Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge Read Free Page A

literacy, unity, or continuity.
    By the accession of Augustus, Rome owned most of the Mediterranean seabord, Gaul to the Rhine and Syria to the Euphrates. Acquisition had not been systematic or based on a sustained vision. A torrent of territory had fallen to the Republic during its later years, the result of spectacular victories by generals like Pompey and Caesar. In fact they had been moves in a power game, ambitions on a collision course both with the Senate and each other. These were the forces over which the consuls lost control, compelling Rome toward the thirty-five-year débâcle of dictatorship, assassination and civil war which encompassed the Republic’s dissolution; leading to the emergence of Octavian, Julius Caesar’s great nephew and heir, as Rome’s first emperor (later to be named Augustus).
    Including the additions made by Augustus and his successors, the empire would be among history’s more extensive, covering three-and-a-half million square miles of land and sea, with a land area about the size of the United States and Alaska. This Augustus managed with a peculiar mixture of strength and tact, wishing to be known by no more imposing a title than princeps (first citizen), though posterity, dismissing subterfuge, bluntly called him emperor: first of some seventy holders of that office between his taking power in 27 BC and the fall of Rome some five centuries later. From princeps there comes the term ‘principate’, meaning either the reign of an individual emperor or the early imperial period generally. This regime, described by Tacitus as ‘neither of total slavery nor total liberty’, 6 would vary in its ratio of freedom to tyranny with each occupant of the throne.
    Augustus, probably Rome’s most successful emperor, charmed the Senate with generous amnesty and gentle persuasion, allowing it to retain the inner empire and its members to lead legions and govern provinces as before, while he controlled the high command and the outer territories, including the frontiers. The forces were overhauled and the Western world’s first standing army created, consisting of 150,000 legionary and a similar number of auxiliary soldiers. The concentration of power in one man, who controlled the military machine, as well as the permanence of that machine, would deter both internal and external challengers. Augustus’ reforms thus offered a genuine prospect of peace, though long habits of strife and the pursuit of glory would render Rome incapable of grasping it fully.
    The expression pax Romana, adopted from the elder Pliny, was used by that writer incidentally, in describing plants ‘now available to the botanist from all corners of the world, thanks to the boundless majesty of the Roman peace’. 7 During the 1st century AD the principle of a universal peace will at times be honoured more in breach than observance, in the sense that most of Rome’s rulers reverted at least once to external ventures. But the pax Romana is not to be sneezed at. Despite notable exceptions, the empire and its battlefronts would soon fall quiet for almost two centuries. This was something new to the human condition. The temple of the double-faced Janus, traditionally open in time of war, had been closed only twice in the seven centuries between the city’s foundation and Augustus’ accession. Within the Barbaricum, where feuding and raiding were facts of life, a prolonged or widespread peace was similarly unknown. Given such unpromising precedents, the imposition and maintenance of the pax Romana was an extraordinary feat and perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement until that time.
    Augustus’ professional army of twenty-eight legions, assisted by some 300 auxiliary units, was now posted to the outer provinces where it would remain for three centuries and more. There the exterior nations, counting only those within reach of imperial territory, may have outnumbered