[gozur88]

>Any action which leads an agent to a state closer to his preferred state is an economic victory.

I find that construction odd. Are you trying to say all goals of war are ultimately economic? If so I think that's needlessly restrictive.

>Because whatever value those peoples derived from conflict wasn't most likely in increased treasuries, but instead in the extension of land and in the number of subjects...

I know next to nothing about Assyria, but the Roman treasury profited quite handsomely from conquest, to the point that in the Republic's most expansive period you only had to work two days a year as a Roman citizen to pay your taxes.

Because when the Romans conquered a people they took everything that wasn't nailed down, sold the land, sold the rights to collect taxes in that area, and then sold people themselves.

[tpeo]

What I meant is that "economic" phenomena encompass a much wider range of phenomena you might be thinking of. It's the opposite of being restrictive: any problem at all where have something like an agent which has to choose something over something else might be considered an "economic" problem, at least from an economist's perspective. If anything like a ranking of choices can be defined as well as a set of possible choices, that's something an economist can work with.

About the Roman bit, the real issue would be how much of any direct monetary gain from conquest ended up in the hands of the Roman state rather than in the hands of private citizens.