Read Online War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris - Free Book Online

exacting bloody revenge, the Nucerians complained to the emperor. Committees met and reports were filed; Pompeii’s festival organizers were exiled, and the city was banned from holding gladiatorial shows for ten years (no small punishment, as it turned out, because Mount Vesuvius erupted and wiped Pompeii off the map another ten years after that). And there the matter ended.
    When Bosnia erupted into ethnic violence in the 1990s, one Croat observed that before the breakup of Yugoslavia, “we [had] lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.” Yet first-century Pompeii had no such police force to impose peace; indeed, there was nothing like a modern police force anywhere in the world till London got one in 1828. So why did the killing stop?
    The explanation seems to be that Rome’s rulers succeeded in sending a message that only the government had the right to get violent. If Pompeians had carried on killing Nucerians in A.D. 59, more memos would have moved up the chain to the emperor, who had thirty legions to deal with people who gave him trouble by fighting without permission and killing potential taxpayers. But the paradoxical logic of violence was at work: because everyone knew that the emperor could (and, if pressed, would) send in the legions, he hardly ever had to do so.
    I mentioned in the introduction that Hobbes liked to distinguish between “commonwealth by acquisition, ” or using force to compel people to be peaceful, and “commonwealth by institution, ” or using trust to get them to follow rules. In reality, however, the two go together. The Pompeians laid down their swords in A.D. 59 because centuries of war had built such a great Leviathan that they could trust it to overawe its subjects. The empire,Gibbon pointed out, had replaced war with law. In the first two centuries A.D. , using force to settle disagreements became, if not completely unthinkable, then at least highly inadvisable.
    Government and laws bring their own problems, of course. “Formerly we suffered from crimes,” Tacitus had one of his characters joke. “Now we suffer from laws.” A government strong enough to stamp out wrongdoing, the empire’s subjects learned, was also a government strong enough to do even greater wrong.
    Some Roman officials exploited this to the full, but—as usual in Roman history—the worst crimes date to the first century B.C. , when central government was at its weakest. Gaius Verres, who governed Sicily between 73 and 71 B.C. , joked that he needed three years in the post—the first to steal enough to get rich, the second to steal enough to hire good lawyers, and the third to steal enough to bribe a judge and jury. Verres proceeded to do all three, beating, jailing, and even crucifying those who would not pay him.
    All, though, for naught. Marcus Cicero made his name prosecuting Verres, who only escaped conviction by fleeing into exile. Over the next two centuries, prosecuting corrupt officials became the standard way for young lawyers in a hurry to get ahead, and even though villains with friends in high places regularly got off, new laws steadily narrowed the scope for using violent extortion.
    The empire that Rome’s wars created was no utopia, but the tone of the mass of surviving writings (by Romans and provincials alike) does suggest that it made its subjects safer than they would have been without it. And it also, apparently, made them richer. With pirates and bandits suppressed, trade boomed. To move its armies and fleets around, the government built state-of-the-art roads and harbors, which merchants used too. In return, Rome taxed the traders and spent most of the money it raised on the armed forces.
    The army was concentrated in frontier provinces, few of which were fertile enough to feed so many men who did not work on the farm (by the first century A.D. , about