In the past three decades, contemporary Aristotelians have posed effective challenges to liberal theory by stressing the importance of citizenship, political virtue, civic prudence, and the political passions. Without denying the manifest goods made possible by the liberal political order, neo-Aristotelian theorists have argued that we can improve our understanding of political life by directing attention to the resource-rich tradition of Aristotelian political science. Dissatisfied with the apathy of liberal citizens, for example, Susan Collins has revived a specifically Aristotelian model of citizenship that is the product of authoritative civic education focused on seeking the human good. Gerald Mara argues that the Rawlsian and Habermasian vision of “public reason” and the autonomy of political agents can be helpfully supplemented by the Aristotelian exploration of the passions that shape public rhetoric and communication. Ronald Beiner has redeployed the Aristotelian concepts of eudaimonia, phronēsis, and virtue in order to criticize the subjectivism of liberal “values” and the emptiness of liberal neutrality. Beiner's view is that active, Aristotelian citizenship focused on working out a shared human destiny is the best way to realize, in practice, our higher and distinctively human capacities for judgment. Stephen Salkever theorizes an Aristotelian “ethics of natural questions” as a deliberative model superior to that offered by the typically Kantian exponents of deliberative democracy, such as Habermas.

The victory of Octavian over Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium in 31, and still more the process, beginning in 28 and culminating in the reordering of his powers and, on 16 January 27, the conferral by the senate and people of the name Augustus marked a change which was rapidly known throughout the Roman world and which altered for ever the nature of the Rome's empire. It was inevitable that so great a change in the distribution and the management of the provinciae and the concentration of imperium in the hands of one individual would affect the ways in which the words were used, and such language in turn reveals a different way of thinking about empire, certainly when compared with the patterns we have seen in Cicero, but even with the more ‘imperial’ ideas of Pompeius. In this chapter it is these shifts in meaning, or rather the addition of meanings, of imperium and provincia which will form the centre of attention, and in particular any evidence for the use of imperium in a geographical sense, of ‘empire’ rather than ‘power’.

AUGUSTUS AND THE RES GESTAE

The obvious place to start such an investigation is with Augustus himself in the record he himself left in the Res Gestae. By the end of the reign of Augustus, it is clear that the change for which we are searching had come about. In the Res Gestae the princeps refers to the closing of the gates of the temple of Janus and writes that the intention of the ancestors had been to close them ‘[cum p]er totum i[mperium po]puli Roma[ni terra marique es]set parta vic|[torii]s pax’ (‘when through the whole imperium of the Roman people by land and sea peace had been gained by victories’).

It would be a bold historian who attempted to fix a date for the beginnings of Roman imperialism, to say nothing of a Roman empire. From the earliest traces we have within the historical record of Rome as a functioning community, in the sixth century BC, the city's political institutions were based on the structures of its army; and, in just over a century from the capture of Veii in 396, Roman control spread across the whole of the Italian peninsula. Moreover there can be no doubt that Roman society throughout this time was decidedly military, and perhaps even militarist, in character. This could well be described as imperialism, and Rome's patchwork of military alliances and settlements as an empire. Although traditionally the period of Roman imperialism is reckoned to have begun with its expansion overseas, and thus with the first war against the Carthaginians (264– 241 BC), there are obvious continuities between the extension of control over Italy and the move into Sicily, which brought Rome face to face with Carthage, as indeed there are between the Italian conquest and the wars for dominance over the Latin league which preceded it.

For the purposes of this present study, however, which is focussed on the language used to describe the emerging empire and the institutions which created it, the period from the mid third century down to the changes wrought by the dictator, L. Cornelius Sulla, in the late 80s bc does make an appropriate starting point.

Note: In the tables which follow I have listed some of the meanings of imperium and provincia which are of particular importance for the discussion of Cicero's usages in chapter 3. These do not include all the occurrences of the two words, which are, however, included in the rows marked ‘All’. It should also be noted that the same passage is sometimes counted in more than one row; for instance, Pro Roscio Amerino 50 contains an instance of imperium where the word is used to refer to the power of the people in the sense of the Roman ‘state’ in an imperial context and is paralleled with nomen, thus appearing in four rows in the table.

The process which has resulted in this book began many decades ago when, as an undergraduate student, I found myself asking the question, ‘What did the Romans think they were doing when they created the Roman Empire?’ For many years this question lurked in the background of my thoughts as I worked on Roman history more generally and on Roman Spain in particular, not least because it was not clear to me how such a question might be answered. What follows is, I hope, if not an answer, at least a contribution towards one. It emerged not least from a remark made in passing by Fergus Millar, that to understand what imperium meant it would be necessary to read the whole of Latin literature. I have not quite done that, but the development of accessible digital texts has made possible the next best thing, the scanning of large quantities of texts to discover the passages in which both imperium and its stablemate, provincia, appeared. I should give due recognition to the Packard Humanities Institute and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae project of the University of California, without whose excellent productions the work of this book would have taken several lifetimes. I also mention, honoris causa, two pieces of software which have been indispensable: the search program Musaios, developed since 1992 by Darl J. Dumont and Randall M. Smith; and the database program, Idealist. These two enabled me to assemble a database of several thousands of passages from ancient authors, which were further analysed with the help of an Excel spreadsheet.

The first meeting of the senate after the funeral of Augustus, so Tacitus tells us, concerned itself not only with the deification of the dead emperor but with the work of his successor. In a scene which carried memories of Augustus' speech to the same body in January 27 BC and which was to be re-enacted on numerous occasions as emperor followed emperor, Tiberius insisted on his incapacity to shoulder the immense burden, and that in a state with so many illustrious men the burden should be shared. Whether Tacitus was right or not in suspecting Tiberius of insincerity (and the subsequent exchanges in the senate suggest that he was correct at least in noting that his speech contained more dignitas than fides), the difference between what was being discussed in AD 14 and in 27 BC is notable. Once Augustus had been persuaded not to hand over the control of the world to the senate, the formal business of the session appears, as I have noted, to have been that of assigning provinciae. There is no sign of this in the reports of Tiberius' address, either in Tacitus or in Dio. Though Tiberius is represented as wishing to share the work of the res publica, this is not a matter of which provinciae he would take and which give up. Tacitus says nothing about what the various partes rei publicae might consist of, but Dio has three: Rome and Italy; the legions; and the remaining subject peoples. Though the language here clearly reflects Dio's own period, this division, or something like it, would make sense of the question posed by C.

There is one rich source of uses of the words imperium and provincia which has been used only in passing in the main sections of this book, and that is the legal sources. The authors, whose writings were excerpted on the orders of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century AD and gathered together into the Digest in the process of producing a manageable account of the law, are of undoubted value in any attempt to understand the workings of the structures of the Roman world and of the mentalities which underlay it. There are, however, three particular problems in the use of the Digest when trying to discover patterns of word-usage from the late third century BC through to the mid second century AD. The most obvious difficulty is that the majority of the citations in the Digest are from writers from the late second and early third centuries AD, such as Ulpian, Paul and Papinian, who are, properly speaking, outside the limits of the already somewhat lengthy period covered by this book. Secondly the citations in the Digest are short and thus sometimes lack context. Perhaps more important, however, is the uncertainty as to the content of the citations, since the collection was edited and interpolated by the compilers on the instructions of the emperor, in order to make the sense clear and bring the material up to date. The extent of these interpolations has been a matter of dispute among scholars for over a century, but there is no doubt that there has been some considerable editorial work. The uncertainty that this creates adds to the problems always present in determining exactly what an ancient author wrote and requires extra care when tracing the usage of particular words.

The period between Sulla's resignation from the dictatorship in 79 BC and the establishment of the power of Augustus after the battle of Actium in 31 is, for any writer on the constitution and structure of the Roman state, dominated by one individual, the consul of 63 BC, M. Tullius Cicero. The reason for this is obvious but bears repeating. The sheer bulk of Cicero's surviving literary output, in terms of speeches delivered to the senate and people or in the law courts, of works on philosophical and rhetorical subjects and of correspondence with his friend Atticus and with his other friends and associates, is extraordinary, especially when compared with the paucity of material from the periods immediately preceding and following. It makes Cicero, as Elizabeth Rawson wrote, ‘almost unique among the great men of antiquity: because we know a great deal about him’. Cicero's predominance, from the point of view of modern students of ancient history, does not depend upon his significance as a leading politician in the turbulent events of the last decades of the Roman republic, whatever he himself would have us believe. Although he held the consulship and was for that reason alone one of the senior members of the senate from 63 BC onwards, the same could be said of many others, and, unlike most of his contemporaries, he made no attempt to display his prowess as a military commander, taking a provincia in Cilicia in 51 only because he was forced to do so.

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.

This book has been an attempt to trace the historical development of the meanings and usage of two words, imperium and provincia, across the centuries in which Rome acquired and established power beyond the boundaries of Italy, becoming the mistress of a territorial empire which, in terms both of its geographical extent and of its longevity, was immense. Earlier in this book I likened this process to the construction of a biography, or more precisely of a pair of biographies of two closely related members of a family. In this concluding chapter the detailed review of the life history of these two words will be drawn upon to see the shape of their ‘biographies’ and the differing ways in which the two words interrelate across the period; and then to assess the contribution of this pattern to the understanding of the ways in which the Romans thought about their empire. The evidence from the ‘long second century’, from the Hannibalic war down to the death of the dictator Sulla, though it is sparser than for the periods that follow, shows that within the constitutional and political sphere the primary meaning of imperium at that time was the power of the city magistrates, extended by decision of the senate and (probably) the assent of the people to pro-magistrates when necessary. The word had (and continued to have throughout the period examined) a range of other meanings, notably and most commonly that of an order, given by a superior to an inferior; and, as might be expected, of the power to issue such orders.