The centrality of the Mediterranean should not blind us to the huge land-mass of Roman conquests. Julius Caesar in pursuit of military glory advanced Roman power to Gaul and Britain. Under Augustus, armies and administrators incorporated large territories in north-western Spain, western Germany, Switzerland and the Balkans. In sum, the Romans had advanced the boundaries of empire as far as the ocean in the west, and the Sahara desert in the south. To the north-west, the rivers Rhine and Danube (eventually supplemented by a long line of forts) roughly demarcated the comfortable limits of Roman power, and also served as convenient lines of supply to the frontier armies.
The considerable distance between the city of Rome and its land frontiers had far-reaching, but diverse, even contradictory implications. Distance and slow travel overland effectively insulated Rome and its political leaders from attack by marauding barbarians (until 410) or by rebellious generals, whose collaboration was in any case hindered by fragmented commands split along an extended frontier and among rival aristocrats. Frontier armies intervened effectively only twice in central politics (in 69 and 193) in over two centuries. The Roman military was depoliticized – an achievement all the more remarkable, if we compare it to the frequency of coups d’etat in contemporary third world states.
Complementarily, sheer size and slowness of communications also prevented close control and swift reaction by the central government to crises on the periphery. Even in an emergency, for example, it took 9 days for a mesenger on a series of horses to ride from Mainz, Germany to Rome. Routine messages about the death of kings took very much longer, and the time of their arrival was unpredictable. In the late third century, in an effort to resolve these problems, emperors split the empire into four parts, each with its capital closer to the frontiers. But there was another and then seemingly insuperable problem. The northern territories were economically less developed, less urbanized, and less densely populated than the southern coastal regions of the Mediterranean These northern regions could only with difficulty in Roman (as against post-mediaeval) times produce sufficient taxes to pay for their own extensive defence.
For emperors too, the maintenance of control was (it seems reasonable to imagine) a central objective. If it was, they were not very good at it. Of the first eleven emperors, only four died (or were reputed to have died), naturally. The basic problem was the founding ideology of the Principate. Monarchy was made more acceptable to the traditional senatorial aristocracy by the fiction that the emperor was only first among equals (princeps). The clear implication was therefore that any Roman aristocrat of distinguished descent could himself become emperor. Hence, a long-term structural tension between emperors and aristocrats. That was a basic feature of Roman politics. Emperors in the first century killed dozens of aristocrats. They repeatedly created a reign of terror, which would have made Ivan the Terrible seem mild.
The Roman aristocracy was remarkably different from any feudal or post-feudal European aristocracy. At its core, was a political elite of six hundred senators. They were chosen in each generation both from among the sons of senators and from a politically inactive, much larger land-owning elite, originally based in Italy, but increasingly derived from all over the empire. Ideologically, that is in the image usually represented by Roman elite writers (and by modern historians suckered to think that ideology represents reality instead of disguising it), the Roman senatorial aristocracy was hereditary.
But in fact, inter-generational succession rates in the Roman aristocracy were remarkably low. The basic reason was that unlike European feudal and post-feudal aristocracies, which were aristocracies based on land-ownership and hereditary title, the Roman senatorial aristocracy was a competitive aristocracy of office. And in order to be a top official (ordinary consul or supplementary (suffect) consul), the successful contestant had to have held a whole series of administrative posts; this demand was sometimes relaxed for claimants of very distinguished descent, who were promoted fast without any qualifying military experience. In short, the successful Roman political aristocrat had to have been a successful administrator and remain in favour for years, sometimes under different emperors or influential advisors at court.
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