Foreword
Some 2,000 years ago a Chinese Taoist thinker named Sun Tzu produced a small but immensely influential book, The Art of War (trans. 1991). Its final, thirteenth chapter carries the title “On the Use of Spies”. It begins with a statement: “what enables an intelligent government and a wise military leadership to overcome others and achieve extraordinary accomplishments is foreknowledge,” which “cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be found out from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.” Tzu goes on to discuss the five kinds of spy, the various channels through which a commander can learn the strength, position, and intentions of the enemy, and, equally important, the extent of his knowledge or ignorance of the strength, position, and intentions of his adversary.
At about the same time, in Europe, Rome’s first emperor, Octavian, who had assumed the name Augustus, was engaged in putting on a sounder basis the rather haphazard system of gathering military intelligence in use during the centuries in which the Roman Republic had step by step extended its authority over Italy, Spain, North Africa, Greece, and the Middle East. Some of the methods used by the Republic to acquire foreknowledge in earlier times – interpretation of the movements of flocks of birds, inspection of the livers of sacrificed animals, observation of the feeding habits of the sacred chickens, consultation of oracles – sound like those specifically ruled out by Sun Tzu – “ghosts and spirits.” But even secular methods of gaining foreknowledge were in those times primitive compared to those available to modem intelligence officers. There were no telephones to be used (and tapped), no radio messages sent by clandestine radio operators planted in enemy territory to be intercepted (and, if possible) deciphered, no ciphers, for that matter, none of the equipment of the modem agent – onetime pad, silk, and cyanide. (Julius Caesar had a cipher, a simple letter transposition system, but he seems to have used it only in his private correspondence.)
The collection and transmission of military intelligence was almost exclusively by word of mouth. Military scouting parties reported to their commander, prisoners answered their interrogators, and travelers, merchants and diplomatic personnel passed on what they had learned about foreign territories. Under the Republic there was no central staff or center for the reception and classification of such data, and because the two consuls, the supreme executives in peace and war, changed every year, there was no continuity in its collection and interpretation. This discontinuity made the Republic vulnerable, and in the course of its steady climb to mastery of the ancient world it suffered some spectacular disasters due to its faulty or indeed total lack of foreknowledge. Professor Sheldon discusses some of these in detail. The most striking is the mishandling of the threat posed to the Republic by the operations of the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, in Spain. When the Romans finally declared war, one consul was on the way to Spain via the Greek city of Massilia (Marseilles), a Roman ally, and the other was preparing for an expedition against Carthage when the news came that Hannibal had crossed the Rhone and was coming down through the Alpine passes into northern Italy. Time and again in the following years he defeated the Romans, taking them by surprise, though in the end he had to return to Carthage, where he lost the battle and the war.
Professor Sheldon’s fascinating book covers the story of Roman military intelligence, its successes and its many failures, from the early days of the Republic to the year ad 284, which saw the beginning of the transformation of the Roman Empire under Diocletian into an oriental monarchy. She is a professor of history (and a colonel) at the Virginia Military Institute, where she has taught a course in this subject for many years and published more than two-dozen articles on it in professional journals. This book is a distillation of what she has written and taught over the years; though the notes give full references to sources and deal with matters of scholarly controversy, the text of the book is aimed at the general reader.
The account of the development of Roman intelligence methods from an embryonic form under the Republic to a fully developed system under Augustus and his successors is enlivened by separate chapters on some of Rome’s failures in the field. In addition to a chapter on Hannibal and his brilliant use of informants, there is one on Caesar’s two incursions into Britain, which after careful analysis comes to the conclusion that they would have been much more successful had he made a better preliminary study of the target area. In a later chapter, however, Sheldon discusses Caesar’s measures, in both the Gallic and civil wars, to improve intelligence communications, including a messenger system with relay horses stationed at fixed points, a prototype of the rapid communications system later organized by Augustus. Another deals with one of the Republic’s most disastrous defeats, the destruction of the army of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the millionaire triumvirate partner of Caesar and Pompey, when he invaded Parthia. But Augustus too, in spite of his centralization and reorganization of the intelligence system, was to suffer a disaster due to a lack of foreknowledge – the annihilation of three legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in Germany in ad 9. At a time of apparent peace on the Rhine, Varus took his legions across the river to summer quarters among what seemed to be friendly German tribes. But when he moved, at summer’s end, to winter quarters, he was pinned down in a deadly ambush and his entire army, with all its possessions and dependents, was destroyed. In her detailed account of the disaster, Sheldon draws on the results of recent excavations, which have definitively located the site of the battle, uncovering large quantities of Roman artifacts. This event was certainly a failure of intelligence, but since the man who organized the ambush and steered the Romans into the trap, Arminius, was a German tribal leader who had seemed to be a friend of Rome, Varus’s mistake is understandable.
When, in 31 bc Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium made him master of the Roman world (which now included the rich province of Egypt), he set to work to give the collection of intelligence the organization and continuity of administration it had so far lacked. One man was now in charge of both civil and military affairs, and some measure of stability and regularity was built into the process of gathering information. One of the most important measures was the creation of an empire-wide postal service, with relay stations equipped with fresh horses and accommodations for the messengers, a service strictly reserved for government officials. In an empire to which, as Virgil put it in the Aeneid (I.278–9), Jupiter had set no limits in time or space, information about foreign countries, and its fast delivery, was of great importance. But there was another side to intelligence, now that one man alone held power. The murder of Julius Caesar was a warning that conspiracies at home might be even more dangerous than threats from abroad. Inevitably Augustus, as he now called himself, found he had to initiate what was to be a long tradition of internal surveillance, that culminated in a Roman system combining elements of the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and the Postal Service.
In a final chapter Sheldon reviews and analyzes the whole history of Roman intelligence activity, assessing its successes and failures as well as its inevitable trend to put internal security at the forefront of its agenda. She ends her survey at the year ad 284, because at that time, under the Emperor Diocletian, “the ground rules were altered.” So she has “elected to leave the subject of Roman intelligence in the late Empire for a separate volume.” Readers who have enjoyed and learned from her first volume will look forward with eager anticipation to her second.
Professor Bernard M.W. Knox
Director Emeritus, Center for Hellenic Studies
Washington, DC
This book is intended as a primer on ancient Roman intelligence activities. It is aimed at the general reader with no background in classical studies or intelligence history, but should also appeal to those with backgrounds in military history and intelligence work. The thesis is easily understood by all: that spying is as old as history itself, and that it has always been of crucial importance to military commanders and political leaders. The book covers the period from the founding of the Republic, through the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the late third century ad.
The actual writing of intelligence history, however, has had a much shorter lifespan than the practice of intelligence gathering itself. General William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, of OSS fame, was one of the first people to recognize the need for writing a history of the intelligence profession. As part of his attempt to fill this gap in the historical record, he commissioned Father Francis Dvornik, a Jesuit scholar then at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, to write the early chapters of a book on the history of intelligence services. Although General Donovan’s death in 1959 put an end to the larger project, Father Dvornik had collected enough material for an entire book, and ultimately published his research under the title Origins of Intelligence Services. This book still remains one of only two books that survey the ancient evidence for all of antiquity, and the only one in English. The other work is Wolfgang Riepl’s Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums. Father Dvornik set out to study formal intelligence services and communication systems, rather than the intelligence process in all its aspects. And since his book was only a survey, each individual chapter could have been turned into a separate book. I decided, in this volume, to write a more extensive coverage of the Roman material. Much material has already been published elsewhere, and a considerable amount of further research has been done, but there is still a need for a book that can be used by general readers or undergraduates as part of a course on intelligence studies or ancient history. When I wrote my dissertation in 1987, there were no full-length studies on Roman intelligence. Since then, Austin and Rankov’s book Exploratio has appeared and their work certainly gives a detailed coverage of Roman intelligence activities for classicists. But it would be arduous for the average undergraduate, or any reader for that matter, without a background in classical studies. The works of A.D. Lee and Boris Rankov on the Roman and Byzantine side, and the appearance of Frank S. Russell on classical Greece, are also heartening. Much good work has appeared that needs to be brought to the attention of the general reading public. David Woolliscroft’s excavation of numerous sites in England and Scotland, for example, and his discussion of Roman signaling, has changed the way we talk about this subject entirely.
With intelligence studies have being included in curricula, it is important that the ancient component be added. In a course I once took at Georgetown University, the professor began the semester by saying that “intelligence was so old it went all the way back to the Renaissance.” We now know it went back much further. Pushing back that date has been one of the goals of my professional career. Intelligence professionals have always known the high price one pays for intelligence failures. Since September 11, however, much of the rest of the world has finally come to realize the importance of timely intelligence in combating terrorism around the world and preventing disasters such as the World Trade Center bombing.
The subject of this book covers close to a thousand years of Roman history, far too much material to discuss in detail. Thus, I have tried to construct a narrative that follows the chronological order, so that the story may unfold as it happened. I have traced the development of those institutions that were part of the Roman intelligence apparatus, and have attempted to show how and why they developed. I have focused on the people, institutions, and events that best illustrate the importance of intelligence gathering, or alternatively the disasters that occur when these resources are neglected. Focusing solely on intelligence failures can often lead to a depressing story, and I do not wish to distort the picture of Roman history by suggesting they always failed. They certainly had numerable successes as the very existence of their empire suggests, but by focusing on the intelligence failures, we can see that when the Roman system succeeded or failed, intelligence played a part in these events. Even men known for their superior military abilities, such as Julius Caesar, could find themselves in untenable positions if they failed to use the intelligence sources they had at hand. There are some striking parallels to modem intelligence issues, which I hope will become apparent as the reader follows the Romans through their phenomenal growth from an Iron Age community on the Tiber to domination of the Mediterranean world. The painful stages of their learning process should be ample indication of the high price they paid for their intelligence failures.
The common fate of books aimed at multiple audiences is to please none of them. I doubt very much if I have been the discoverer of the golden mean. Two problems have been vexing: what to do about references and how much argument to include in the text. My goal has been to navigate between the Scylla of adequate scholarship and the Charybis of readable material. My policy has been to cite the ancient sources in the notes and to mention the most useful and up-to-date secondary literature for readers who wish to pursue their investigations further. At the very least, the content of the notes should spell out my tremendous debt to other scholars.
An important caveat to all readers is that the Romans must be accepted on their own terms. Do not look to Rome for an ancient equivalent of the FBI or the CIA. There was none. More importantly, forcing our modem conceptions of intelligence on the ancients produces little if any understanding of the Romans and worse yet produces very bad history. The Romans, like many ancient societies, created institutions that have no modem equivalent. The Romans did not separate the intelligence function into the neat bureaucratic categories of modem intelligence. Even the lines between civilian and military activities were fluid. They lacked our divisions of labor and jurisdiction, and the amount of corruption that went on seems unbearable by modem western standards. Institutions aside, a great deal of intelligence activities did occur that resemble ours, and we can use our modem terms to describe them. Words like collection, analysis, dissemination, and counterintelligence, when used wisely, can help us to accurately describe Roman activities. The Romans understood these concepts and practiced by them. On the most basic level, spies have done the same thing for thousands of years, and calling them spies is no anachronism. When all collection is HUMINT (human intelligence), cloak and dagger does not differ much from toga and dagger.
As much as possible, I have tried to keep the text free from modem technological jargon. For example, much of this book deals with what the modem idiom refers to as C3| – Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. This comprises the personnel, organizational structure, procedures, facilities, and equipment systematically employed in the planning, directing, and controlling of military forces. All those elements that combine to provide accurate, adequate, and timely information enable a commander to transmit orders and instructions to his forces. But I have not used this term to describe what the Romans did because it inflicts on them an organizational principle that they clearly lacked. When Edward Luttwak (Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, 1976) analyzed the defense policy of the Roman Empire using the vocabulary of modem military structures, he produced an interesting conceptualization for readers at the Pentagon, but I am still not convinced he brought us any closer to an understanding of the Roman mentality. Roman activities were often messy, unprofessional, and even unsuccessful, but we do less damage to the historical record if we leave them that way. Trying to incorporate them into a grand strategy that may not even have existed may be more satisfying to us intellectually, but it is ultimately less accurate.
The originality of this book lies in its attempt to put a large amount of obscure material into a readable, chronological form for a new audience. Ancient intelligence history is largely inaccessible to the average reader because of its sheer antiquity, and because the sources are discussed by specialists in a form aimed only at the cognoscenti. The sources are in unfamiliar dead languages, the societies and cultures are remote from our time, and vastly differ from our own. The technical terms that are the shorthand of ancient historians constitute a foreign language in and of themselves. I have tried to define unfamiliar terms as clearly as possible, and provided maps and illustrations to help orient the reader to time and place, in order to make the context clear.
The many students who have taken my course on espionage in the ancient world over the last fifteen years are well acquainted with the problem of access to the collected literature of ancient intelligence. Much of the detailed research is hidden away in learned journals; I hope this volume will make the Roman material accessible to students at all levels and to readers in many different professions. My goal is to push back our historical consciousness by a few thousand years, to prove once and for all the statement that espionage is indeed the world’s second oldest profession.
Acknowledgments
The most pleasant part of this project is to record the generous help of friends and colleagues. My debts to others are manifold.
My thanks first and foremost go to all my students at the many institutions where I have taught my course, “Espionage in the Ancient World”: Georgetown University, American University, George Washington University, the Smithsonian Institution, Montana State University, Norwich University, and the Virginia Military Institute. They have forced me to think more clearly about researching ancient intelligence and its attendant problems. Both graduate and undergraduate students have provided ideas and criticisms that were helpful in the preparation of this book. The graduate students at the Defense Intelligence College in Washington, DC, were particularly helpful with their insights into the intelligence process, as were the cadets at Norwich University and the Virginia Military Institute on points of military history. I am grateful to them all for their enthusiasm, candor, and unswerving support, which was a constant reminder to me of why I teach.
Thanks to my colleagues in the Washington classical community: first and foremost Professor Elizabeth Fisher of the Classics Department at George Washington University for her advice and kind hospitality on research trips. The library staff at Catholic University was immensely helpful with inscriptional material. Mrs Inge Hynes, former librarian of the Center for Hellenic Studies, helped with German translations and has been a constant friend and supporter since our days together on Whitehaven Street. My thanks also go to Alice-Mary Talbot, Director of Medieval and Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and to Mark Zapataka in the library at Dumbarton Oaks, for their gracious hospitality and help in locating Byzantine materials. And finally, the staff of the Library of Congress has always been ready with advice and expertise about navigating one of the finest collections in the world.
Professors Arthur Eckstein of the University of Maryland and Josiah Ober of Princeton University kindly agreed to read parts of the manuscript and made useful comments, saving me from numerous errors. Elsewhere in the academic community, I must thank Professor Warren Esty of Montana State University for his advice on numismatic evidence, and Dr Chrystina Häuber for lending her expertise on the topography of ancient Rome and helping to arrange the logistics for our trip to the excavations at Kalkriese. The chapter on Varus in the Teutoburgerwald could not have been completed without the generous help of Dr Haeuber and Herr Franz Xaver Schuetz of the University of Bonn. My thanks also go to Dr Susanne Wilbers-Rost and her staff at the excavations of Kalkriese, and to Dr Hermann Queckenstedt, Geschaftsführer of the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land, for their kind hospitality and for allowing us to see excavations and the materials found there. Our travel was made possible by the Department of History at VMI.
Several people volunteered their critical abilities, which were indispensable during the early stages of this book, and gave of their time above and beyond the call of duty: Professor John P. Karras of the College of New Jersey, who was dragged through every unforgiving version of this project, and continued to give uncompromising criticism; Adrian Hillary, whose precision in both language and fact are a standard I will always emulate; James P. Harold kindly helped with interlibrary loans and technical assistance; Dr Levon Avdoyan greatly facilitated my access to the Library of Congress collections, as did Philip De Sellem.
Two of my colleagues in the Department of History at VMI were kind enough to read parts of the book and to offer their suggestions: Professor Kenneth Koons and Col. Turk McCleskey. Their precision as historians and graciousness as officers and gentlemen make them a joy to work with professionally. Professor Paul Pierpaoli read the book in its entirety and was my primary editor on the final work. The library staff provided invaluable help with graphic design, interlibrary loan, and reference problems. LTC Janet Holly, Capt. Kenneth Winter, Mrs Elizabeth Hostetter, and Mrs Linda Covington were the best and most patient colleagues any scholar could have. Major David Hess spent a great deal of his time helping with map production and Bill Benish helped with the ever-present technical problems of the computer. On the other side of the mountain in Charlottesville, I would like to thank the staff of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, and across the hill in Lexington I thank the staff of the Leyburn Library. This book would not have been completed without the patient support of the Microsoft Corporation, whose helpful staff can bring even the most technologically impaired classicist into the twenty-first century.
Financial support for travel to libraries around the country and overseas was provided by the VMI Department of History, as well as by the Faculty Development Committee of the Dean’s Office. They also provided much needed release time to work on this project.
Authors are often reliant on unknown readers for immensely useful comments that save them from egregious and embarrassing errors; I am no exception. I thank the anonymous reader as well as the staff of Frank Cass for all their editorial help, and whose humor and professionalism got me through the dark days when the reader’s comments got lost in the mail during the anthrax scare after September 11. I am especially indebted to Frank Cass himself, for his unflagging faith in this project.
In Europe I owe a debt of gratitude to Lester K. Little and the staff of the Library of the American Academy in Rome for help locating photographs, as well as the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut in Rome. I thank several organizations and authors for permission to publish maps: the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies for Britannia, Tempus Publishing Ltd, Carnegie Publishing Ltd, Archaeology magazine, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Dr David Shotter and Dr Nicholas Hodgson. I am especially grateful for the kind generosity of Dr David Woolliscroft of the University of Liverpool and Director of the Roman Gask Project, for his sage advice and for allowing me to use maps from his publications.
The saddest part of this project is giving posthumous thanks to the people who did not live to see the manuscript go to press: David Atlee Phillips, whose kindness, generosity and encouragement will continue to be an inspiration to me, and who was one of the motivating forces behind this project. I greatly miss Col. Russell J. Bowen, an intelligence expert with whom I spent many hours arguing the finer points of intelligence history, both ancient and modem. (His donation of 15,000 volumes on intelligence to Georgetown University will be a lasting legacy to all intelligence historians.) Walter Pforzheimer, often called the Dean of Intelligence Historians, passed away just as this book was going to press. Scholars of the Hellenistic world will miss Professor Robert Hadley of George Washington, who was always at hand with answers to research problems. The scholarly world lost, both in the same year, Professor Chester G. Starr, whose mentorship guided me through my graduate days in Ann Arbor and beyond, and his wife, my dear friend Gretchen, whose encouragement was unflagging. I am also saddened by the passing of Professor William G. Sinnigen, whose work introduced me to the Roman secret service and who was kind enough to follow my work long after I had left Hunter College. Finally, there was the loss of Joan Aubert whose son, my husband, made writing this book a much easier and less lonely project.
About the author
Sheldon Col. received her PhD in ancient history from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, on intelligence gathering in ancient Rome, won a National Intelligence Book Award in 1987. She is a Professor of History at The Virginia Military Institute, and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Dr. Sheldon is also on the Editorial boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and the Journal of Military History. She has written more than three dozen articles in such publications as Studies in Intelligence, Intelligence and National Security, the American Intelligence Journal, Military and Naval History Forum, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Journal of Military History, and the Washington Post. Her books include Espionage in the Ancient World: An Annotated Bibliography (McFarland, 2003).