A few weeks ago, Joseph Stromberg asked me why I thought so many neoconservatives had an interest in the classics, in either Greek history or Roman history.
Well, as it happens, a lot of these neoconservatives are Hellenists. They're people who specifically study Greek history.
Leo Strauss, for example, quite infamous founder of Straussianism and very influential thinker who thought that neoconservatives have adopted, was himself a Hellenist. He didn't do a lot of work on Rome.
Be this as it may, though, nonetheless we do see a certain fascination that Rome exercises upon the imaginations of neoconservatives and, for that matter, students of realpolitik.
Why should this be the case? Well, where realpolitik is concerned, some of this is just pure power worship, I think.
And this was true in the ancient world as well as in the modern world.
In the modern world we see a number of ancient sources who are very much interested in the development of the Roman Empire
simply because it was the biggest, most powerful thing that existed at the time.
It even eclipsed the accomplishments of Alexander the Great, which themselves had been tremendously influential.
In the ancient world you always found people trying to emulate, trying to surpass Alexander.
When the Romans came onto the scene that impressed people even more.
So if you wanted to be something, if you wanted to be world famous as a conqueror
You had to understand what made Rome successful and emulate that.
I think this exercises a certain attraction
upon people who like global power, even today.
But you can kind of understand the realpolitik aspect of it.
You can see that power,
even if you're not necessarily desiring to acquire it yourself,
is nonetheless something that is of interest to study.
It is something that is likely to affect your life.
and so, you know, that's where the Real Politique angle might come in even for people who are not sort of megalomaniacs as some of these guys may be.
But I think that there happens to be actually quite a bit more to the fascination that Rome exercises over, well, neoconservatives but also people all over the political spectrum
and that is that Rome stands as an example of what I would call military virtue, which is something that I think we see just very highly valued in our society today.
There's this idea that the military, in one form or another, instills not only martial virtues like courage and discipline, but also certain higher virtues as well, perhaps loyalty to a cause greater than oneself, and also things like the ability to lead men and the ability to perhaps excel in competition, things like that.
There's also an aspect of the fact that militaries make very firm sex distinctions.
Oftentimes you'll hear conservatives complaining about the effeminization of America.
Well, the military is one institution you can point to and say, okay, that is quite masculine.
One of the things you see here, and this is all by way of preamble, and you'll see where this is going in just a second here,
But in the 1990s, you saw a lot of these very popular talk shows, Oprah Winfrey or Ricky Lake or Jerry Springer, whoever happens to be your personal favorite.
They would have segments along the theme of, my teenager is out of control.
And the solution to this was usually boot camp.
We're going to send the kid to something that emulates basic training for a Marine or for the Green Berets or something.
and somehow this is going to make the kid behave much better so you can see I
think that is is an instantiation that's an example of this belief in military
virtue yeah I think you can see it as well in for example Bill Buckley's
enthusiasm for compulsory national service this idea that you know you take
people who are just civilians who are just self-interested and you put them
through either military or quasi militaristic training and somehow they
become better people for it there's also an idea that's kind of even broader than
on that, which is that the military is a socially integrative force, that the military helps
construct a national identity, and that the military, well, for example, can erode racial
barriers between peoples.
They can help integrate society in that sense, but they can also help integrate society ideologically.
It helps create a sense of Americanism, that the military not only enacts patriotism by
going out and creating an opportunity for people to exercise their love of country,
I think that it also creates a kind of patriotism by creating this sense of an institution which all Americans, regardless of background, can support.
They can say, oh, those are our boys, those are our troops.
Well, what does any of this have to do with Rome?
Well, Rome is the military society par excellence.
There really hasn't been, I don't think, any other civilization that has been quite so thoroughgoingly militaristic as Rome,
from its very earliest founding in 753 BC
down to the period I'm going to be covering,
which is that of the Julio-Claudian emperors,
who are the first emperors of the Roman Empire,
or we might say the Roman Principate.
Rome, of course, had been a republic before it became an empire,
but even as a republic, it still had an empire
in the sense of having territories beyond its own borders.
So that's an important point to make there.
So for the most part, I'm going to refer to the Roman Empire,
Empire, as you guys probably know it, as the Roman Principate, because it's much clearer.
We're not just talking about, well, the distinction between the Republic and the so-called empire
is that you had the rise of a sort of autocratic rule.
It's not that the one hadn't had these foreign possessions and that the other did.
So anyway, Rome is a military society par excellence, as I say, and so I think we can,
by looking at Rome, gain some insight into the notion of whether or not there is such
and such a thing as martial virtue, military virtue, whether in fact the Roman military helped to stabilize Roman society
or whether it seems to us to have destabilized it.
And if it did in fact destabilize it, then certainly that is a cautionary tale for us and perhaps there are lessons that we could learn from that.
So, one of the reasons why Rome is particularly interesting as an example is because you certainly do have, as I said,
This great power that encompasses most of the known world at the time, and you also
have a great deal of courage, a great deal of manliness in the Roman legions, but at
the same time you also have these phenomena that are associated with what we would call
decadence.
I think plenty of people here probably know about the kinds of crimes and unnatural acts
committed by Caligula, Nero and emperors like that, ranging from incest with their own sisters
to cruel and unusual punishments of totally innocent people,
all kinds of things like that.
So there is that kind of personal decadence,
but I think decadence can be expanded
into a much larger concept.
We can also ask about the sort of political
and civil instability that existed at Rome
around the time of the birth of Christ.
We can also talk about the demographic status
of a certain country, in this case, Rome.
If your population is increasing,
And we can probably say that that's, if not a good thing, then that's at least a sign of growth, it certainly is that.
And decadence would be the opposite. Decadence would be demographic decline.
We can also look at economic freedom. We can say that, okay, well, if you have flourishing economic freedom, that's probably a good thing.
And certainly, ethically, we would say that is a good thing.
And you can look at the opposite. You can say that, well, if you have economic freedom being abrogated, that that's probably a sign of decadence.
And finally, we might look at the military itself in our investigation into Rome and ask ourselves...
Well, in one sense, it wouldn't seem to be decadent because it would seem to be flourishing,
it would seem to be going out and becoming more powerful than it had ever been before in the period that we're about to examine.
On the other hand, if you look at the actual conditions of individual soldiers and commanders,
they were often quite pitiable indeed.
So in one sense, the Roman military in this period couldn't fairly be described as decadent,
but in another, I think it could, especially where the individual is concerned.
So in Rome, you have this combination of things.
You have both extreme militarism and also decadence, both on the individual level
and in all of these broader political, demographic, or economic levels.
And so that's why Rome presents quite a question to us.
Is it the case, in fact, that these are simply things that happened accidentally
at the same time, or is it the case, in fact, that there's some sort of relationship here?
Perhaps the military lessened the degree of decadence in Rome at this time,
or perhaps the military actually contributed to,
maybe even caused, the sorts of decadence that we'll be looking at.
I should perhaps give you some background on the Roman army
and its place in the Roman Republic prior to this period.
So we're looking at basically the time from 509 BC when Rome becomes a republic,
down to about the time when Julius Caesar is assassinated actually,
a little bit before that, because by the time Caesar is assassinated, the Republic has already fallen into civil war and decay.
Well, actually, even before Rome had become a Republic, back between 753 BC and 509 BC,
Rome was still a very militaristic society.
And in fact, this is quite true of many early Indo-European societies.
Some of you may know that, even to this day, the motto of Rome is SPQR, Senatus Populus Quae Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome.
And that may sound unobjectionable to you, you know, okay, you have a Senate and then you have the people.
But actually this phrase conceals something that might have been known to the early Romans, but that is unknown to most of us.
And that is that the word populus doesn't originally mean people, as we use it today, in just general sense of individuals or persons.
It originally meant an army, and this is actually true of other Indo-European cultures as well.
I believe the German folk originally meant army as well.
So there was always, in this sort of Indo-European background, a certain militaristic element.
And in city-states like Rome, the army was from the very beginning a very important constitutive element.
Now, in its very earliest period, between 753 BC and 509 BC, Rome was certainly trying to expand, but it wasn't necessarily for malevolent reasons.
Rome was in Italy, it had various belligerent neighbors who were interested in conquering Rome's territory, or conquering one another's territory for that matter.
So you would have, for example, the Etruscans or other city-states within Italy impinging upon Roman independence.
And there's actually some reason to think that during the period of kings before the Republic,
so the period between 753 and 509, that Rome may in fact have been subjugated by the Etruscans.
We can suspect that because several of the names of the Roman kings are in fact Etruscan names, not Latin names.
Rome had become a superpower, however, towards the end of the third century and the beginning of the second century BC,
when Rome had come into contact with another superpower, a North African city-state called Carthage.
Rome had encountered Carthaginian forces in Sicily and in Spain,
and both Rome and Carthage had wanted to gain control of Sicily and Spain because these were quite rich areas, especially Sicily.
So, this meeting of two growing regional powers led to warfare, and it was warfare that Rome ultimately won, and this would have some quite severe consequences that I'll discuss in just a moment here.
But basically, the outline I'm providing is that Rome grew from a small city which perhaps was conquered by other peoples, to one that was able to stand on its own in Italy,
to one that was ultimately expanding enough and successful enough in its contact with other peoples,
successful in the military sense, that if a city attacked Rome, Rome would not only defeat it,
but then would also pull it into its own political orbit.
But Rome was sufficiently successful and powerful in that regard that it was emerging as a world power by about the third century BC.
And in fact, in the course of the wars with Carthage, Carthage in fact allied itself with certain Macedonian and Greek warlords, and this brought Rome into contact with them as well, and Rome was able to subjugate Greece.
So, for example, a Greek historian by the name of Polybius, who lived from about 200 BC to 118 BC, became very interested in Roman power and its forms and its ways of operating.
And to that effect he wrote a history, which I have here in fact, and discussed some of the reasons for Rome's military success.
He attributed a great deal of it, in fact, to the citizen-soldier, the fact that the Romans,
unlike the Carthaginians, were not reliant upon mercenaries and foreign troops,
that the Romans, in fact, did their own fighting.
What they did was, you know, they had...
Every male citizen of Rome was liable for military service,
and, you know, military service was for a certain period of time.
Because the Romans were fighting, you know, as a cohesive unit, they all sort of knew one another,
they would feel shame if one of them failed to perform well on the battlefield.
A mercenary was less motivated by that factor because a mercenary wanted his pay.
He wasn't necessarily concerned with the glory.
But the Romans would go above and beyond the call of duty, or so Polybius argues,
because they wanted to perform well in front of their countrymen, the people they would see every day.
They're followed from the Punic Wars, the wars with Carthage, basically a continual series of wars,
Social wars, for example, in which the various city-states that Rome had conquered in Italy, decided that well, I should mention these city-states, once they were conquered by Rome, were themselves liable for providing auxiliaries to the Roman military.
They had to provide certain legions of their own that the Romans would then command and use to expand their own power.
Basically, these Italian city-states said, look, we speak a very similar language to you Romans. You're conscripting us for your warfare. You should extend citizenship to us. We should have the same rights and privileges as Romans themselves.
The Roman Senate didn't like the idea of this very much, and so it led to a war between Rome and its allies, its socchi, and that's why it's called a social war.
War, and there were various other wars as well in the East, for example, against a fellow
by the name of Mithridates, who was the king, rather, of what is an area that is now part
of Turkey, Pontus.
And then you had just the increasing power of generals and their armies at Rome itself.
I can illustrate this, actually, by reference to a notion that we might borrow from Robert
Howard Higgs, who in Crisis and Leviathan describes how in the opportunity provided by a crisis, a war, for example,
government can grow in ways that it can't during peacetime, and that afterwards there's often a tendency,
especially if there have been certain ideological preconditions met, for the state to remain at a slightly inflated level.
Even as it decreases from its crisis level, it nonetheless remains larger than it had been before the whole cycle started.
We see this, for example, in Rome.
In Rome, during the earliest period of the Republic, there were about four legions.
That was the Roman army, and the legions were about 6,000 men at peace.
During the Punic Wars, though, around the late third century, early second century BC,
this ballooned because they were fighting a war against a world superpower, against Carthage.
So they went from four legions to about 11 legions.
and then afterwards a lot of these legions stayed around and as Rome continued to be sucked into more and more wars I shouldn't say sucked into them because in fact the Romans were quite happy to engage in them but as Rome out of the aftermath of its wars with Carthage came into wars with Greece and with Mithridates the need for an increased number of legions continued to exist so we went from four legions to about eleven and then it went down a little bit and then it ballooned again to about twelve
and then ultimately it was going to reach about 28 or 30 legions by the time of the civil wars, by the time of, well, shortly before Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, and then afterwards Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, the first pre-caps, he would stabilize the number of legions to 28.
So, you can see that's quite a growth of state power right there, from four legions to twelve to twenty-eight.
I should very briefly describe for you what these legions were like, how they were composed.
Originally, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, the legion required...
You had to be a Roman citizen to be in a legion, originally, and you also had to have enough property.
You had to be both a landowner and you had to have enough money to equip yourself to buy whatever weapons and armor you would need for the fight.
Gradually this changed though because there were only a limited number of large enough landowners or people with enough wealth to equip themselves.
And as a result, they had to sort of lower the threshold for letting people come into the military because they needed these much larger armies to fight these world wars.
So you had a diminution over time of the property qualifications for service.
And there's also the factor involved there that if you are a landowner,
you actually need to come back to your land to supervise, at the very least, its maintenance.
And for a lot of these guys, they were kind of yeoman farmers.
They were actually just small individual landowners who would actually be involved in tilling their own land.
If you're going to have these very large armies, they still disbanded these armies from time to time,
of Time, but they were in service for much longer periods of time than they had been before.
If you're going to have these kinds of armies, you need people who are not required to go
back to their farms and attend to their land and their own personal affairs for however
many months out of a year, six months or whatever.
And so there was a certain appeal to having people with less property in the military
to going towards the people who just didn't have anything to lose, they didn't have to
to come back and attend to their own business for a couple of months a year.
Even well before we get to the point of the Julio-Claudian emperors,
in extraordinary circumstances, property-less persons could be enlisted in the Roman army anyway,
if it was a sufficient emergency.
So again, what we have here is a sort of Higgsian effect,
where at first you have something that's just kind of an exceptional circumstance,
over time it becomes less and less exceptional,
as the threshold of what constitutes a crisis either decreases,
or else the simple growth of the state gets them involved in more and more wars
and as a result there's a continual crisis
and so there's always an exception
which allows for the enlistment of people who normally would not be able to be enlisted.
It did, of course, change the nature of the Roman army
that you should have this kind of, well, proletarianization is exactly what it is,
the entry into the military forces of people who didn't have a lot of money.
For one thing, it actually contributed to professionalization
Because people who didn't have a lot of property, who entered the Roman military,
they wanted to get something out of it, they wanted to get some pay out of it.
Whereas you'd had, you know, a degree of that in the earlier army that had been slightly,
composed of slightly wealthier citizens,
but of course these wealthier citizens didn't need the army in order to make a livelihood.
Whereas the, a lot of the property list persons, the proles, they did.
And also because a lot of these proletarians needed their positions in the military to make a living,
and it was a much better living than they could make on the Rome because they owned no land,
they became quite loyal to their commanders because the commanders were the ones who were dispersing
the spoils of war. As a result, what you see happening over time is that the Roman military,
because of proletarianization, actually becomes more loyal to its commanders than to the city of
Rome itself, and honor becomes much less of a consideration for the military than getting paid
by the Commander.
In fact, as time went on, the Romans
became so needful of having yet more people enlist
in their legions.
And these continual wars had so damaged the population of Italy
and of Rome itself that the Romans
had to resort to enlisting within their own legions,
as Roman legionaries, people who were not Romans at all.
So for example, in the civil wars in the first century BC,
And you actually see Pompey, the major rival of Julius Caesar, enlisting what he called a legio vernacular.
He just got some Spanish citizens from his Spanish territories and said,
OK, you guys are now a Roman legion and you're going to fight alongside my Roman legions.
We're not going to pretend that there is a distinction or anything. You guys are the real thing.
And this was different from how it had been before, where you would sometimes have foreign forces fighting alongside Roman forces,
They were not considered to be actually Roman themselves.
Hoppe changed that.
He said, okay, you guys are now going to be constituted as part of our own military.
And as a reward, we're probably going to give you citizenship at the end of your time.
You may want to know what it was like to serve in the Roman military.
During most of the Republican period, as we said, every Roman citizen was liable for military
service, every male Roman citizen.
On average, this tended to be about six years of service.
At a maximum, it could go up to about 16 years.
And in fact, as you might imagine, as these wars continue, as Rome's power is expanding,
the state sees more and more of a need to keep people in the legions for much longer
periods.
So, in fact, while six years of service had originally been the average and the legal
maximum had originally been 16, by the time of the civil wars, you have people who've
under Augustus, after the civil wars, Augustus the first emperor, he legally increased the amount of service that a Roman citizen could be called upon to provide in the military to 20 years, and in addition to that, a further five years of reserve duty, which meant that after 20 years you'd be decommissioned from your legion, but you still had to tag along with your legion,
in its sort of baggage train, and in an emergency you might be called upon to fight.
But you weren't supposed to be doing the regular duties that the Legion would have to do.
For example, once you were a reservist, you didn't have to clean latrines or whatever might be required.
You were just there to be a sort of auxiliary, to be a help in the case of a dire emergency, if you were needed.
We say that Augustus increased the maximum service period from 16 years to 20 years.
That's true legally. In terms of actual practice, like I said, you already had people serving 20 years and more within the Roman legions.
And in fact, even after Augustus increased the legal limit, you still had people serving much longer than they were supposed to.
Now, naturally, if you have this enormous, world-conquering military, you have to pay for it.
And not only that, but also, what do you do with these guys who are decommissioned, these guys who do retire from the military?
Now think about it, if you have a sort of seasonal army of citizen soldiers, they go to war, and then they go back to their farms at the end of that.
And they take care of their farms, they have their own way of making a living, they're fine.
If, on the other hand, you're taking men, even assuming that they do have a farm, even assuming that they do have some means of sustaining themselves,
But if you take them and then keep them for 20 years in the military, what can they do after that?
Even assuming that they had had property, by this point their property is either worthless or has been taken over by somebody else.
Because in fact, things like that did happen if you were away from your property for long enough.
The Romans could be quite glib about what might happen to it.
But, you know, after 20 years of just being a soldier, you're not very well positioned to do anything else.
So this was a very serious problem. You had all these veterans and they needed some sort of pension plan.
Well, Augustus, for a while, and before Augustus, Pompey and Caesar during the Civil Wars, had simply given land to the veterans.
They said, okay, well, we'll give you a land grant in Italy or something and you can learn to farm again.
Maybe you still have some slaves or something and you can make a living that way, even if your old property has been lost.
This didn't work so well, though. There's only so much land to go around in Italy.
And what Caesar and Pompey and later Augustus had to do, in fact, was to confiscate the land from other landowners.
So, for example, the Roman poet Virgil, who is sort of the greatest poet of all, of the Latin language, even he, in his youth, had been expropriated by Augustus.
His family estate had been confiscated and given over to veterans.
You might think of some of the situations that pertain right now in Africa.
I think perhaps in Zimbabwe, for example, you have these people who claim to be military veterans.
in Africa, oftentimes they aren't, who say that, well, you have to give us, you know, land, you have to take land from the white settlers and give it to us because we need to make a living.
Something like that was happening at Rome. You had, in order to keep the military happy, in order to give the veterans a pension, you had to give them land.
Well, I mean, this was just causing so many problems that Augustus eventually abandoned it.
And what he decided was, well, instead of doing this, instead of confiscating people's land, giving it to veterans, what I'm going to do is just give the veterans a pension.
Commission, give them a one-time cash payout when they're decommissioned, when they're
demobilized, and it'll be large enough that they'll be able to survive for the rest of
their lives off of this cash gratuity.
Well, as you might imagine, this cash gratuity doesn't just grow on trees either.
It has to come from someplace.
And just as the state had resorted to expropriating landowners earlier in order to give veterans
The State now resorted to taxation in order to give veterans a pension or a cash gratuity.
So now I go into Julio-Claudian taxation because Augustus was the one who set this up.
So we're now firmly in this period between 31 BC and 68 AD, during which you have these first five emperors,
Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, and then Nero.
In order to provide for these pensions, Augustus decided he would form a new sort of treasury because his own finances were already stretched pretty thin.
Augustus was having to maintain this enormous army, this enormous Roman army of 28 legions of 6,000 men each.
Just paying their salaries was an enormous drain on the state revenues and it was in fact taking up about 50% of state revenue,
Maybe a little bit less than that, but it was quite high.
And then beyond what went to the military for pay, you also had, at the time, things
like the corn dole, you had to give bread to the property-less persons in Rome in order
to keep them happy and keep them from starving or whatever.
So Augustus couldn't just rely on the funds he already had in order to pay these pensions,
these cash gratuities to the veterans.
What he did then was institute new taxes.
The Romans had been very tax-averse through their whole history.
They had had a few indirect taxes, there was a tax on the manumission of slaves, there
was a tax on auctions, but for the most part the Romans didn't like to be taxed themselves.
This was why you had provinces.
The whole point of the Romans going out and conquering other peoples was that you could
make conquered peoples pay their taxes to you rather than having to pay taxes yourself
as long as you wanted this sort of public fund.
So what Augustus did is he said, well, we can only get so much revenue out of the provinces.
We're going to have to institute some new taxes here in Rome itself.
And in fact, he did.
He instituted a sales tax of about 1% and an inheritance tax of 5%.
And this went towards the new military treasury, the Irarium Militare.
In the provinces, it's actually a kind of interesting situation in the provinces.
The provinces have been in terribly bad shape during the Republican period, because in the
Republican period, you had sort of temporary rule in these provinces.
A proconsul or a proprietor would be assigned to the consul for a year, during which time,
as you might imagine, this proconsul would try to take as much money as possible from
Under the Empire, because you had a more stable rule, you had a more sort of Hoppean situation, where a single man was in charge, he gave a legate responsibility for raising funds and controlling a certain province, and as a result, the Provincials were actually quite happy, they were no longer being exploited from year to year, instead they were still being exploited, but it wasn't as much of a mad game.
and also Augustus' way of looking at the world had changed a bit because he now had to keep not only the masses at Rome satisfied but he also had to sort of prevent rebellions in the provinces.
He didn't want a lot of that going on while he was still trying to conquer territories in the East, for example, and just maintain this enormous worldwide empire that the Romans had built up.
So, in fact, Augustus had good reason to liberalize policies towards the provinces, liberalize tax collection there a little bit.
But in order to make up the revenue, what he did was to clamp down on Rome itself and to impose the 1% sales tax and the 5% inheritance tax.
And, of course, two points to be made here is not only was this bad for Romans themselves in Rome, who had previously not had to pay these taxes,
But also, this was a very un-Roman thing to do.
Romans just didn't pay taxes, except in very rare cases.
What you had here was a novelty.
Rome was a very, very conservative city.
They didn't like the idea of novelties.
They didn't like the idea that a government could come and do something it had never done before.
So, if you had these ancient taxes, like the manumission tax,
it was less of a problem.
But when you had new taxes instituted, that was a growth in government
and a change in culture that to the Romans was absolutely revolting.
But, nonetheless, these taxes were less of a problem for Augustus
than it would have been to try to expropriate landowners
and give their land to veterans.
So, in fact, this irarium militare stayed in existence for a while.
You had these sales and inheritance taxes.
Interestingly enough, Caligula abolished the sales tax for a while.
It was his way of gaining some popularity with the Roman masses.
But it seems like this tax was later re-imposed, although the records are not entirely clear on that point.
So, one of the changes you had had in the Julio-Claudian period was that in order to pay for the military,
especially to pay for those pensions and retirement benefits, you had the institution of new taxes.
Well, the Julio-Claudian period is also a very interesting time in terms of its demographics.
If you're going to have an army that's a superpower, you not only need the money to pay for it, but you also need enough men to serve in it.
Where do you get these men from? Rome had suffered under a civil war for about a century, and that's quite apart from all these wars in the East and in Gaul and so forth.
So all this had led to a great deal of attrition of actual Roman citizens.
Roman citizens. People have been killed in the wars, and for that matter, some of them were just maimed in the wars as well, and just could no longer be of military service.
And also, as you might expect, well, in some ways it's actually unexpected. Interestingly enough, demographic studies tend to show that in war, I guess, populations can sometimes increase.
You often have a lot more reproduction than you have in times of peace.
But that wasn't so much the case in this period.
Rome actually was experiencing a demographic decline.
War had partially depopulated Rome and Italy, and especially the senatorial class.
The senatorial class had suffered not only from being involved in all these wars,
in these wars, but also it was the senators who had the most to fear personally from the emperor because the senators might displace him, so you had had prescription lists and prominent men were being killed because they posed a threat to the emperor and earlier to the triumvirs.
And so for that reason, that contributed to Rome's demographic problems. Pliny the Elder actually describes this as a penuria un tutis, a shortage of young men.
And it was also a shortage of young men because fewer and fewer young men wanted to volunteer for the military.
For the most part, Augustus tried to keep enrollment in the legions as voluntary as possible.
He did not want to conscript Romans and Italians because of the uproar that that would cause.
But here you had a shortage. Men didn't want to enlist in the legions for the very simple reason that you might be serving in the legion for 15 or 20 years or even more.
Your whole lifetime would go down the toilet, basically, if you enlisted, so they didn't do it.
Well, so how do you make up for this shortfall?
Well, what Augustus and later emperors did was to turn to recruiting foreigners, for example.
The precedent for that had already been established by Pompey when he had created this vernacular legio, this sort of Spanish legion.
So, for example, in the Julio-Claudian period and a bit later on, between the rule of Augustus and that of Caligula, the legions were about 65% Roman and Italian.
Between Claudius and Nero, that percentage declined to 48% and then later on, from 68% until 117 AD, the percentage of Italians in the Roman legion, and Italians includes the Romans, of course, was only 21%.
So increasingly, the Romans were having to enlist non-Romans in order to fill out the military.
As you can imagine, this had some very significant effects.
Romans might have compunctions about going to war with other Romans.
I might not want to kill someone I know who's a countryman, but I might have much less resolve about that, much less of a reservation.
If this is someone to whom I'm not related, I maybe don't even speak the same language.
and Language, although for the most part they tried to make sure that the legions were learning Latin for obvious military reasons, you have to communicate.
Nonetheless, the sort of sense of Roman-ness declined and therefore the legions had less reservations about, if necessary, going to war with other Romans,
because Roman citizenship was becoming a legal fiction as opposed to an actual ethno-cultural reality.
Well, and in fact, in 69 AD, after Nero, what happens is that Nero commits suicide, and then the legions of different parts of the empire all declare that their own commander is going to be the emperor.
So as a result, in the year 69, you actually have four competing claimants to the throne, four people claiming to be emperor.
And some of these guys were quite de-Romanized indeed.
So, for example, in 69 AD, while the armies of these four people claiming to be emperor are fighting one another, some of them, for example, are seen in Rome, and when the sun is rising in the morning, they actually turn and sort of worship the sun, which is quite an unusual, it's not a Roman practice at all.
These legions had gone native because they'd been out in the field, out in the east for 20 years or 30 years or even more.
So, you have a demographic decline, you have a turn towards non-Romans to fill out the ranks.
Augustus didn't really like this. Augustus wanted to get things back as much as possible to Romanism, to Rome.
And so he tried to pass state legislation, actual government, to try to use the power of government to facilitate greater fertility among the Roman people, let's put it that way.
He tried to regulate sex and marriage. He tried to restore the Roman senatorial class through legislation.
As you might imagine, this didn't work at all. In fact, it was a laughing stock. Augustus' own daughter, Julia, was a slut.
If Augustus' own family wasn't able to live up to these standards, it was a joke that anyone else would be expected to.
And Augustus only had one daughter. Part of Augustus' moral legislation was that he imposed penalties for people who had no children and financial incentives for people to have as many children as possible.
But Augustus himself only had one daughter, so there's certainly not a case of leading by example there.
Marriage, interestingly, right now you have a lot of debates here in America over things like gay marriage and divorce and things like this.
Marriage in Roman times, during the Republic at least, had been almost completely a family matter.
It was not something that the state regulated, controlled or created.
Augustus, through his moral legislation, basically took over the administration of things like divorce and marriage.
This, again, is an extraordinarily revolutionary thing to do.
This is something that was very, very much un-Roman.
But as we've seen, the whole process of imperial expansion had de-Romanized things,
and it created such a crisis that it made the culture much more flexible,
much more amenable to these sorts of changes, these sorts of revolutionary alterations.
Robert Nisbet, who was an American sociologist, he died around 1994 or so, but a very good guy, he was not exactly a libertarian, but he was very much a scholar that we should have a look at,
has written about how, in fact, during the Julio-Claudian period, the first century AD,
Imperium, which is the legal authority that a commander exercises over his troops, displaced what had been patria potestas, the power of the father over his family.
In short, what you saw happening was that increasingly what defined a person's day-to-day life was his relationship to his military unit,
because it had such a growth and expansion of military power and less and less was it the case as had been in earlier Roman days that it was the family that was the central institution of Rome that had been the defining element.
So, for example, people were spending less and less time under the authority of their father. In Rome, they were actually legally under the authority of their father. They could even be executed. Even a fully grown son was still under the authority of his father.
Well, the exception to that, of course, was when he was out serving in the legions, where you could even potentially have a son outranking a father.
And so as you see the growth of imperium, the growth of military command, you see a breakdown in patria potestas.
And this was true with respect to the emperor as well.
The emperor was called the emperor precisely because he exercised imperium.
and the imperialized imperium.
And this had the effect of further weakening the traditional patriot protestos.
Instead, your relationship as a person towards the emperor,
whether you were in his employ, whether you were getting money from him, whatever,
became more and more important than your relationship with your family had been.
And it became less a matter of you being from a noble family
and trying to rise up in the ranks, as it had been during the Republican era,
and instead was a matter of how you could please the emperor
and the Emperor's opinion mattered to you much more if you were in his employ than your father's opinion.
So this contributed to the social breakdown and the demographic decline of Rome as well.
What you had was both political centralization and sort of cultural atomization,
precisely because the relationship to the military or to the Emperor took precedence over relationship to the family.
And this of course also, as you might expect or may not,
led to increasing amounts of bachelorhood, on the one hand, and also promiscuity.
Simply because, whereas the family had been concerned with keeping legitimacy,
you have to have legitimate offspring with a legitimate wife in order to pass down the property
and also maintain the honor of your family, during the Empire this became less of an issue.
Instead it was about getting your pension from the commander, from the legion and also from the emperor.
So there was much less of an incentive to moral, sexual, I guess, fidelity.
And that may tie into the demographic problems.
So we've seen there were economic changes in this period, there were demographic changes.
You may think, well, what about politics?
One of Augustus's great claims to fame was that he had brought peace back to Rome.
Rome had previously suffered under about a century of civil war.
If nothing else, didn't the military at least stabilize Rome politically?
Well, the answer to this is no.
What in fact happened was that as soon as Augustus died in 14 AD,
two legions, well actually a couple of legions, in Pannonia,
which is more or less modern Hungary, and in Germany, revolted.
They revolted, well, for very good reasons actually.
They were, they had been in the field for over 20 years in some cases. These had become quite old men.
They were suffering from brutalities at the hands of their commanders.
As you might expect, I mean, this is the military. If your commander tells you to do something, you have to do it.
And if you don't do it, you can be punished. Well, in the Roman case, it was a, these punishments could be quite severe, whipping and scourging,
whatever the commander felt like. This imperium really was,
was, did go that far. The Imperium was such that a commander could do just about anything
to his troops. So conditions were just absolutely abominable within the military itself and
as a result, you know, the soldiers just wanted out of this situation and they wanted out
of the field. I mean, you see right now a lot of American soldiers want to be brought
home from Iraq. They've been there for about, you know, six months in some cases, maybe
almost a year. With these Romans, some of them had been in Hungary or in Germany for
as much as 20 years or even 30 years. And even if they had very little chance of assimilating
back into Roman culture at home, they at least wanted out of the military. They at least
wanted to be decommissioned and to get their pension. And, you know, you saw the kinds
of things going on here that you often see in other states as well. The military does
The state is quite eager to cheat veterans out of their pensions.
It's easy enough to do, so that's something that the state sees as a way of saving money.
And of course, as you can imagine, having 20 years of service and then another 5 years
in the reserve meant that there was a very good chance that just because of old age,
remember you've got a life expectancy here of about in the 40s or in the 50s, that if
If you kept someone in the military that long, they would die before they could claim their pension, so this was another way of the state saving money.
And it appears that about half of the legions would die before they reached the age at which they could claim their pension,
and the other half actually were able to reach that age, although whether or not they actually got their pension was another question.
So as a result of the terrible conditions and being cheated out of their pensions, the Roman legions revolted in Germany and Pannonia,
destabilizing Rome, they had to send other legions, they had to send representatives of the emperor to negotiate with them, offer them higher salaries and more luxurious pension packages and it succeeded.
Tiberius was the one who did this and he was able to quell the revolts in Pannonia and Germany but nonetheless it was a sign of political problems down the road.
There had also been the Praetorian Guard which was established by Augustus.
The Praetorian Guard was sort of the home guard for Italy and Rome. It was also the personal bodyguard for the emperor.
Well, the Praetorian Guard had control over who got to see the emperor and who didn't.
And as a result, it could sort of filter his appointments.
And so the Praetorian Guard actually became very powerful, as perhaps you know.
And ultimately, the Praetorian Guard was in a position, if it wanted to, to kill the emperor and to appoint a successor.
Praetorians were involved in the assassination of Caligula, for example, and even earlier during the period with Augustus, I'm sorry, with Tiberius, the Praetorian prefect Sejanus was almost as powerful as a co-emperor, basically, simply because of the position that the Praetorian Guard enjoyed.
And then, of course, we see at the very end of the Julio-Claudian period in 69 A.D. that civil war erupts again. You have four people claiming to be emperor, different legions are supporting different claimants, and the idea that Augustus had established peace, well, it was a very temporary peace. It lasted from Augustus' reign down to the end of Nero, and even that had been interrupted by these periodic revolts in places like Penermia in Germany.
The military was not a stabilizing force in Rome, it was a destabilizing force.
It was something that could erupt into civil war unless very high salaries and pensions were paid
and very careful measures were taken by the emperor.
Those are the main elements I should cover here.
And in conclusion, what do you have going on?
A number of the characteristics that had been essential to Rome during the Republican period,
that Romans generally did not pay taxes, that Romans, what they did do is they served in the military,
that Rome had very high moral standards, that marital fidelity,
While not, you know, obviously perfectly observed, nonetheless counted, and legitimacy in children was a very important thing,
all of these things sort of had gelled together during the Republican period,
but these were slowly dissolved by the military towards the end of the Republic,
and then during the early Principate or the early Empire, it becomes even worse.
That basically the military was, because of its demands of money and men,
breaking down all of these elements, it was breaking down the social structure in Rome,
it was breaking down the traditional Roman reservations against taxation,
and it was also not something that was terribly beneficial for a lot of the people serving in the legions themselves,
and because the legions were increasingly having to draw upon foreigners in order to fill out their ranks,
and you even had a process of de-Romanization, that the legions became less and less tied to Rome culturally and ethnically.
So I would certainly say that it looks to me as if what you see in Rome is not a case of military virtue, of boot camp creating better citizens and of everyone coming together to support a national identity,
so much as what you see is actually the destruction of what had once made Rome characteristically Roman.
Of course, you could say that you do see the creation of a new sort of identity out of all of this decadence.
You do see the rise of an imperial identity defined, of course, by the military, defined by the emperor as the supreme commander-in-chief
and by the legions which take on more and more importance as the livelihood and as the sort of cultural milieu in which large numbers of people live.
So in that sense, I mean, that would be something that perhaps militarists would like, that you can create an identity of sorts out of this.
But traditionalists, I mean, people who actually value, you know, Romans who would have valued Rome for what it had been, for all of the things that have made it characteristically Roman, avoidance of taxation, things like that, and the moral codes,
Rome was no longer Roman at all, and that's why you see in historians like Tacitus, for example,
in all these Roman historians, a very elegiac, a very gloomy sense that Rome had fallen already.
Even though, I mean, the Julio-Claudian period runs through 68 AD,
Rome itself doesn't fall to the barbarians until 474 AD.
So, I mean, the Roman Empire survived a very long time,
but what had been great about Rome, what had been Roman about Rome,
As far as historians like Tacitus are concerned, had already died in the period between 31 and 68 AD.