Roman Attitudes to Empire and Imperialism: A View from History

Description

Roman Archaeology Conference, Session 5B – The Comparative Archaeology of the Roman Conquest: New Research in Gaul, Germania and Iberia (Nico Roymans, Manuel Fernandez-Götz & Ángel Morillo)

Paper abstract:

Roman historians and political commentators were remarkably self-aware of the issues that the creation and maintenance of their empire brought, frequently presenting Rome’s hypocrisy of imperial rule through the mouths of the victims of empire: the most obvious examples being Tacitus’ Calgacus (Agr. 30-5-6), Sallust’s Mithridates (Histories 4.69M), and Caesar’s Critognatus (BG 7.77). There existed an uneasy tension between a certain code of ethical conduct, which the political elite upheld, at least ideologically, in their attitudes to empire, and the various forms of violence meted out as part of Rome’s practice of imperialist expansion.

Understanding the nature of Roman imperialism has, of course, be a constant focus of Republican and early Imperial history. Studies in this area have swung from a deep focus on Rome’s internal structures and debates, to the application of realist IR theories seeking to view Rome as part of a much larger system. As Jonathan Prag has recently stressed a major challenge to our understanding of Roman imperialism is the issue of the conceptualization of Roman foreign policy, and indeed our exploration of the issues has been understandably shaped by the sources that historians have engaged with. The rhetorical engagement with ideas of empire in the literary sources has potentially obscured ideological aspects of imperialist expansion.[1: Prag, J. R. W. (2017) ‘Die römische Republik und der Westen’, in  Haake, M. and Harders A.-C. (eds.) Politische Kultur und soziale Struktur der Römischen Republik: Bilanzen und Perspektiven, pp. 287-308.]

This paper serves as a way into the debates from an historical perspective, to provide an overarching framework of recent trends as background for the following presentations of newly collected archaeological datasets.