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immediate rewards of loot and plunder, but subject populations represented the most durable and sustainable dividends of an
    imperial conquest. In time, most eventually developed new methods
    of resisting central authority, but the Romans were particularly adept
    Roman
    Britain 23
    at creating sustainable bureaucratic systems to draw this process out
    and make the most effi cient use of their enormous subject population.
    From the top down, these institutions seem rational and relatively
    benign, but in reality it took intimidation, naked force, and institutionalized slavery to produce all the grand monuments and cultural
    achievements of the ancient world.
    Popular histories of Rome ignore these realities because Roman
    subjects are largely missing from the historical record. Ancient historians and geographers such as Strabo, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius,
    and Zosimus provide rich and colorful accounts of Roman empire
    building, but their descriptions of the “barbarians” who became the
    subjects of the empire cannot be taken at face value. Concerned primarily with domestic issues, classical authors used the empire as a
    backdrop for critiques of Roman politics and society. Epigraphs, legal
    texts, bronze copies of discharge diplomas, and census data help to
    contextualize and correct the classical historians. Archaeology is also
    particularly helpful because it shows how people actually lived rather
    than what others said about them. But many archaeologists are drawn
    to grand monuments and stately villas, and too few pay attention to
    the Roman conquest’s violence and disruption. Consequently, simple
    farmsteads and urban dwellings remain largely unexamined.
    There is therefore no comprehensive picture of what it meant to
    be a common Roman subject. A careful reading of the ancient historians in fact suggests that the Romans themselves knew very little
    about the peoples of the empire, regardless of how long they ruled
    them. Indeed, it is almost certain that Roman offi cials and tax collectors were no more successful in governing captive territory directly
    than their more modern successors were.
    This fogginess surrounding the realities of the Roman past
    allowed succeeding generations of historians and theorists to follow
    Tacitus and Cassius Dio in reinterpreting the Roman Empire to speak
    to contemporary concerns. In the early modern Andes, Spanish conquerors used Roman imperial analogies to understand and govern the
    conquered Inkan Empire. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
    Roman Empire voiced worries about the decline of the fi rst British
    Empire in the late eighteenth century. A century later, late Victorian
    and Edwardian imperial enthusiasts imagined themselves the heirs of
    a grand imperial Rome that had uplifted their Iron Age ancestors.2
    24 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    As the dominant force in the ancient world for more than fi ve
    centuries, Rome exemplifi ed imperial power and became a yardstick
    for westerners to measure the empires that succeeded it. The Roman
    Empire was therefore a blank slate. Variously, the Rome of Cicero
    and Virgil stood for high culture, Caesar’s assassination was a triumph of republican virtues, Augustus’s principate embodied imperial greatness, and the excesses of Caligula and Nero were cautionary
    tales about the corrupting infl uences of imperial power.3 Rome thus
    is the starting point for today’s debates over the nature and effi cacy
    of empire building.
    In contrast to the liberal western empires of the twentieth century that pretended to govern in the interests of their subjects, the
    Romans made no apology for expanding imperium Romanum by
    violence and conquest. They also did not initially see any incompatibility between empire building and their democratic institutions. It
    was actually the Roman republic that built the imperium Romanum .
    Invoking Rome’s destiny for universal rule, the republican statesman
    Cicero declared in 56 b.c. that “it has now