eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire argues that the longevity of the empire rested not on Roman military power but on a gradually realized consensus that Roman rule was justified. This consensus was itself the product of a complex conversation between the central government and its far-flung peripheries. Ando investigates the mechanisms that sustained this conversation, explores its contribution to the legitimation of Roman power, and reveals as its product the provincial absorption of the forms and content of Roman political and legal discourse. Throughout, his sophisticated and subtle reading is informed by current thinking on social formation by theorists such as Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520923720 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2000 |
| Series: | Classics and Contemporary Thought , #6 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 515 |
| Lexile: | 1720L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire
By Clifford Ando
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2000 the Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-92372-0
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Communis Patria
We take the Roman empire for granted. As an agglomeration of territories and ethnic groups conquered in swift and bloody wars—and the swiftness of that conquest continues to defy historical explanation—the empire possessed an internal stability that ought to elicit considerable surprise. Instead, we treat its longevity as inevitable; historians from Flavio Biondo to Otto Seeck and beyond have set their sights on its ultimate decline and fall, rather than on its remarkable tenure. Studies of resistance and insurrection abound, but they invariably reinforce our view of the empire's history as one of actively appreciative prosperity, punctuated only rarely by purely local disturbances.
The most important exception to this tradition is, paradoxically, its most famous exponent, Edward Gibbon, whose History remains the greatest work on its topic. While conducting research in the fall of 1773, Gibbon penned a brief essay that he later published as the closing chapter of the History's third volume. Although titled "General observations on the fall of the Roman empire in the West," the chapter immediately directs attention away from its avowed topic: "The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long."
Historians of Rome's decline, like those of late antiquity, have long studied Gibbon's topic without addressing his question. The praises of Rome have been catalogued, but their motivation remains unexplored; the fall of Rome seemingly can be explained without knowing how it reached the heights whence it fell; "the boundaries of the classical world" are delineated, but their genesis, apparently, is self-evident. Those who have investigated with brilliance and insight the haunting power exercised by cultural memories of "eternal Rome" have rarely asked why Egyptians or Greeks or Gauls felt that "the most brilliant light of all the earth had been extinguished" or that "in one city the whole world had perished" when the "head of the Roman empire" was cut off. We can no longer afford such innocence. Neither the exercise of power nor obedience to empires remains unproblematic. Gibbon's question requires an answer.
If Gibbon saw that it is longevity and not caducity that demands inquiry and explanation, why did he entitle his study The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire? Did he come to believe that the story of the empire's ruin was neither simple nor obvious? If so, why did he publish the unaltered text of the "General observations" in 1781, since it seems to contest the value of his great undertaking?
Gibbon presents a similar paradox in the History's first volume. Readers in 1776 cannot have known that five more volumes would follow over the next dozen years, and yet they may have been surprised to learn of Septimius Severus that "posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire." If our first instinct is to look backward over what we have read, to understand what Severus had done to justify this verdict, we should also look forward. An empire that on Gibbon's reckoning survived twelve hundred years after Severus had planted the seeds of its decline was indeed remarkable, and historians of that empire must surely consider the forces that sustained it, even as they narrate the unfolding of those events that encompassed its ruin.
Viewed from this perspective, the antithesis between stability and decline, between longevity and loss, begins to dissolve. To identify the causes of Rome's destruction, Gibbon had to demonstrate that the empire had been susceptible to them. His work thus intertwines an exposition of the empire's artificial supports with the story of their removal. The exposition of those supports is less explicit than we might have wished because the history of stability does not lend itself to narrative, and narrative was Gibbon's chosen tool. Gibbon therefore began only when "the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline."
In point of fact, Gibbon combined diachronic and synchronic exposition, both within and across chapters, so artfully as to escape the conscious awareness of his readers. Many happily remember that he begins "in the second century of the Christian Æra," when "the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind." But his diachronic analysis begins only in his fourth chapter, and his preceding chapters themselves locate the origins of "the system of the Imperial government" in the reign of Augustus: it is in the institutions of Augustus that Gibbon sought the supports that Severus was to overthrow at the end of the second century.
Gibbon began with the insight that the empire, although acquired and ultimately dissolved through force, had not been sustained by it. Unlike other ancient monarchies, in which Gibbon saw "despotism in the centre, and weakness in the extremities," Rome did not control—indeed, could not have controlled—its provinces by stationing a garrison in every city. According to Gibbon's calculations, a premodern economy could not have sustained such a body of nonproductive manpower as would fill those garrisons. What made the policing of the Roman empire unique, and rendered its political culture uniquely homogeneous, was the fact that control through coercion was in some profound sense unnecessary. Citing with approval the speech of Agrippa in Josephus's Jewish War, Gibbon argued that Roman magistrates had seldom "required the aid of a military force" because "the vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence, and scarcely considered their own existence as distinct from the existence of Rome."
Gibbon pursued this insight on two fronts, one ideological and one cultural. First, Gibbon recognized that individual emperors and even the "Imperial system" could face challenges from within the governing class, especially from the men who superintended the legions on the emperor's behalf. To explain the lack of such challenges in the first two centuries, he maintained that Augustus and his successors identified civilian corporate bodies as the final repositories of authority in the state in order to persuade potential usurpers that neither assassination nor revolts would earn the throne. Guilty of murder or treason, the usurper would have had to watch the Senate nominate and the people elect a man whose first official act would be gratefully to execute his benefactor. It had been this constitutional "distance" between military and civilian authority that saved, as their proximity would later damn, the feeble or truculent men whom fate placed on the throne. Gibbon thus considered a stable succession one essential measure of the empire's stability. To adopt this measure is, however, not to ask why cities or legions or senators devoted their energies to promoting particular candidates for the rulership of the world rather than to contesting the system that assigned such power to a single—a single Roman—individual. The legitimacy of the "system of the Imperial government," in all its extent, is presupposed, in the eighteenth as in the second century.
Second, Gibbon argued that the Romans had offered citizenship as a reward for those who adopted Roman culture. Gibbon did not inquire too deeply whether or why provincials would have wanted Roman citizenship; he understood that it brought important legal privileges and protections, and perhaps he regarded these as sufficient enticement. What is more serious, he posited the existence of a Roman culture that was, if not homogeneous, at least distinct from some notional provincial cultures. On this understanding, not only did individuals move from one culture to the other as though changing their cloaks—itself a dominant ancient metaphor for cultural bilingualism—but Roman culture remained static, impervious to influences brought by provincials from their former lives. Cultures were one thing; their participants, another.
These arguments beg many questions. Gibbon saw some of them, but I shall leave his answers to one side for the moment. Today we cannot avoid several problems that Gibbon's chronological parameters neatly excluded, in particular those arising from Roman conquest. Processes of acculturation were preceded by acts of annexation. What made Roman power persuasive or even attractive to the populations of the provinces? What rendered provincial cultures permeable to Roman paradigms for the legitimate exercise of government? In short, what induced quietude rather than rebellion?
To answer these questions we must first understand that provincial obedience to Roman domination was an ideological construct, its realization dependent on many people's sharing a complex of beliefs that sanctioned a peculiarly Roman notion of social order. In Part 1 of this work I examine this problem from two perspectives. Chapter 2 considers the intersection between ancient experience and modern theories of domination and ideology. Although this book shares with traditional ideology criticism the goal of exposing the ideological work accomplished by the particular voices of imperial culture, it simultaneously draws from Weber a concern for the origins of provincial obedience. Emphasizing the flexibility of doxic systems, I shall argue that the Roman state successfully invoked the obedience of its subjects by appealing to several principles of legitimation concurrently. Particular constituencies responded to those principles whose validity they were predisposed to accept. It was, therefore, Rome that supplied the initial articulation of the values to which residents of the empire oriented themselves as members of its community, and it was the belief that others shared those values that legitimized Rome's representation of social order. Acquiescence and, ultimately, loyalty to Rome thus required recognition that the Roman construction of society, in relations between provinces, cities, individuals, emperors, and empire, adequately mapped the collective value commitments of its residents.
On this understanding, provincial obedience to Roman domination must be explained by revealing the mechanisms that rendered its particular apportioning of wealth and power morally palatable to those whom it seemingly disadvantaged. The Roman government could not have achieved this ideological revolution unless, at some level, both its official discourse and the apparatus that it imposed satisfied and, indeed, deliberately responded to the needs of those it governed. We should, however, be wary of identifying the needs of the population, both economic and psychological, with those of their Roman overlords. What is more, the needs of provincials were neither identical nor even articulated in the same fashion in different parts of the empire: the specific historical forces that generated them arose in local dynamics. Likewise, the Roman government pursued its own immediate goals largely without regard for the long-term effects that its actions had on the mentality of provincial populations.
Modern scholars of empire tend to read promises to maintain social order with suspicion. We must not allow anachronistic cynicism to cloud our vision. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, many around the Mediterranean regarded Roman success in war as evidence that their own gods had sanctioned Roman conquest. Similarly, there is abundant evidence that populations around the empire, particularly in the Greek East, recognized and appreciated the political and economic stability with which the imperial government endowed daily life. Such people tended to view Romans' exercise of coercive force as legitimate and to concede Rome the right to impose a particular jural-political order. We must therefore separate provincials' occasional reactions to particular impositions or individuals from their acknowledgment that the imperial government had the right, indeed, the responsibility, to maintain its normative order. Such an acknowledgment was, moreover, at some level uncontroversial: no ancient writer disputed that a complex society could endure only if compliance with its laws and mores was binding. What was new under the empire was the transference of that responsibility, in some measure, from the local community to the larger community of the empire.
At the same time, the Romans came to regard the arts of government as their special skill and boasted of this both at home and abroad. When provincials took up this refrain, they did so most often by congratulating Rome for having unified the world. The end of the first century A.D. thus witnessed a gradual convergence in rhetoric about Rome and her provinces and about citizens and subjects, producing varied descriptions of the empire as a single community, united by the city of Rome, its emperor, and the common interests of its people.
We could ascribe the motivation for provincial iterations of Roman propaganda solely to self-interest. But the mere existence of that propaganda raises another possibility. The Roman government devoted enormous resources to communicating with its subjects. Part 2 of this book explores the mechanisms, aims, and effects of these communicative actions. The Romans brought to the governance of their empire a set of theories developed in their own political life, and they somewhat counterintuitively adapted these to the governing of provincial aliens. As Romans had sought to found the order of Roman society on consensus, a unanimous intersubjective agreement about social, religious, and political norms, so under the empire the Roman government encouraged its subjects to play an active role in empowering their rulers. Above all, they sought expressions of consensus, realized through religious and political rituals whose content could be preserved in documentary form. In so doing, Romans surrendered their notions of social order to the constructive and deconstructive powers of provincial discourse.
Rome's desire for consensus thus opened a conceptual and discursive space for provincials and Romans alike to negotiate the veracity of Roman propaganda and the rationality of Roman administration. Chapter 4 follows Jürgen Habermas in treating the communicative practices of imperial Rome as doubly contingent: utterances, whether rhetorical or imperative, could be successful only when their auditors assented to their inherent validity claims. On the one hand, because Rome claimed to govern rationally—because Rome claimed to dominate legitimately—Rome had to justify its demands upon provincials and, when challenged, had to redeem its justifications through discourse and not through force. For example, the government affirmed the legal validity of texts produced by its bureaucracy by first copying and then checking them (describere et recognoscere), a process that concretized its claims on its subjects, even as texts authenticated or notarized in this fashion provided those subjects with a tool with which to manipulate the organs of their government. Provincials, on the other hand, acknowledged the truth content of Roman official documents in several ways, but above all by using those documents to construct histories of themselves, their institutions, and their empire.
The exchange of official, authenticated documents produced an atmosphere in which collectivities throughout the empire competed in their expressions of loyalty. Chapter 5 considers this culture of loyalism in detail. For example, documents invoking consensus rarely claimed to represent the will of the entire world; rather, they purported to represent the will of particular groups. By describing those groups, such documents also interpellated them as discrete collectivities. Their loyalties thus divided, these collectivities had no basis for united action and, instead, competed in expressions of fealty to the prevailing order. To take but one famous example, at the close of the trial of Gnaeus Piso, not only did the Senate thank the equestrian order and the plebs as though these were standing corporate bodies, but it published its thanks in every major city and every legionary camp in the empire. Such expressions of loyalty created a burden on parallel corporations to do the same.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire by Clifford Ando. Copyright © 2000 the Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, ix,PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xi,
ABBREVIATIONS, xv,
1. Introduction: Communis Patria, 1,
PART 1 • ANCIENT AND MODERN CONTEXTS,
2. Ideology in the Roman Empire, 19,
3. The Roman Achievement in Ancient Thought, 49,
PART 2 • CONSENSUS AND COMMUNICATION,
4. The Communicative Actions of the Roman Government, 73,
5. Consensus in Theory and Practice, 131,
6. The Creation of Consensus, 175,
7. Images of Emperor and Empire, 206,
PART 3 • FROM IMPERIUM TO PATRIA,
8. Orbis Terrarum and Orbis Romanus, 277,
9. The King Is a Body Politick ... for that a Body Politique Never Dieth, 336,
10. Conclusion: Singulare et Unicum Imperium, 406,
WORKS CITED, 413,
GENERAL INDEX, 451,
INDEX LOCORUM, 459,