Chapter 3 — Roman Organization
Alexander’s empire had established the pattern for what followed in the West.
The net effect of what Greece accomplished was to close off forever any consideration of otherworldly inquiry. It didn’t extinguish religious yearnings, but relegated them to superstition and a lesser concern. Building an empire in such a world requires ensuring the citizens have three basic needs covered in one way or another. First, there is a sense of physical security. It’s not so much the actual security itself, but the perception of relative security from typical threats to life — starvation, disease and predation. Second is something to occupy the intellect. Greeks thought they had that worked out very well. Third is a sense of identity, an awareness of belonging to something worthy. It took Philip and his son Alexander to refocus that so that the Greek peoples were united enough to pose a valid threat to other empires and kingdoms, in pursuit of Hellenistic glory.
The Greeks seemed to understand these human needs on some level, but all their various efforts to implement such grand ideals turned out to be unsustainable. The Greeks were so preoccupied with the ideals, they never could quite tolerate the reality that human nature could not be forced to rise beyond a certain level. They understood instinctively the mass of humanity could not ascend to the understanding of philosophers, or the virtue of noblemen, or the talent of artisans. But they never quite understood how to bring their theories to reality. It required a race of people with a more pragmatic turn of mind.
This would be the Romans. Something fundamental to Roman social structure and the character of their civilization answered the need of discovering what people could tolerate for a sustainable empire.
Roman philosophy, literature, architecture and art were not uninspiring, but nonetheless relentlessly practical at some fundamental level. They were the first in the West to effectively plan around human weakness, taking for granted that everyone had a price. When you make Roman policy and expectations consistent with their best interests, using a mixture of policy tinkering and threatening, people tend to find a way to participate meaningfully and keep things working. No one gave thought to rarefied dreams of perfection, but to pragmatic discernment of what could be had in the real world.
They understood how to get the most from amassed resources to accomplish great feats of engineering, including engineering human behavior. We note in passing, for example, that Rome was the first empire in history to discover that a very high investment in military equipment and training purchased consistent victory despite surprises. An exceptionally high degree of uniformity at the lowest level of the standard infantryman, arming them more heavily than other armies provided for their more elite troops, made Rome’s legions hard to match. While the communities all across the empire had a duty to provide their best men for the army, for the individual soldier it became a high privilege. Government expenditures on the military were carefully programmed to maximize the very limits of human capability. Rome managed to invest overall quite a bit more in their military forces with far fewer sudden and shocking demands on the productivity of the people.
Without digging into the specific details, we notice the Romans seems to have absorbed the Greek Civilization without entirely plumbing the depths of what it meant. Where the Greek language and education was established, they simply assumed the administration in place. They changed only those elements of Greek government necessary to give them reliable control. Farther north and west, where the Greeks had not paved the way, the people were encouraged to learn Latin if they wanted to be involved in government and commerce. Wherever Rome sent her troops one always found her engineering, organizational and legal influences.
Romans understood the basic needs of the people they ruled. For the most part, they stayed out daily affairs. A subject could retain his allegiance to his national identity throughout the empire. Where the unique character of some little kingdom made wholesale adoption of Roman policy too shocking, the Roman administrators made adjustments. They never pushed where they weren’t willing to back it up fully with force. Extermination was always an option, but they were hesitant for one simple reason: People were primarily an economic asset.
Never mind what Roman writers and philosophers said was most important to Rome; the actions of the government always seemed to place naked economics at the center of their efforts. It was economics that finally brought Rome down. Virtually everything else she understood quite well, but restraining greed was the ultimate failure. It seemed everyone operated from the wordless demand of some unconscious god that they must have just a bit more the next time around. At some point, they failed to recognize they had reached the practical limits and were unwilling to accept the natural equilibrium. They exchanged their devotion to order for a devotion to hedonism.
The necessity of hiring more and more German mercenary armies on the frontier to fight other German tribes, mercenaries that weren’t truly absorbed into the Roman Civilization, was the path to their final failure. Rome didn’t so much fall as they were simply taken over by their own hired thugs.
Recommended readings: This is one of the few cases in this course where just about any good summary will do. Even Wikipedia’s entry on Ancient Rome is sufficient for our purpose here. If you can’t tolerate that, try other portals such as About.com.
**********
As always readers, I treasure your assistance in making this a viable course of study.
