionary troops or superior military technology or logistics, but rather on
armies of construction
workers and carful town planning. He traveled extensively through the provinces
as a tourist and
not as campaigning general; eh was the first emperor to take a sustained and
active intellectual
interest in the ancient history and monument son the eastern Mediterranean world.
He long
paraded his love of Greek culture, building great monuments such as Hadrian’s
library in Athens,
he also finished the largest temple sever constructed in the Roman Empire the
great shrine to
Olympian Zeus.

• Hadrian’s major contribution though was the creation of Panhenellion,meaning all

Greek. It was
more than a mere dedication to the Olympieion, but an organisation of Greek
cities, covered five
Roman Provinces, extending far beyond mainland Greece to include the cities in
Macedonia,
Thrace, Asia Minor, Crete, Rhodes and North Africa.

• It envisaged a permanent international federation embracing not only ancient

foundations such as
Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Argos ,but also including those cities across the
eastern Mediterranean
which could demonstrate a close conenction with ‘Old Greece’. Hadrian’s
organisation reshaped
the Greek world bringing together in a single institutional framework many cities
that had never
before been connected and indeed in the past had been bitter enemies of each
other.
• What propelled Rome from a regional power to an imperial force was not only the
conquests of Gaul, Britannia
or more less much of Europe but its reorientation towards the Eastern
Mediterranean and beyond. Rome’s
success and glory stemmed from its seizure of Egypt in the first instance, and
then from setting its anchor in the
east - in Asia.

• Egypt’s conquest brought to Rome the vast harvests of the Nile Valley, the price
of grain tumbled, providing a
major boost to household spending power. Interest rates plummeted, falling from
around 12 to 4 percent; this in
turn quickly fuelled the familiar boom that accompanies a flood of cheap capital:
a surge in property prices. The
amount of ruthless expropriation of Egypt’s fortune to Rome has been termed as
‘ancient apartheid’ by one
scholar; its aim was to maximise the flow of money back to Rome.

• Egypt opened the gateway to the east for Rome who saw that the exports of the
east were colossal and
eventually under Augustus in 1BC, a detailed survey of both sides of the Persian
Gulf was conducted to report
ion trade in this region and to record how the sea lanes linked with Red Sea. He
also oversaw an investigation of
the land routes heading deep into Central Asia through Persia. A text known as
Stathmoi Parthikoi (
Parthian Station) was produced around this time which recorded distances between
key points in the east, and
carefully set out the most important locations from the Euphrates up to
Alexandrapolis, modern Kandahar, in
Afghanistan, in the East.

• Commercial exchange with India did not open up as much as it exploded- clear with
the rich archaeological
record from the subcontinent as Roman Amphorae, lamps, mirrors and statues of
gods have been recovered
from a wide range of sites, including Pattnam, Kohlapur and Coimbatore.

• The Stathmoi Parthikoi reveals what the goods the Romans wanted from the western
India, noting that the
merchants could acquire valuable minerals, such as tin, copper, and lead, as well
as topaz, and where ivory, precious
gemstones and spices were really available.

• New wealth brought Rome and its inhabitants into contact with new world and new
tastes. The poet Marital typifies the
internationalism and expanded knowledge of this period in a poem mourning a young
slave girl, comparing het to an
untouched lily, to polished Indian ivory, to a Red Sea pearl, with her hair finer
than Spanish wool or blonde locks from
the Rhine.

• Not all were impressed by the new tastes : the Tiber had been overwhelmed by the
waters of the Orontes, the river that
flows through Syria and southern Turkey, complained dJuvenal in his Staires later
- in other words, Asian decadence
 had destroyed the old-fashioned Roman virtues.

• The commodity that really came to symbolise this decadence was Silk. Seneca for
one, horrified by the popularity of
the thin flowing material, declared that silk garments had barely any resemblance
to ‘clothing’ given that they hid
neither the curves nor the decency of the ladies of Rome. For him Silk was simply
a cipher for exoticism and eroticism.

• Silk was a commodity which reached Rome through the Silk routes became a real
concern for Romans, as Pliny the
Elder resented for vanity of wearing silk 100 million sesterces per year were
being pumped out of the Roman economy
and int trade markets beyond the frontier.

• Yet, the trade continued as greater Roman influence on trade and polity furthered
with the establishment and growth of
trade outposts such as Palmyra also called the Venice of the the sands, Petra,
Batnae, where great fairs were held to buy
and sell things sent from India and China, as well as all manner other goods
which were also brought there by land and
sea.
• Kushan empire played a very important role in this trade connection between such
diverse territorial areas,
becoming a conduit between the East and the west.

• Although goods are imported and exported from the Mediterranean into China in
growing quantities, the
Chines themselves played little role in trade with Rome via the Indian Ocean.

• Under the great General Ban Chao, we find the first description of the Romans in
the Chines imagination
as ‘tall and regularly featured’ population of the powerful empire in the west -
Da Qin - or the Great Qin-
as the Roman Empire was called, reported to have possessed abundant supplies of
gold, silver, and Fien
jewels: it was a source of many marvellous and rare objects.

• The Roman interest was mainly focused in Persia, as is evident from the lack of
effort in Rome’s history
to establish an embassy or seek knowledge of the world beyond the Himalayas and
Indian Ocean, with a
single Roman embassy attested as reaching the emperor Huan around 66 AD.

• As early as the conquest of Egypt, poets like Virgil and Horace were celebrating
the extending influence
of Roman culture , with Horace claiming that Rome was destined not just for the
domination of the
mediterranean, but of the mastery of the entire world- including conquering the
Indian and the Chinese.

• However, the first obstacle was the Persian territory.

• The Roman Empire affected the history of culture in various more or less separate
ways.

• First : There is a direct effect of Rome on Hellenistic thought. This is not very
important or profound.

• Second: the effect of Greece and the East on 4th western half of the empire. This
was a
profound and lasting , since it included the christian religion.

• Third: The importance of long Roman peace in diffusing culture and in accustoming
men to the idea of a single civilisation associated with a single government.
Roman thought through the period
Hellenistic World, Cynics and Sceptics, Epicureanism and Stoicism
• After the 3rd century BC there is nothing really new in Greek Philosophy until
the Neoplatonism, the contact with Zoroastrian dualism and
(in lesser degree the religions of India), Buddhism brought hellenic world in
contact with philosophical thoughts from various regions.

• This period saw the development of the specialist, in the modern sense of world.
Specialisation characterised the age in all departments, not
only in the world of learning. Governance was also affected by the dominant trend
of the period. Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, and
Apollonius , were content to nee mathematicians; in philosophy they did not
aspire to originality.

• The Roman rule brought stability when compared to the chaos of Alexander world
and despite the fact that compared to Greeks, the
Romans were “stupid and brutal”, they at least created order.

• This period saw a conflict between those what was theoretically believed and what
was actually felt.
• Diogenes of Antishnes, a disciple of Socrates, was the founder of the school of
Cynics, and had a distaste for philosophical quibbling. He
would have nothing but simple goodness, he associated with working men , and
dressed as one of them. He promoted the idea of ‘return to
nature’, that there should be no government, no private property, no marriage, no
established religion. “I’d rather be mad then delighted.”

• His student Diogenes of Sinope, lived like a dog, and was therefore called a
‘Cynic’, which means canine. He rejected all conventions-
whether of religion, of manners, of dress, of housing, of food, or of decency. H
lived by begging, His doctrine was reflection of the age
which was retreat of philosophy, as philosophers discovered that the world was
just a bad and evil place an the only subjective virtue or
contentment through resignation are secure.