1 WRITING REVOLT IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE Myles Lavan If the later Middle Ages are emerging ever more clearly as an age of revolt, the Roman empire of the first and second centuries ct has long seemed an age of order.‘ There were a few large- scale provincial rebellions, but they were mostly limited to peripheral areas and to the imme- diate aftermath of conquest. The thousands of cities in the empire offer only scattered evidence for urban revolts; slave revolts appear few and minor; peasant revolt is virtually invisible. It has even been suggested that banditry all but disappeared for much of the period? For many schol- ars, the remarkable thing about revolt in the early Roman empire is its rarity. On one reading, this picture is explained by the Roman state’s success in securing the consent of the governed, its provision of mechanisms of dispute resolution that were relatively predictable, rational, and autonomous from local interests and thus worked to reduce the frequency with which aggrieved groups turned to violence, and perhaps also its ability to constrain predatory behaviour by local magnates through the ever present threat of Roman intervention in the case of unrest.“ On a more cynical interpretation, the Roman empire appears peaceful not because rational Roman govemrnent worked to limit the causes of conflict, but because the threat of retaliation by Rome deterred the disadvantaged from attempting to use violence to address their grievances. Stability was a product of an unusually neat alignment of interests between the imperial state and local elites, with Roman power underwriting highly unequal distributions of wealth, privilege, and political power in the provinces.‘ But the image of the Pax Romana has not gone unquestioned. One approach has been to assemble the scattered evidence for revolt into a coherent picture. Thomas Pekary, for example, set out to critique the prevailing view that the Roman empire was highly successfiil at keeping the peace by cataloguing every instance of ‘unrest and revolt’ that he could find. Producing a list of more than 100 examples, he concluded that minor disturbances of the peace were a feature of life in the empire even during peaceful periocls.5 At the macro-level, it has become evident not just that large-scale revolts requiring a major military response were frequent during the first generations after incorporation into the empire, but also that there were regions where they continued sporadically through the second century — notably Britain and Mauretania, as well as the obvious case ofjudeaf‘ At the micro-level, banditry can now be seen more clearly as a ubiquitous structural consequence of the uneven penetration of the Roman state? Equally important work has highlighted the unreliability of the literature produced by the Roman elite and civic epigtaphy - our two most important sources — as evidence for revolt.” 19 -