ABSTRACT
In his recent book on the world history of debt during the past fi ve millennia, the anthropologist David Graeber provides a wide-ranging explanation of the so-called state-credit theory of money, whose proponents maintain that, contrary to the belief of orthodox neo-classical economists, markets and money did not predate states, but were actually originally created by the state to serve its needs. At one point during the discussion, Graeber observes that
[i]t is one thing to explain why early states demanded taxes (in order to create markets). It’s another to ask “by what right?” Assuming that early rulers were not simply thugs, and that taxes were not simply extortion ( . . . ) one must ask how they justifi ed this sort of thing. 1
How, indeed, do states justify what they do, and, more importantly, why do their subjects or citizens actually accept these justifi cations and obey their governments (something which, as the historical record shows, they mostly did and mostly continue to do, in all ages, throughout the world)? This of course is political history’s million-dollar question. One answer, as Graeber indicates, is that of the thug: brute force and the fear that it inspires. As ancient historians, we are all too familiar with the type of argument: After Actium, Octavian was the most powerful man in Rome because he controlled all the troops – it is even in the sources, because Cassius Dio says it as well. 2 Yet as John Crook has pointed out, stating that ‘Augustus’ ultimate possibility of coercion lay in the control of the army’ does not get us very far, ‘for we have still to ask ( . . . ) how he was able to control the army’. 3 To this question, Crook then provides an answer:
One of the reasons why Augustus’ formal authority cannot be detached from his actual power is that armies can only with diffi culty and exceptionally be recruited and held without a legitimate claim . Augustus was, in the fi rst years after 30 B.C., consul, and the provincia he was given from 27 B.C. entitled him to overall command of the troops within it (which was most of the troops, and their oath of obedience was necessarily to him). 4
In other words, it makes no sense to think of the Principate as a monarchy behind a Republican institutional and ideological façade, because in a way, the
so-called façade is the Principate; it is what makes the exercise of power possible. It allows people to believe in the legitimacy of the power of the princeps , and to identify with the politico-ideological system that he represents, by means of often ritualized expressions of consent (exemplifi ed in this case by the oath of obedience to Octavian as consul). Here, then, we touch on the two themes central to this volume, namely legitimation, consisting of an identifi cation with the ideological and political claims of the ruler, and the manifold ways in which this identifi cation found public expression, in ritualized forms of behaviour and communication. These were the central elements of the process (or processes) that arguably led to the creation of something we might call ‘imperial identity’, that is, a sense (or indeed, various senses) of belonging to, and identifi cation with, the Imperium Romanum .
