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The Empire of Honour: The Art
of Government in the Roman World
by J.E. Lendon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
The following is an excerpt from a review entitled "Empire State
Building" in the March 27, 1998 issue of the Times Literary Supplement,
written by Mary Beard.
In AD 68, the Emperor Nero was finally deserted by his supporters: his
friends and advisers mysteriously slipped away: the soldiers ignored his
orders; the only option was suicide. Ancient writers make this into an
eerie scene of loss, "the Emperor at last bereft of his power". But for
J.E. Lendon, in Empire of Honour, it prompts much more puzzling questions:
not how did Nero lose his authority, but how did he ever exercise it in
the first place? How did any Roman emperor ("good" or "bad" induce his
subjects to obey his orders? How, further down the
imperial hierarchy, did the officials of Roman government get rebellious
or recalcitrant provincials to toe the line and pay the taxes?
The first chapter of Empire of Hounour is an excellent account
of how much we simply do not know about the governance of the Roman
empire, exposing the gaps in our knowledge that most conventional accounts
assiduously conceal. At its most "bureaucratic", the Roman administration
comprised only about 30,000 civilian officials - roughly one for every
2,000 subjects, compared with one for every thirty-five or so inhabitants
in the modern United States. How did this skeleton staff manage to rule
the empire? By force, perhaps (the 350,000-strong army as much a weapon of
government as of defense)? By fear ("a very economical way of ruling")? By
a web of collaboration with
self-promoting quislings in the conquered territories? By a complex
network of patronage that linked the emperor with the most insignificant
peasant in the most backward province?
Lendon has a keen eye for the inadequacies of all these explanations;
mostly, as he points out, they succeed only in pushing the question back a
step (if fear and force are important," it still remains to explain how
the imperial authorities... commanded the obedience of the agents of
force")...
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