I. War and Sate Formation I
Warfare in Bronze Age China during the Xia, Shang, and Western Zhou periods (c.2000-770 b. c.e.) constituted one of the two great affairs of the state—the other being the sacrifice of animals and humans.62 These “affairs” were the exclusive prerogative of the aristocracy and formed the basis for legitimating its rule as well as its self-definition. Consequently, war was central to state formation in this era.63
The aristocracy at this date formed a segmentary lineage system, that is, a group of clans and households that organized and ranked itself according to their genealogical proximity to the ruling lineage.64 Monarchs enjoyed primacy in honor but a rough degree of social parity with their aristocratic peers. The members of this class thought of themselves as sharing a common nobility but jealously guarded the honor to which each believed his rank entitled him. It is not surprising, therefore, that the personal slights, real or imagined, formed an endless source of feuding or that such feuds regularly issued in violence among members of a class that defined itself in large part through war. Monarchs became progressively less able to control these conflicts owing to the inherent weakness of the governments they headed. The segmentary lineage system not only shaped the social hierarchy of the aristocracy but the political landscape of Bronze Age kingdoms. Lineages’ rankings within the system determined which of the various ministries at court and territories of the realm a clan controlled. These positions were the hereditary possessions of the lineages and replicated the institutions of the monarchy on a smaller scale. Clans possessed their own temples and sacrifices and networks of aristocratic dependents and retainers who could be mobilized for war. They constituted, in fact, fully autonomous states in their own right since they were fully capable of carrying out independently the “great affairs of the state.” Thus, the structure of what passed for the state in the Bronze Age can best be described as feudal because the “state” as such was nothing more than an aggregate of “mini-states”—including the monarchy itself—on whose collective military resources the power of the kingdom depended. It is scarcely surprising, then, that the ministerial and territorial lineages gradually grew to rival the power of the monarch himself or that the vendettas and wars spawned by aristocrats’ extreme sensitivity to slights to their honor led finally to centuries of internecine bloodshed that the monarchy was powerless to check. The Spring and Autumn period that followed (722-481 b. c.e.; note that the Eastern Zhou dynasty [770-256 b. c.e.] overlaps with this and the following period, the Warring States [453-221 b. c.e.]) witnessed a long era of violence through which the Zhou aristocracy not only largely destroyed itself and more than 100 ministates but the greater political order that they had constituted.
Out of this carnage a very different form of state emerged as the intense conflict among the lineages led them to social and administrative innovations aimed at securing a military advantage against their rivals.65 The first steps were taken in the mid-seventh century, when the state of Qi abandoned the aristocratic monopoly on warfare in order to enlarge its armed forces. Other states were forced to follow suit. At first, only the nonaristocratic portions of the capital populations were enrolled in the army, but over time as conflicts intensified and demanded ever larger armies, the state of Jin in the mid-sixth century extended conscription to subject peoples and the rural population of its agricultural hinterland. This development was at first only a temporary expedient, but the pressures of war forced Jin and other, competing states to make such measures permanent until by the third century they were fielding armies of enormous size numbering in the hundreds of thousands of men (if the sources are to be believed). Finally, the state of Qin under the guidance of the legalist thinker and general Shang Yang in the mid-fourth century established what would become the paradigmatic structure of the “warring state.” It is not clear that every state subsequently conformed completely to the administrative pattern that Qin created, but the various reforms it undertook were to one degree or another replicated among its rivals. Central to the Qin reforms was the grouping of the population into units of five households that were each responsible not only for providing the squads of five recruits that formed the building blocks of Qin armies but also for
Mutual surveillance. Members of the households who did not report the crimes of another member were held jointly liable for his or her transgressions. Second, because Qin’s rulers viewed agricultural productivity as crucial to a strong military, the government systematically discouraged other forms of economic activity, for example by imposing various penalties on merchants and craftsmen. To ensure that the maximum amount of land was brought under cultivation, Qin also penalized households with adult sons living at home. These penalties forced sons to establish independent households and to cultivate their own allotments of land in order to support them. In tandem with this step, Qin also divided its territory into a grid of blocks, each of which was sufficient to support a family from the food produced on it. This reshaping of the countryside in order to ensure the maximum extraction of the resources for war was given physical expression through a system of paths forming a rectangular grid over the crop lands of the state. Finally, the government financed its war making through a head-tax imposed on the population.
Qin carried out this vast effort at social and economic engineering through the creation of an equally extensive administrative apparatus. The entire territory was divided into administrative districts, the xian, which were identical with the units of military administration and recruitment. The subunits of the xian, the jin, became the basis for local government. To control this system, Qin established a bureaucracy capable of extending the central government’s reach down to the local level. Unlike civil administration under the Bronze Age monarchies, officeholders were not nobles and did not enjoy hereditary tenure of their posts. They were commoners, professionals who earned their positions through specialized skills and abilities and served at the pleasure of the monarch. These administrators collected taxes and conducted levies for military service and corvee labor, and to facilitate these tasks, they carried out detailed censuses of the population. They also enforced a severe but apparently relatively impartial system of justice among the subjects. Finally, the taxes extracted from the peasantry paid not only for the bureaucracy that governed them but for a standing corps of professional soldiers that formed not only the core of the Qin military but in addition gave rulers a ready and reliable source of coercive force for use against recalcitrant subjects. These innovations created “warring states,” as Mark Lewis puts it, “states built through the institutions of military recruitment and control. In these states warfare was no longer the means by which an aristocracy defined its authority, but rather the primary institution used by the rulers of states to organize, rank, and control their subjects.”5 Military necessity, in other words, brought about the militarization of these states.
In this climate of endemic warfare, mass armies were essential to the survival of any warring state, and to mobilize them their governments relied not simply on the coercive power that their bureaucratic apparatus provided but also on the tangible incentives that they offered to peasants for their compliance with demands for taxes and service and for zeal in battle when conscripted. In this light, the governments’ concern to maximize their populations’ agricultural productivity and the concrete measures that they undertook to do so can be seen, from a different angle, as efforts to secure the welfare of their subjects. If subjects were to pay taxes, it was in their rulers’ interest to ensure that they did not lack the wherewithal to do so. In addition, because land was apparently plentiful in this period, rulers could not afford to be too harsh in their demands on their subjects, for subjects who felt themselves oppressed in one kingdom could easily migrate to another where conditions were better. The system of highly competitive states each eager to attract additional subjects created a kind of “ ‘right of exit’ which could serve as an implicit rein on arbitrary power.”6 Moreover, because justice came through salaried local officials appointed by the central government rather than at the hands of some local potentate, the laws, if severe, were at least applied even-handedly. But the most important incentive that these governments held out was the prospect of bettering one’s economic and social position through success in war. The warring states established elaborate hierarchies of ranks or titles that rewarded meritorious service to the state, particularly in war. Once again, Qin is paradigmatic. Lewis describes its system of seventeen ranks in this way:
Military success measured by the number of heads of slain enemies was rewarded with promotion in rank. For individual squad members or the chiefs of a squad of five, rewards were given for heads of enemies actually killed by the individual. For the commander of a unit of a hundred men or more, rewards were given for the total number of enemy killed by his troops. Those killed in battle could have their merits transferred to their descendants. Reaching certain ranks entitled the bearer to the possession of specified quantities of land, houses, and slaves. Those of the eighth rank or above also obtained the tax income of a specified number of villages. . . and the highest four ranks in Qin’s hierarchy of military merit were the lords (jun. . .) and hou. . . found elsewhere. Lower titles matched with ranks in the army and government administration, with the lowest four ranks corresponding to the soldiery, and ranks five and above serving as officers in the army and officials in the administration. The ranks likewise entailed certain legal and religious privileges. In the legal realm,
The surrender of titles could be used to remit certain punishments, so they provided a degree of protection against severe penalties. In the religious realm, they entitled the holder to privileges in burial, including the right to a higher tomb mound and the planting of more trees on the tomb.66
The subjects of Qin and the other warring states therefore appear to have been willing and perhaps even happy to go to war because they perceived it to be in their material self-interest to do so and because their rulers looked after their general economic welfare and offered them access to impartial justice.
The formation of the Roman imperial state was strikingly different, despite its origins in a similar pattern of constant, intense warfare.67 Italy in the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries b. c.e. was a region of small city-states and loose tribal confederations, of which the centrally located Roman Republic was one of the stronger. Gradually, Rome extended its hegemony over most of Italy during the fourth and third centuries and over the whole of the Mediterranean in the second and first. Yet although Rome went to war almost every year during these four centuries and mobilized Italy’s population in proportional terms on a scale comparable to China’s warring states, it never developed the sorts of administrative structures that in China were a concomitant and prerequisite for the full mobilization of state resources for war. Indeed, the institutions of government during Rome’s greatest period of military mobilization, in the late third, second, and first centuries b. c., were minimal compared to those of Qin and the other warring states. Until 49 b. c.e., an aristocracy controlled public affairs through a council (the senate), which had little formal legal power but enormous informal authority. Its members also staffed all magistracies, which were filled through a system of competitive elections in which all Roman citizens were theoretically entitled to vote (although the organization of the voting assemblies and other circumstances made these elections far from democratic). These magistrates conducted all the business of state, but because the magistracies were few, the business they conducted was quite limited. A quinquennial census of the Republic’s citizens was taken for the purposes of establishing liability to military service and taxation. However, despite draconian penalties for evasion, the census basically depended on the voluntary cooperation of registrants for its success. No bureaucracy was in place to enforce compliance. Similarly, to administer its towns and rural areas the Republic relied on the cooperation of local elites whose power bases were independent of the central administration. Conscription, too, was predicated on the willingness of recruits to come forward in the absence of an extensive bureaucracy or police force to enforce compliance. Beginning in the fourth century, taxes of a sort (the tributum) were collected to fund the
Republic’s military endeavors, but these were technically loans from the citizens to the Republic that might, at least on occasion, be repaid at the end of a victorious campaign. In 167 b. c.e., following the conquest of Macedon, the senate abolished their collection altogether, and thereafter Roman citizens enjoyed immunity from direct taxation for several centuries (although they were subject to a number of indirect taxes).
The divergence in the trajectory of state-formation in Republican Rome and the warring states of China may be attributable, in part, to significant differences in the nature of the military challenges each faced. Warfare among the warring states of China was nearly continuous. One calculation puts the number of wars between the major states between 656 and 221 b. c.e. at 256.9 Alliances among the several major states that competed for power in this period were impermanent and frequently shifting, and for over four centuries no one of them was able to gain a position of such unchallenged superiority that it could either conquer its rivals or force them to accept its hegemony. These wars moreover often lasted several years and could result in the complete annihilation of the losing dynasty, the destruction of its alters and temples, and the absorption of its domains into the victor’s kingdom. In a context of such existential danger to the states and their inability to depend on resources beyond their own frontiers for the means to defend themselves, it is not surprising that rulers adopted a strategy of maximizing the extraction of money and manpower from their own territories through the establishment of strong controls at the center, an effective administrative apparatus, and the extensive regimentation of their subjects. The pattern of Roman warfare was quite different. Rome began as the dominant city-state in Latium, and its path to dominion in Italy was largely uninterrupted despite major military challenges and occasional serious setbacks. Beginning in the later fifth century, it overcame one rival after another in the peninsula, and when it faced war on more than one front, it was generally able to prevent its enemies from combining effectively against it. After c.275 b. c.e., its existence as a state was threatened only once, by Hannibal, and for a comparatively brief period, from 218 to 207 b. c.e. (Although Hannibal did not leave Italy until 203 b. c.e., the Roman defeat of reinforcements from Spain led by his brother in 207 b. c.e. effectively ended any threat he posed to Rome.) It did not face the sorts of long-term challenges that threatened states in China, and this fact may to some extent account for the failure of the Republic’s leaders to make the sorts of extensive alterations in the institutional structure of the Republic that Chinese rulers resorted to in order to survive.
It would be wrong, however, to downplay too much the military dangers that the Republic did face. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Rome confronted
Powerful enemies, any one of which could have destroyed it, and the consequences of defeat in the major wars it waged in the third century could have led to the unraveling of its hegemony in Italy and quite possibly the annihilation of the Republic and the death or enslavement of its citizens. Military pressures were at times unquestionably severe and the challenges often daunting, and in response Rome’s leaders naturally sought to increase the Republic’s military resources. However, instead of expanding the apparatus of government and enhancing its effectiveness in extracting the resources for war from its citizens, Rome’s leaders turned to alliance building and the enlargement of the citizen body itself in order to build up their city’s military capabilities. These measures in effect substituted for the more intensive control of state territory that furnished China’s warring states with their strength. Initially Rome and its closest neighbors, the Latins, formed a league for mutual defense as early as the regal period, and this alliance furnished much of the bedrock of its military power in the fifth and fourth centuries following the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic (trad. 509 b. c.e.). In this era and continuing on into the third century, as Rome subdued various Italian states and others sought its protection, it struck treaties with them. These imposed no money tax on the Republic’s Italian allies (the socii); instead the treaties required them to furnish contingents for the Republic’s armies and “to have the same friends and enemies as Rome,” that is, to cede control of their foreign affairs to the Republic. These alliances, which gradually grew to encompass the whole of Italy south of the Po river, proved to be far more dependable than was the case among the warring states of China. There the existence of several relatively evenly matched competing states created endless possibilities for realignment as each sought to maximize its power or to counter perceived threats. Rome’s allies had no alternative but to acquiesce because no other Italian state could rival Rome’s power. Consequently, Rome could bring overwhelming military force to bear in putting down attempted revolts. Only with the aid of a potent, external source of military strength, such as Pyrrhus in 281-279 b. c.e. or Hannibal in 218-207 b. c.e., could the allies hope to break free of Roman dominance, and a number of them did desert. Yet even during these relatively brief episodes, enough allies remained loyal to enable Rome ultimately to turn back the challenge and restore its hegemony. However, Roman hegemony, if distasteful and not to be preferred to freedom if the opportunity presented itself, was nevertheless in general not oppressive. In return for placing their military forces at Rome’s disposal, the allies were left almost entirely autonomous in their local affairs, which their local elites continued to control, and their soldiers and citizens were entitled to share in the fruits of Roman victories.
In view of the Republic’s success in enlarging the number of allies from which it could extract the wherewithal for war, intensification of extraction through an enlarged state apparatus was unnecessary. Rome’s rulers took a similarly quantitative rather than qualitative approach within the Republic itself. Beginning in 338 b. c.e., following the suppression of a serious revolt among its allies in Latium and Campania, Rome used the extension of its citizenship to ensure the loyalty and support of various groups of non-Romans in Italy. New tribes were created in which to accommodate these newly enfranchised Romans and merge them into the civic and political structure of the Republic. Citizenship was not an unmixed blessing: it meant obligations for military service and taxes, while benefits such as the right to vote or hold public office were largely beyond the reach of most new citizens. Yet new citizens during the later fourth, third, and second centuries were integrated on terms of complete equality with the old, and there is no evidence of resistance or rebellion among them. Rome steadily enlarged its territory (the agerRomanus) until by the late third century it encompassed much of the best land in central Italy. At that date, the citizen body probably numbered around 300,000 adult males out of a total of perhaps 970,000 in the peninsula south of the Po Valley. Romans therefore constituted somewhat less than a third of the Italian population at this date, making them the largest of Italy’s ethnic groups and so able to overwhelm any single group, much less any individual state, that might challenge their suzerainty.68
The ability of the citizen body as well as of the Italian allies to bear the burdens of warfare was enhanced by the one form of social engineering that the Republic regularly undertook, the dispatch of colonies to occupy conquered lands.69 The primary purpose of such foundations was military—the colonies were located at strategic points in recently conquered areas to serve as de facto garrisons and staging areas. Down to the early second century, their participants, Roman citizens and members of allied communities, acquired Latin rights, modeled on those possessed by members of Rome’s former Latin neighbors (who had become citizens following the suppression of their revolt). After the Hannibalic War, however, new colonists retained or were granted Roman citizenship. Citizens of the earlier Latin colonies enjoyed a privileged status vis-a-vis ordinary socii, which linked them closely to Rome and made them among the Republic’s most dependable allies. They enhanced Rome’s military potential by perhaps somewhat fewer than 150,000 men. Those who elected to participate in any of these colonial foundations were men who lacked adequate farms on which to support themselves and their families. Colonies thus to some extent prevented the creation of a class of landless citizens and allies who were unable to pay taxes or serve in the army (since at Rome as in the classical Greek poleis a minimum amount of wealth was required to qualify for infantry or cavalry service), while those who remained behind were spared the need to divide their holdings among too many heirs. As the result of these policies of colonization, alliance building,
And the extension of citizenship, when Rome finally did face a comparatively prolonged military crisis during the early and middle years of the Hannibalic War, it was able to muster the overwhelming numbers of soldiers from among its citizens and its Latin allies as well as other allies that it needed to suppress revolts, prevent more, and gradually wear Hannibal down by attrition.
Rome’s hegemony in Italy as well as its large citizenry also supplied much of financing for war.12 Rome’s allies paid the troops they contributed to the Republic’s armies (although Rome provided grain rations for these troops at no charge), while the size of the Republic’s citizen body meant that the financial burdens Rome’s wars imposed on its own population were also widely distributed. More importantly, as Rome began to acquire control of territories outside of the Italian peninsula, first the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, later in Spain, southern France, North Africa, and large parts of the Greek East, it imposed a tax in money or grain on the provincials but did not require soldiers from them on a regular basis as it did from the Latin and Italian socii. These areas contributed substantial sums to the Roman treasury both in the short run, as war reparations following their initial subjugation, and over the long term as Rome gradually imposed regular taxation, which further eased the financial burdens that were imposed on Roman citizens. However, the Republic depended on the cooperation of local figures or institutions or on private companies of Romans and Italians for provincial tax collection. And as in Italy, provincial administration was minimal. Although powerful ruling dynasties were eliminated, the cities of their former kingdoms largely governed themselves and administered their own hinterlands. The governors dispatched from Rome exercised only a very general supervision, serving as judges in certain court cases, ensuring that the cities adhered to the terms of their treaties, and maintaining order in their provinces.
The Republic, like the warring states of China, was able to mobilize the mass armies that fought its battles by offering incentives to those it conscripted in order to secure their willing compliance and their enthusiastic participation in combat. Initially, these incentives seem to have taken the form of political rights. Even before the establishment of the Republic, when Rome was still governed by a monarchy, King Servius Tullius’s creation of the comitia centuriata in the mid-sixth century in connection with the establishment of a new type of army based on an enlarged body of citizens gave all those whom he expected to participate in future wars a voice in decisions about whether to go to war and when to make peace. With the establishment of the Republic, the comitia centuriata also acquired the right to select those who would lead Rome’s armies. And according to many, although not all, scholars of the early Republic, the plebeians’ threat to refuse military service at times when the city was in grave danger from its
Neighbors forced a variety of concessions from Rome’s patrician rulers.70 These included the fundamental citizen right of provocatio, that is, appeal to the judgment of the people from a magistrate’s capital sentence; recognition of the power of the tribunes of the plebs to offer protection against arbitrary arrest and punishment by magistrates; a voice in the conduct of the res publica via an assembly known as the concilium plebis; the abolition of enslavement for debt; and a major alteration in the composition of the ruling class itself as a consequence of the opening up of the chief magistracies and priesthoods to wealthy men of plebeian stock. After the first quarter of the third century, however, political concessions to the citizens by the Republic’s rulers grew much less frequent. Such concessions, one may suppose, were always distasteful to the aristocracy since they limited in one way or another their power in the state and over its citizens, but Rome’s rulers had little choice since the military situation made granting them imperative. A change in the military situation, however, made possible a shift in the kinds of concessions Rome’s rulers were prepared to grant in exchange for ordinary citizens’ military service.
The Republic’s great victory at Sentinum in 295 b. c.e. broke the back of a grand coalition of its principal enemies in Italy, the Samnites, Etruscans, and Gauls, and a rising of the former in connection with Pyrrhus’s victories in 280-279 b. c.e. was brutally suppressed following Rome’s defeat of the Epriot king in 275 b. c.e. Thereafter, no Italian opponent ever again posed a serious threat to the Republic, and it is possible that this far less threatening situation in the peninsula made aristocrats much less ready to grant political rights and powers to ordinary Roman citizens. However, it may also be true that for the latter the prospect of a greater voice in the community’s decision-making processes or increasingly well-defined civil rights grew less attractive to them, since the territorial expansion of the Republic and the attendant dispersal of the citizen body over an increasingly wide area made civic and political rights, which for the most part could only be exercised at Rome itself, of little immediate value. Instead, what may have come to matter far more to ordinary Romans were opportunities for personal advancement through warfare. After battles generals regularly paraded their legions and presented decorations to foot-soldiers and cavalrymen who had displayed exceptional gallantry by risking their lives above and beyond the call of duty. These awards, like the ranks of Chinese warring states, enhanced the social and particularly the religious status of those who won them. As Polybius reports, only these sorts of decorations were permitted to be worn in religious processions. Spoils taken from an enemy killed in man-to-man combat were hung up outside the victors’ houses. They served as permanent markers in civilian life of the prestige a soldier had won at war, for the spoils remained in place even after a house changed owners.71 But an even more powerful incentive was the prospect of loot. As early as 264 b. c.e., the consuls could incite voters in the comitia centuriata to approve the dispatch of forces to relieve the Mamertines in Sicily by pointing out “the great benefit in the way of plunder which each and every one would evidently derive” from the war, as Polybius puts it, undoubtedly drawing on the early Roman historian Fabius Pictor.72 And nearly a century later, volunteers flocked to Rome when the consuls were levying an army for the war against Perseus because they had seen that those who had served in the previous two wars in the East had come back rich.73 When after the defeat of Perseus at Pydna the Roman general Aemilius Paullus disappointed them in their hopes of rich plunder from the Macedonian royal treasury, these soldiers came very close to denying him a triumph.74 By contrast, thirty years later, when Rome was waging difficult wars in Spain that offered little prospect for booty, recruits were notoriously reluctant to come forward.75 In addition, some, though by no means all, veterans could expect to receive allotments in the colonies that the senate from time to time founded in Italy to secure Rome’s hegemony. In the distribution of these material rewards, the troops of Rome’s Italian allies apparently shared on equal terms with the Republic’s citizens.
Because Rome was able to marshal the money and manpower it needed to meet the military challenges it faced in establishing its empire without having to create an extensive state apparatus in order to extract the resources required, other factors were able to play the decisive role in determining how the Republic’s administrative institutions developed—or rather failed to. Chief among these were the needs of Rome’s ruling aristocracy to protect its corporate interest in preserving its supremacy in the state and in ensuring its cohesion. The most striking difference between the governments of China’s warring states and the Roman Republic is of course the absence of a monarchy in the latter. The importance of a monarch for Roman state formation is clear in the role that is attributed to King Servius Tullius in creating several of the key institutions of the Republic during the mid-sixth century b. c.e.: a new type of army, an enlarged citizen body, and the assembly of the centuries.76 Once the monarchy fell around 509 b. c.e., the aristocracy that took power sought to ensure that no one of their number ever gained similar monarchic power again. Collegiality in office and one-year terms were the most important checks on individual magistrates’ ability to accumulate and exercise power, but the senate’s refusal to countenance the creation of any sort of professional bureaucracy, although justified ideologically by the aristocratic ethos of public service, also in effect worked to preclude the establishment of an institution that could rival its authority in the state and serve as an instrument of domination by a would-be monarch.
Yet the tension between the senate’s practice of collective leadership of the state and the exigent demands that war could impose was never resolved. It was reflected structurally in the institution of the dictatorship. During the fourth and third centuries, military emergencies often led to the appointment of a dictator, who had full and unconstrained power in order to deal with the crisis. However, dictators served only for six months, not the year that other magistrates normally held office, and this limitation reflected the deep suspicion within the aristocracy of concentrating too much power in the hands of any one of its members. Ideologically, the need to keep such power within bounds was expressed in legends of idealized heroes like Cincinnatus, who was summoned from his farm and appointed dictator to save a Roman army that the enemy had trapped. Once he had accomplished his mission, however, Cincinnatus laid down his office and returned to his plow a mere fifteen days after leaving it.77 For most of the Republic’s history, the tension between the need for effective military leadership in a crisis and the danger this could pose to the aristocracy’s collective rule was obviated by the deep reserves of military power that Rome could bring to bear along with a highly effective tactical system of infantry combat (on which, see below). Together, these factors secured victory regularly enough to permit the practice of placing command in the hands of politically successful members of the aristocracy, even if they had evinced little prior aptitude for generalship or had even led Roman armies to defeat. Military efficiency, in other words, yielded to the need to distribute high public offices and bestow honor widely among the aristocracy in order to foster cohesion among its members and prevent one or a few individuals from dominating public life at Rome by virtue of their repeated success on the battlefield.78 79
The primacy of politics over war in Roman state formation continued when a monarchy was reestablished in the late first century b. c.e.22 Civil war had engulfed most of the Roman world between 49 and 31 b. c.e., although fighting was not continuous. These wars were ended by Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who subsequently established a long-lasting rule in 27 b. c.e. that became the basis for imperial government over the ensuing centuries. In doing so, Augustus created the germ of the administrative and financial bureaucracy that would form the institutional backbone of that government. He also altered the Roman military,
Substituting long-service professionals for the conscripted citizen-soldiers of the Republic. His aim in undertaking this latter reform was not to increase military effectiveness but to secure his own hold on power. Augustus had come to dominate Rome by gaining the loyalty of armies nominally under the authority of the senate or his rivals, and these had enabled him not only to survive the deadly struggles of the period but eventually overcome all opposition. By substituting professional soldiers for conscripts, he sought to secure the loyalty of these troops to himself and his family in order to ensure that no potential challenger to his rule would be able to gain control of military forces sufficient to overthrow him. Augustus therefore took responsibility for paying each legionary a substantial bonus upon his discharge, and he retained nominal command of nearly all legions, exercising day-to-day authority through lieutenants. Soldiers therefore took an annual oath of allegiance to him personally, and in his name decorations and money donatives were awarded after successful campaigns. These practices were continued by all subsequent emperors.23
Yet these changes came at a time when the external military dangers threatening Rome’s empire were virtually nil. Augustus’s reign did witness a continuation of the regular, large-scale warfare that had characterized the Republic as Augustus sought to enlarge his empire, but thereafter down to the later second century c. e., Rome was at war much less frequently and, except for relatively brief periods, on a far less extensive scale. Yet despite this slackening in the pace and intensity of warfare, the imperial bureaucracy at this time enjoyed a long period of sustained development and growth. Augustus’s aim in his administrative measures was simply to increase his ability to control the vast empire he had won without having to depend too heavily on an aristocracy of whose loyalty he could not be certain. Politically, his position was somewhat fragile, despite his success in destroying his military rivals, for he could not rule effectively without at least the tacit support of a senatorial aristocracy that had a visceral hatred of monarchy and of whom at least some considered themselves as worthy of supremacy as Augustus. Consequently, he went to great lengths to mask the reality of his monarchy behind a facade of claims to have “restored the Republic.” Rather than create an obvious administrative apparatus staffed with his appointees, which would have smacked of royalty, he instead turned to his personal household slaves and freedmen to help him manage the vast quantity of administrative and financial business that now came within his purview. He also began to use men from the wealthy but nonsenatorial equestrian class as his agents in the provinces. Subsequently, as the position of emperor came to be accepted as permanent, emperors expanded these practices, eventually creating a formal structure of administrative departments in the palace with fixed responsibilities. Over time, emperors were able to draw the upper classes increasingly into collaboration in imperial rule, and consequently the social status of those who filled the positions within the palace bureaucracy as well as the provincial administration rose dramatically, until they comprised those from the top of the social hierarchy rather than the bottom.80 The needs of war were responsible for very little of this.
However, these administrative reforms were by no means as thoroughgoing as those in the Chinese warring states, as the ad hoc nature of imperial provincial administration demonstrates.81 Some provinces were technically under the control of the senate, an institution that emperors preserved from the Republican era although remade so that it was completely subservient to the emperors’ wishes. Members of the senate governed these provinces, yet these governors were in effect imperial appointees because of the emperors’ ability to control the decisions of the senate. Other provinces the emperors governed directly through lieutenants (legati or procuratores), while increasingly large portions of the empire came to be owned by the office of the emperor. These areas, too, were controlled by imperial appointees (also termed procurators). Where China, under the constant stress of war, developed a cadre of professional civil servants who were eventually appointed through a rigorous examination system and were quite distinct from the old Zhou nobility, Rome’s civil administration remained socially much like the Republic’s. The senatorial class filled the top positions in the imperial bureaucracy (although nearly all of the leading families during the Republic had disappeared from the senate’s ranks by the end of the first century c. e., and new families had risen to prominence) and holders of lesser posts were drawn from the wealthy equestrian class. No objective system of evaluation of an individual senator’s or equestrian’s qualifications for a post existed; rather birth and patronage were the keys to securing both the magistracies that were prerequisite to appointment to the top positions within the imperial administration and those positions themselves as well as any other.82 Likewise, there is no evidence of the kind of far-reaching social and economic engineering that Qin put in place. At most, one can point to a limited number of colonial foundations under the empire that imposed uniform survey grids on the countryside surrounding them according to which allotments were apportioned among the settlers. For the most part the administration’s reach did not extend to the local level, but, as under the Republic, the central government depended on the cooperation of local elites to collect taxes and execute its directives. Under Rome’s first emperor, the census was extended to his provincial subjects along with Roman citizens in order to establish the liability of the former to taxation. However,
There was no attempt at this stage to impose a uniform system of laws or governmental institutions throughout the empire. Those who lived under Roman rule enjoyed a wide variety of legal statuses and institutional arrangements (although this was more pronounced in the eastern half of the empire than in the west, where the imperial government founded a number of cities and so was able to impose much more institutional uniformity on their internal arrangements).
2. War and the Ruling Class
War was as integral to the identity and legitimacy of the Roman aristocracy under the Republic as it was for the Zhou nobility before and during the Spring and Autumn era. Down to the early first century b. c.e., no Roman aristocrat could run for political office until he had completed ten years of military service, and a reputation for courage and the glory obtained from extraordinary feats of arms represented a strong commendation in the eyes of the voters for election to magistracies.83 This link between military and political success arose from two factors. The first was an aristocratic ideology that elevated service to the state above all else and made it the paramount source of personal prestige; the second was simply the fact that during most of the Republic’s history the most critical issue confronting the state was war. Naturally, therefore, leadership in war and the victories Rome’s generals won came to constitute far and away the greatest services to the state and so the richest source of glory and renown. Those who had bestowed such benefits upon the Republic enjoyed enormous authority in the conduct of public business by virtue of them. This nexus between war, personal prestige, and political influence is often thought to have been a critical element in the Republic’s bellicosity between the fourth and the first centuries b. c.e., although the matter is controversial.84 Yet even in the first century, when other sources of personal prestige were increasing in importance, the cachet of military glory remained strong, and the Republic’s armies continued to be led by members of the senatorial class. The closest thing to a class of military experts at Rome in this period was the viri militates (“military men”), aristocrats who served frequently in positions of subordinate command. But they were in no sense professional soldiers; they were merely members of the political class who competed for the same high public offices and political influence that other senators did. Their strategy was simply to focus their efforts primarily on military achievement, the traditional source of glory at Rome, rather than the kinds of endeavors like forensic oratory or expertise in the law that had recently come to take their places alongside a military reputation as sources of prestige at Rome.
The primacy of political over strictly military needs manifested itself on a tactical level as well.29 The system of rotational command of armies has been alluded to above: the Republic’s chief magistrates, the two consuls, were selected by the Roman voters and served only for a single year. Reelection became progressively rarer between 300 and c.151 b. c.e., when it was outlawed altogether (although exceptions were occasionally made). This system meant that generals who had demonstrated real aptitude for command only rarely got the chance to lead armies a second time. The men who succeeded them might have had considerable experience as soldiers during their twenties, but thereafter the offices they held were mainly civilian in character. They came to the task of leading their armies untested in the exercise of overall command. It is not surprising, therefore, that Roman infantry tactics, based on legions arrayed in maniples, remained largely unchanged during the Republic. Even the shift from legions organized by maniples to one drawn up by cohorts represented mainly a refinement of the earlier technique. The Roman tactical system had to be straightforward enough to be mastered by a general who had never exercised overall command of an army before (even though previous experience might have shown him how the system worked.) The manipular legions were highly effective in combat, as the Republic’s many victories attest, and the legions organized into cohorts that succeeded them were even more so, so there was little incentive to change. As a consequence, the expectation of success in battle on the basis of a proven tactical system simply reinforced the tendency to give priority to the political needs of the aristocracy rather than emphasize experience and demonstrated success in selecting generals at Rome.
This republican integration of civilian and military leadership within its aristocracy carried over into the empire, in keeping with the claim of Augustus to have “restored the Republic.” Because emperors determined who held the highest public offices, aristocrats who sought them were forced to become their collaborators in order to obtain these honors, which they needed in order to validate the elite social status they had inherited or to which they aspired. Although overall command of Rome’s armies was now vested in the emperor himself, in practice day-to-day command of the legions was in the hands of imperial appointees, also termed legati, who were drawn from the ranks of those senators who had been allowed to hold the higher public magistracies. These men were no more military specialists than their Republican predecessors had been. They had typically held a variety of lower civilian and military posts prior to appointment as a legate of a single legion or a group of two or three legions. What secured these positions was, first, loyalty to the reigning emperor and, second, the patronage of those with influence with the emperor or the personal friendship of the emperor himself
(although obvious incompetence would not have been tolerated). Behind this, however, lay an aristocratic ideology carried over from the Republic that held that an aristocrat’s innate personal qualities, especially his individual excellence or virtus, were what enabled him to lead in either a civilian or a military capacity, not any special training or talent.85
The integration of civil and military administration at Rome was reflected in the position of the emperor himself. Roman emperors were commanders in chief of all military forces—not simply in name but often in fact. When major wars had to be fought, emperors frequently took the field at the head of their forces, even if they did not usually lead troops into battle and relied on others to handle the strategic, tactical, and logistical details of their campaigns. When emperors were not present in person, overall command in such cases rested with close relatives, usually sons and successors. Victories were ascribed to an emperor’s personal divine spirit or genius, and all were celebrated in his name, even if he had not been present. Indeed, the title of emperor derives from imperator, an accolade bestowed upon a victorious general by his troops under the Republic. The difference with the advent of the monarchy was that now there was only one imperator in place of the several aristocrats who might previously have laid claim to that title. Military prestige was in turn crucial in constructing the ideological foundations of imperial rule. The republican notion that service to the state was the basis for political authority and leadership was made to serve the ends of monarchy through the emperors’ monopoly over such benefits. And since victory in war still represented, as it had under the Republic, the paramount service to Rome, each victory an emperor’s armies won became a further confirmation of the legitimacy of his rule.86
Relations between the civilian elite and military leaders in Warring States China stand in sharp contrast to the situation at Rome.87 There the destruction of the Zhou nobility during the wars of the Spring and Autumn period and the rise of warfare involving mass armies that required a very different set of skills than individual fighting prowess opened the way for the creation of a class of military specialists. These men were commoners and professionals, like their counterparts in the bureaucracy. And like them, military commanders owed their positions to training and demonstrated competence. They not only commanded the armies of the warring states but were often the authors of theoretical works on warfare, such as Sunzi’s The Art of War. Indeed, the ability to command successfully came to be associated with mastery of a body of such texts rather than a general’s innate personal capabilities. This literature stressed not only discipline in managing mass armies but trickery and deceit in the conduct of military operations, the ability to penetrate an enemy’s stratagems and to mask one’s own. Whereas at Rome the ability to win military victories formed the basis for authority in the civilian sphere, in China this approach to strategy and tactics put warfare at odds with the basis of a ruler’s legitimacy. As Lewis puts it, “The prince, whether as the moral exemplar of the Confucians or the distributor of rewards and punishments of the Legalists, could only rule if his commands were trustworthy, so the deceit and trickery that defined the Way of the commanders undercut the foundations of the Way of the ruler.”88 To resolve this dilemma, some Chinese philosophers argued that war and the military constituted a realm separate and distinct from the civilian world, so that what was acceptable and necessary there did not impinge upon the ruler. Consequently, they argued, commanders in the field could not be controlled by rulers and to attempt to do so would lead to disaster. The ruler, when he formally invested a general with his command by ceremoniously handing him an ax in the ruler’s ancestral temple, at the same time granted him absolute and autonomous authority during his conduct of the campaign. To further underscore that separation, the army itself used clothing, language, and rituals that were distinct from the civilian world.
However, this position was strongly opposed by scholars of both the Legalist and Confucian schools, who insisted on “the unquestioned supremacy of a ruler who upheld the social order through proper laws or appropriate rituals.”89 This premise led each school, for different reasons, to deny the propriety of and need for a separate military sphere governed by its own distinct sorts of rules. Their arguments in either case began with the assertion that a virtuous ruler at the head of a properly constituted state had no need of the clever stratagems and trickery that military writers insisted that war required. For the Confucians and the Legalists alike, the conduct of war was merely an aspect of social relations: “A properly governed people was the basis of military power. . . the virtues of the ruler manifested in governmental policies led to success on the battlefield just as they did within the walls of the capital.”90 For the Confucians, that meant a state characterized by harmony between the ruler and his subjects and one in which a proper hierarchy existed among them. Since the army was identical with the people, the proper hierarchy and formations within the army would arise naturally out of a properly ordered society. Soldiers would be linked by the same ties of obedience and affection that united families. For the Legalists, on the other hand, “the army was the primary form of organizing the people, so the techniques that preserved social order also maintained discipline in the army, and no separate military arts were needed.”91 The consequence of this line of thought was to deemphasize the role of the military specialists who had emerged during the Warring States period, to identify the military with civil society, and—as at Rome—to characterize the ruler as the natural leader of both. This line of thinking gradually prevailed and ultimately profoundly affected military command during the Han and later dynasties.
[F]or the philosophers who asserted that the social order depended on the trustworthiness of the ruler in his rituals or punishments, the claims to autonomy of an art [i. e., of command] based on manipulation and deceit were clearly unacceptable. This tension is reflected in the history of the Han officer corps, where powerful, semi-independent commanders of the military elite of the civil war and early decades were gradually supplanted by agents of the court with no military experience, and military command ultimately became the province of imperial affines and courtiers chosen for their obedience rather than their skill. The triumph of apologists for autocracy over the claims of expertise initiated both the long-term devaluation of military command in China and the emergent ideal of the literary man who was able when necessary to bring his general skills to bear on military command.92
This culture of antimilitarism was made possible to a considerable degree because for several centuries following the foundation of the empire by Qin in 221 b. c.e. and then, after a period of civil war, the establishment of the Han dynasty, China did not face a military challenge on its borders that seriously threatened its existence. At this time, the empire’s most potent opponents were the Xiongnu, nomadic horse-archers living on the steppe north of China.93 Their mobility and fire-power presented an insurmountable tactical challenge to the Qin and early Han empires’ slow moving infantry armies, and the fact that the livelihood of the Xiongnu depended exclusively on flocks that could be easily and quickly moved when danger threatened made them economically invulnerable to any military campaign that China could mount. Because the steppe was too arid to support the agriculture that was the essential economic basis for Chinese society, the empire could not hold captured territory by establishing colonies of peasants to support garrisons of soldiers, while the cost of transporting food and other necessities from the center to large concentrations of troops on the periphery proved to be prohibitively expensive. However, despite the military strength of the Xiongnu, they never represented a serious threat to the imperial government’s existence. China’s much larger population dwarfed their numbers, but more importantly, the central aim of the Xiongnu rulers’ strategy was not to conquer Chinese territory—for the Xiongnu had no desire to become farmers— but to extract tribute from the empire. The position of the Xiongnu rulers depended upon their ability to redistribute the luxury goods they received from the Chinese emperors to their elite supporters and to force the emperors to open Chinese markets to ordinary Xiongnu in the frontier regions, where they could exchange their pastoral products for the grain and other goods from China that they could not grow or manufacture themselves. The Xiongnu state in effect was parasitic on its Chinese counterpart, for without a steady supply of luxury goods to pass along and the ability to provide access to the markets that supplied everyday items in demand among ordinary Xiongnu, a ruler would lose his support and his “empire” would fall apart. And despite the fact that buying peace from the Xiongnu was deeply distasteful to the imperial court and, during the reign of the Emperor Wudi (or Wu, r. 140-87 b. c.e.), despite a huge effort to defeat the Xiongnu through massive military campaigns and extensive colonization, in the end the cost and ultimate futility of attacking them made paying the Xiongnu not to raid Chinese territory the only acceptable option during the Former or Western Han era (206 b. c.e.-9 c. e.).39 Thus, a philosophical aversion to war and the military among Confucian and Legalist thinkers could flourish in China in large part because the situation on the empire’s northern frontier made a strong and effective military response there both unnecessary and ineffective.
Imperial China, therefore, like Rome during the Republic and under the first and second centuries of imperial rule, came to vest command in an elite whose entitlement to those positions arose from their personal qualities, cultural attainments, and relationship to the emperor rather than technical expertise or demonstrated talent for the conduct of war. Although the paths each took to reach this state of affairs were quite different in detail, they were to some extent similar in origin. In either case, the result arose from the demands of political power: in China, that meant upholding absolute supremacy of the ruler at the expense of military expertise, while at Rome a Republican form of government militated strongly against anything that could lead to the elevation of one aristocrat to a commanding position within the state, such as the ability to monopolize the personal glory that accrued from victory because of a superior aptitude for leadership in war. At Rome, too, any aristocrat who had demonstrated the requisite personal qualities was considered fit to lead an army, a presumption that was carried through into the empire by emperors who ruled through the active collaboration of a tame senatorial class that still sought honor through service to the state. However, in each case objective conditions made this development possible, especially the situation on the frontiers. Neither the Han rulers 94 nor Rome’s emperors for most of the first two centuries of their rule faced dire military threats from beyond their borders. Hence, each could assign command on the basis of criteria other than training, skill, and experience at little cost to the empire’s military position.
3. War and State Formation II
The changed nature of the military threat facing the Qin dynasty and its successor, the Han, also culminated in the abolition of mass armies and the system of universal male conscription upon which they depended under the Eastern Han dynasty (23-220 c. e.) in 30-31 c. e.40 The large infantry armies of the Warring States era had been developed to combat similar armies fielded by the various Chinese states contending for power during that period. Once Qin had overcome its rivals and established China’s first universal empire, the need for warfare against other Chinese armies vanished, save for periods of civil war like those that brought about the fall of Qin in 206 and the establishment of the Han dynasty in its place in 202. But these outbreaks were rare thereafter, and consequently the need for mass armies and universal military service disappeared. Instead, the military focus under the Han shifted to the northern frontier and the Xiongnu, against whom, as noted above, mass infantry armies were largely ineffective. Defense against this sort of highly mobile enemy required long-service garrisons to protect distant frontiers and, ideally, armies of mounted archers that could meet the Xiongnu on their own terms. In his efforts to conquer them, the Emperor Wudi began to remake the imperial army, employing large corps of mounted troops as well as professional soldiers during his campaigns.95 96 However, since horses cannot easily be raised in the great river valleys that formed the Chinese heartland owing to unsuitable environmental conditions, emperors had to seek horses and horsemen in the north, and this meant that the best soldiers with which to combat the Xiongnu were other Xiongnu. Eastern Han emperors began therefore to employ tribes of southern Xiongnu, who had lost out in a civil war against their northern cousins and who subsequently surrendered to the emperor to oppose the latter.
World History
