What made Rome so dominant in the Mediterranean world and beyond was the fact that overwhelming armed force developed in tune with a sophisticated civic machinery: a mesh of state-of-the-art social, cultural, and legal systems that Romans considered to be virtuous in and of themselves. Whether or not they were right—and today we may well entertain our doubts about a society that heavily circumscribed the rights of millions of women and the poor, viciously persecuted dissenters from its norms, fetishized blood sport and other forms of civic violence, and depended
