Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [24]
At its height, the Roman Empire counted perhaps 60 million inhabitants within its borders. The empire was so vast that Romans liked to believe that it stretched to the limits of the inhabitable world. Terminus, the god of boundaries, had supposedly been absent at Rome's birth.2
According to the historian Anthony Pagden, the Romans consciously “aimed at world domination.” As early as 75 BC, the republic struck coins “with images of a sceptre, a globe, a wreath, and a rudder”—symbols of Rome's hegemony over all the world. The empire's global reach was evident even to the average citizen, who saw lions from Syria, bulls from Greece, leopards from Tunisia, and bears from England all compete against gladiators in the empire's great amphitheaters such as the Colosseum in Rome, which packed in nearly 50,000 people for regular events. In the words of Seneca, playwright and philosopher of the first century, “[Romans] measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” In the mid-second century, the emperor Antoninus Pius took the title Dominus Totius Orbis—Lord of All the World.3
More than just an immense military power, Rome represented a new pinnacle of Western civilization, achieving heights in science, literature, and the arts that would not be surpassed for more than a thousand years. In addition to classical poets and philosophers such as Virgil and Seneca, Roman civilization produced Galen, doctor to the gladiators, whose medical textbooks were widely used in Europe until the fifteenth century, and the astronomer Ptolemy. Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, wrote Natural History, one of the world's first encyclopedias, and the ten books by the Roman architect Vitruvius inspired the builders of the Italian Renaissance more than a millennium after their author died. Rome also set new global standards of representative government. In the year AD 212, Emperor Cara-calla extended citizenship to every freeborn male inhabitant of the Roman Empire. This mass enfranchisement catapulted Rome far beyond Greece or any other ancient civilization in terms of individual participation in the political process.
The “glory of Rome” spanned more than two millennia, from the city's fabled founding by Romulus in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in AD 1453. Rome's rulers are among the most famous in history, whether for their conquests or cruelty. The names of Julius and Augustus Caesar give us two of the months of the calendar; the name of Caligula is practically synonymous with despotism and depravity. But most historians agree that the High Empire, from AD 70-192, represented the apogee of Roman civilization.
The High Empire roughly tracks the reign of four successive emperors: Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aureli us, each of whom followed the Roman practice of adopting a son whom they molded into the next emperor. During this period, the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace, prevailed, and Roman provinces from southern Scotland to the agricultural towns of West Africa actively traded with each other. The nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen captured the essence of the period, writing, “Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in an orderly sequence.”4
This chapter will not even remotely try to offer a history of the Roman Empire. Instead, focusing on its second-century golden age, I will explore the way in which tolerance enabled Rome to pull away from its rivals on a global scale and grow into the hy-perpower of its time. I will also highlight the factors underlying the Roman Empire's extraordinary staying power—a subject of special relevance for the United States, which has been a global hegemon for less than two decades.
COSMOPOLITAN ROME: “THE SINGLE