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fi nally come about that the
    limits of our empire and of the earth are one and the same.” This view
    continued into the imperial era. Augustus bragged that Rome controlled the world, and the poet Virgil had Jupiter sanctify the empire
    in the Aeneid : “For these [Romans] I place neither physical bounds
    nor temporal limits; I have given empire without end.”4
    Yet the Romans were by no means as self-assured as these boastful quotes suggest. They actually acquired most of their territory
    in piecemeal, almost accidental fashion. Claudius’s planned invasion of Britain was an exception. Almost universally, the Romans of
    the post-Augustus era were more concerned with stability and control than with expansion for its own sake. Moreover, they needed
    allies to exercise power at the local level. In this sense, the imperium
    Romanum was actually an administrative grid imposing control on
    an enormously diverse range of local polities and cultures. Strength
    alone was not enough to consign an entire population to permanent
    subjecthood, and so the Romans shared power with useful local elites
    to govern the larger subject majority. Like all of the empires that
    came after it, the Roman Empire established its authority through
    militarism and terror, but it needed these partners and intermediaries
    to actually rule.
    Roman
    Britain 25
    The Romans were generally more open to easing the line between
    citizen and subject than their successors in later empires. At a time
    when identities were highly fl uid and fl exible, Roman elites were
    usually willing to accept any person of status as Roman provided
    he or she spoke Latin and embraced Roman culture. The Senate was
    quite generous in granting citizenship to friends and allies during the
    republican era, and the emperors continued this practice to the point
    where Caracalla bestowed blanket citizenship on all residents of the
    empire in a.d. 212. Those who prefer to imagine the Roman Empire
    as a civilizing force cite this mass enfranchisement as evidence of its
    benevolence, but it is more likely that Caracalla’s concession was a
    pragmatic acknowledgment that the boundaries of true subjecthood
    had blurred to the point where the Roman Empire was actually no
    longer an imperial institution by strict defi nition.
    In other words, if empire is the direct and authoritarian rule of
    one group of people by another, then Rome ceased to be truly imperial when it turned its subjects into offi cially recognized Romans.
    The Roman state certainly exploited its lower orders, but Caracalla’s action suggests that the respectable and military classes of the
    empire had become so romanized that the distinction between citizen and subject no longer mattered at the elite level. This universal
    enfranchisement must have tempered the extractive power of the
    state and may have contributed to the fi nancial crisis that beset the
    later Roman Empire.
    The Romans’ assimilationist policies were possible in part because
    modern conceptions of race did not apply. They did not conceive of
    “Romanness” in terms of race or blood, but they had a strong sense
    of their own distinct identity and considered themselves inherently
    superior to everyone who did not share their culture and morality.
    While they inherited the Greek perception of foreigners as barbarians, they also borrowed freely from subject cultures even as they
    despised them. Confi dent of their superiority, the Romans assumed
    that “tribal” peoples became less virile and easier to handle once
    they embraced Roman culture. Assimilation was thus a coercive and
    administrative tool as well as an affi rmation of Roman preeminence.
    Contrary to modern assumptions, it did not convey blanket equality
    or release common people from the responsibility to serve the empire
    with their tribute and labor.5
    26 THE RULE OF EMPIRES
    For all their self-confi dence, Roman intellectuals were also profoundly anxious about the consequences of empire