Class 11 History Chapter 2 An Empire Across Three Continents Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What was the Principate?

Answer: The Principate was the regime Augustus established in 27 BCE, in which he was the sole ruler but kept up the fiction of being only the Princeps, the Senate’s ‘leading citizen’.

Q. What was papyrus?

Answer: Papyrus was a reed-like plant grown along the banks of the Nile in Egypt and processed into a writing material used across the Roman world.

Q. What formed the northern and the southern boundaries of the Roman Empire?

Answer: The rivers Rhine and Danube in the north, and the Sahara desert in the south.

Q. What was a denarius?

Answer: A Roman silver coin containing about 4½ grams of pure silver, the backbone of the empire’s currency for its first three centuries.

Q. What is transhumance?

Answer: The regular annual movement of herdsmen between higher mountain pastures and lower ground, in search of grazing for their flocks.

Q. Who were the humiliores?

Answer: The vast lower classes of the empire: rural labourers on the great estates, mining and industrial workers, migrant and casual labourers, artisans and slaves.

Q. What was the solidus?

Answer: A coin of 4½ grams of pure gold introduced by Constantine, which became the currency of the late empire and outlasted the empire itself.

Q. What do historians mean by ‘late antiquity’?

Answer: The final, transformative phase of the Roman Empire’s evolution and break-up, roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries CE.

Q. What did the Chinese mean by ‘Ta Ch’in’?

Answer: ‘Greater Ch’in’, the name they gave to the whole western world that Rome and Iran had divided between them.

Q. Why is the Roman army described as a professional army, and how did it differ from Iran’s?

Answer: Roman soldiers were paid by the state and enlisted for a minimum of 25 years, so soldiering was a career rather than a duty. Iran’s army was raised by conscription, that is, by forced recruitment, which is why the paid professional army counts as a genuinely distinctive Roman feature.

Q. How did Rome and Iran divide the world between them?

Answer: Between the birth of Christ and the 630s, Rome ruled most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East around the Mediterranean, while Iran controlled the region from south of the Caspian Sea to eastern Arabia, and sometimes much of Afghanistan. Their territories were separated only by a narrow strip along the river Euphrates.

Q. What did the chapter mean by a ‘Roman city’?

Answer: An urban centre with its own magistrates, its own city council and a ‘territory’ containing villages under its jurisdiction. One city could never lie inside another city’s territory, though villages almost always did.

Q. Why did the Senate fear and hate the Roman army?

Answer: The army was the largest single organised body in the empire and had the power to decide an emperor’s fate, so senators saw it as a source of unpredictable violence. The resentment sharpened in the third century, when paying for the army meant heavier taxation.

Q. What were amphorae, and how do archaeologists use them as evidence?

Answer: Amphorae were the containers in which liquids such as wine and olive oil were carried across the Mediterranean. Because the clay of a fragment can be matched to the clay pit it came from, archaeologists can say where and often when a vessel was made, and so trace which region’s producers were winning which markets.

Q. What was ‘Dressel 20’, and what do its find-spots tell us?

Answer: Dressel 20 was the container used mainly to carry Spanish olive oil, named after the archaeologist who first defined its shape. Its wide scatter across the Mediterranean shows how far Spanish oil travelled and that Spanish producers had taken markets from their Italian rivals, almost certainly with better oil at lower prices.

Q. Why was free labour used so extensively on public works at Rome?

Answer: Because widespread slave labour would have cost more. A slave had to be fed and maintained the whole year round, whereas hired workers could be taken on when needed and let go afterwards, which made free wage labour the cheaper choice for large projects.

Q. What is meant by Christianisation?

Answer: The process by which Christianity spread through the different groups of the population and became the dominant religion of the empire. It was gradual and uneven: polytheism survived for a long time, especially in the western provinces.

Q. Why did Constantine introduce the solidus, and what did it replace?

Answer: The empire’s currency had rested on silver for its first three centuries, but the Spanish silver mines were exhausted and that system could no longer be maintained. Constantine therefore founded a new system on gold, with the 4½ gram solidus at its centre, minted on a scale that ran into millions of coins.

Q. How could Roman law act as a brake even on the most fearsome emperors?

Answer: The Roman state was authoritarian and usually met protest with violence, yet by the fourth century a strong tradition of Roman law had developed that even emperors were expected to respect. It was strong enough to let powerful bishops such as Ambrose confront emperors directly over the harsh treatment of ordinary people, and the laws that tried to curb the extortion of higher bureaucrats and provincial governors are themselves evidence of the same tradition of criticism.

Q. Describe the three kinds of source historians use to write the history of the Roman Empire.

Answer: 1. Texts. Histories written by contemporaries, usually called ‘Annals’ because they narrate year by year, together with letters, speeches, sermons and laws.
2. Documents. Chiefly inscriptions and papyri. Inscriptions were cut into stone, so a great many survive, in Greek and in Latin. Papyri are documents written on papyrus, an Egyptian reed processed into writing material, and the scholars who study them are called papyrologists.
3. Material remains. Buildings, monuments, pottery, coins, mosaics and even whole landscapes, recovered by archaeologists through excavation, field survey and aerial photography.
4. Their limits. Each kind of source can carry the historian only so far on its own, so the three are used together, and how well that is done depends on the historian’s own skill.

Q. Explain the roles of the emperor, the Senate and the army in the politics of the early Roman Empire.

Answer: 1. The emperor. The sole ruler and the real source of authority, though Augustus dressed the office up as that of a leading citizen. Succession passed by descent, natural or adoptive, as with Tiberius, Augustus’s adopted heir.
2. The Senate. A body of the wealthiest landowning families, with lifetime membership, which had held real power under the Republic. It represented the aristocracy, and because most surviving histories were written by senators, emperors are judged in the sources by how they treated it.
3. The army. Paid, professional, 600,000 strong by the fourth century, and the largest organised body in the empire. It could make or unmake an emperor and agitated, sometimes by mutiny, for better pay.
4. The balance between them. An emperor’s success depended on controlling the army, and a divided army usually meant civil war.

Q. How were client kingdoms absorbed into the Roman Empire, and why was this more typical than conquest?

Answer: 1. What a client kingdom was. A ‘dependent’ kingdom whose ruler used his own forces in support of Rome and was allowed to go on existing in return. The Near East was full of them.
2. How they disappeared. Roman rule was extended by absorbing them gradually into provincial territory rather than by fighting them. By the early second century CE, every such kingdom lying west of the Euphrates had gone.
3. Why this route. External warfare was uncommon in the first two centuries, and the one big expansion attempt, Trajan’s occupation across the Euphrates in 113-17 CE, was abandoned by his own successors as fruitless.
4. What Rome gained. Great wealth without a war: Herod’s kingdom alone yielded 5.4 million denarii a year, equal to over 125,000 kg of gold.

Q. Describe the causes and the symptoms of the third-century crisis.

Answer: 1. Iran. A new and far more aggressive dynasty, the Sasanians, rose in 225 CE and pushed towards the Euphrates within fifteen years. Shapur I’s own rock inscription, cut in three languages, claims he annihilated a Roman army of 60,000 and captured Antioch.
2. The northern frontiers. Germanic tribal confederacies, notably the Alamanni, the Franks and the Goths, moved against the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and from 233 to 280 CE repeatedly invaded the line of provinces stretching from the Black Sea to the Alps and southern Germany.
3. Fighting on several fronts. From the 230s the empire was under pressure in the east and the north at once, and had to give up territory beyond the Danube.
4. The clearest symptom. Twenty-five emperors ruled in only 47 years, which is the measure of how far political stability had broken down.

Q. Describe the legal position of women in Roman society, and the inequalities that persisted alongside it.

Answer: 1. Property. In the late Republic a wife’s property stayed under her natal family’s authority, so she remained her father’s primary heir and became an independent property owner on his death. In law the married couple was two financial entities, and the wife enjoyed complete legal independence.
2. Dowry and divorce. The dowry went to the husband only for the duration of the marriage, and divorce required no more than a notice of intent from either husband or wife.
3. Inequality of age and choice. Marriages were generally arranged, and men married in their late twenties or thirties while women were married off in their late teens or early twenties, which built inequality into the household.
4. Violence and paternal power. Augustine records that his own mother was regularly beaten by his father, and that most wives in his hometown carried similar bruises. Fathers held extensive legal power over children, in shocking cases including the power of life and death over unwanted infants.

Q. In what ways did Roman employers control their workers?

Answer: 1. Close supervision. Columella advised organising workers into squads of ten so they could be watched more easily, and advised keeping double the tools needed so production never stopped.
2. Physical restraint and search. Alexandria’s frankincense factories sealed workmen’s aprons, made them wear masks or close-mesh nets, and stripped them before they could leave. Pliny the Elder condemned the chaining of slave gangs by the feet as the worst method of organising production.
3. Branding. Agricultural labour was disliked enough that an early third-century edict refers to Egyptian peasants deserting their villages so as to avoid farm work, and a law of 398 CE ordered workers to be branded so that runaways could be identified.
4. Debt bondage. Employers cast agreements as debt contracts, so that, in a second-century writer’s words, thousands surrendered themselves to servitude although they were free. Augustine records parents selling children into 25 years of servitude.

Q. Describe the social hierarchy of the early Roman Empire, and how it had changed by the late empire.

Answer: 1. Tacitus’s order. Senators, called patres or ‘fathers’; the leading members of the equestrian class; the respectable people attached to the great houses; the ‘unkempt lower class’ or plebs sordida, whom he calls addicted to circus and theatre; and at the bottom the slaves.
2. The Senate and the equites. By the early third century the Senate numbered about 1,000, roughly half still from Italian families. The equites were traditionally the second wealthiest group, often shipowners, traders and bankers as well as landowners.
3. The middle and lower groups. A large body connected with imperial service, along with prosperous merchants and farmers, stood above the humiliores, the vast mass of rural, industrial, migrant and casual labour, and many thousands of slaves.
4. The change. From Constantine’s reign senators and equites merged into one expanded aristocracy, at least half of it of African or eastern origin. It was enormously wealthy but less powerful than the purely military elites, who came almost entirely from non-aristocratic backgrounds.

Q. ‘Urbanisation was the answer to governing an empire that stretched across three continents.’ Explain this statement.

Answer: The problem. At its second-century peak the empire ran from Scotland to the borders of Armenia and from the Sahara to the Euphrates, with a population of about 60 million, and there was nothing resembling a modern government to administer it.
Cities as the machinery of government. The great urban centres along the Mediterranean shores, Carthage, Alexandria and Antioch the largest among them, were the true bedrock of the imperial system. It was through cities that government taxed the provincial countryside, which produced most of the empire’s wealth.
What a city was. An urban centre with its own magistrates, its own council, and a territory of villages under its jurisdiction. A village could be promoted to city status, or demoted, as a mark of imperial favour or its opposite.
Local collaboration. The system worked because local upper classes actively collaborated with Rome, administering their own territories and collecting the taxes themselves.
Advantages of city life. A city was better provided for in a famine than the countryside around it, as Galen’s account of city-dwellers hoarding a year’s grain shows. Cities also carried public baths and entertainment on a large scale, with one calendar recording shows on 176 days of the year.
The political consequence. Across the second and third centuries power shifted dramatically from Italy to the provinces, as provincial upper classes supplied more and more of the administrators and army commanders.

Q. Describe the economic expansion of the Roman Empire across its three continents.

Answer: Infrastructure. The empire carried a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards and olive-oil factories.
The three great commodities. Wheat, wine and olive oil were traded and consumed in enormous quantities, coming mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa and Egypt, and to a smaller extent from Italy.
How goods moved. Liquids travelled in amphorae. Monte Testaccio in Rome is said to hold the remains of over 50 million of them, and matching a fragment’s clay to its clay pit lets archaeologists trace exactly whose oil was reaching which market.
Shifting dominance. Spanish olive oil, carried in Dressel 20 containers, peaked between 140 and 160 CE, having beaten Italian producers on quality and price. North African estates then dominated through most of the third and fourth centuries, and after 425 CE the eastern provinces, the Aegean, southern Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, became the major exporters.
Fertile and less developed regions. Writers such as Strabo and Pliny named the regions with a reputation for exceptional fertility. Campania produced the best wine, Sicily and Byzacium exported wheat to Rome, Galilee was cultivated to the last inch, and Baetica in southern Spain produced oil on estates called fundi along the Guadalquivir. Against these stood Numidia, where transhumance was widespread, and northern Spain, with a Celtic-speaking peasantry in hilltop villages called castella.
Technical sophistication. The chapter warns against underestimating this economy: diversified use of water power, advances in water-powered milling, hydraulic mining in the Spanish gold and silver mines on a scale not matched again until the nineteenth century, organised commercial and banking networks, and the widespread use of money.

Q. How did Diocletian and Constantine remake the Roman state, and why is the period that followed called late antiquity?

Answer: What late antiquity means. It is the term historians use for the final, transformative period of the empire’s evolution and break-up, roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries, a time of cultural and economic ferment rather than simple decline.
Diocletian (284-305 CE). He cut back overexpansion by abandoning territory of little strategic or economic value, fortified the frontiers, reorganised provincial boundaries, and separated civilian from military functions, which gave military commanders, the duces, far greater autonomy and power. In 297 CE the empire was reorganised into 100 provinces.
Constantine’s monetary reform. He founded a new gold currency on the solidus, a coin of 4½ grams of pure gold minted in millions, which outlasted the empire itself.
Constantine’s political reform. He founded a second capital at Constantinople, on the site of Byzantium and surrounded by sea on three sides. The new capital needed a senate of its own, so the fourth century saw the governing classes expand rapidly.
Economic results. Monetary stability and a growing population stimulated growth: rural investment in oil presses and glass factories, new technologies such as screw presses and multiple water-mills, and a revival of long-distance trade with the East. Egypt alone paid over 2.5 million solidi a year in tax under Justinian, and large parts of the Near Eastern countryside were more developed and densely settled in the fifth and sixth centuries than they would be even in the twentieth.
Religion. Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the official religion began a gradual Christianisation. Polytheism survived for a long time, especially in the West, and Judaism remained a great and internally diverse tradition of the empire.

Q. Why did the western Roman Empire fragment in the fifth century while the eastern empire survived?

Answer: Different fortunes. Prosperity in the East was especially marked and its population went on expanding into the sixth century, despite the plague of the 540s, while the West broke up politically.
Germanic settlement in the West. Groups such as the Goths, Vandals and Lombards took over the major western provinces and founded kingdoms historians call ‘post-Roman’: the Visigoths in Spain until the Arabs destroyed them in 711-720 CE, the Franks in Gaul from about 511 to 687 CE, and the Lombards in Italy from 568 to 774 CE.
The empire stayed united in the East. There the reign of Justinian (527-65 CE) marks the high point of prosperity and imperial ambition. He recovered Africa from the Vandals in 533 CE.
The cost of reconquest. Recovering Italy from the Ostrogoths devastated the country and opened the way to the Lombard invasion that followed, so the western recovery did not hold.
The eastern empire’s own struggle. In the early seventh century the Sasanians invaded the major eastern provinces including Egypt, and Byzantium, as the eastern empire was now called, recovered them only in the 620s.
The final blow. The expansion of Islam, called the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world, took large parts of both the eastern Roman and the Sasanian empires by 642 CE, barely ten years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death.