Bret Devereaux

And I'm also not saying Rome wasn't willing, at points, to be staggeringly brutal in keeping its allies in line. But that brutality had limits - Rome couldn't hold Italy by pure force of arms alone, and they knew it, and they didn't try. 4/

The limits to coercion appear quite clearly in both 209 and 90. In 209, with Hannibal in Italy, 12 allied communities in Italy essentially refuse to send anymore soldiers (claiming they have none). The senate wags its finger, but does nothing (Liv. 27.10.10) 5/

(I promise this will come to a point relevant to the modern world soonish). In 90, faced with widespread revolt among the allies, the Romans are forced to rely on carrot, rather than stick and offer Roman citizenship, with its attendant privileges, to any who laid down arms. 6/

My point being that the system here is both carrot-and-stick, and the Romans often got more mileage out of the carrot - the promise of loot, collective security, just generally respecting their allies - than they did the stick. There simply wasn't enough stick to go around. 7/

This comes out very clearly in the events running up to the Social War (the revolt of the Italian allies in 91). Part of - and this is a tweet-unfriendly complex issue, forgive my simplification - part of the reason for the revolt was that the balance of benefits...8/

...in the alliance system had shifted decisively towards Rome. The 'loot' income stream, which the allies shared, was being replaced by a 'tribute' income stream, which they had no part in. Moreover, a Roman program of land redistribution, the Gracchan reforms...9/

...we might call them a form of 'economic nationalism' - they proceeded at the expense of the allies, redistributing public land (some of which was rented by allied communities) to Roman citizens - and only Roman citizens. Suddenly the spoils were reserved for Romans. 10/

I see close parallels with much of what we are doing now - banging the table about NATO contributions, demanding to know what NATO can do for us and demanding that our NATO partners sacrifice more - rather than less - of their national interest on the altar of the alliance 11/