Conquest and consequences
Polybius’ ‘fifty-three years’ covered the end of the third and the beginning of the second century BCE, but it was some sixty years earlier that the Romans first encountered an enemy from overseas. That was Pyrrhus, the ruler of a kingdom in northern Greece, who in 280 BCE sailed to Italy to support the town of Tarentum against the Romans. His self-deprecating joke – that his victories against Rome cost him so many men that he could not afford another – lies behind the modern phrase ‘Pyrrhic victory’, meaning one that takes such a heavy toll that it is tantamount to defeat. The phrase is rather kind to the Romans’ side of the story, for Pyrrhus was a serious match for them. Hannibal is supposed to have rated him the greatest military leader after Alexander the Great, and – according to a number of affectionate anecdotes – he was something of an engaging showman. He was the first to pull off the stunt of bringing elephants to Italy and on one occasion is supposed to have tried, unsuccessfully, to disconcert a visiting Roman by revealing one of his beasts from behind a curtain. He is also the first character in the history of Rome to whom we can plausibly put a face.
30. This portrait of Pyrrhus made more than two hundred years after his death, found in a lavish villa just outside Herculaneum, is very likely to go back to an image made in his lifetime. There are several earlier ‘portraits’ of Romans, or their enemies, but none can be reliably tied to a historical individual. This is where we first see the real face of a character in the history of Rome.
31. The disastrous Roman expedition to North Africa in the First Punic War was given an heroic spin by the story of Marcus Atilius Regulus. After a Roman defeat there in 255 BCE, the Carthaginians released him to go home to negotiate a truce, on condition that he would return. In Rome, Regulus urged against any peace treaty, then – good as his Roman word – went back to Carthage to face death. This nineteenth-century painting re-creates his final departure from Rome, despite the pleas of his family.
From the invasion of Pyrrhus to 146 BCE – when Roman armies destroyed both Carthage, at the end of what was called the Third Punic War (from the Latin Punicus, or ‘Carthaginian’), and, almost simultaneously, the wealthy Greek city of Corinth – there was more or less continuous warfare involving Rome and its enemies in the Italian peninsula and overseas. One ancient scholar isolated the year ‘when Gaius Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls’ (235 BCE) as the only point in this period when hostilities were not taking place.
The most celebrated, and devastating, conflicts were the first two Punic Wars, against Carthage. The earlier lasted for more than twenty years (from 264 to 241 BCE), largely fought in Sicily and on the seas round about, except for one disastrous Roman excursion to the Carthaginian homeland, in North Africa. It ended with Sicily under Roman control – and after a few years Sardinia and Corsica too, though the epitaph of Barbatus’ son rather exaggerates his achievements in ‘capturing’ the island. In one extraordinary recent find, some of the detritus of the final naval battle between Romans and Carthaginians has been dragged up from the bottom of the Mediterranean. Just off the Sicilian coast, close to where the two fleets are supposed to have met, underwater archaeologists exploring the area since 2004 have recovered several bronze rams from sunken warships (mostly Roman, but including one Carthaginian vessel), together with at least eight bronze helmets, one carrying a trace of some Punic graffiti, probably scratched by its drowned owner, and pottery amphorae that must have been carrying the ships’ supplies (see plate 8).
On a very different geographical scale was the Second Punic War, which was fought between 218 and 201 BCE. It is now best remembered for the heroic failure of Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with his elephants (more of a propaganda coup than a practical military asset) and inflicted vast casualties on the Romans in Italy, most notoriously in 216 BCE at the Battle of Cannae in the south. Only after more than a decade of inconclusive warfare did Hannibal’s home government – increasingly uneasy about the whole escapade and now with the invading army of Africanus to face – recall him to Carthage. But it was not merely an Italian and North African war. It had started with a clash between Romans and Carthaginians in Spain, hence the Roman fighting there through most of the second century BCE. And the possibility of support for Hannibal from Macedon pushed the Romans into a series of wars in northern Greece that ended with the defeat of the Macedonian king Perseus in 168 BCE by Aemilius Paullus, Scipio Aemilianus’ natural father, and soon after with Roman control over the whole of what we call mainland Greece.
What is more, the Romans were also engaged in major conflicts with the Gauls in the far north of Italy in the 220s BCE. They made periodic interventions across the Adriatic too, partly to deal with so-called pirates (a catch-all term for ‘enemies in ships’) who were supported by the tribes and kingdoms on the opposite coast – or so it was said. And in 190 BCE, under the command of Scipio Asiaticus, they decisively defeated Antiochus ‘the Great’ of Syria. Not only was he busy modelling himself on Alexander the Great and extending his power base accordingly, but he had also given a home to Hannibal, now in exile from Carthage, who was reputed to be offering the king master classes in how to confront the Romans.
Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life, and Roman writers organised the history of this period, as I have just done, around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day. When Sallust called his essay on Catiline’s plotThe War against Catiline, or Bellum Catilinae, he was reflecting, and maybe slightly parodying, the Roman tradition of seeing war as the structuring principle of history. It was a tradition that went back a long way. There is a surviving snatch of Ennius’ epic poem on the history of Rome that refers explicitly to ‘the Second Punic War’, in which he had fought as a Roman ally; it was written even before the third had happened.
In practical terms the Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life. Throughout this period, somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year, a greater proportion than in any other pre-industrial state and, on the higher estimate, comparable to the call-up rate in World War I. Twice as many legions fought at Cannae as had fought at Sentinum some eighty years earlier – which is a convenient indication of the increasing size of these conflicts and the ever more complex and demanding logistics of equipment, supply and animal transport. An army of the size the Romans and their allies fielded at Cannae would, for example, have needed around 100 tonnes of wheat alone, every day. The deals with the local communities that this implies, the marshalling of the hundreds of pack animals, who added to the demand by necessarily consuming part of what they carried, and the collection and distribution networks would have been inconceivable at the beginning of the century.
It is harder to put a figure on the casualties: there was no systematic tally of deaths on an ancient battlefield; and all numbers in ancient texts have to be treated with suspicion, victims of exaggeration, misunderstanding and over the years some terrible miscopying by medieval monks. Nevertheless, the combined total of the Roman casualty figures that Livy provides for all the battles that he records in the first thirty years of the second century BCE – so not including the massive losses sustained against Hannibal – comes to just over 55,000 dead. This is far too low. There was probably a patriotic tendency to downplay Roman losses; it is not clear whether allies as well as Roman citizens were included; there must have been some battles and skirmishes which do not feature in Livy’s list; and those who subsequently died of their wounds must have been very many indeed (in most circumstances, ancient weapons were much better at wounding than killing outright; death followed later, by infection). But it gives a hint of the human cost of this warfare on the Roman side alone. The toll on the defeated is even harder to gauge but was presumably worse.
It is necessary, however, to see beyond this carnage, terrible as it was, to look harder at the reality and organisation of the fighting and to investigate the domestic politics that underpinned Roman expansion, as well as the Roman ambitions and wider geopolitics of the ancient Mediterranean that may have encouraged it. Polybius is the most important guide, but there is other vivid contemporary evidence – often documents inscribed on stone – that makes it possible to trace some of the interactions between the Romans and the outside world. Accounts still survive that capture at first hand the bewildering experiences in Rome of envoys from small Greek towns; and we can still read the texts of detailed treaties between the Romans and states abroad. The oldest fragment, from 212 BCE, is part of a much longer agreement between Rome and a group of Greek cities, and it sets out precise rules on how any war booty is to be divided between Rome and the others: basically, cities and houses to the Greeks, movable property to the Romans.
There were also important consequences for Rome itself of military success overseas. The literary revolution was only one part of it. By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth. Bullion by the barrow load, taken (or stolen) from rich eastern cities and kingdoms, poured into the well-guarded basement of the Temple of Saturn in the Forum, which served as the state ‘treasury’. And there was enough left over to line the pockets of the soldiers, from the grandest general to the rawest recruit.
There was plenty for Romans to celebrate. Some of the cash was ploughed into new civic amenities, from new harbour installations and vast warehouses on the Tiber to new temples lining the streets, commemorating the assistance of the gods in securing the victories that had brought all this wealth. And it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.
Yet these changes were destabilising too. It was not just that some curmudgeonly Roman moralists worried about the dangerous effects of all this wealth and ‘luxury’ (as they put it). The expansion of Roman power raised big debates and paradoxes about Rome’s place in the world, about what counted as ‘Roman’ when so much of the Mediterranean was under Roman control and about where the boundary between barbarism and civilisation now lay, and which side of that boundary Rome was on. When, for example, at the end of the third century BCE the Roman authorities welcomed the Great Mother goddess from the highlands of what is now Turkey and solemnly installed her in a temple on the Palatine, complete with her retinue of self-castrated, self-flagellating, long-haired priests – how Roman was that?
Winning, in other words, brought its own problems and paradoxes. But even the definition of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ can be uncertain. Those uncertainties are sharply revealed in the story of the Battle of Cannae, in the second of the Punic Wars. It gives a glimpse of the strategy, the tactics and the real face of ancient combat, but for Polybius – and perhaps for Hannibal too – it raised the question of whether Rome’s most notorious defeat was not in some ways the strongest indicator of its power.