Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Ideas of empire
- 2 The beginnings: Hannibal to Sulla
- 3 Cicero's empire: imperium populi Romani
- 4 The Augustan empire: imperium Romanum
- 5 After Augustus
- 6 Conclusion: imperial presuppositions and patterns of empire
- Appendix 1 Cicero analysis
- Appendix 2 Livy
- Appendix 3 Imperium and provincia in legal writers
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Ideas of empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Ideas of empire
- 2 The beginnings: Hannibal to Sulla
- 3 Cicero's empire: imperium populi Romani
- 4 The Augustan empire: imperium Romanum
- 5 After Augustus
- 6 Conclusion: imperial presuppositions and patterns of empire
- Appendix 1 Cicero analysis
- Appendix 2 Livy
- Appendix 3 Imperium and provincia in legal writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by the force of it, – not the geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he cometh.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1871), §44.This book is a search for the unattainable, for the notion or notions that the Romans had of their empire as their power spread beyond the boundaries of the Italian peninsula in the third and second centuries BC down to the time, in the midst of the second century AD, when it seemed to have acquired a permanent hold over southern and western Europe and its attendant islands, Asia Minor and what we now call the Middle East, and the northern strip of the African continent. The problems with this search are twofold, one of which makes the process difficult and the second apparently impossible. Both must be stated at the outset, because it is these two factors which shape the process of this investigation and its possible outcome.
The first is the notion of ‘empire’ itself. The idea of what an empire consists of is simple. Michael Doyle states the matter with admirable concision: empires are relationships of political control over the effective sovereignty of other political societies. However, in actuality empires are immensely varied in the way that political control is achieved and exercised.
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- The Language of EmpireRome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD, pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008