In 146 BCE, Rome destroyed the cities of Carthage and Corinth, and in 133 BCE the Spanish stronghold of Numantia. The destruction of a city in the Greco-Roman world was a deeply symbolic act, and these particular acts of ‘urbicide’ – as we now call the intentional destruction of a city – were viewed by Greco-Roman authors as pivotal moments in Roman the expansion of Rome’s power. All three acts can be understood through the prism of retributive ‘conspicuous destruction’, designed to deter others from revolting against Rome’s power. In each case, Rome effaced individual responsibility for any perceived acts of disloyalty, and collectively punished the community through its effective elimination: after many perished in the siege and or sack of the city, the surviving population was enslaved, and the city itself destroyed – not to be re-inhabited by the survivors. When viewed through the prism of the definition of ‘genocide’ in the ‘Genocide Convention’, these actions of Rome could be viewed as intentional acts to destroy these civic communities ‘as such’, and thus warrant consideration as genocide. Of the three, Carthage stands out in the predetermination on the part of some at Rome – fueled by existential anxieties - to destroy the city, before an actual pretext existed.

Caesar’s conquest of Gaul makes for a fascinating study in mass-violence in the ancient world. Caesar’s own narrative of his conquest, the Bellum Gallcium, provides us with one of our few first-hand accounts of conquest. Caesar’s keen political eye means that the narrative must be one he considered would resonate with a significant proportion of Romans. As such, it provides perhaps one of our best guides not so much as to what happened, but as to the place of mass violence within Roman thinking. Within the text, Caesar clearly states what can be regarded as a genocidal’ desire, namely that the ‘the stock and name of the tribe’ (stirps ac nomen civitatis) of the Germanic Eburones might be destroyed for their role in ambushing Caesar’s forces (Bellum Gallicum 6.34), as well as narratives of other acts of mass-killing. In addition, Caesar narrates several instances of mass-enslavement – an action that, although not readily caught by modern legal definitions of genocide, would have the same effect by dispersing a people, and causing the cessation of that people’s existence as a distinct group of people. However, Caesar’s text also shows a concern to portray such events as justified as within a retributive framework of wrongs done to Rome.

This chapter outlines the expansion of the Roman Empire during the Republican period and goes on to discuss the consequences of this expansion, the subsequent installation of a military monarchy (principate) and the Roman boundaries during that time. It discusses the Roman Empire as a legal, cultural and economic area, and the underlying factors behind its spatial dimensions. It shows that Rome’s wars and expansion were a by-product of multiple coexisting factors, ranking from predatory imperialism to the need to defend itself and its allies against other predators, from the magistrates’ quest for glory to the generals’ need to boost the morale of their armies and acquire political backing from the soldiers. Under the principate the factors influenced the empire’s expanding or contracting borders ranged from the desire of certain emperors to immortalize themselves by crossing the ocean, the symbolic limit of orbis terrarum), to the need to maintain the armies within the ecologically sustainable areas, to the degree of pressure from the empire’s enemies and recalcitrant subjects. Rather than presenting a one-size-fits-all explanation to the empire’s territorial extent, I follow the historical narrative which outlines multiple factors that influenced the empire’s size at every given moment.

A counterpoint to Rome’s most powerful (and most proudly Roman) vehicle, essedum, is the subject this chapter. A brief introduction discusses another non-Roman battle car, the scythe-chariot, and the ways in which its portrayals can externalize onto Eastern enemies Roman currus’ dangers and violence. Essedum represents an alternate strategy of domestication. This war-chariot of the Britons, first encountered and described by Caesar during his British expedition, was subsequently appropriated as an exotic and fashionable means of getting around Rome and its environs. As the vehicle’s original associations fade through time, the conveyance becomes increasingly normalized for quick trips and even seems to have become a kind of light stagecoach for long-distance journeys. Still, as the chapter argues, essedum’s lingering identity as mobile spoils of war available for leisure use by elites allowed the vehicle to function as a safe, subordinate alternative to the pinnacle achievement represented by the triumph.

What were the sources for the ethnographic knowledge of Bardaisan of Edessa (active c. 200 CE) and his literary circle? This chapter maintains that such ethnographic knowledge, as exhibited by Bardaisan’s surviving historical fragments and the Syriac Book of the Laws of the Countries, was much more indebted to intertextual engagements with Greek and Latin material available to a contemporary Roman readership than to information collected from ‘eastern’ contacts and connections, as scholars sometimes surmise. Roman imperial networks in fact enabled the circulation of ethnographic information that served the authorial strategies of Bardaisan’s literary circle. Yet, Bardaisan’s circle attributed such knowledge, whether implicitly or explicitly, to eastern literary and oral sources and thus framed themselves as ‘eastern’ experts for both local Edessene and broader Roman audiences. In this way, they navigated the intricate space between ‘Roman’ and ‘Other’.