Leading Rome from a Distance, 300 BCE–37 CE

Roman political leaders used distance from Rome as a key political tool to assert pre-eminence. Through the case studies of Caesar’s hegemony, Augustus’s autocracy, and Tiberius’s reign, this book examines how these figures’ experiences and manipulations of absence established a multipolar focus of political life centred less on the city of Rome, and more on the idea of a single leader. The Roman expansion over Italy and the Mediterranean put the political system under considerable stress, and eventually resulted in a dispersal of leadership and a decentralization of power. Absent generals rivalled their peers in Rome for influence and threatened to surpass them from the provinces. Roman leaders, from Sulla to Tiberius, used absence as a mechanism to act autonomously, but it came at the cost of losing influence and control at the centre. In order to hold influence while being split off from the decision-making powers of the geographical nucleus that was Rome, communication channels to mitigate necessary absences were developed during this period, such as travel, intermediate meetings, letters (propaganda writings) and a complex network of mediators, ultimately forming the circle from which the imperial court emerged. Absent leadership, as it developed throughout the Late Republic, a hitherto neglected issue, eventually became a valuable asset in the institutionalising process of the autocracy of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius. Rome’s growth brought about a greater challenge to the basic realities of communication, representation, travel and warfare. The constraints of empire gave rise to extraordinary commands held by its foremost generals. These absent leaders began dominating the capital from the provinces, from which C. Julius Caesar emerged as an autocrat after a period of civil war. Whereas presence had defined the Republic, absence clearly was shaping the Principate. In its constitutive phase, the power structure of the monarchy was decisively shaped at the structural and institutional level by the emperor’s absence, a development that can be summed up in vertical hierarchisation through spatial distancing. The art of governing Rome and ruling the empire evolved with Augustus’s and Tiberius’s distance from the centre. In order to show how all parties tried to mediate the geographical distance between the leading figures and the capital in the transitional period between the Republic and the Empire, a range of tools were recurred to and developed to mitigate their necessary absences. This book analyses mobility, correspondence, patronage, and advocacy, maps the paths not taken, and concludes on the degree to which expedients became formalised and institutionalised. The variables of temporality and spatiality in the empire therefore posed a constant challenge to the ruler, whose presence in Rome always revealed his power and powerlessness at the same time. This was Rome’s paradox of proximity.