'I have granted them empire without end," says Jupiter of the Romans in Virgil's "Aeneid," the epic poem that tells the story of Rome's earliest inhabitants coming from the fallen city of Troy to Italy and beginning the long work of establishing the Roman people. Virgil composed his epic in the first century B.C. during the reign of Augustus, the long-lived ruler who, in his own and Virgil's understanding, brought peace to a Roman world ravaged by civil war. The political and cultural purpose of the poem was to give the Romans a prehistory and an identity as a people uniquely able (in Virgil's words) to "impose permanent peace, spare the subordinate and subdue the proud."
How the Roman elite shaped an identity for itself and its many subjects is one theme of Greg Woolf's "Rome: An Empire's Story," a remarkable work of synthesis that describes the rise, flourishing and decline of the Roman Empire. The apex of the story, when the effort to shape an identity reached its point of ultimate definition, is the age of Virgil and Augustus—that is, the last decades B.C. and first decade A.D. To those two figures we owe a great deal of what we mean when we speak of ancient Rome.
Textbooks divide Roman history into the republican and imperial periods and fix the beginning of the empire proper to the age of Augustus. Not the least merit of Mr. Woolf's chronicle is its depiction of how misleading this division can be. We are misled because, starting with Augustus and continuing for more than two centuries, we call the chief executive of Rome "emperor" (as the Romans did) without seeing that the label confuses the form of government with the entity being governed. What is called the Roman Republic had been an empire for two centuries before Augustus. The main difference was that, from Augustus forward, the empire essentially ceased to expand, changing from what Mr. Woolf calls a "conquest state" to a "tributary empire."
The Latin word imperium meant "command authority" and denoted throughout the republic the power granted by the people to particular individuals for particular purposes, usually war. As the republic acquired territory outside Italy—first eastward, into the Balkans, Greece and Asia Minor, then westward, into Spain and Gaul—the conquest and defense of territory were vouchsafed to figures with precisely such authority. This system worked, if sometimes creakily, from around 200 B.C. to the mid-first century B.C., when Julius Caesar became the sole commander in chief, establishing the precedent for Augustus.
Mr. Woolf suggests that "empire is a movement through historical time, not a fixed set of institutions." In short, the effort to sustain imperium takes different forms, depending on the life cycle of the empire itself and the pressures it faces. The Romans created an image of themselves that outlived their own empire and flourished thereafter, in the attempts, by others, to re-create something like it, in the classicism of art and architecture, in the enduring importance of Roman law, and in the imperial symbols—e.g., the eagle—adopted by Napoleon and the American Founders.
Rome: An Empire's Story
By Greg Woolf
(Oxford, 366 pages, $29.95)
Mr. Woolf details the many ways in which the Romans, beginning in the republican period, conducted their long expansion and maintained the empire for so long. What, for example, was the role of climate and ecology in an iron-age civilization such as Rome's? A large role, clearly. When the Romans emerged from the Mediterranean basin into western Europe, they found a world dismayingly dark and chill. They made it more familiar by introducing apples, plums, celery and cabbage into the region's agriculture, crops that are now considered temperate but that were originally Mediterranean. Just as important, the conquerors' own displays of culture made native elites eager to Romanize. France would thus become, over time, a Latin and not a Germanic society, imbued with Roman law and custom rather than the rough Germanic tribal culture portrayed by the Roman historian Tacitus.
By tracing the make-do mechanisms by which the Romans acquired territory, Mr. Woolf sometimes makes it seem as if the Roman Empire, like the British, was acquired "in a fit of absence of mind." The reasons for acquiring a new province were often haphazard and short-term. Pergamon, for example, in northwest Anatolia, fell into the Romans' laps as a bequest from its last king, in 133 B.C. This prosperous province proved to be more a liability than an asset. The Romans now had an open border in Asia Minor, whereas before they could watch its troubles behind the barrier of the Aegean. And across the border soon arose a terrible enemy: the Anatolian king Mithridates.
Despite the clear and growing threat he represented to the entire Roman position in the east, the Roman leadership permitted Mithridates to consolidate his power, even allowing him to have thousands of Romans in his territories massacred as part of a strategy to show his power and gain the support of the locals by involving them in his crimes. The Romans back home hadn't understood how hated their tribute collectors and merchants had become. Generally the Romans paid too little attention to how their conquests fared and repeatedly had to pay a bloody price to secure what common sense and diplomacy might have protected.
This contrast between possessing the will to conquer and lacking the understanding to govern well bedeviled the late republic and is, for Mr. Woolf, one of the chief paradoxes of Roman history, another being how long-lasting Rome's initially ramshackle structure became as the empire consolidated its conquests. Imperial history continued, in Mr. Woolf's view, to the seventh century, when the Muslim conquests of the Near East and Spain reduced the empire to a rump state consisting of the Balkans and Asia Minor, with its capital at Constantinople, the "New Rome."
As for the old Rome, it shrank to barely 30,000 inhabitants. The city had, however, become the seat of the papacy and would embark on a new career as the center of a new sort of empire, one that would never have come into being if the old empire had never existed. In ancient Rome's ruins and monuments, Mr. Woolf writes, we can grasp what Roman civilization was like, though we see only "the hard fossils from which the ephemeral material of human life and public rhetoric has since withered away."
Mr. Gress is the author of "From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents" (Free Press).