Rome at Its Height: The Machine of Empire and the Cracks in It

The idea

The exam's questions on the Empire test its parts, and the anchor presents the parts as one machine that ran for two centuries and then showed its cracks. Start with the engine. Augustus built a professional army, twenty years' service, regular pay, a bonus and land, sworn to him and not to the Republic, and he built a civil service to pay it, replacing tax farmers with salaried officials. The army held the frontiers, the Rhine and Danube after Teutoburg in nine, Hadrian's Wall, the Euphrates against Parthia, and it did more than hold them. Auxiliaries served twenty-five years and became citizens; provincial elites learned Latin and gained office; aqueducts, baths and roads followed within a generation; and the provinces became Roman by service and by stone. Add the fuel. Roman law ran everywhere a citizen went, and Caracalla made almost everyone a citizen in two twelve. Roads, a common language and the Pax Romana let goods move from Spain to Mesopotamia, and the anchor calls the productivity unmatched until the seventeenth century, a claim it owns. Now the cracks, which the anchor sets in the same chapter. The emperor's relation to law was never defined, so the machine depended on the man; it worked under Augustus and Trajan and failed under Caligula and Commodus, and after sixty-nine everyone knew that armies, not families, made emperors. Succession by adoption ran only while emperors had no sons, and ended with Marcus Aurelius's. Wealth sat with a one percent whose fortunes grew eight times while nothing new was made, and slavery, the anchor says, stifled innovation; as conquest stopped, slaves grew scarce and free farmers sank into coloni. Silk and pepper drained gold east. And beyond the Euphrates stood Parthia, then the Sasanians, an enemy Rome fought for centuries without winning. Two thirty-five is where the machine breaks, and the next unit begins there.