What is an Empire?: Rome and the Greeks after 188 B.C.

Interstate politics in the ancient Mediterranean was for centuries what political scientists term a multipolar anarchy—a world consisting of a plurality of independent states all contending with each other for survival and hegemony. The most successful of these was of course Rome. But did the tremendous victories of 201, 196 and 188 B.C.—over Carthage and then Macedon and then Syria—mean that Rome established an empire in the eastern Mediterranean? This is asserted by some modern scholars—that the Roman Republic established an empire in the Greek East from 188 B.C.¹ I will argue differently here. The emergence of Rome as a true imperial metropole was haphazard and long-delayed. After the defeat of Carthage, Macedon and the Seleucid Empire, Rome by 188 had certainly achieved what political scientists term “unipolarity”: in the Mediterranean state-system the preponderance of power was now in the hands of a single entity.² But does the emergence of even great interstate asymmetry of power equal the establishment of an “empire”? This is the complicated question I will address.

The modern study of empire began as the study of legal structures of administration, and if one restricts oneself to legal structures there are no ambiguities: either you are in the empire, administered directly by the metropole, or you are not.³ In our period, the Roman Republic had such a formal-legal empire, in the form of four provinces ruled directly by Roman governors and garrisoned by Roman troops—but only in the West: the provinces of Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, Nearer Spain, and Further Spain. These provinces had emerged as by-products of Rome’s wars with Carthage, and were created primarily for strategic reasons, as a way to prevent the recovery by a (temporarily) defeated enemy of valuable resources and bases of operations.⁴ But in the Greek world east of the Adriatic, such formal Roman rule did not exist in 188 B.C. And did not emerge for another half-century. From a legal-administrative perspective, the answer in the East to our question is clearly: No.⁵

But many modern scholars of course do not limit the term “empire” to a situation of formal-legal apparatus of subordination and administration. They underline instead a broader concept of empire: the “effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by an imperial society.”⁶ This is the theory of “informal empire.” The most detailed theory of informal empire is that of Michael Doyle. Examination of Doyle’s schema will help us in conceptualizing and categorizing the political situation as it existed in the Greek East after 188 B.C. And this examination is necessary, because there are real dangers of misunderstanding when one leaps to use the term “empire” as if it means simple gross inequality of power.

Doyle argues that any situation that is less than one state’s effective political control over a subordinate state’s internal as well as its external policies, a control that can be achieved (to be sure) either through formal or informal means, is not empire.⁷ When a metropole controls continuously the foreign relations of weaker neighbors, but not their internal structures or politics, Doyle describes this as “hegemony.” When a metropole desires neither to interfere in weaker states’ internal structures or politics, nor to control continuously their foreign relations, but merely to establish certain limits on those foreign relations, Doyle describes this less oppressive situation as a “sphere of influence.” He emphasizes that proper political analysis requires one to distinguish each of these situations carefully not only from empire, but also from each other; they are not the same.⁸ But in historical reality it is not as easy as in political-science theory to distinguish each of these stations along the spectrum of increasing subordination—i.e., to separate historically a situation of “sphere of influence” from one of “hegemony” from one of (informal) “empire.” This is because the geopolitical situations that exist in the actual world are both highly-complex and constantly shifting, and tend to blur...