Empire in the Greco-Roman World
- 1 April 1978
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Greece and Rome
- Vol. 25 (1) , 1-15
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s001738350001932x
Abstract
Historians, we are told on all sides, have signally failed to clarify the terms ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, though they employ them all the time. The man in the street, curiously enough, sees no great problem, and I shall argue that he is right. Much of the trouble in the professional literature stems from a elementary confusion between a definition and a typology. It would not be a useful definition of empire, for example, that excluded either the Athenian or the Persian empire because Athens was a democratic city-state or Persia an autocratic monarchy; whereas that distinction might be important in both a typology and an analysis.Keywords
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