New Directions in the Late Republican Roman Empire

Why did Marcus Antonius set out on a huge expedition to Parthia in 37 BCE? Biographers and historians, for example Goldsworthy 2007 and Halfmann 2011, tend to take the answer for granted: all Romans wanted to avenge Marcus Crassus’ defeat and bring back the standards his army lost there, thereby restoring the proper order of world politics. For too long our understanding of Romano-Parthian interaction has been dominated by the assumption, based on the Augustan message, that Rome had to triumph over the Parthians to restore national honour.

This paper examines the political relationships between the Triumvir M. Antonius and the individual commanders who administered the eastern half of the empire in the years 41-32 BCE. The establishment of the Triumvirate created a new situation in terms of the jurisdiction of the provincial commanders vis-à-vis the Triumvirs. Negotiating this new legal situation also had the potential to be politically difficult for those involved.

This paper examines later Roman Republican contacts with the Danube region, and treats especially the so-called Geto-Dacian copies and imitations in silver of Republican denarius coinage. There are several hundreds of these types, with new ones persistently surfacing on the art market. Most seem to have been struck in the years ca. 80-40 BCE, and served as a locally accepted currency that supplemented official Roman money.

This paper argues that new ways of thinking about Roman imperium developed in the 70s BCE, in response to the Mediterranean-wide crisis of violence ushered in by the rebellion of Rome’s Italian allies in 91 BCE. I focus especially on Gnaeus Pompeius’ vision of a more careful imperium marked by well-organized provinces, sensitivity to local circumstances, and just treatment of Rome’s allies, as well as techniques of governance developed in Quintus Sertorius’ independent Spanish state.

This paper takes a fresh look at the Asian mission of Q. Mucius Scaevola and P. Rutilius Rufus in light of new scholarship on efforts to improve provincial governance during the late Roman republic (Morrell 2017). I argue that Scaevola and Rutilius’ activity in Asia in the 90s BCE should be seen not simply as an exception to the norm of exploitative governance but as one in a series of efforts to improve the administration of Rome’s provinces and an important model for subsequent reformers.