Mobilizing the Allies: Clientela and Rome’s Relationship with the Socii

It is now commonly observed that Rome owed much of its military success in the third and second centuries BCE to its ability to effectively mobilize the non-Roman population of Italy (Brunt 1971; Eckstein 2008; Taylor 2020). This observation, however, raises the question as to why Rome was able to mobilize its subject Italian communities, the socii or ‘allies,’ so much more effectively than Rome’s rivals were able to mobilize their own subject populations. In this paper, I analyze the Roman system for recruiting the socii and argue that the system, forced to rely on willing compliance over compulsion, was made possible by structuring the reciprocal relationship between Rome and the allies in an analogous way to the shared institution of clientela.

First, the paper considers the evidence for the systems by which the Romans recruited the socii during this period. I argue that while Rome relied on force or the threat of force in extremis, short of actually declaring an allied community in rebellion and waging war on them, Rome had few if any means of compelling recruitment from the allies. The Romans did not operate the direct administration of allied levies, leaving that up to the communities of the socii. Moreover, Rome could not rely on emotional attachment or feelings of ethnic kinship to mobilize most of the allies (Fronda 2010). Consequently, while Rome could crush a small number of recalcitrant allied communities, on the whole Rome was forced to rely on willing compliance, rather than on force, in order to obtain the heavily equipped and high-quality soldiers it required.

The paper then considers how this willing compliance was achieved. I argue that Rome formulated the reciprocal obligations of its alliance system in an analogous way to clientela. While patronage relationships structured many of the interactions between Roman and Italian elites (Badian 1958; Terrenato 2019), the relationship between Rome itself and the allied communities was understood to work on similar logic, with unequal but reciprocal obligations combined with a polite obfuscation of the true nature of the relationship. Because this institution was common and relatively well-regarded, structuring Rome’s relationship with the other communities of Italy this way enabled Rome to access their military potential while minimizing the injury to their honor both reducing the pressure to revolt and improving the military performance of the socii. At the same time, this structure imposed duties on Roman leaders to observe their part of the reciprocal obligations, which shaped Roman decision-making, most visibly during the early years of the Second Punic War.