First off, I should admit some bias. As a student of comparative government, I am of the mind that any country, regardless of all the inherent complexities therein, can be governed effectively and survive in the long term provided it has all the necessary institutions (except in the case of conquest or a major ecological disaster). So, for the purpose of this thread, I have assumed that there is an ideal institutional arrangement that could stabilize the Roman Empire, at least for a timeframe preceding conquest by another power, i.e. a large confederation of steppe tribes.
With that out of the way, I’ve identified a few key weaknesses, and the purpose of this thread is to try and establish believable or plausible ways to address these institutional shortcomings within the timeframe of the early Roman Empire (i.e. during the 1st and 2nd centuries).
With that out of the way, I’ve identified a few key weaknesses, and the purpose of this thread is to try and establish believable or plausible ways to address these institutional shortcomings within the timeframe of the early Roman Empire (i.e. during the 1st and 2nd centuries).
- Poor military command structure: Modern militaries have complex and well-defined chains of command to eliminate the possibility for any individual command group to disrupt the overall stability of the state (not always successfully, of course). The early Roman Empire had no central command to speak of, and each individual governor was equally ranked and directly subordinate to the emperor. Constantine’s reforms altered this substantially, which is one reason why the late Roman Empire was far more able to combat internal revolts. This is the easiest to remedy, since it happened relatively smoothly IOTL, without too much backlash from any extant institutions (except for the Praetorian guard, who were irrelevant by the 4th century anyways).
- Diffusion of command structure: This is related to the above point. The decentralized nature of the military coupled with the placement of military commands in the hands of uninterested transplanted governors meant that the nature of power relations in the empire was constantly in flux, which is good when you have a strong emperor on the throne, but lends itself be leveraged by usurpers when the emperor is weak or very young. Diocletian’s reforms addressed this to some extent by bifurcating provincial administration between governors and vicari (governors themselves had no martial authority thereafter). But is it feasible for this or the above reforms to be undertaken during the 1st or 2nd century?
- Too large to be effectively centralized: The Roman Empire was the second-largest contiguous European state to ever exist (after Russia). Obviously that makes administration and communication difficult, which is what led to the problematic autonomy of provincial generals. The emperors of the principate accommodated this by sending senatorial amateurs to govern each province for a few years and then recalling them to Rome where the emperor could keep an eye on them. However, this is unworkable in the long-term, as foreign military threats tend to increase in intensity over time, and there comes a point where senatorial amateurs are broadly insufficient in their command ability. The importance of imperial oversight on governors doesn't change, so one of two solutions must be settled upon: either establish a federalized government where provincial elites contribute directly to imperial government or radically expand the central governing apparatus in terms of manpower in order to accommodate more top and mid-level bureaucrats.
- Insufficient financial resources: The Roman army on its own is very expensive to maintain, and that's before one even considers the cost of maintaining the central bureaucracy (which increases in size over time). By the end of the 2nd century, the legions were unsustainable at contemporary income levels, which was the primary impetus behind the Edit of Caracalla, and Diocletian’s later tax and price reforms. The result was the ability by the empire to double and even triple the size of the army during the 3rd and 4th centuries. My primary question is this: is there a long-term solution to this deficit?
- Lack of legitimizing force: The principate was legitimized when Augustus negotiated the constitutional settlements of 27 and 23 BCE, which effectively used the decaying corpse of the republic to mask the brute-force nature of this one-sided arrangement. Diocletian and Constantine attempted to remedy this by establishing the personage of the emperor as divine, first through the medium of classical paganism and later through Christianity. There are three broad approaches to government legitimacy: traditional (monarchies, theocracies), charismatic (dictatorships, direct democracy), and legal rational (republicanism). The transition from the principate to the dominate was largely an attempt by Diocletian to transfer the legitimizing force of the empire from one of charismatic legitimacy to one of traditional legitimacy (since the most stable, legal-rational legitimacy, failed during the fall of the Republic). Often times, discussions of Roman institutional weakness are reduced to talking about the imperial succession, but I believe that any instability on that front is a reflection of this underlying failure. The main challenge here is that modern states broadly derive their legitimacy from a constitution, national identity, or some other ideological framework that came about during the rise of Westphalian sovereignty and later the Enlightenment and the rise of nationalism. I’m pretty much at a loss here. It may not be feasible to accommodate for this failing since the institutional framework of the Roman Empire was never fully divorced from that of the Republic until late in the 3rd century.
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