CULTURES OF EMPIRE: GREECE AND ROME

CULTURES OF EMPIRE: GREECE AND ROME by Robin Osborne in the New Left Review

The roman empire has long provided both a model for modern imperialism and a framework within which to think about it. Not only, as the Greek historian Polybius already observed in the second century bc, did the Romans take care to find reasons why every war of conquest was necessary to their national security; they also came to see themselves as a civilizing power, and to realize the power of civilization. [1] This makes it easy for scholars to write critiques or defences of modern imperialism into accounts of the Roman empire; in retrospect, it is hard to read any of the twentieth-century analyses—that it was defensive and non-annexationist, that it was motivated by greed, or that the Greeks got what they asked for—without reference to the authors’ attitudes to modern Western imperialism. [2] This makes it all the more important to find firm ancient evidence on which to ground contemporary historical analysis.. . .