The Imperial Affliction: The Impact of Empire on Roman Rulers

ongoing

This project explores the impact of ruling the Roman Empire on the rulers themselves and asks how this fed back into the practice of rule, as an explanation for well-recognized, but poorly explained, trends in Roman administrative practice towards greater arbitrariness, violence, and despotism. Inspired by comparative evidence and scholarship on modern imperial systems, it hypothesizes that the tactics by which Rome compensated for its limited manpower, such as ad-hoc decision-making and the empowerment to deal summarily with provincials, incrementally changed the practice of those figures—emperors, governors, officials, military commanders—who enacted them. This brings together two poorly-theorized observations of Roman imperialism—its reactiveness, and its increasing arbitrariness—in a compelling explanatory thesis with comparative payoffs. It has relevance for the study of all imperial systems in which the ruling class consider themselves superior to the ruled, re-conceptualizing arbitrary and violent practice as a pathogen contracted through the experience of ruling subject communities. It ties into EU objectives concerning citizen participation in institutions of the state, since it argues that when a state views its citizens as subjects, rather than partners, a tendency towards arbitrariness is inevitably involved.