Rome and Us #2: Purpose and Multiculturalism

We crave for origin stories. A story that makes things seem destined. A story that assigns a greater purpose to things. Ancient Rome, once it began to be successful, was no different. The foundation story of Rome dates it to 753 BC, writes Mary Beard in SPQR. It even got narrowed down to a specific date - 21 April. That’s the date modern Romans still celebrate as the birthday of their city “with some tacky parades and mock gladiatorial spectacles”.

 

Rome’s foundation story starts with a man called Romulus. Did the founder really start off Rome? Or was the founder an “imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’”? Probably the latter, says Beard, since one can find a “shifting and sometimes self-contradictory amalgam” of stories around the man and his time, “constantly adjusted in the telling and retelling to changing circumstances and audiences”:

“(The Romans had not) inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse… (the people had) constructed and reconstructed the founding figure of Romulus as a powerful symbol of their preferences, debates, ideologies and anxieties”.

It’s a pattern of story-telling in history that has continued through the ages.

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How is it that Alexander’s empire disintegrated within minutes of his death? Whereas Rome went on and on? Romans took pride in their ability to maintain an empire. Take what Augustus Caesar said after his triumph over Mark Antony in the succession war. Since the final victory happened in Alexandria, Egypt, Augustus visited Alexander the Great’s tomb and scoffed that anyone could win an empire, but only Romans knew how to retain it. Ouch.

 

The root cause seems to lie in how Rome treated the vanquished:

“Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory.”

Let’s elaborate on that. Rome never left an occupying force to rule. Nor did it impose its own proxy. Rome asked for two things: (1) taxes and (2) an obligation to supply troops to fight for the Romans. If the troops contributed to the next victory, Rome would share part of the loot with the region they came from.

“This system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise.”

 

This approach, when you think a bit, scales up, i.e., it can continue to work as an empire becomes bigger and bigger. The alternative of leaving an occupying force to maintain order doesn’t scale. Plus, Rome never imposed its culture or value system on others, a move that might have brewed resentment. (Sadly, this isn’t a lesson the modern West learnt – trying to force their values like democracy and freedom of speech has only had disastrous consequences).

 

Even better, Rome was far more inclusive than all its contemporaries. Everyone in the conquered lands could potentially get Roman citizenship. Which meant they could vote and stand in elections at Rome and thus influence policy. Even slaves could be (and were) freed or they could buy their freedom. If their master was a Roman citizen, the freed slave got Roman citizenship too “with almost no disadvantages as against those who were freeborn”.

 

But of course, such inclusiveness and opportunities for everyone created the kind of problems we see today as well. It raised the fear that “foreigners” would flood and take over the city! What might have saved Rome though was that the speed of such assimilation and integration was slow, transportation and communication systems being the main reason. But such integration did happen:

“The Roman senate gradually became what we might now describe as a decidedly multicultural body, and the full list of Roman emperors contains many whose origins lay outside Italy.”

Yes, eventually, even a non-Italian (forget non-Roman) came to be the emperor!