What is an Empire, and How Do You Know You Have one?  Rome and the Greeks after 188 B.C.

“Multipolar anarchy”

“unipolarity”

Does great international asymmetry of power = empire?

Rome, Carthage, Macedon (northern Greece), the Seleucid monarchy (Syria-Iraq)

The legal empire, 180s:  the provinces of Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, Nearer and Further Spain

But east of the Adriatic there were only legally independent states

“The empire of formal dominion”

            vs.

“Informal empire”  (e.g., “the invisible empire of informal sway”)

Empire as “effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinated society by

                        an imperial society” (Michael Doyle)

The normal asymmetries of power between independent states

Michael Doyle’s spectrum of subordinated relationships (very schematic):

independence	“sphere of influence”	“hegemony”	“empire”
	(limits on foreign policy)	(controls foreign policy)	(controls foreign & internal pol)

What do we mean by “control”?  by “informal control”?                                                               

second-tier states, ca. 200 B.C. Aetolia, Athens, Pergamum, Rhodes and Ptolemaic Egypt

vs.

Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus III of Syria-Iraq

No Roman provinciae assigned in the East 187-171 and 168-150 B.C.

Polybius, writing ca. 150 B.C., places the emergence of real Roman rule after 168 B.C.

Pergamum, Rhodes, the Achaean League and Macedon gain  in power as Rome’s allies, 191-188

Why no Greek balancing against the rising hegemon Rome?

Macedon in 170s as a peer-competitor

“The imperial threshold”

“internal balancing”

Apollonidas of Sicyon, 185 B.C.

Hierarchy co-existing with libertas

The debate between the Achaean statesmen Philopoemen and Aristaenus, 184 B.C.

The Roman letter to Rhodes complaining about Rhodian oppression of the cities of Lycia, 177 B.C.

The difficulties of counterbalancing

But the Greeks historically did counter-balance against a hegemon

“long distance” or “offshore” balancing by the hegemon

Mithridates VI of Pontus, ca. 90 B.C.—plus rebellion in Italy against Rome at the same time

Cato the Elder’s opinion, ca. 167 B. C., on the situation as it had previously existed in the East after 188.