Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate.(Review)

Historian, The, June, 2001 by Roth, Jonathan P.

Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate. By Susan P. Mattern. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 259. $35.00.)

The recent debate over Roman Imperial grand strategy has concentrated on frontier policy. Susan P. Mattern, however, focuses primarily on the mind-set of the Roman elite and their conceptions of geography, ethnography, and economy. She begins by arguing that Roman political and military leadership was mainly amateur, and that the same types who wrote the classical texts of the Imperial period also shaped the Empire's strategic policy. This is a bold contention. Indeed, there is a vigorous debate on the question of whether there existed a class of professional "military men" (viri militares) in Rome, and how...

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