I skipped over chapter 11 since it covered things I don’t really care to post about.

12 Rome Outside Rome 

Pliny’s province 
In 109 BC, Pliny the younger left Italy for the province of Bithynia (northern coast of Turkey). He exchanged roughly a 100 letters with emperor Trajan. 2000 years later, their most famous exchanges have to do with Christianity, as it is the first mention of the religion outside Christian or Jewish sources. 

But the exchange reveals a new sense of what provincial governors responsibilities were with regards to Rome. In the older days, provincial governors would have been sent out and acted largely on their own. Now they were sent out as administrators of imperial will. 

The boundaries of empire 
The expansion of the empire had essentially stopped in 9 AD. Trajan added to it slightly with expansion into Dacia (Romania) in 102 AD and Mesopotamia in 114 and 117 AD. 

But in general, the provinces were territories to be managed, policed, and taxed. More and more, the Romans relied on locals to do most of the work. This collaboration with subject peoples meant that those peoples were increasingly identifying their interests with Rome’s. Politically and culturally, they felt they had a stake in the Roman project as insiders rather than outsiders. 

Romanization and resistance 
In his account of Agricola’s time in Britain, Tacitus recounts the education campaign to bring liberal arts to the young. Liberal arts means things that free people ought to know. But Tacitus also thought that this was really an attempt to make Romans out of the provincials. Agricola was the only one we have record of doing so. Most governors left the provincials largely alone. But there was a dynamic going on. The power or Rome made it a culture the people wanted to emulate, and Rome’s traditional openness to people meant that those that wanted to do things the Roman way were welcome to do so.  

But in such a widespread empire, there were lots of ways in which local populations Romanized. They did it by becoming Roman in their own ways, influenced by their previous cultures. The west was much more ready to conform to Roman cultures than the eastern peoples, who had a much longer tradition.  

Free movement 
Facilitating this Romanization was the massive movement of peoples and goods throughout the empire.  

Christian trouble 
For the first two centuries Rome occasionally punished the Christians, but most lived in the empire untroubled. One account was of a young mother who was hauled in and asked to deny Christianity. She refused and was sentenced to death. But Roman blood sports obeyed a set of rules: it was animals, criminals and slaves who met their deaths, not young mothers. The crowd apparently shuddered as the young woman was killed and milk dripped from her breasts. Why, the crowd wondered, was Rome putting young mothers to death?  

But there was an irreconcilable clash between Rome’s religion and Christianity. Rome had an entire pantheon of gods and welcomed them from wherever in their empire they came. Christianity was exclusively monotheistic, categorically rejecting the gods who had protected Rome for centuries. 

Technically this was true of Judaism too, but Jews managed to operate within Rome fairly well. For Rome, Christianity was far worse. 

The Christian conception of God had no ancestral home. Rome expected deities to be from someplace. The Christian God was universal and sought adherents. And Christianity was defined by an entirely new process of spiritual conversion. 

At the same time, Christianity was rooted in the Roman empire, in its territorial extent, and spread because of movement through Rome’s channels of people, goods, books and ideas. Ironically, the only religion Rome sought to eradicate was the one whose success the empire made possible.  

Epilogue: The First Roman Milennium 

Caracalla granted citizenship to everyone in the empire at 212 AD. This answered a question that guided politics for centuries: what is the boundary between Romans and those they ruled? But as soon as one barrier of privilege had been lifted, another was put up. Once citizenship had been acquired, it became irrelevant. Soon the issue was defined along wealth, class and status. 

The city of Rome lost its place as the capital of the empire in the early 4th century. Rome was sacked and fell to invaders on three occasions in the 5th century. The new capital, Constantinople, continued some of the fossilized traditions of the old Rome. It was given its own senate house. One muddled commentator in the 8th century explained that the name of this building must have come from being built by a man named Senatus.