Considering its exceptional size, durability and historical legacy, it is unsurprising that few subjects in history speak as strongly to the public imagination—at least in the Western world—as the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Over the past centuries, it has served as an ideological inspiration for imperialism and, conversely, has been interpreted in light of such imperialist strategies. Yet it also remains one of the most vehemently debated topics: despite centuries of scholarship (not only in the historical disciplines), opinions still differ as to what were the mechanisms behind Roman expansion, the reasons for its enduring success or its ultimate decline.
By deconstructing monocausal explanations grounded in Rome's presumed moral, organisational and military superiority, recent scholarship has seen considerable advances in this debate. On the one hand, science-based methods increasingly contribute to our understanding of Imperial decline; on the other, critical re-readings of ancient written sources and a growing body of archaeological evidence lead to more systemic and dynamic understandings of early Roman expansion.
Nicola Terrenato's The early Roman expansion into Italy forms an extremely welcome contribution to the latter line of enquiry. Drawing on ideas the author has developed in previous papers, the ambitious aim of this book is twofold: to present “a combined archaeological and historical synthesis of the Roman expansion in central and southern Italy during the fourth and third centuries BCE”, which is “more productively embedded in the general, global archaeological and historical discourse” (p. xiv); and to “change our understanding of the very nature of Roman conquest of central and southern Italy” (p. xv).
Terrenato's approach to the topic can be characterised as systemic and multi-scalar. It sets out with a discussion of the deeper historical (Chapter 2) and broader geographic context (Chapter 3) in which Rome arose. It then proceeds with a closer examination of the process of expansion. This is done first through a discussion of Rome's dealings with a selection of incorporated communities (Veii, Caere, Capua and the Samnites, discussed in Chapter 4). These suggest that Rome used a broad range of strategies in its expansion, in which cooperation and negotiation played a much larger role than violence and warfare. Next, he analyses the internal power dynamics within the Roman state, arguing that Roman expansion was a haphazard process resulting from negotiations between elite families and factions with private agendas. In Chapter 6, he then re-assesses commonly held views on the impact of Roman expansion, including the demographic impact of violence, territorial reorganisation and law, arguing that the Roman conquest was much less disruptive in all these domains than previously thought.
Terrenato's argument revolves around what he calls the ‘Imperial Grand Bargain’. In the later fifth- and fourth-century BC Mediterranean, a handful of states (Syracuse, Carthage, Tarquinia and Marseille amongst others) through their positions in long-distance trade networks and their increasing dominance over neighbouring polities, started to realise that ambitions for wider imperial expansion were realistic; in fact, in an increasingly interconnected Mediterranean, it was inevitable that some of these ‘imperial bids’ would be successful. In this setting, smaller polities were in a sense forced to join one or another of these bids. At first sight it might seem undesirable (they would lose their independence), but Terrenato argues that this offered local elites immense opportunities: if they backed the right bid, they would join in a global elite network, share in the spoils of empire and at the same time re-inforce their local power base.
The early Roman expansion into Italy provides both a highly original approach to Roman expansion and a very attractive new model to explain Rome's initial Imperial success: it convincingly problematises long-standing explanatory models of Imperialism that emphasise the Romans’ aggressive nature, defensive needs or economic mechanisms as the drivers of imperialism (as reviewed in Chapter 1). Terrenato's holistic alternative to such mono-causal and Romano-centric models considers Roman expansion as the result of dynamic and context-specific dealings with individual polities, peoples and elite individuals, and thus gives much more prominence to non-Roman agency in the process. Also, it deconstructs the abstract, monolithic notion of the Roman state, giving agency to elite factions and individuals within that state, and thus considering successful expansion as the outcome of the interplay between private and imperial agendas, both Roman and non-Roman. While developed for the early phases of expansion, such a model also seems highly relevant to subsequent phases of Imperial expansion, and for our understanding of state-formation processes in general.
While very attractive, it should be noted that Terrenato's argument is, as he himself repeatedly admits, in part speculative: it draws heavily on information provided by sources written centuries after the events that they describe. Even if they fit the model well, the information these sources provide is in essence indirect, limited and anecdotal (where available Terrenato also draws on archaeological evidence, but the interpretation of such evidence in light of the model remains difficult). In addition, where the consequences of Roman expansion in some areas (law, culture, social dependency) may have been exaggerated at times, Terrenato's re-appraisal might underestimate its impact in areas such as land-holding patterns and agricultural production. While archaeologically still not well understood, there certainly are cases which show that the scale and impact of colonisation, road building and centuriation could be massive. More generally, the underlying structural demographic and economic conditions in which expansion occurred play only a minor role in the new contextual narrative: even if these were not a consequence of expansion, the question of the extent to which population growth, urbanisation, agricultural transformations and, ultimately, economic growth enabled or stimulated expansion deserves fuller consideration.
These critiques do not deny the fundamental contribution this book makes to the discourse on Roman expansion. Terrenato has written an accessible, provocative book that develops a novel and holistic approach to Roman imperialism, and offers a ground-breaking new understanding of Rome's success. Both historical and archaeological aspects of Terrenato's argument are controversial, and it is sure to stimulate further debate (to which on-going archaeological investigations will certainly contribute). Although the approach relies heavily on written and epigraphic sources and will therefore not easily be used in other contexts where such sources are unavailable, the ideas developed are surely relevant to scholarship on complex societies and pre-modern empires in other parts of the world.
