Empires: Rome -The Background History Part Two

Rome was over 700 years old when the Republic died. By this time Rome was already an empire by the time the first emperor took the purple. In spite of the calamity of the civil war, Rome's confidence in dealing with the outside world remained unshaken. The idea of appeasement and passivity when dealing with other nations and city-states was alien to Roman thinking. Over the years the Roman Empire had grown dramatically. There were some very interesting paradoxes and inconsistencies with the way Rome grew from a tiny backwater under a king, then a small republic, then a republic that managed an empire and of course an empire ruled by imperial caprice. Some of these Roman Emperors were truly horrible human beings. There is a period of imperial history, roughly from 98 AD to 180 AD, sometimes called the time of the "Five Good Emperors" that I would like to talk about in this blog eventually. The story of Hadrian, one of the 'good' Emperors and Antinous is posted on my other blog. Had I known I would try to manage two blogs, I would have posted about Hadrian and Antinous on this blog, although even though I want to have a lot about fascinating people in history on this blog, I can't possibly go into the depth of their personalities and personal lives that I did in that series and still keep the focus on the main things I want to talk about here.

Getting back to some of the anomalous ways that Rome grew from a tiny city-state to hyperpower status. Romans could be utterly barbaric in their conquests and wars they fought as their power grew. In fact, the Roman military machine was feared, eventually- as few if any others of its time were. One could tell if an uppity province or kingdom had chosen to fight Rome rather than acquiesce to her might. The decapitated heads and limbs of not just every living human being in some towns and villages would be found, but also the headless and limbless bodies of cows, horses, dogs, sheep and pigs. The Roman death machine killed every living thing with a brutal and chilling efficiency. However, Janus-like, there was an entirely different face to Roman imperialism in many cases. Rome became known for its generosity, especially towards refugees from the Italian peninsula. There is a historical legend that the early Romans agreed to incorporate the neighboring Sabines into the city in order to avoid a conflict over Roman kidnapping of Sabine women. In 56 B.C. Cicero wrote, "What is most responsible for the establishment of the Roman Empire and the fame of the Roman people is that Romulus, the founder of the city, instructed us by his treaty with the Sabines that the state should be increased even by the admission of enemies to the Roman citizenship. Our ancestors through his authority and example never ceased to grant and bestow the citizenship."

Sometimes instead of annihilating the cities and towns of conquered peoples, Rome offered them peace treaties, that were wisely almost never refused. Largely, the terms of the treaties were quite simple. The conquered cities or nations could keep their own leaders and live under their own laws. The two basic conditions the defeated peoples would have to follow were: 1) They could trade freely with Rome, but not with each other. With this condition in place the smaller city-states quickly became economically dependent on Rome. 2) The second condition, which was a very important one also, that fed Rome's military machine and Roman imperialism was that the conquered states had to provide Rome with troops. The image is of a Roman mosaic in the British Museum in London. Keeping on keeping on here, I so wish I had started this blog differently-with more of an outline to go by. I think I should have had so much more background information posted before attempting a series about a group of people, but its too late to start again-unless there is some way I can save the Cleopatra series to drafts. I think I will just leave it the way it is and hopefully as time goes by everything will come together. In this blog I would like to discuss many different great powers, empires, hyperpowers in all different historical eras. Hopefully the internet will remain a free place long enough to get to these different epochs. In some ways I would like to compare various powers from different eras of time and the way they dealt with the states they absorbed or conquered-and in the case of the Soviet empire and a few others-neither situation really happened completely. So perhaps I will find a way to do some posts comparing major powers from all different eras in a series of posts. I would also like to focus on a lot more than how major powers and empires dealt with conquered territories-with posts about economics and all of the other issues I mentioned at the beginning of this blog. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!