l
we therefore conclude that Augustus and Tiberius were useless? So
doing, we should run the risk of misunderstanding all the history of
the Roman conquest. By merely comprehending the value of the apparent
inactivity of Augustus and Tiberius, one can understand the essence of
the policy of world expansion initiated by the Roman aristocracy after
the Second Punic War. At the beginning, this policy was pre-eminently
destructive. Everywhere Rome either destroyed or weakened, not
nations or peoples, but republics, monarchies, theocracies,
principalities--that is, the political superstructures that framed the
different states, great or small; everywhere it put in place of these
superstructures the weak authority of its governors, of the Senate, of
its own prestige; everywhere it left intact or gave greater freedom to
the elementary forms of human association, the family, the tribe, the
city.

So for two centuries Rome continued in Orient and Occident to suppress
bureaucracies, to dismiss or reduce armies, to close royal palaces,
to limit the power of priestly castes or republican oligarchies,
substituting for all these complicated organisations a proconsul
with some dozens of vicegerent secretaries and attendants. The
last enterprise of this policy, which I should be tempted to
call "state-devouring," was the destruction of the dynasty of the
Ptolemies, in Egypt. Without doubt, the suppression of so many
states, continued for two centuries, could not be accomplished without
terrible upheavals. It would be useless to repaint here the grim
picture of the last century of the Republic; sufficient to say, the
grandiosity of this convulsion has hindered most people from seeing
that the state-devouring policy of Rome included in itself, by the
side of the forces of dissolution, beneficent, creative forces, able
to bring about a new birth. If this policy had not degenerated into
an unbridled sacking, it could have effectuated everywhere notable
economies in the expenses of government that were borne by the poorer
classes, suppressing as it did so many armies, courts, bureaucracies,
wars. It is clear that Rome would have been able to gather in on
all sides, especially in the Orient, considerable tribute, merely
by taking from the various peoples much less than the cost of their
preceding monarchies and continuous wars. Moreover, Rome established
with the conquests throughout the immense Empire what we would call
a regime of free e