Harris - Roman Power : A Thousand Years of Empire

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William V. Harris 2016

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First published 2016

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ISBN 978-1-107-15271-7 Hardback

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for W.E.S.H., with love

I especially want this book to be accessible and useful to people who, while they want to learn about the Romans and their empire, know little about Roman history as it is now understood. With such readers in mind, I have explained technical terms and identified historical actors more than I would have done in a narrowly academic book, and I have also provided a table of dates. At the same time, the book has some moments of originality (sketched out in ) which may attract the attention of other scholars of ancient history.

As it is now understood: with that phrase I intend to say that I have attempted to take very recent as well as older scholarship into account. But alas no one can possibly claim to have read and seen everything that pertains to a thousand years of Roman history. Roughly 130 ancient writers are mentioned in this book (not counting the authors of documentary texts), and there exist texts that I have not read. Meanwhile the modern bibliography of Roman history, literature, law, and archaeology is a tropical jungle. I have attempted to take account of as much of it as possible, down to the early months of 2015.

In the interests of transparency I have referred as often as possible to the primary sources and to the vastly variegated material evidence that a Roman historian has at his or her disposal. I have also provided in the notes a basic guide to modern scholarly writing about Roman power, tending to emphasize what is recent but not shying away from older works. I have emphatically not provided full bibliographies on every controversy. And I have regretfully privileged works in English: Roman history is an international subject, and a scholar must attend carefully to literature in at least five modern languages, but one has to recognize that many anglophone students are monolingual.

The book is short in relation to its gigantic subject-matter. I have elided two aspects of this subject-matter, and the reader deserves explanations. In the first place, I have not said a great deal about the biases, motives, interests, methods, presuppositions, or general background of the men (they are virtually all men) who provide us with our textual evidence. A full discussion would have required a separate volume of a quite different character. Readers on the alert will undoubtedly notice a number of implicit evaluations.

I have also elided almost all discussion of the natural environment of the Romans and their neighbours. That is my next big project. The reader of this book will notice some references to mineral and timber resources, access to which was quite crucial to Roman power on a number of occasions. The reason why there is not more here about the natural environment is fairly simple: too much is uncertain at this date. Two examples: deforestation is hard to define, let alone assess; there was a lot of it, but the inhabitants of the Roman Empire may have managed their woodlands well enough that no major ecological or economic harm was done. I have discussed this matter elsewhere (Harris for overviews). In short, we are still some distance away from being able to relate the growth, survival, or decline of Roman power in a definite and convincing way to environmental factors.

Walter Scheidel, as I am happy to acknowledge, started me thinking systematically about this subject by inviting me to write an essay about power for the Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies . Many thanks to him for that stimulus.

This book would have taken even longer to write if it had not been for a generous award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for which I am profoundly grateful; I am especially grateful to the officer of the Foundation who was most responsible, the distinguished sociologist Harriet Zuckerman.