The impression that the pax Romana reigned supreme over the empire for
the fi rst two centuries AD without any great effort by the central authorities
is to be found stated or assumed in a good deal of the Roman literature of
the period and in modern scholarship derived from it, but the impression is
in some ways misleading. Intensive Roman military activity in the conquest
of territory and in civil wars caused exceptional distress among the subject
populations in the last two centuries of the Republic, and the more moderate
violence of the following centuries appears benign in comparison, but the
Principate did not mark the end of warfare within Rome’s provinces.
Government without a civil service did not mean that the tasks that a
bureaucracy would have performed simply disappeared; instead, problems
which arose had to be dealt with ad hoc and could be more diffi cult to cope
with through being left to fester for too long.
The potential for violence in provincial cities was considerable and not
infrequently realized. Alexandria in Egypt was a site of constant disorder,
according to Dio Chrysostom ( Or. 32), and even more peaceable cities
erupted in times of food shortage, such as Prusa in Bithynia (Dio, Or. 46) or,
with potentially drastic consequences for an offi cial, Aspendus in Asia Minor
(Philostratus, Vit. Ap. 1.15). In the early empire imperial attempts to placate
the populace by doles were rare outside Rome. Attempts to prevent violence
were limited to restrictions on public organizations, particularly in the form
of collegia (see below, p. 180–3). A single city by itself had little chance of
defying Roman authority for long, although Athens appears to have attempted
to do so in the last years of Augustus’ life. On the whole the Roman authorities
seem to have taken a certain level of urban unrest for granted as something
not worth worrying about: it is instructive to contrast Josephus’ narrative of
serious riots in Jerusalem in the early fi rst century with the passing remark of
Tacitus that in Judaea ‘all was quiet under Tiberius’ (Tac. Hist 5:9).^1
4
Enemies of Rome
Martin Goodman
55