25

Rome Reaches Out

Lucius Veratius was an extremely wicked man of immense brutality. He used to consider it very amusing to slap the face of a free man with the palm of his hand. A slave used to follow him, carrying a purse full of small change and whenever he had slapped someone, he would order twenty-five small coins (asses) to be counted out, as prescribed by the Twelve Tables. As a result, the praetors later decided that this law in the Tables was obsolete and defunct, and declared by edict that they would appoint assessors to estimate personal damages instead.

Favorinus (c. AD 120–50), in Aulus Gellius,
Attic Nights 20.1.13, on a change in the
early law-code of Rome

We left Rome in 451 BC at the time of its early laws, the Twelve Tables, and looked at it mainly in the context of the surrounding Etruscans and western Greeks. The site of Rome had long been inhabited, but, like so many of the towns in the Greek-speaking world, by the fifth century BC Rome traced her origin back to a founding hero. In fact, she looked back to both a founder and a visitor, and they were a remarkable contrast. One was Romulus, who was believed to have been suckled by a she-wolf and brought up by the wife of a simple shepherd. As a ‘once and future king’ he began as an outcast, a type of story which is quite frequent for founders and leaders in many societies. In due course, Romulus killed his brother Remus, a less usual turn to the story.

Alternatively, Rome was credited with a visit from the wandering Trojan hero Aeneas, who arrived in Italy and founded nearby Lavinium after the sack of Troy. Aeneas was well known in Greek poetry, including Homer, but his connection with Rome is not attested for us before c. 400 BC. By then it was part of a wider Western trend. Non-Greek cities in south Italy and Sicily also claimed similar links with travelling Trojans. These Trojan claims were a useful way for non-Greek outsiders to connect with the respected myths of the Greek world. For the Romans, the ‘Trojan connection’ was developed through Aeneas’ son and was to prove very useful when they began to have dealings with Greeks in Greece and Asia.¹

Wolf’s milk, exile and fratricide were an unusual ancestry. But they went with something very important: an exceptionally generous asylum policy. Romulus was supposed to have declared his new Rome to be an asylum centre for all comers. In Athens, myths and dramas presented the Athenian hero Theseus as kind to strangers too, but at Rome the kindness went with a most un-Athenian readiness to grant citizenship to outsiders. The citizenship was even granted to Romans’ slaves when they were formally freed by their citizen-masters. Freeing became frequent in Roman households (less so on Roman farms), but there was a hard-headed reason for much of it. Many slaves paid for their freedom and continued to pay or help their masters when freed. For masters, therefore, it was more sensible to free slaves after a while than to maintain them as an ageing asset. The community also benefited: children born to slaves when freed were available for recruitment as Roman legionary soldiers. From this abundant source, Rome’s military manpower thus grew far beyond the armies of Athens’ or Sparta’s tightly limited citizenry.

Nonetheless, it was slow to bear fruit. From the 450s (when the laws of Rome’s Twelve Tables were published) until the 350s Romans evidently had had to confront a whole series of difficulties. There were recurrent political tensions in their citizenry; years of bad harvests beset them; many of their Latin neighbours renewed hostilities. The late fifth century was a time of widespread migrations by other peoples in Italy, especially those who descended from the inland Apennine mountains. They entered the plains and the fertile western coast of Italy and blocked Rome’s expansion in that direction. The best-known of these migrants are the Samnites in south Italy: their warriors on horseback were honoured by stylized tomb paintings, well preserved in the area of Paestum in southern Italy.²

For a century or so, from 460 to 360 BC, there were fewer than ten years in all when the Romans were not at war. Their darkest hour was c. 390 BC, when Gauls (ultimately from southern France) came south into Italy and raided Rome itself. Legends later multiplied around this event, but it had been big enough to be noticed by Greeks, including Aristotle.³ The most famous story is that the raiding Gauls were dislodged from Rome’s revered Capitol hill when they caused the sacred geese of the goddess Juno to cackle in the night. The brave Manlius was alerted and drove the enemy off. Actually, the Gauls’ looting may have continued without interruption. Holy objects from Rome’s religious cults were escorted for safety to the nearby Etruscan town of Caere (modern Cerveteri) in the company of the six Vestal Virgins, the distinctive young servants of Rome’s virgin goddess Vesta (Hearth). It was this retreat, not the geese, which became known to Aristotle in Greece. The day of Rome’s worst defeat by the Gauls, 18 July, remained a day of ill omen and no business in the Roman calendar.

After this crisis, a Greek visitor in the 370s, the age of Plato, would have found Rome a rambling muddle. Later the Romans explained the absence of any town plan as due to their hasty rebuilding after Rome’s sack by the Gauls. In fact, it was endemic. Unlike Alexandria, Rome was never planned by a king or lawgiver. Instead, it evolved untidily, both in politics and architecture. The expulsion of the kings in the late sixth century had led to the immediate founding of the Republic and the dividing of the king’s powers among magistrates. They were to hold office for a year and, in most historians’ opinion, the most important of them were to be two consuls, serving as colleagues. Arguably, the consulship was not formally confined to patrician nobles, but initially patricians almost always held it. Much depends on how much trust we can put in the later lists of consuls, or fasti, but even so it seems clear that there were periods of irregularity, especially in the eighty years or so after the Twelve Tables. Quite often, two consulships were not filled.

Beyond the small group of ex-consuls, there were many other Roman citizens to consider, both in the town area and in its dependent

countryside. Politically, the position of half of them is easily summed up. As in the Greek world, half of the city of Rome, the women, could not vote or hold political office. Unlike Athenian women, they were not even able to be priestesses of the gods, unless they were one of the six Vestal Virgins. While their father or grandfather lived women were legally (like sons) in his ‘power’, and when he died they were put promptly (unlike sons) under the guardianship of their male next of kin. As perhaps more than half of Roman women aged twenty did not have fathers or grandfathers still alive (on a likely average), most adult women would be under guardianship. When they married, the predominant form of marriage conveyed them like children into the ‘hand’ of their husband. But even when ‘guarded’ they could own or inherit property (although they could not dispose of it without their guardian’s consent). When married, they could inherit from their husband on his death, like one of his children. Moreover, husbands were often away fighting and women were authoritative both within their own households and with their children. The legal formalities seem to exclude almost any independent action on their part, and yet the legends of the early Republic (perhaps reflecting domestic reality, especially in the upper class) are rich in stories of courageous or chaste heroines. Politically, however, women were irrelevant on the public stage.

Here the most important people were the small male clique of senators. Most probably, they had served as advisers to Rome’s kings and after the kings’ expulsion their advisory council had lived on as the Roman Senate, a body of distinguished men, many of whom had been magistrates themselves. They could advise the holders of public offices and resolve disputes between them. The crucial question was whether non-nobles were to be made members of this Senate or not. As in Greek cities of the seventh centuryBC, the question became increasingly acute, until it was agreed, c. 300 BC, that the ‘best men’ should be selected by merit, not by birth. At first, the ‘best’ would mostly be the well-born, nonetheless. Senators had presumably been enrolled at first by the consuls, but byc. 310 BC enrolment became the job of the two annually appointed censors.

Beyond the Senate, there were the people at large, the citizens on whom Rome’s military activity depended. There were particular reasons why they could not be overawed and relied on, unlike their contemporaries in Philip and Alexander’s Macedon, the ‘Foot Companions’. Rome’s first popular strike, or secession, in 494 BC had not been forgotten by the common people and there were ample reasons why it might recur: debt continued to tie poor people harshly to their social superiors, but politically they had scope (though not much) for manoeuvre. For the citizenry did meet in assemblies (including a ‘council of the plebs’ which no patrician could attend). Formally, at least, each adult citizen-male did have a vote in these meetings, and the citizen-majority was sovereign in the assemblies which passed laws. What the majority decided became a law, without any further checks on a law’s legality and its relation to existing statutes; in this respect, the Romans’ assembly was even more capable of instant legislation than the contemporary assembly in democratic Athens. However, the assemblies were organized as if the prime aim was to exclude the ‘tyranny’ of the crowd. The assembly of the ‘tribes’ mainly met so as to pass laws, and by 332 BC it was divided into twenty-nine ‘tribes’, or districts. The system was one of block-voting, and when a majority of the twenty-nine tribes had voted the same way the others did not even vote at all. Such votes as were given went only to establish the majority within each tribal ‘block’. As these ‘blocks’ were of very different sizes, many more voters might have voted against a law than for it, and yet by a majority of ‘blocks’ the law would go through.

The other main assembly, the ‘centuriate assembly’, was most important for electing most of the magistrates and for judging certain trials. Its organization was even more cleverly weighted against a lower-class majority. Those without property were bunched into only one century (out of a total of 193) and, yet again, would very seldom vote. The richest, including the cavalry, voted first and their centuries’ majority votes usually sufficed for a majority. Such changes as there ever were to this unprecedented system were only changes of detail.

Each type of assembly could only be summoned and presided over by a magistrate. Nobody else could speak, and until the later second century BC voters voted visibly and could therefore be intimidated by ‘canvassers’. The ‘tribal’ assembly gave most blocks of votes to people outside the city, with the inevitable result, no doubt intended, that only the reliable and richer citizens who could come into Rome would vote at all. These assemblies were complicated bodies and certainly assumed that ‘the people’ were sovereign. But that sovereignty was so cleverly contained that only a few modern historians would insist on calling it democratic, quite apart from the hierarchical social context (and clever bribery) within which votes were exercised at all.

There was, however, a glimmer of popular sovereignty and rights here. The ‘people’ did elect magistrates, including the tribunes who could veto unacceptable proposals put to a public meeting. The tribunes were not necessarily populist, but there was scope to be so if they dared to use it. There was also a brute fact of life: the Senate could not legislate. It could pass advisory decisions (consulta) and for a while it either did or could vet any decision which was to go to an assembly and be made into a law. But the senators were not ‘the government’ nor was public business consigned for a matter of years to any representative body of delegates or magistrates, chosen from their number. As the Romans had not adopted a constitution from a lawgiver, it is we who look for their ‘constitution’ in what was a bundle of evolving customs, traditions and precedents. At the heart of their practice, there was a two-headed beast, as some of them later characterized it: the venerable senators and the (formally) sovereign plebs.

At first, the tensions were contained within a sharply stratified social order. Nonetheless, they were there, and as a result the years from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth centuries are rightly described by historians as Rome’s ‘struggle of the orders’. It was not carried on as an extreme struggle of the poor against the rich: there were no demands by the poor to redistribute private property, as in some of the contemporary Greek cities in nearby Sicily. There is a constant risk of believing the much later traditions which were projected back into this period from later times of crisis and are overwhelmingly our main type of evidence. However, it does seem that the main struggle over land was simply over the ‘public land’ which was being annexed by conquest from Rome’s neighbours. Rich Romans used this land, but it was not strictly theirs. Should this use be restricted for other Romans’ benefit?

More immediately important were struggles over debt and the related issues of ‘freedom’. The demand was not, as in the Greek world, to abolish existing debts. It was rather to regulate the ways in which debtors were treated and to check the harassment of poor men by their social superiors. Far more than at democratic Athens, ‘freedom’ was valued at Rome in a negative sense, as ‘freedom from’ interference. Among the senators the most prized freedom was the ‘freedom from’ monarchy or tyranny, the one-man rule against which the Roman Republic had developed. Among the people, the most prized ‘freedom’ was ‘freedom from’ unchecked harassment by superior persons like senators. But there was also a stubborn sense of Roman citizens’ ‘freedom to…’, freedom to legislate, freedom to judge cases of treason and freedom to elect magistrates. These ‘freedoms’ were embedded in the assemblies which had existed before the Republic took over from the rule of kings.

There was scope for struggle on each of these points, but the most likely dangers lay with initiatives from within the upper class. A prominent Roman might break rank with his own class and, in order to be dominant, appeal for support to the lower orders. Manlius, the hero against the Gauls, was accused of such a tyrannical tactic. As riches were never static within only a few families, there was also tension in the upper levels of society over the distribution of privileges: within the growing ranks of the rich, who was to be eligible for magistracies and the Senate? Gradually, the noble patricians gave ground in order to preserve a united ruling class, but not because the poor as a class rose against them on this issue.

Historians formerly tended to see the struggling Rome of this era as out of touch with the main Greek world. Nowadays, the opposite is emphasized, with good reason. Indeed, there were acute food shortages, but they caused Romans to look outwards and send envoys to south Italy and Greek Sicily. There were wars with the migrant Gauls and others, but in 396 BC the spoils of a Roman victory over nearby Veii were sent to Greece to be dedicated at Delphi: the intermediary was Massilia (Marseilles), an important western Greek contact of Rome who had her own ‘treasury’ already on the site.⁴ In the 340s this same Delphic oracle was said to have been consulted by Romans in their own right and to have told them to put statues of two famous Greeks, the ‘wisest’ and the ‘best’, on their designated space for public meetings. The wisest Greek was Pythagoras (well known in south Italy and Tarentum), and the bravest Greek was Alcibiades the Athenian aristocrat (known for his actions in Sicily and at Thurii in south Italy).⁵Thenceforward, the images of these two Greeks are said to have looked down on Roman public business.

In the 320s the wars of Alexander and of the Successors were marginal to the Romans, although they did probably send an embassy to the great man in Babylon. Much more important were their dealings with Carthage. Since the late sixth century a series of treaties had regulated the two powers’ access to one another’s spheres of interest. These treaties prove that ‘struggling’ Romans were certainly not cut off from interest in north Africa, either.⁶

Each of these foreign outlets (south Italy, Sicily, Carthage and mainland Greece) were to attract Roman troops within a single lifetime, in a remarkable burst between the 280s and the 220s BC. But the prelude was remarkable too. Between the 360s and the 280s the Romans sorted out most of their political tensions and became dominant among the Latins who surrounded them. They also extended their power into the rich hinterland of the Bay of Naples (from 343 onwards) and even to Naples itself (in 326). A setback at the Caudine Fosks (321 BC) against a Samnite ambush was promptly avenged (320 BC). In 295 they won a huge battle up at Sentinum in Umbria which confirmed their growing power to the north. The battle was even mentioned by a distant Greek historian, Duris of Samos.⁷

This surge up and down Italy occurred in what was the single lifespan of the Macedonian Ptolemy, friend of Alexander and founder of the royal line in Egypt. Ptolemy is most unlikely to have even mentioned Rome in his history of Alexander: the great Greek minds in his contemporary Alexandria were moving on a totally different level to that of the Romans. The Roman expansion was the work of people who had no literature and as yet, no formal art of oratory. At Rome, Homer was still unknown and Aristotle would have been completely unintelligible. The great arts of the most classical Greeks, thinking, drawing and democratic voting, were not talents of the Romans. Nonetheless, plain blunt Romans reformed their army and gave up their ‘hoplite’ style of tactics, arguably in the 340s–330s, the years of further concessions by the noble patricians to the non-nobles.⁸ They also broke up the political league of their Latin neighbours and imposed settlements on its member-states one by one.

This decade (348–338 BC) is therefore of crucial importance to ancient history. In Macedonia, King Philip, Alexander’s father, was balancing and training a new Macedonian army with a new type of tactics. In Italy, Romans were also undertaking a military revolution. It resulted in three main ranks of infantry being combined in a flexible formation and being equipped with heavy throwing-spears and swords. The two resulting types of army would dominate the East and West respectively, before clashing decisively in the 190s BC; the Romans’ greater flexibility won the encounter, and the tactics of this time remained the backbone of her world-conquering armies for centuries. In 338 BC, a cardinal year, Philip had conquered the Athenians and their Greek allies and then imposed a ‘peace and alliance’ which marked a decisive limit on political freedom in Greece. In this same year, Rome imposed long-lasting settlements among the neighbouring Latins. She did the same elsewhere in Italy, in the towns then and later who submitted to her. The various grades of citizenship which she offered to these Italian towns were also to have a long, important future. They became a blueprint from which the Romans’ relations with towns throughout their Western Empire later developed.

These years of Roman struggle occurred outside the course of politics in the Greek world, but the major themes of justice and luxury were as prominent in Romans’ public life as ‘freedom’. The older Roman framework of public justice had been relatively simple. Much was left to self-help and privately initiated prosecution, but according to the Twelve Tables (in 451 BC), a few major crimes, including murder and theft, would also be prosecuted before one of the magistrates.⁹ In 367 BC a major change was made to the magistrates available. A separate ‘praetor’ was introduced besides the two consuls. Thereafter Roman praetors became major overseers of justice. Their edicts while holding office were to have a fundamental impact on Roman law; praetors did not legislate, but they did grant legal actions for a far wider body of civil cases than the Tables had specified. Successive praetors took over previous praetors’ edicts which thus grew by gradual additions; the edicts filled in gaps in the civil law, becoming the ‘Roman equity’ of later legal thinking.

Within this growing framework, Roman justice was still heavily conditioned by social relations and by wide discrepancies of social class. In the 320s one major oppression of the poor, debt-bondage, was at least brought under legal restraints. The status itself did not disappear (as it had in Athens since Solon’s reforms in 594 BC), but henceforward a Roman creditor could put a defaulting borrower into bondage only after obtaining a judgement in court. Citizens, meanwhile, did have one major resort against physical harassment and the blatant use of force by a social superior. Inside Rome itself, they could ‘appeal’ or call out, by the famous Roman right of provocatio.¹⁰ This right had begun as an informal cry for help which any citizen might make to the public at large. It acquired a new focus when tribunes of the people were established in 494 BC. These officers had the right to interpose their persons between a bully and his victim if a citizen ‘called’ on them inside the city; the tribunes had been declared ‘sacrosanct’ by oath and could not be harassed without the wrong to them being avenged. By c. 300 BC the practice of appeal became formalized further in law. It became a ‘wicked crime’ for someone to execute a citizen who had appealed for justice. However, no actual penalty is prescribed in our surviving evidence for anyone who was so wicked, nor were beatings or other types of harassment outlawed.

Among the people, this right of ‘calling out’, or appeal, was a cornerstone of freedom. Among the senators, ‘freedom’ had a further connotation: equality within their own peer group. This ideal was sustained by a very strong tradition of the rejection of luxury. Great Roman leaders of the past were idealized as simple farmers, men like Cincinnatus (the namesake of modern Cincinnati) who left his plough only briefly in order to serve as Rome’s dictator. Curius Dentatus (a consul four times, with three triumphs) lived simply in a little cottage and was believed to have rejected offers of gold from the Samnites (who were idealized as a hardy, simple people too). Curius’ cottage continued to be revered, and a special ‘Meadow’ near Rome commemorated Cincinnatus.¹¹ Roman women were also supposed to behave with restraint and here too examples upheld values, in a typically Roman fashion. Continuing tales were told of the virgin Tarpeia who had been seduced by the sight of the gold bracelets on Rome’s enemies, the Sabines.¹²In early days a Roman wife was said to be forbidden even to drink wine. One Roman woman who tried to steal the keys to the wine cellar was actually said to have been clubbed to death by her husband, a cautionary tale to the others.

This ideal of austerity did not exclude the use of slave-labour by its exemplary heroes and their heirs. Such labour was freely available at Rome, because captives in war and defaulting debtors became enslaved and were readily available for the richer Romans’ use. As in Athens, there was never a Roman ‘golden age’ before slavery. Slave-owning was not, then, seen as unbridled luxury; rather, ‘luxury’ was ascribed to rival cities in Italy, south of slave-owning Rome, where it was cited as their undoing. The most effete were said to be Capua (near Naples), a city of Etruscan origin, and Tarentum (modern Taranto), the bastard child of her austere founder, Sparta. These cities’ love of scents, baths and ornaments was said to have sapped their capacity to resist or to take wise political decisions. In fact, each city marked an important staging-point on Rome’s advance southwards down Italy. In 343 Capua’s appeal to Rome first brought Roman troops into the immensely fertile land behind Naples. In 284 Rome’s attack on Tarentum ended by entrenching her power among the Greek cities of southern Italy.

During this advance through Italy Roman power was not without attractions for the upper classes in the towns along her route. Men in the upper class who feared their own lower classes were much more ready to team up with these apparently sound conservative leaders in Rome. In 343 such people in Capua threw themselves on Rome’s decision by opting for voluntary surrender (or deditio).¹³ Roman troops entered the city and in the following year, an outburst of discontent among Rome’s occupying garrison was blamed on the ‘corrupting’ luxury of ‘soft’ Capua. In fact, the discontent probably had political roots too. At Rome, it led on to further concessions to the plebs by their Roman superiors: one good reason for giving them was that the commoners were needed as working soldiers.

In the 280s yet more local rivalries drew Rome even further into the south of Italy. In the south, Greek cities of considerable size and cultural distinction still regarded themselves here as ‘Great Greece’, but they had continued to be beset by non-Greek barbarian peoples and by deep-seated rivalries between each other. Rome did not hesitate to accept a request for help from distant Thurii, Herodotus’ former refuge and the Greek city which had been founded by Pericles’ Athenians. Thurii’s immediate enemies were the non-Greek Lucanians, but a friendship with Thurii traditionally caused the hostility of another Greek city, Tarentum, further north. Tarentum, an ancient Spartan foundation, was by now a rich and cultured democracy.

Siding with Thurii, Rome then turned against Tarentum and justified herself later with a concerted campaign of historical spin. When Roman envoys arrived in Tarentum they were said to have been mocked before an assembly in the city’s theatre. One citizen, Philonides, was even said to have excreted on the Roman envoy and to have made fun of his barbaric Latin.¹⁴ To the Tarentines, the Romans seemed like illegal troublemakers. Some of their ships had been infringing a previous agreement that they would not sail beyond a specified point on Italy’s south-east coast. For there was a long diplomatic history here in the Greek-speaking south. Fifty years before the Roman incident Tarentum had summoned the brother-in-law of Alexander the Great to help her cause locally (c.334–331 BC) and the coastal agreement in question may go back to his short-lived intervention.¹⁵

Instead, Rome pleaded an ‘insult’ by Tarentum and attacked her. Armed intervention in the south required willing soldiers and, once again, we find that important political concessions had recently been made at Rome to the common people from whom the soldiers would be drawn. Shortly before the involvement with Thurii, it was enacted that decisions of the Roman people’s assembly were to be binding on all the people, nobles included. The senators, moreover, would no longer be able to vet decisions of the assemblies before agreeing to adopt them.

This fateful rule, the Hortensian Law, was passed with a background of continuing resentment by debtors and probably did not seem an unduly dangerous concession in the eyes of the governing class at the time. From the 340s onwards magistracies at Rome had progressively been opened to non-nobles, and so a broader class of former office-holders had been gradually built up. As these same office-holders became senators, a like-minded governing class had been formed from the nobles and the rich newcomers. In the eyes of this class, there was not too much danger in giving ‘popular’ decisions the form of law. The ‘tribal’ assembly which approved them was heavily weighted against the city-dwelling poor, the majority. It only met when magistrates summoned it, and only voted when they put proposals to it. The magistrates were usually reliable members of the governing class.

Spurred on nonetheless, Roman soldiers would fight decisively against old, civilized Tarentum. Their ally, ‘Athenian’ Thurii, was no longer a democracy, whereas their enemy, ‘Spartan’ Tarentum, was now the democracy instead. The age-old rivalry of Sparta and Athens was thus played out again, but this time in the presence of Romans, and Roman troops proved to be the decisive military force.