A number of scholarly trends have converged in recent years, urging us to view Roman government as minimalist in both its aims and achievement. Essentially reactive, it possessed neither the interest nor the ability to formulate policy, particularly concerning processes as complex as urbanization or acculturation. Advocates of this view understand, of course, that the empire was an extraordinarily complex collectivity, and that furthering understanding of it requires enormous efforts at collecting and analyzing data; indeed, they make a disproportionate number of distinguished contributions of this kind (Eck and Mtiller-Luckner 1999; de Blois 2001). Yet work along these lines has often promoted such particularism in the treatment of data as to subscribe, consciously or unconsciously, to a number of related epistemological fallacies: every text is so firmly and precisely situated in a context (about which we in fact know extremely little) that it becomes ‘‘unique,’’ rendering comparison impossible and disinclining scholars to study data in aggregate; likewise, only such actions and beliefs as are attested by surviving evidence are admitted to have been thought or performed, rendering the construction and use of models impossible.
Where Roman government is concerned, we might ask how or whether our data, which concentrate so heavily on matters of law and finance, can be made to harmonize with that strand of Roman imperial propaganda that justified the empire by summoning Romans ‘‘to inculcate the habits ofpeacetime’’ (Verg. Aen. 6.852; cf. Woolf 1998: 54-67; Ando 2000: 49-70, 336-51). One view, widely shared in the Roman world, held the primary tool of any such program to be the law: not for nothing did the late Roman scholar Servius gloss Vergil’s paci...morem with leges pacis, ‘‘the laws of peace.’’ This view was itself predicated upon a particular understanding of civil society and the bonds that held it together (Ando 2000: 9-11,406-12); nor would anyone in the ancient world have questioned that the arts of civilization could only be cultivated in a city properly designed, ordered, and adorned (B. D. Shaw 2000).
Further work on Roman government should perhaps look first to the Euphrates. An extraordinary cache of papyri, first announced in 1989 and systematically published between 1995 and 2000, illuminates the organization of the eastern regions of Coele Syria in tantalizing detail. Having acquired a land of villages, the Romans selected one, Appadana, to become its primary instrument of governance. Appadana becomes a city, is granted a Greek name, Neapolis, and acquires the political and social structures of a late-Roman Greek city: a council, whose members have Roman citizenship and Roman names, and residents interested in the actions available to them in the legal regime that henceforth would order their world (P. Euphr. 1 and 4; P. Bostra 1).
World History
