Explanation in the Special Sciences by Marie I. Kaiser Oliver R. Scholz Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann

Author:Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

8.4 How to Run an Empire?

It should have become clear that a single master plan for world conquest is not the explanation for the emergence of the Roman Empire. The power and influence of Rome grew in a piecemeal fashion, as the sum of many individual episodes. And the patchy nature of the Roman possessions was also continued in the imperial era, when territories with quite different legal status became collectively called the Imperium Romanum. Even the question what the empire really was defies a clear modern definition: it was not simply the personal possession of a king, like the Hellenistic monarchies. It was also not simply the territory of the Roman people because the latter, i.e., the ager Romanus resp. the legally defined Roman homeland in Italy, was never expanded beyond central Italy. The best approximation of a legal definition in modern terms describes the empire as an alliance of cities with Rome as the senior partner. So the administrative structure reflects the mode of growth of the empire, and it had three levels: the cities with considerable local autonomy, the provinces, and finally the emperor. The latter two represent the “imperial” or “Roman” administration of the empire, but it is uncertain what this really means. Our sources do not explicitly explain the workings of the imperial administration; we are lacking texts that would provide an organization chart or handbook of administrative procedures. But what we do know is that the bureaucratic apparatus was small by modern standards. There were no large bureaucracies, neither in Rome nor in the provinces. The emperor ruled essentially with the help of a limited number of friends, advisers, and secretaries. And the same system of minimal government was repeated by the individual governors in the provinces, who also had only a small staff. Some scholars even deny that the modern notion of an administration applies at all to the Imperium Romanum (especially on Roman Asia Minor, see Marek 2010, 453f.; for a general discussion of the emperor’s role, Millar 1992 is essential).

The absence of a professional bureaucracy indicates that the empire cannot be understood in terms of a modern state. A further example which provides evidence for this is the issue of Roman strategy. The problem is that there were no general headquarters of the army, no ministry of defense or state department, no secret services, no permanent embassies or professional diplomats, no institutes for political science or international relations, and no think tanks or military academies. The whole institutional framework that is essential in a modern state in order to formulate the strategic aims is lacking.

Nevertheless, Edward Luttwak published his “Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire” in 1976, and the debate about Roman strategy is still influenced by this work (see Campbell 2010; Heather 2010 for recent discussions).

Luttwak has analyzed the military arrangements of the Roman Empire, in particular with respect to the borders, and he considers three distinct phases of Roman strategy:

Phase 1 in the time of Julio-Claudian emperors (27 BC–68

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