Roman Grand Strategy

According to David S. Potter’s superb The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (Routledge History of the Ancient World) , there was no such thing as Roman grand strategy.

In part this was a limitation of cartographical technology: “Roman surveyors had the ability to draw very detailed maps of small areas. They did not have the capacity to draw accurate large-scale maps; rather they could measure the empire in terms of how far places were from each other along a road. Local maps represent the ability to obtain immensely detailed local knowledge, large-scale maps the impossibility of projecting that knowledge into a useful format for central decision making.”

It was also a limitation on what Roman understood by “strategy”:

“When Augustus said that the empire should be limited to the area within existing borders, that seems to have been the extent of what he was proposing; he could provide a list of what legions and auxiliary cohorts were where, a list of revenuse and of citizens. But there was no broad strategic vision on the order of plans drawn up by a European general staff in the nineteenth century. Indeed the Greek word strategema meant only a trick or device to be used on the battlefield (the Latin strategema is obviously a loan word, and it means the same thing). Works on generalship entitled Strategemata , in Greek or Latin, are no more than lists of clever battlefield maneuvers culled, ordinarily, from literature.” There is often “substantial practical advice” in manuals on war, “but no independent vocabulary or capacity for detailed long-range planning.”

In short, since the late republic, the Roman notion of world domination meant “all the world that was worth ruling was already under Roman control.”