Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [27]
The Punic Wars demonstrated the success of Rome's strategic tolerance. Hannibal's military strategy was based on the belief that after several Carthaginian victories, Rome's Italian allies would rush to defect. To Hannibal's surprise, however, despite a number of hard-fought battles, every one of Rome's alliances held firm and Rome prevailed.
Of course, Rome was also prepared to deal brutally with enemy cities that would not yield. For example, with Carthage itself, Cato famously declared, “Carthage must be destroyed.” Three years after the Third Punic War began in 149 BC, the city of Carthage was razed, most of its population slaughtered, and Carthage's territory annexed as a new Roman province.9
The conquest of Carthage marked a significant shift in Roman policy that would permanently change the direction of the empire. For most of its early expansion, Rome refrained from direct annexations. Instead, the early Roman emperors expanded the empire by establishing dependent states and spheres of influence and by using offensive armies to intimidate potential enemies. Thus, at the time of the Punic Wars, it would have been difficult to determine the exact borders of the Roman Empire with any precision.
Around the first century AD, however, Roman strategy changed. Emperors like Augustus and Trajan led military campaigns to annex already conquered territories—from Wales to Armenia, from Switzerland to Jordan—gradually bringing them all under Rome's direct rule. Rome's borders came to be clearly defined, usually tracking major waterways. Once the empire's boundaries were set, Rome's emperors poured enormous resources into building border fortifications like Hadrian's Wall in northern England. At the same time, they dramatically expanded the Roman network of paved roads, allowing imperial legions to move quickly when there were revolts to be suppressed or barbarian invaders to be repelled.
Even under direct control, however, the Roman emperors interfered very little with the lives of their subjects, imposing virtually no major economic or social reforms. Indeed, one source describes the Roman Empire as “government without bureaucracy.” Certainly, it was undergoverned by comparison to the contemporaneous Han Chinese Empire, which, proportionately, employed a bureaucracy perhaps twenty times as large.
From 150 BC to AD 70, Rome expanded at a startling pace, engulfing most of continental Europe, Asia Minor (now Turkey), and much of the Middle East, including Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. Throughout these military campaigns, Rome extended the right of citizenship to defeated elites while harshly punishing states that resisted Roman rule. Six centuries after its founding, Rome had grown from a tiny city-state to a global empire that surrounded the Mediterranean on all sides, turning the famed sea into a Roman lake.10
THE GOLDEN AGE OF ROME
Historians disagree about the exact timing of Rome's golden age or High Empire, but the general consensus is that it stretched roughly over the reign of four emperors, beginning with Trajan, who ruled from AD 98 to 117 and was known as the optimus princeps (best ruler) by later generations of Romans.” Charismatic, popular, and remarkably accessible for an emperor, Trajan is equally famous for his spectacular military conquests and the excellence of his governance. Under Trajan, the borders of the empire expanded all the way to the Persian Gulf; no other Roman commander ever marched so far. He apparently returned from conquered Dacia (now Romania) with millions of pounds of gold and silver—the last time Rome's treasury would reap large profits from a war.
At the same time, Trajan also implemented one of the few examples of social legislation in the ancient world, creating the famous alimenta program that lent money to farmers, with the interest going to support poor children. Trajan's legacy as a just and fair ruler formed the basis of the Senate's fourth-century prayer that the new emperor might be “better than Trajan.” In the Middle Ages, Dante imagined