Why Rome ruled the world. More than military glory

Why Rome ruled the world

Mary Beard, Prof of Classics, Cambridge University

The Roman empire  at its height, in the second century AD, stretched from the Sahara to Scotland, from Syria to Spain, and was home to well over 50 million inhabitants.

More than military glory

Some of the favourite explanations just won’t do. For a start, the Romans were not more militaristic than anyone else in the Mediterranean world. To be sure, they put enormous store by military glory. There was no more spectacular ceremony in Rome, at any period in its history, than the triumphal procession, celebrated after all the greatest Roman victories (or bloodiest massacres, depending on your point of view), putting on display, to the cheers and jeers of the Roman crowds, the loot that had been captured and the enemy prisoners taken.

The question is not why the Romans kept going to war. Warfare was endemic in the ancient Mediterranean, peace only rarely broke out, and the Romans were no better or worse than any others. The question is why the Romans kept on winning.

But there is no sign that the early Romans had any concerted plan to gain an empire, still less that some cabal of ambitious Roman generals sat down over a map in (say) the fourth century BC, as Roman expansion was beginning to get seriously under way, plotting a world takeover.

An equally small part of the answer might lie in superior military tactics or hardware. The Roman army did have some unusually nasty weapons at their disposal. But, by and large, despite many modern myths about Roman military genius, battle tactics in the ancient world were fairly rudimentary on all sides, and superior weaponry was not usually the deciding factor.

What counted most in securing victory was manpower, simply the number of boots you could put on the ground. And that is precisely where the Romans soon found their advantage, by a simple mechanism that was unique in the ancient world: extending its citizenship to outsiders, including those it had defeated and, in the process, massively increasing its fighting force. The secret of Rome’s success was something invisible to the eye, and much more sophisticated than hooked barbs; it was a radically new definition of what “being a citizen” meant, with all the rights and obligations that entailed.

At first sight what the Romans did differently may not seem a huge innovation. The standard pattern of warfare in Rome’s early days (let’s say from the eighth century BC to the fifth, before it had moved very far beyond its own hinterland) was brutal but straightforward. Rome, like its neighbours, would generally have been ‘at war’ in most summers.

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