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Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.
in a process unique in any pre-industrial empire, the inhabitants of those conquered territories, ‘provinces’ as Romans called them, were gradually given full Roman citizenship, and the legal rights and protections that went with it.
for many Roman slaves, particularly those working in urban domestic contexts rather than toiling in the fields or mines, it was not necessarily a life sentence. They were regularly given their freedom, or they bought it with cash they had managed to save up; and if their owner was a Roman citizen, then they also gained full Roman citizenship, with almost no disadvantages as against those who were freeborn.
Nor was ancient Roman religion particularly concerned with personal salvation or morality. Instead it mainly focused on the performance of rituals that were intended to keep the relationship between Rome and the gods in good order, and so ensure Roman success and prosperity.
One of the most famed plebeian victories came in 326 BCE, when the system of enslavement for debt was abolished, establishing the principle that the liberty of a Roman citizen was an inalienable right.
far more radical than anything to survive from classical democratic Athens, most of whose writers, when they had anything explicitly to say on the subject, were opposed to democracy and popular power.
arrangements made afterwards between the Romans and the various Latin communities. For these gave Roman citizenship to vast numbers of the defeated, in numerous towns throughout central Italy,
For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE).
In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city.
Throughout this period, somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year, a greater proportion than in any other pre-industrial state and, on the higher estimate, comparable to the call-up rate in World War I.
it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.
The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.
It was a coercive empire in the sense that the Romans took the profits and tried to ensure that they got their own way when they wanted, with the threat of force always in the background. It was not an empire of annexation in the sense that later Romans would understand it.
Gaius did not introduce a ‘corn dole’. To be precise, he successfully proposed a law to the Plebeian Assembly establishing that the state should sell a certain quantity of grain each month at a subsidised, fixed price to individual citizens in the city.
He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed.
Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage.
But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century.
Caesar was travelling with a battalion of no fewer than 2,000 soldiers as a guard and escort, which was an awful burden for even the most generous and tolerant host:
Roman marriage was, in essence, a simple and private business. Unlike in the modern world, the state played little part in it. In most cases a man and a woman were assumed to be married if they claimed that they were married, and they ceased to be married if they (or if one of them) claimed they no longer were.
It is clear, however, that Roman women in general had much greater independence than women in most parts of the classical Greek or Near Eastern world, limited as it must seem in modern terms.
one of the reforms of Augustus towards the end of the first century BCE or early in the next was to allow freeborn citizen women who had borne three children to be released from the requirement to have a guardian; ex-slaves had to have four to qualify.
Whatever the rumours and allegations, and whatever the status of the little boy whom Cleopatra had pointedly named Caesarion, Caesar had recognised no legitimate children.
His early record as Octavian was a mixture of sadism, scandal and illegality. He fought his way into Roman politics in 44 BCE, using a private army and tactics that were not far short of a coup. He went on to be jointly responsible for a ghastly pogrom on the model of Sulla’s proscriptions and, if Roman tradition is to be believed, to have plenty of blood, literally, on his hands.
But it is absolutely clear that, both at the time and even more so in retrospect, Augustus (as he was soon known) exploited the idea of a clash between his own deep-rooted, Roman, Western traditions and the ‘oriental’ excess that Antony and Cleopatra represented.
Augustus said, as Suetonius quotes him, ‘I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble,’
ancient cities were not zoned as modern cities are. Rich and poor lived side by side, large houses with many tiles sharing the same streets and districts with tiny hovels.
Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.
Most victims of crime would have relied on their own strong arms or friends, family or local vigilantes to get even with the person they believed responsible. There was no system for dealing effectively, through official channels, with ordinary wrongdoing, only a cycle of rough justice and brutal retaliation.
(in both ancient Greece and Rome, slaves were allowed to give legal evidence only under torture)
