Universal empires.

maybe it's up to the enemies of those two empires in question . America had the support of so many countries who felt they might be swallowed up the Russians ; maybe Romans were the only game in town when people felt they would get a worse deal from the Persians . And of course the exact opposite with people flocking to the Persians .

Pleads to foreign states to intervene in local wars were not rare. It is also how the Sicilian campaign begun, by one hellenised (but not a greek colony) state asking for athenian help.

I don't think it is as strange that some greek states/confederations asked of Rome to intervene as they did. What is far gloomier is how all the greek empires of the time managed to self-destruct by perpetual and massive wars. Bordering foreign states easily get involved in such things, even if they are far more barbaric, and power vacuum allows mayhem to happen, by which time you see even gauls invading south Greece.

Owen Glyndwr said:

Obligatory Guy Halsall plug:

Mouthwash, go read Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West. It's my single favorite history book and has informed a lot of what I personally want to study. A significant portion of the text is committed specifically to the Roman political system and how they managed various local elite groups. It'll be a good start for your question of how the Romans controlled so much land.

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Already on my list, thanks. Most of what I've know comes from Hellenistic reading, and Europa Barbarorum.

Dachs said:

In part this is because Rome didn't have foreign representatives on a regular basis. With the exception of Flamininus for a few years in Greece after the Battle of Kynoskephalai, the Romans didn't leave troops and officials behind or directly manage their spheres of influence. This actually caused the war between Antiokhos III and Rome. It took a few more decades for Rome's bizarre mixture of hands-off and hands-on policy to change into a more consistently applied hegemony.

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Spengler said that the Roman Empire wasn't conquered, but rather "the orbis terrarum condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name." His answer to why a state could grow in power and territory while tearing itself apart through civil strife is that, by the late Republic, the factions of the city really represented the factions of international society. The entity called Rome was simply the nexus by which power is wielded in the Mediterranean; if it had never existed something else would have filled the role.

This is my point: that only holds true if you ignore the people with little or no involvement and interest in Roman politics, like Persia, Africa (except a fairly narrow area around the coast and the Nile), most of Europe more than a few tens of miles beyond the Rhine and Danube, and so on. In other words, we define the Mediterranean world as 'that part of the world in the Roman sphere of influence', and then define Rome as 'that things which influenced the Mediterranean world'. It's circular. Bear in mind that Persian nobles came to Greece in 401 BC to persuade people to help them in their political causes; you can't imagine any of them coming to Rome to do the same thing.

I also don't buy the 'natural unity' argument - that the Mediterranean would have been united anyway, because it is a natural community of some kind. I think that's based in how the Romans saw themselves, particularly in the later period as it became increasingly obvious that 'the Roman Empire' as they wanted to think of it was in no way equivalent to the area in which the Roman state could exert force. Hence you end up with this quite vague, cultural idea of being 'Roman', which turns gradually into the idea of 'Christendom'. Note, for example, that the pre-conquest Greek words for 'Roman' and 'Greek' came to mean 'Christian' and 'Pagan' respectively.

Flying Pig said:

This is my point: that only holds true if you ignore the people with little or no involvement and interest in Roman politics, like Persia, Africa (except a fairly narrow area around the coast and the Nile), most of Europe more than a few tens of miles beyond the Rhine and Danube, and so on. In other words, we define the Mediterranean world as 'that part of the world in the Roman sphere of influence', and then define Rome as 'that things which influenced the Mediterranean world'. It's circular.

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I didn't define Rome to be such a thing. England isn't a part of the Mediterranean in any sense. A united Mediterranean polity may have had an interest in establishing its borders to the north, but considering the power disparity it doesn't really say much that Rome was able to take and keep territory there.

I also don't buy the 'natural unity' argument - that the Mediterranean would have been united anyway, because it is a natural community of some kind. I think that's based in how the Romans saw themselves, particularly in the later period as it became increasingly obvious that 'the Roman Empire' as they wanted to think of it was in no way equivalent to the area in which the Roman state could exert force. Hence you end up with this quite vague, cultural idea of being 'Roman', which turns gradually into the idea of 'Christendom'. Note, for example, that the pre-conquest Greek words for 'Roman' and 'Greek' came to mean 'Christian' and 'Pagan' respectively.

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You're confusing culture and geopolitics. My argument is that the Mediterranean was a 'natural community' of the latter, not the former.

For instance, native Egyptians probably had very little in common with Etruscans in Italy. But they both are on the same ocean, and therefore any Mediterranean power will not be able to ignore one or the other.

Large rivers always served as natural boundary. The borders of the Byz Empire never would go north of the Danube either. Nor were there ever any greek colonies north of the Danube (Crimea is another case, it is nowhere near the Danube and it is coastal; there were colonies there since antiquity). In fact that river was one of the most identifiable borders between classical civilization and barbarism.

Mouthwash said:

Spengler said that the Roman Empire wasn't conquered, but rather "the orbis terrarum condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name." His answer to why a state could grow in power and territory while tearing itself apart through civil strife is that, by the late Republic, the factions of the city really represented the factions of international society. The entity called Rome was simply the nexus by which power is wielded in the Mediterranean; if it had never existed something else would have filled the role.

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If the orbis terrarum was so innately conducive to the formation of such a community, why was that the case? And why did it never happen again after Rome? That explanation doesn't really answer any questions, it just changes the wording of the already extant questions.

Kyriakos said:

Large rivers always served as natural boundary. The borders of the Byz Empire never would go north of the Danube either. Nor were there ever any greek colonies north of the Danube (Crimea is another case, it is nowhere near the Danube and it is coastal; there were colonies there since antiquity). In fact that river was one of the most identifiable borders between classical civilization and barbarism.

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Rivers could serve as boundaries, but they were also transportation arteries. Furthermore, although the Rhine-Danube line was important to Rome in a variety of ways, it was not a stop line beyond which lay nothing but "Indian country". Roman rule continued, through the cultivation of pliant "allied" kings, through cultural and economic influence, through military recruitment initiatives, and through regular military campaigning to demonstrate dominance.

The Rhine became not a border, but the center of a major economic zone after the fall of Rome in the West - an economic zone that, for the most part, remained politically unified for a millennium and a half. And although the Danube served as a northern border for Rome in the East from time to time, it also served as the core of Old Bulgaria. Under the Ottomans, it wasn't a border zone either.

tl;dr: there is nothing natural about "natural frontiers".

Well, there is - they're easy to agree on if you're defining frontiers by drawing lines on maps, like they did after most of the major wars of the modern period. In the ancient world, it actually makes no sense to have a river as a boundary - contrary to received wisdom, they don't confer much defensive advantage, and are much more useful to have behind your defensive line so that you can use them to move goods and people along it.

Flying Pig said:

Well, there is - they're easy to agree on if you're defining frontiers by drawing lines on maps, like they did after most of the major wars of the modern period. In the ancient world, it actually makes no sense to have a river as a boundary - contrary to received wisdom, they don't confer much defensive advantage, and are much more useful to have behind your defensive line so that you can use them to move goods and people along it.

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There's nothing natural about that: it is an entirely human conceit. Nor is there anything natural about the selection of which specific geographical markers to use as borders. Why the Rhine and not the Vosges, or the Moselle, or the Seine? Why the Danube and not the Carpathians and the Prut?

True enough, but I think the point stands: it's a mistake to assume that the sort of boundaries that look sensible today would necessarily have looked sensible to somebody working in a world largely without precisely defined legal boundaries between states.

Dachs said:

If the orbis terrarum was so innately conducive to the formation of such a community, why was that the case? And why did it never happen again after Rome?

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Simple: because the Mediterranean lost its monopoly on power. Northern Europe developed large and powerful states of its own, then Eastern Europe followed, and the map was expanded tenfold in the Age of Exploration. So any hegemon today would be a global hegemon. This is precisely what we see: America doesn't annex territory or demand tribute, yet it wound up as the global guarantor of stability.

Flying Pig said:

True enough, but I think the point stands: it's a mistake to assume that the sort of boundaries that look sensible today would necessarily have looked sensible to somebody working in a world largely without precisely defined legal boundaries between states.

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That's just confusing, because it's not even what we were talking about.

Mouthwash said:

Simple: because the Mediterranean lost its monopoly on power. Northern Europe developed large and powerful states of its own, then Eastern Europe followed, and the map was expanded tenfold in the Age of Exploration. So any hegemon today would be a global hegemon. This is precisely what we see: America doesn't annex territory or demand tribute, yet it wound up as the global guarantor of stability.

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It never had a monopoly on power. It's also not clear to me that a monopoly on power would mean anything about the ostensibly innate tendency of the Mediterranean littoral to politically unify, as if by magic. That's not even an explanation, that's geopolitical gobbledygook, or the worst kind of stadial history. You complained about lazy explanations in the OP and then went on to endorse one of the laziest explanations possible.

Dachs said:

It never had a monopoly on power. It's also not clear to me that a monopoly on power would mean anything about the ostensibly innate tendency of the Mediterranean littoral to politically unify, as if by magic.

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What I mean is that there were large, advanced states in the Mediterranean that did not exist in surrounding regions (except to the east). This later ceased to be the case. So, there isn't any reason to view the Mediterranean as special or extra powerful; it just happened to develop earlier. My entire point is that any geopolitical system will, if left alone, end up with a hegemon.

Mouthwash said:

You have two areas of civilization, the Mediterranean and the Near East. After centuries of struggles among minor states, they are united under the Roman Republic and Achaemenid Persia. But these 'universal empires' were both huge deviations from the mean; they had no precedent whatsoever.

The Near East produced, at intervals, Akkadian, Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian and Median empires. Each group typically controlled a geopolitical region which they had difficulty expanding beyond, such as Mesopotamia or the Taurus mountains. The Mediterranean was dominated by city-states, which squabbled over territory in typical thalassocratic fashion but didn't form lasting empires. Somehow, the Achaemenids wound up controlling half the world's population and Rome not only possessed the entire Mediterranean, but conquered their way up to Scotland. And these were enduring states of affairs. The Achaemenids ruled for two centuries, the Romans remained united for three.

I think there is rather more to it than lazy explanations like "the Romans had a professional army" or "the Persians respected indigenous cultures." In fact, I'd say that the characteristics of each empire aren't as important as their circumstances.

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I disagree about there being no precedent for the Persian Empire. Instead, there were nothing but precedents. The Persian Empire was the Assyrian Empire plus Persia, basically. The Assyrian Empire didn't stretch as far, but the bulk of the Persian Empire was the same bulk of the Assyrian Empire. A lot of the administration was the same as well.

The basic timeline is that the Assyrian Empire collapsed. The Babylonians (which were essentially Assyrians at this time having been ruled by Assyria for centuries, often by the King's younger brother) attempted to rebuild much of the Empire (with some success, although they did not get Egypt back). Persia then conquered the Babylonian Empire, regained Egypt, and then gained a little more on their eastern front and in Anatolia.

Louis XXIV said:

I disagree about there being no precedent for the Persian Empire. Instead, there were nothing but precedents. The Persian Empire was the Assyrian Empire plus Persia, basically. The Assyrian Empire didn't stretch as far, but the bulk of the Persian Empire was the same bulk of the Assyrian Empire. A lot of the administration was the same as well.

The basic timeline is that the Assyrian Empire collapsed. The Babylonians (which were essentially Assyrians at this time having been ruled by Assyria for centuries, often by the King's younger brother) attempted to rebuild much of the Empire (with some success, although they did not get Egypt back). Persia then conquered the Babylonian Empire, regained Egypt, and then gained a little more on their eastern front and in Anatolia.

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Nope. Assyria and Babylonia were purely Levant based powers; Persia controlled all that plus Anatolia, Egypt, and the Caucasus. Which would amount to about half of its empire.

(I know Assyria briefly possessed Egypt. It doesn't count.)

Mouthwash said:

What I mean is that there were large, advanced states in the Mediterranean that did not exist in surrounding regions (except to the east). This later ceased to be the case. So, there isn't any reason to view the Mediterranean as special or extra powerful; it just happened to develop earlier. My entire point is that any geopolitical system will, if left alone, end up with a hegemon.

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Again, that explains nothing. If I point out that there are plenty of "geopolitical systems" as defined by other academics which have not possessed hegemons, you will presumably claim that they weren't really geopolitical systems, or that they were "on their way" to getting their hegemon but weren't quite there yet, or that they used to have a hegemon but didn't anymore but would have a new one soon enough. (For a certain definition of "soon". Blizzard Standard Time?) You've created a descriptive, not explanatory, framework, and it doesn't really describe things all that well.

You asked the question "why do universal empires, and the Roman and Iranian ones specifically, happen?" You claimed that the usual academic-historical answers were "lazy", even though they generally rest on things that can be well-described from the evidence and that we can try to causally link to the thing they're supposed to explain. Instead, you chose the answer "well, they just kind of happen because of where they are".

If you can't see why that's not a satisfactory answer for many people after the last several posts, well, there really isn't much point in continuing the discussion.

Dachs said:

Again, that explains nothing. If I point out that there are plenty of "geopolitical systems" as defined by other academics which have not possessed hegemons,

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I mean an isolated geopolitical system; if South America were to be cut off from the outside world, than a hegemon would develop. It doesn't work if an area is subject to meaningful pressures from outside. It also doesn't work if the area is simply too large or scattered. Power (either economic or military) must be able to be projected throughout.

I defy you to name a system, fulfilling the above requirements, that didn't develop a hegemon or a similar entity.

you will presumably claim that they weren't really geopolitical systems, or that they were "on their way" to getting their hegemon but weren't quite there yet, or that they used to have a hegemon but didn't anymore but would have a new one soon enough. (For a certain definition of "soon". Blizzard Standard Time?) You've created a descriptive, not explanatory, framework, and it doesn't really describe things all that well.

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No, I've created an explanatory framework, which makes predictions. These predictions are general and are somewhat vulnerable to goalpost-shifting, but that doesn't make it any different than liberalism or Marxism.

You asked the question "why do universal empires, and the Roman and Iranian ones specifically, happen?" You claimed that the usual academic-historical answers were "lazy", even though they generally rest on things that can be well-described from the evidence and that we can try to causally link to the thing they're supposed to explain.

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The problem with your 'causal linking' is that history is a result of the actions (or non-actions) of every single human being involved. Declaring that the Romans happened to invent some special political system which allowed them conquer the world, is every bit as nonsensical as saying that if not for Marx the Cold War could never have happened, because no communism.

Use the state as analogy. It wouldn't stand a chance if all of its citizens were to defy it. Why do people universally accept their government as legitimate, and give it a monopoly on violence?

What the hell is an isolated geopolitical system? How are we defining isolation here? Was Italy an isolated region? Gaul? Britain? Greece? Germany? Isolated from whom?

As an example, Nauru is fairly geographically isolated from other landmasses and it had twelve competing tribes when the Europeans first arrived there, which indicates a lack of hegemon - But according to mouthwash, it must have had a single hegemonic power

Lexicus said:

This is a period about two centuries before there were any emperors and the main people concerned would have been the inhabitants of the world of Greek kingdoms and city-states scattered around the Mediterannean, not 'tribesmen.'

So anyway, people indeed did go to Rome, to talk to prominent Senators and plead their case.

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They went to Rome in that case because they couldn't go to Macedonia. And Rome was by then the next big military power nearby. Italy was part of the greek world, but Rome by then had the same status to the Greeks as a big city-state. It wasn't yet the big Empire. Corinth had to burn to get that point across the greek's minds.

I'm with Owen in the explanation about Rome's eventual hegemony in the Mediterranean: they had the best political system to co-opt local elites. Being a Republic, ironically, helped them built the Empire. A local political from an allied city who threw his lot with a leader of another polity (say, a Cleomenes III, or a Eumenes III) would be out of power or dead as soon as that individual died. Whereas an "ally of the people of Rome" could count on roman help regardless of leadership changes in Rome. The Roman Republic was a small risk as an ally (even if it extracted a lot by way rapacious taxation - which didn't affect its allied elites much, but did cause a number of rebellions). The alternatives to Rome were monarchs who were big risks as allies.

Having a good military was also important, of course. But the romans got good at that by sheer stubbornness at throwing army after army against its enemies. And perhaps the republic also helped with raising armies: monarchs had to pay them, romans (until Marius) just... bred!