Scholarly narratives of Rome’s growth often track the strains that its face-to-face model of political life underwent as the city-state developed into a sprawling empire. In his revised 2019 Köln dissertation, Ralph Lange examines an aspect of this process, studying the extended physical absences that Rome’s growing dimensions required of its political leaders and the effects that their absences had on Rome’s political culture from the Middle Republic to the early Principate. The book focuses in particular on the absences required of leaders who left Rome on official business. It also considers instances, as with Tiberius on Capri, where a leader could avoid spending time in Rome while continuing to conduct affairs of state elsewhere. Lange’s chief interest is in how an increasingly mobile political leadership, and the social and political technologies used to mediate and mitigate their distance from Rome, influence the development of Rome’s political culture. As such, this book will be of interest to researchers exploring the history of Roman politics, especially its spatial dimensions. Lange’s approach is organized and lucid. He analyzes leadership along the axes of representation, interaction and (especially) communication (5). Major tools for bridging distance include mobility, correspondence, intermediaries, patronage, delegation and court-societies (3).
The book makes two main points. The first tracks a shift in political gravity from Rome to the mobile leader over the time-period of Lange’s study. Initially, absence from Rome posed a challenge for politicians’ agency and career advancement that necessitated a struggle to maintain links to the political centre in Rome to counter this. From the Middle and especially the Late Republic, this changes. For some, distance from Rome becomes a source of empowerment. Mobile politicians accrue such power that political life at Rome comes to be increasingly subordinated to them. Reversing the direction of dependency, it is Rome more and more that must work to maintain connections to the empowered absent leader. The second point is a “paradox of proximity” (160) that made Rome both a source of and a limit on the leader’s power. With distance from Rome progressively serving as a means of greater power, a dynast or an emperor could use his mobility to gain material and social resources while staying further out of reach from Rome-based efforts to constrain or oppose his behaviour. Out of sight, he was also less likely to offend his fellow citizens (esp. the upper classes) with his superior status and social distance. Still, during the period of Lange’s study, Rome remained an essential aspect of any leader’s power and legitimacy. Absenting himself from Rome for too long risked endangering his hold on both of these, while a return would place his supreme position in greater tension with expectations and ideals like civilitas: “[his] presence in Rome always revealed his power and powerlessness at the same time.” (160)
The book’s structure follows a linear historical trajectory. Between the introduction and conclusion, a brief first chapter offers chronological background for the longer chapters 2-4. Endnotes, a bibliography and an index complete the volume. The book’s writing is clear and accessible and the bibliography is robust.[1] The introduction sketches out the key concerns of the volume and offers some abbreviated historical context. Though Lange offers an able survey of recent scholarship on Roman historiography, he emphasizes that “this is a historical analysis, not a study of historiography” (5) and that his analysis is focused on “actual political action…rather than symbolic acts” (7), such as a senator’s villa-bound retreat. Be that as it may, some readers may feel that the sophisticated literary accounts that Lange largely relies on (Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus…) may deserve a little more consideration in their own right. There may also be a little more space for history-focused analysis of some of these sources. In Lange’s discussion of Tiberian Capri (127), for instance, readers might benefit from learning that notions of there being 12 imperial villas on the island rely on an unstable passage of text in Tacitus (Ann. 4.67.3)[2] and that recent archaeological research conducted after Krause’s landmark 2003 work on the Villa Jovis has continued to refine our image of the imperial presence on Capri under Tiberius.[3]
In Chapter 1, Lange succinctly tracks developments in the Middle Republic that contextualize the book’s closer focus on the Late Republic and early Principate. The situation during this period serves as a baseline for later changes. Political power is firmly anchored in Rome and generals typically return there at the end of campaigning season. While distant postings could offer leaders opportunity for conquests and consequent wealth and fame, they also posed possible difficulties. Distance from the electorate at Rome threatened obscurity, while enemies at Rome or in the province could undermine efforts at self-advancement. Yet beginnings of the shift in political gravity are already present. Rome’s expanded boundaries make it harder for magistrates to complete their tasks within a year and aristocratic ambition searches for greater opportunities for achievement. These developments prompt initial steps towards delegating greater and longer-lasting powers to leaders in the field.
Chapter 2 is focused on Julius Caesar. By the Late Republic, distance from Rome offers its leaders increasing power and autonomy, producing dynasts who rule with growing independence from the political centre. Sulla’s two marches on Rome are a bell that cannot be unrung: there is now always the risk that an absent potentate can forcibly reinsert himself into political life at Rome on his terms, rearranging its rules to suit his interests. Caesar is the culmination of this process. Still, and particularly during the Gallic Wars, Caesar’s agency on the imperial periphery is associated with his success in mitigating his distance from Rome. Though he is often absent, his presence is felt through prolific correspondence, trusted intermediaries, patronage brokers, and visits to Cisalpine Gaul alongside tactics like public building and influence-seeking loans. During and after the Civil Wars, Caesar evinces a concern that events at Rome during his absence could undermine his agency and he attempts to mitigate this possibility.
Despite this continuing dependence on Rome, Caesar’s exalted status produces a social distance from his political peers that renders his proximity difficult for them to tolerate. Tension between the ruler’s social distance and physical proximity is an important leitmotif in the book that could still benefit from some greater nuance. For Lange, this friction diminishes when the ruler is absent from Rome, provided that this absence is not permanent: relations conducted at a physical distance make it easier to obscure imbalances of power and avoid offence. The advantages of mobility and pitfalls of proximity thus incentivize the leader’s frequent absence from Rome, which fosters the development of a mobile court society around the leader. The court’s progressive development and institutionalization are an important recurring topic throughout the book, though readers may sometimes wish for greater clarity about its spatial positioning in relation to the leader, given the importance of spatial concepts for Lange’s study.[4]
In Chapter 3, Lange tracks a further shift of political gravity from Rome toward Augustus. Already during the civil wars after Caesar’s death, the Senate’s ability to enforce its wishes is weakened, enabling an array of mobile and empowered dynasts and shifting alliances where the senate is only one of several sources of influence on events. Once his primacy is established, Augustus sometimes rules the empire from the provinces for years at a time, his mobile leadership facilitated by the intensified circulation of information between Rome, the provinces, and the itinerant emperor. The book places less emphasis on Augustus’ than on Caesar’s efforts to mitigate the effects of his absence from Rome. Still, we follow Augustus’ efforts, both to use progressively more formal deputies to allow him to exert his authority indirectly in circumstances when he is not physically present and to unobtrusively manage political matters out of the limelight before they arrive in traditional political spaces, like the Senate. Signs also emerge of Rome’s increasing dependence on Augustus in his absence for its continued stability. Lange’s Augustus is a canny operator, watching developments in Rome closely in his absence and taking political advantage “of both the intended and unintended consequences of his absence” (89).
Chapter 4 characterizes Tiberius as a further step in the institutionalization of the distant leader’s power. The focus of the chapter is on Tiberius’ absences from Rome within Italy, above all his permanent withdrawal to Capri from 26-37 CE, though Lange wisely avoids getting sidetracked in tracing the political intrigue and salacious behaviour that our sources for this episode recount. For Lange, Tiberius’ persistent absence from Rome further advances the shift in political gravity that the book successfully illustrates. Influence, instructions and information are funnelled more narrowly from the emperor to recipients through favoured subordinates like Sejanus. Abusive dilatory practices in the emperor’s absence and the Senate’s deferential inertia in the face of Tiberius’ ambiguous missives illustrate its dependence on clear guidance from the emperor for it to function successfully. While correspondence helps mitigate Caesar and Augustus’ distance from political life in Rome, it fails to achieve the same effect for Tiberius. This does not seem to be solely a function of logistical constraints, as Tiberius ably rules the empire from Capri, unhindered by his distance from Rome.
A lucid conclusion summarizes the book’s argument. This is all the more useful, due to the book’s tendency to make its argument somewhat inexplicitly through a style that favours narrative exposition over explicit signposting. Occasionally, this approach leads the book into more summary than may be necessary for the argument (e.g. 27-28, 146-47). A final page of the conclusion briefly looks past Tiberius to subsequent developments in the early imperial period that cast Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius as positive or negative models for subsequent imperial mobility.
Beyond Lange’s period of study, the locus of political gravity slowly continued to evolve: the first century CE sees some emperors rise to power far from Rome, in the third century, Herodian could write that “Rome is where the emperor is” (1.6.5), and the fourth century sees the capital relocated to Constantinople.[5] Lange’s book illustrates earlier aspects of this same process, highlighting in particular the alignment of early developments along this path with Rome’s imperial expansion and the shift to one-man rule. It also demonstrates the flexible nature of physical and, to a somewhat lesser degree, social distance in Roman political history: the vast physical dimensions of empire have a remarkably different political significance in different times and contexts. Lange’s insightful study could form a productive basis for future work to further nuance this narrative and its spatial paradigm by drawing on more non-historiographical literature and contemporary theoretical discussions of distance[6] and by extending the story past Tiberius to periods when Rome’s political centrality receives further challenges.
Notes
[1] I counted over fifty typos and comparably minor formatting errors.
[2] Woodman, A.J. 2018. The Annals of Tacitus: Book 4. Cambridge, 308-309.
[3] Krause, C. 2003. Villa Jovis: die Residenz des Tiberius auf Capri. Mainz: Von Zabern. See e.g. Di Franco, L. “Da Augusto a Tiberio, da otium a secessus: L’evoluzione del ruolo dell’isola di Capri quale residenza imperiale attraverso le evidenze archeologiche” MEFRA 134.1 (2022) 211-258.
[4] Though Lange’s bibliography includes a work published as late as 2024, the core of his research was completed before the publication of the most recent scholarship on the imperial court. See for example B. Kelly and A. Hug (eds.) 2022. The Roman Emperor and His Court c. 30 BC-c. AD 300. Volumes 1-2. Cambridge, and C. Davenport and M. McEvoy (eds.) 2023. The Roman Imperial Court in the Principate and Late Antiquity. Oxford.
[5] See further, e.g. P. Ceausescu, “Altera Roma: histoire d’une folie politique” Historia 25 (1976) 79-108.
[6] E.g. for further nuance about distance in human geography and social cognition, respectively, see Y. Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977 and T.W. Schubert and A. Maass (eds.) Spatial Dimensions of Social Thought. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011.