Universal empires.

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.

So...is there a question? or a conclusion? or...

What caused this phenomenon?

I can't speak to Persian/Fertile Crescent polities, but for the Romans it was (to simplify heavily):

really effective political/élite/identity management
really good at utilizing/generating manpower

Like people go on and on about the brilliance of the maniple system and pila and whatnot. But really mattered was that they could mobilize, equip, and train massive amounts of men in short stretches of time and large losses didn't seem to effect them. The Romans lost 8 consular legions in 20 months between Trasimene-Trebia-Cannae, and although Hannibal was able to sway some foederati over to his side, the alliance system held in tact and Hannibal was eventually forced to withdraw because the Romans formed new legions. It all comes down to getting the local élite (and later that would include border nobility across the Rhine/Danube) to buy into the system, and the Romans were exceptionally good at that.

The Romans were successful because their political arrangements WRT defeated peoples (the Socii or allies) meant that their manpower pool was virtually unlimited by the standards of the first few centuries BCE.

When you say feoderati in the most recent post I assume you mean socii.

The Persians I'm less prepared to comment on, I don't think they are as unprecedented as the Romans though because the Sassanid territory was a lot smaller than the Achaemenid territory.

The focus on tactics is, imo, misguided. The Wehrmacht in World War II was tactically far superior to all its opponents, it still lost.

Yeah socii, got my terms mixed up. I think more than that they were just really good at building up some groups and playing them off other groups. The system fed into itself, where advancing at the local (non-citizen) level was predicated on gaining access to Roman titles (amicus, for example) and Roman goods. It was a really really good system, which is why they were able to control such a large (even by modern standards) swathe of territory for such a long (again, even by modern standards) period of time.

I mean you can look at the infrastructural side too. The Romans of the late Republic-early Empire had a fairly effective system for training and promoting generals, and for much of history having some semblance of discipline and organization was going to win you a good chunk of battles irrespective of temporary disadvantages. Looking through Caesar's writings (yes I know they are also colored by political and literary demands) shows this a fair amount. Caesar and his officers were constantly getting ambushed and outmaneuvered by Galli and Germani, but ultimately their lines held and would force their enemies to retreat.

Yeah. The Romans didn't just wholly dominate the peoples they conquered- the concept of Roman citizenship, which they were willing to extend and export, was the key. It gave the defeated peoples a stake in the Roman enterprise. The outcome of the Social War and the fact that it wasn't repeated shows this pretty strongly.

Owen Glyndwr said:

I can't speak to Persian/Fertile Crescent polities, but for the Romans it was (to simplify heavily):

really effective political/élite/identity management
really good at utilizing/generating manpower

Like people go on and on about the brilliance of the maniple system and pila and whatnot. But really mattered was that they could mobilize, equip, and train massive amounts of men in short stretches of time and large losses didn't seem to effect them. The Romans lost 8 consular legions in 20 months between Trasimene-Trebia-Cannae, and although Hannibal was able to sway some foederati over to his side, the alliance system held in tact and Hannibal was eventually forced to withdraw because the Romans formed new legions. It all comes down to getting the local élite (and later that would include border nobility across the Rhine/Danube) to buy into the system, and the Romans were exceptionally good at that.

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I don't buy that it's just a matter of what the they did. Rome became the 'Leviathan' that other groups went to with their disputes. This suggests that the shift towards Roman dependency of the entire Mediterranean was something more natural; a multi-polar system coalescing around a single stable power. I also don't think it's a coincidence that Rome was in the precise center of the Mediterranean. If it had been in Spain or Syria, and you really imagine it being so indispensable?

Finally, I don't think that institutions appear from a void. It's incredibly lazy to pin their success on them just happening to be effective at managing conquered peoples, as I said in the OP. Besides, statecraft is an incredibly malleable thing that shouldn't be expected to weather centuries of changing circumstances; even if the Romans were geniuses at it, there's no reason they would stay that way.

Any argument that rests on the Romans being such-and-such (insert historically contingent characteristic or policy) doesn't work.

You don't seem very versed in Roman history.

Mouthwash said:

Somehow, the Achaemenids wound up controlling half the world's population

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Really? Says who?

Agent327 said:

You don't seem very versed in Roman history.

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Well of course I don't think that I could ever ascend to your Olympian level of scholarship. Still, if you're kind enough to correct what seems wrong?

Really? Says who?

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The figure was 44% of the global population. Don't know how that was estimated.

Mouthwash said:

I don't buy that it's just a matter of what the they did. Rome became the 'Leviathan' that other groups went to with their disputes. This suggests that the shift towards Roman dependency of the entire Mediterranean was something more natural; a multi-polar system coalescing around a single stable power. I also don't think it's a coincidence that Rome was in the precise center of the Mediterranean. If it had been in Spain or Syria, and you really imagine it being so indispensable?

Finally, I don't think that institutions appear from a void. It's incredibly lazy to pin their success on them just happening to be effective at managing conquered peoples, as I said in the OP. Besides, statecraft is an incredibly malleable thing that shouldn't be expected to weather centuries of changing circumstances; even if the Romans were geniuses at it, there's no reason they would stay that way.

Any argument that rests on the Romans being such-and-such (insert historically contingent characteristic or policy) doesn't work.

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They didn't really become the go-to guy for settling disputes until after the Punic Wars.

So you need to explain how they got to that point in the first place.

Exactly why and how the Romans came up with their unique form of citizenship, and the particular relationship with the allied peoples, is a mystery and will probably remain so. There just isn't enough evidence from the critical period.

Agent327 said:

You don't seem very versed in Roman history.

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You're right about that, but you probably could be a bit kinder about it. I know very smart professors who could tell you about postmodernist historiography on female textile workers in 1890's Troyes but have zero clue what the Investiture Controversy was or who Michael Jordan is. Everyone is intelligent in their own way, and it pays to have a nicer non-brash approach than saying they aren't versed in the subject when a good bit of "experts" really don't have a good general knowledge anyways

I can not really know why it began with the Romans and Persians, but I want to point out that the Inca ruled an area that was of comparable size. But they had no writing and had it not been for the Spaniards, the Inca empire would have one day crumbled in the usual way. It would not have left a trace of its previous size.

Agriculture was established in most of central Europe in 4000 BC. There may have been a dozen large empires which are lost without leaving a trace.

Mouthwash said:

I don't buy that it's just a matter of what the they did. Rome became the 'Leviathan' that other groups went to with their disputes. This suggests that the shift towards Roman dependency of the entire Mediterranean was something more natural; a multi-polar system coalescing around a single stable power. I also don't think it's a coincidence that Rome was in the precise center of the Mediterranean. If it had been in Spain or Syria, and you really imagine it being so indispensable?

Finally, I don't think that institutions appear from a void. It's incredibly lazy to pin their success on them just happening to be effective at managing conquered peoples, as I said in the OP. Besides, statecraft is an incredibly malleable thing that shouldn't be expected to weather centuries of changing circumstances; even if the Romans were geniuses at it, there's no reason they would stay that way.

Any argument that rests on the Romans being such-and-such (insert historically contingent characteristic or policy) doesn't work.

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I think it has more to do with Rome being in the physical centre of the Roman Empire, and our idea of what constitutes the 'Mediterranean world' being shaped by the empire and its aftermath. When you say that people went to 'Rome' to get backing for their side of a dispute, you mean that they went to the nearest representative of the Roman state, so a frontier officer or perhaps provincial governor: this sometimes, but not always and perhaps not usually, involved the emperor getting involved. We shouldn't imagine aggrieved tribesmen from across the world trekking to Rome on a regular basis.

Flying Pig said:

When you say that people went to 'Rome' to get backing for their side of a dispute, you mean that they went to the nearest representative of the Roman state, so a frontier officer or perhaps provincial governor: this sometimes, but not always and perhaps not usually, involved the emperor getting involved. We shouldn't imagine aggrieved tribesmen from across the world trekking to Rome on a regular basis.

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Fresh in my mind because I'm reading Mary Beard's SPQR right now is an episode where emissaries from some Greek city-state or other (somewhere in southern Italy or northwestern Greece, IIRC) actually did go to Rome to meet with prominent Senators and plead their case for Roman intervention in a dispute with their neighbors (can give details when I get home from work).

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. There was no emperor and "representative of the Roman state" was probably a lot fuzzier than you seem to think. The distinction between private and state power was to some degree blurred throughout Roman history (with private looming larger the further back you go), and for most of the Republican period there wasn't really a formal "government" in the sense that we would understand the term. The emergence of a class of professional bureaucrats/administrators was much much later, after the Romans had already taken control of much of the Mediterannean.

Were the Greeks in question not allies of Rome, though?

Can't quite remember, but I don't think so. Pretty sure in this specific case their mission failed and Rome did not intervene on their behalf.

The Second Macedonian War for example started because lesser Greek kingdoms complained to Rome about how mean Macedon was being. I know Rome had allies in Greece but not sure if these particular kingdoms were Roman allies (though they presumably became Roman allies during the course of the war).

At any rate, to my mind the question is why Rome became powerful enough in the first place that Greeks would want to go to it for help in disputes with their more powerful neighbors, and I've already given my answer to that upthread.

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.

Flying Pig it was the people of Teos, a town which is actually in Turkey (was wrong about the location). An inscription from the second century BCE tells about how they sent envoys to Rome who paid daily calls on "key members of the Senate."

Beard goes on to mention hundreds of statues of individual Romans as "saviors and benefactors" which were placed in towns in the Greek world. So we know this kind of thing was common.

Lexicus said:

The focus on tactics is, imo, misguided. The Wehrmacht in World War II was tactically far superior to all its opponents, it still lost.

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A focus on tactics is misguided, yes.

However, it's not really true that the Wehrmacht was "tactically superior" to its opponents. It's a bit more granular. For most of the war, the Germans possessed a functional elite - the panzer troops and panzer grenadiers, and the SS armored formations - and a vast force of technologically stagnant, logistically starved Landser. The former could reasonably be said to have had generally superior quality compared to even the best units of other armies up to maybe 1943/44; the latter could not.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a judgment call, but I would say that a not insignificant aspect of the collapse of the Nazi empire is the fact that the Wehrmacht's best couldn't do nearly as much as it had been able to do in the early parts of the war.

Lexicus said:

Exactly why and how the Romans came up with their unique form of citizenship, and the particular relationship with the allied peoples, is a mystery and will probably remain so. There just isn't enough evidence from the critical period.

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It would be nice if we ever possessed the kind of data to properly distinguish Roman tiered citizenship from the sorts of citizenship in the Greek federal leagues (Aitolia and Achaia especially) and that in Qarthadast.

It's also worth pointing out that the Romans had trouble maintaining control over their allies, as well. They had to fight a couple-three civil wars with the Latins in their first few centuries; they had to face several rebellions during the Hannibalic War; and there was of course the Social War in the first century BC. In the Hannibalic War, those rebellions coincided with life-threatening external pressure, and it's no surprise that that's one of the most dangerous periods that Roman hegemony had to endure.

There's also the problem that the military numbers in classical sources are almost completely untrustworthy, and even if they were trustworthy they're not remotely comprehensive. We can get a general sense that Rome's available military manpower was enormous, because it successfully prosecuted major wars from 225 BC on down to 190 BC while suffering several major military defeats, and was apparently only starting to scrape the bottom of its barrel in the Magnesia campaign when a stroke of tactical luck allowed the Romans to defeat the Seleukid army. (Contingency matters!) But we can't, y'know, do much with that general sense. We can't even quantify it, and we certainly can't explain it.

Flying Pig said:

We shouldn't imagine aggrieved tribesmen from across the world trekking to Rome on a regular basis.

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As previously mentioned, starting in the decades immediately surrounding the Hannibalic War and the first two wars between Rome and Philip V, those aggrieved tribesmen did trek to Rome - or, at least, their Hellenistic equivalents. The Greek states sent almost no embassies to Rome before 200 BC, but by 185 BC that had changed completely: not only did embassies go to Rome regularly, but foreign princes of the first rank would spend their youths there.

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 Antiochos 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.