Rules of engagement. Multiculturalism

Rules of engagement

The Romans did not change those basic rules of engagement, but they did change their outcome. Instead of just carrying their spoils back home, they gradually came to make permanent links with those they trounced: turning the defeated into Roman citizens, or forming some similar permanent alliance with them.

Why they did this is a mystery, and it may always have been an unplanned, lucky improvisation, rather than a considered strategy. But it had revolutionary consequences. For a start Rome broke the link that applied in most ancient societies between citizenship and birth. The ancient democratic Athenians, for example, had rigorously restricted full Athenian citizenship to those born of two citizen parents.

The Romans were emphatically saying that citizenship did not depend solely on where, or to whom, you were born. It was even possible to be a citizen of two places at once: both one’s home town and Rome (the Norman Tebbit ‘cricket test’, as many of us remember from the 1990s, would have asked which team these people would support in a sporting fixture. But the Romans seem to have taken the possibility of dual loyalty on board without as much problem  as we’ve had).

Multiculturalism

In the long term, this set the foundations for the extraordinary multiculturalism of the Roman political hierarchy. It is thanks to these principles laid down early in Roman history that, centuries later, we find on the imperial throne Roman citizens from Spain (including the emperors Trajan and Hadrian) and Africa (Septimius Severus). But back in the early days, those same principles gave the Romans a massive advantage in their battles with their neighbours, and then with enemies further afield – for some obvious reasons.

Citizenship carried privileges, from the right to the protection of Roman law to the right to vote (though how many people from communities miles away would have made the trek to exercise those rights, we can only guess). It also carried obligations, the main one being for the men to serve in Rome’s armies. To put that another way, the more Rome incorporated those they had defeated, rather than leaving them alone to fight another day, the more troops the Romans had to call on.

It was a brilliant mechanism (even if an inadvertent one) for converting one-time enemies into Roman soldiers with a stake in Roman victory – everyone had a share in the rich spoils that came with winning. And it underpinned more Roman victories that in turn produced more Roman soldiers, and more victories, and so on. By the mid-second century BC, according to one canny Greek observer, through this nexus of connections Rome could draw on more than 700,000 troops – more than any western power had been able to do before. When, soon after, Rome’s great enemy, Hannibal from Carthage, knocked out legion after Roman legion, there were always more where they had come from.

The Athenians, like the citizens of many Greek states, claimed that their original population had miraculously sprung from the very soil of Athens: the land and the people were integrally bound together. The Roman myths were very different, and insisted that the Romans were always in a sense foreigners to their own land.

One Roman story, made famous by Virgil in his Aeneid, told how the Roman race had been established in Italy by a war refugee: Aeneas, in flight from his distant hometown of Troy, after its destruction by the Greeks in the mythical Trojan War. Another focussed on the dilemmas of Romulus who, the story went, had founded the city of Rome on its permanent site on the hills by the Tiber. Romulus realised he had only a handful  of citizens, so declared his new town a  place of asylum, announcing that criminals, foreigners, runaways and ex-slaves were all welcome. The idea was simple: Rome was built, and thrived, on its incorporation  of new citizens.

Indeed it was, and it did. And, in a way, that remains a challenge to our own times. As we see an increasing desire to enforce modern boundaries, we might do well to remember that the biggest empire in the west was proudly built on the idea that it was originally an empire of asylum seekers. I am not suggesting there is a direct lesson; the Romans rarely offer us direct lessons. But it does show us, as we look to close down our own borders, or turn a blind eye to the beaches of modern Greece or camps at Calais, that there is another way of looking at this, and other aspirations to celebrate. The origins of the Roman empire might, indirectly, still have something to teach.

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