t's an arresting image, a sculpture marking Imperial Rome's triumphant quashing of a Jewish rebellion during the reign of Hadrian. The emperor has his foot planted on the back of a captured youth. To Hadrian expert Mary T. Boatwright, a Duke classical studies professor, it's an ambiguous image. Is it an unvarnished celebration of conquest? Or is there a hint of angst in the expression of the conqueror? By the time Hadrian assumed the throne in 117 A.D., he was aware that imperial ambitions carried considerable costs for Rome.

Ancient Rome has an enduring resonance--especially in these saber-rattling times. In making the case to attack Iraq, for example, the editors of The New York Times argued that "the United States is, and seems likely to remain, a nation whose military might and economic power so outstrip any other country that much of the world has been comparing it to ancient Rome." Today the United States stands as the world's "hyperpower," or hyperpuissance, as the French foreign minister dubbed it. Policymakers moved to force a regime change in Iraq and talk of creating a Middle East friendlier to American interests, conjuring up the specter of a revived colonialism. After all, it was at the end of World War I that the British cobbled together the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul to form an Iraqi state.

Emperor Hadrian Photo:© Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis

The idea of an imperial America is something entirely new, of course. Americans from an early point rejected the example of Rome in its imperial guise for good reason: Rome was a savage and barbaric empire. The British Empire, in contrast, was an example of enlightened rule. Those are all time-honored ideas, textbook givens, and deeply-embedded cultural assumptions. But according to Duke experts, the conventional wisdom surrounding empires doesn't hold up to scholarly scrutiny.

As Duke political scientist Peter Feaver observes, it was the Kennedy administration more than four decades ago that committed itself to bearing any burden, paying any price, in furthering the American notion of freedom. Even the most avid supporters of American influence have set limits on how that influence might be exercised, he says. "But maybe we have to bear heavier burdens and pay higher prices than we've been willing to in the past."

The Romans might have looked to the warring Greek states for an indication of the costs of empire. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Thucydides offers an account of Cleon, "the most violent man in Athens." Cleon berated the citizens of Athens for greeting the violent suppression of a rebellion with repentance and reflection. Where the historian saw "the horrid cruelty of a decree which condemned a whole city to the fate merited only by the guilty," Cleon saw power wisely applied. He told an assembly, "I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire, and never more so than by your present change of mind."

Republican Rome was in fact an oligarchy, Duke's Boatwright points out. Conquest was certainly part of Roman thinking, even in Republican days. It was under the Republic, in 53 B.C, that the Romans invaded the territory that is now Iraq; the territory was ruled by the Parthians, who are ancestors of modern-day Iranians. Rome's legions were defeated. The head of the invading general, Crassus, was cut off and used as a grisly prop in a performance of The Bacchae at the Parthian court. Says Boatwright, "They had on the one hand a desire to be like Alexander the Great, going off and conquering the East, because of the lure of the exotic and of world conquest. On the other hand, it was a horrible place for them to be fighting. They didn't have good communications, they couldn't get food, it was hot, it was dry."

The Empire took shape under Augustus, beginning in 27 B.C. At its peak in the early third century A.D., it would comprise not only the Mediterranean region but also Europe as far north as southern Scotland, along with land by the Rhine and Danube. The Parthian debacle was hardly the only cost of Rome's imperial ambitions. Under Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Romans were engaged in warfare to the east, again against the Parthians, and to the north, against the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes. When they triumphed in 165 A.D., the legions brought back something unwelcome from the east: the plague. The campaigns required Rome to raise two new legions, some 5,000 men each. "To pay for these," says Boatwright, "Marcus Aurelius sold off the crown jewels, robes, and other luxurious goods from the imperial palace rather than raise taxes."

Boatwright says that military adventures were rooted as much in strategic and economic considerations as in a raw yearning for conquest. When the Romans subdued the tribes of the Iberian Peninsula, they were interested in tapping local mineral resources and bringing order to the area--not in taming the barbarians. For a long time Rome left Britain alone. Britain was thought to be poor in resources and to pose no serious military threat. Claudius finally annexed Britain in 43 A.D. as a distraction from a series of political embarrassments.

After Augustus, Rome generally valued consolidation and stability above expansion, Boatwright says. So Rome built a system of forts, walls, palisades, roads, and aqueducts--all of which were handy for supporting a military presence, and which also promoted civic order in chaotic places. One of the remarkable aspects of the Empire was that Rome was able to create a "Roman" identity wherever its influence was felt. (For that matter, Rome itself was pretty much an amalgamation rather than a concept of cultural purity; the Greek influence on Rome was enormous.) Tombstones from "indigenous" people in provinces along the northern border, for example, show the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus. Such iconography signaled how deeply the provincial populations absorbed Roman values. Conquered provinces and cities adopted Roman laws. But that was a convenience, not an imperative. As the Roman historian Tacitus noted, the Britons, while enjoying the benefits of civil society, "bear cheerfully the conscription, the taxes, and the other burdens imposed on them by the Empire, if there be no oppression."

Roman governers were basic to the administrative scene and the imperial scheme. But Rome also recruitied sympathetic local leaders. Tacitus referred to a king of the Britons who "lived down to our day a most faithful ally. So was maintained the ancient and long-recognized practice of the Roman people, which seeks to secure among the instruments of dominion even kings themselves."

The Britons, of course, eventually revolted. But nationalistic uprisings were unusual in the Roman Empire, Boatwright says, because Roman rule, if not gentle, was something less than oppressive. Rome was an Empire without elaborate imperial institutions. The Empire's limited aims of maintaining law and order and collecting taxes never demanded any sort of far-reaching bureaucracy. "In places like Carthage and Ephesus, there were communities that governed themselves by their ancestral laws, could speak whatever language they wanted, and could worship how they wished. Now, if they wanted to get political favors, then they might have celebrations of the imperial cult, which acknowledged the power of Rome and the figure of the emperor. But Rome didn't force it on people; Rome didn't have the wherewithal or even the desire to exercise military power over the world."

In the Empire, Boatwright says, no one questioned that power was a good thing. But the use of force was considered and not reflexive. Even Augustus, as part of his valedictory to the people of Rome (engraved on two bronze pillars), didn't want to portray himself as power-mad: "I undertook many civil and foreign wars by land and sea throughout the world, and as victor I spared the lives of all citizens who asked for mercy. When foreign peoples could safely be pardoned, I preferred to preserve rather than to exterminate them."

The British, as they considered their own stance toward foreign nations, may have seen themselves as enlightened imperialists. Writer V.S. Naipul has argued that the long "British Peace" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries gave India the chance to mature as a nation.

Susan Thorne, a Duke history professor specializing in Britain, is skeptical of such assessments. For all the talk of moral duty and a civilizing mission, this was, she says, hardly a benign empire. And it was quick to embrace "historical amnesia," as she puts it, to further the imperialist embrace. "Victorian imperialism was as self-interested as its predecessors. It was distinguished, however, by the humanitarian language with which it was justified. For the Victorians, virtue and interest were not contradictory agendas. And they devoted an enormous amount of ideological labor to their conflation."

Missionaries argued that African leaders were not fit to govern because of their refusal or inability to end internal African slavery, Thorne says. "The irony here is breathtaking, considering 'Christian' Europe's centuries-old and only very recently ended involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and West Indian slavery. All the righteous passion that had been mobilized around the recently concluded campaign to free British-owned slaves was now channeled into a campaign to colonize Africa in the name of freedom."

A scramble for Africa began around the time that the Second Reform Act was passed in 1867. The act, which was sponsored by Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, gave the vote to skilled working-class men. The extension of the franchise along with the extension of the empire "presents something of a paradox," Thorne says. "You had expanding democratic rights at home at the same time that you see the assertion of imperial domination over populations abroad."