Free War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris

managers.
    As so often, Julius Caesar was the classic case. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he famously wrote; “I came, I saw, I conquered.” But he might have done better to say, “Veni, vidi, vici, administravi”; after coming, seeing, and conquering, he administered, and did it magnificently. Among his many reforms was the invention of the Julian calendar, still in use two thousand years later. July is named after him.
    Ancient emperors were not Keynesian economists, sitting around calculating whether a sestertius spent now on keeping the peace would yield two sesterces in taxes down the road. Many of them, though, were hard and clever men who not only grasped the principles of the deal between Leviathan and its subjects but also saw the value of letting everyone know that they understood. One of the oldest surviving political texts in the world, dating back to the 2360s B.C. , makes just this point. In it, King Uru’inimgina (also known as Urukagina; reigned ca. 2380–2360 B.C. ) of Lagash, in the south of what is now Iraq, proclaimed that he had “freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, and seizure. He established freedom. The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful: it was for them that Uru’inimgina made his covenant with [the god] Ningirsu.” Augustus could not have put it better.
    Uru’inimgina is a shadowy figure, almost lost in the mists of time, but he clearly understood the value of investing in this message. In another parallel with doing business, a nontrivial portion of the art of government is really about confidence. People who suspect that their rulers are mad, corrupt, and/or idiots are likely to resist their demands, while if the management seems skilled, fair, and perhaps even loved by the gods, the attractions of plotting against it decline.
    That said, the law of averages meant that the ancient world necessarily got its share of mad, corrupt, and/or incompetent rulers. The real heroes of the story—the men who actually made Leviathan work—were the bureaucrats, lawyers, and hangers-on. Pen pushers and bean counters oftenmade it difficult for Augustus to get much done, but, more to the point, they also made it difficult for Caligula to get much done.
    The surviving sources are full of stories of emperors’ rages against obstructionist senators and the highly educated slaves who managed much of the court’s business. On the whole, these episodes ended badly for the underlings. But in the background of these colorful accounts we can also make out thousands of men who lived less glamorous lives. On tombstones set up everywhere from Britain to Syria, men recounted with pride the offices they had held and honors they had won as they served on committees, collected taxes, and worked their way up the lower rungs of the bureaucratic ladder. “I, even I,” boasted one North African who had started out working in the fields, “was enrolled among the city senators, and chosen by them to sit in the house of that body … I have passed through years distinguished by the merits of my career—years that an evil tongue has never hurt with accusation … Thus have I deserved to die as I lived, honestly.”
    There is no shortage of evidence that the empire’s middle managers could be just as self-interested as their rulers, lining their pockets and promoting their relatives whenever the opportunity arose. But neither are we short of signs that plenty more really were earnest, industrious, and diligent. They made sure that aqueducts got built, roads were maintained, and the mail was delivered. They kept the Pax Romana going.
    Catastrophic blunders could happen, and Rome went through phases of lurching from crisis to crisis. But in the long run, the pressures at work were inexorable. Warriors conquered small states, which forced them to turn into managers. Good