Chapter Nine
The Trickeries of the Greeks
In A.D. 66, the oppressions of the Roman procurator incited rebellion at Jerusalem. The Jewish prince Agrippa II, a loyal Roman client, made a speech to the crowd in the gymnasium to persuade them not to rise against Rome. Here are the words that the Jewish historian Josephus, who shared Agrippa’s pro-Roman views, attributed to him:
Now, I know that there are many who wax eloquent on the insolence of the procurators and pronounce pompous panegyrics on liberty; but, for my part, before examining who you are and who are this people whom you are undertaking to fight, I would first consider apart two distinct pretexts for hostilities which have been confused. For, if your object is to have your revenge for injustice, what good is it to extol liberty? If, on the other hand, it is servitude which you find intolerable, to complain of your rulers is superfluous; were they the most considerate of men, servitude would be equally disgraceful.
Consider then these arguments apart and how weak, on either ground, are your reasons for going to war. (Josephus, Jewish War 2.348-350 [trans. H. St. J. Thackeray])
Agrippa tells his audience not to mix arguments based on justice with arguments based on advantage (in this case, the preservation of freedom, always recognized as the supreme advantage and the strongest argument for war) and then proceeds to mix the two himself, for the rest of his speech is given over to proving that war with Rome would neither be just nor advantageous for the Jews. It would not be just because Rome had been, on the whole, a just patron and they should not blame all the Romans for the crimes of one procurator; it would not be advantageous because they would not stand a chance, a point established by listing all the powerful nations the Romans had conquered. The oration is reminiscent of the Mitylenean debate in Thucydides, where both Cleon and Diodotus begin by distinguishing the factors of justice and expediency with a great show of logic chopping, and then each proceeds to conflate the two in support of his own case. The pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetoric to Alexander advised political orators to combine arguments from justice with arguments for expediency whenever possible and, when trying to persuade an audience to stay out of war, recommended that they use exactly the line of argument that King Agrippa followed. This was a tradition of political rhetoric that played about considerably with the distinction between justice and expediency. Agrippa mentions this as if it were a well-established principle of rhetoric that would be familiar to some of his audience, and his speech demonstrates some of the tricks that could be played with it. Agrippa insists that justice and expediency be separated only when his opponents try to combine them; for his part, he would have argued on grounds of expediency only if there had been no possible way to defend Roman imperialism on moral grounds.
This tradition was still lively in the Hellenistic world under the Roman principate, though the gradual absorption of Roman client states allowed less and less scope for it. But at Rome itself, it never found a home, and the reasons for this rejection are the subject of this chapter.
Certain traditions were passed down about the early confrontations between Greek and Roman culture that made much of the theme of Greek trickery versus Roman forthrightness. One of the first Romans to beat Greeks at their own game was Marcius Philippus, who, on an embassy in 172 B.C., tricked the Macedonians into believing that Rome was not preparing war. According to Livy, probably following Polybius, a group of old-fashioned senators protested this violation of the Roman code of war, which required declaration by the fetials and open hand-to-hand combat without night attacks, feigned retreats, and other plots (;insidiae): Greeks and Carthaginians fought with craft (ars, calliditas), cunning (,astus), and trickery (doll), thinking it more glorious to dupe (/allere) an enemy than to vanquish (sup er are) him; Romans fought with manliness (virtus) and piety (religio).1 Nonetheless, a majority of the Senate approved of the Machiavellian diplomacy of Philippus (Livy 42.47).
Even a Greek observer as shrewd and sophisticated as Polybius thought there was some truth to the claims of the senatorial conservatives. He believed that even in his day the Romans, and they alone, preserved some traces of the old Greek code of hoplite warfare, for they preferred open declarations of war and pitched battles with no surprises (Polybius 13.3).
In 155 B.C., a more famous cultural collision occurred. While Carneades, the head of the Platonic Academy (now a stronghold of philosophical skepticism), was on an Athenian embassy to Rome, he delivered a public disputation on the subject of justice: First, he gave a lecture presenting Platonic– Aristotelian arguments to show that justice is based on objective standards in natural law, then followed it with a second lecture refuting the arguments of the first from the point of view of a skeptic. The story was remembered as the first serious impact of Greek dialectic upon the Roman aristocracy. Plutarch says Carneades drove all the youth of Rome mad with philosophy (Life of Cato 22.4-5; compare Quintilian 12.1.35, Pliny, Natural History 7.112). But conservatives were alarmed, and Cato the Censor, self-appointed guardian of the old Roman mores, was moved to banish philosophers from Rome lest the youth be corrupted. Some have thought Carneades meant to criticize the Roman empire, but that would have been a highly undiplomatic move on the part of an ambassador; he only meant to dazzle his audience with a display of logic and rhetoric.
Nevertheless, it was obvious that such Greek rhetoric had disturbing implications for the cherished Roman belief in the justice and piety of their empire. In his On the Republic, a dialogue set in the year 129 B.C., Cicero set out to remove these doubts. One of the speakers in the dialogue, the ex-consul Furius Philus, is asked to summarize the arguments of Carneades against justice. The arguments that Cicero puts in his mouth probably have little or no resemblance to those of Carneades, who is used here simply as a symbol of Greek sophistry.2 The surviving fragments of Philus’s speech (Republic3.5.8-18.28) show that Philus used standard skeptical arguments to deny that there is any justice in nature, with special reference to the Roman empire. All rulers, he says, seek their own advantage, not the interests of the governed; the dictates of reason and prudence are opposed to those of justice; “no people would be so foolish as not to prefer to be unjust masters rather than just slaves” (3.18.28, trans. C. W. Keyes). Philus admits that the Romans have fought unjust wars under the pretexts of the fetial law and have assembled an unjust empire; if Rome and other empires wished to be just, he argues, they would have to give up all they have taken and withdraw to a life of poverty and misery, but they will not, because justice is irrational and imprudent.
This sounds like cold-blooded Machiavellism, the most extreme statement of that point of view since the Melian dialogue of Thucydides; but unlike the Greeks in that dialogue, Philus is not advocating political realism but playing devil’s advocate. The rhetoric is artificial, the cynicism exaggerated. The practical conclusion to be drawn from such a position is withdrawal from this world of hopeless injustice into the inner freedom of the Stoic or the heavenly city of the Christians. Much of Philus’s argument has been passed down by Christian writers, who found in it proof of the irredeemable evil of the Roman empire and all other worldly empires:3
For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, “The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, Fm called a pi-rate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.” (Augustine, City of God 4.4 [trans. Henry Bettenson] = Rep. 3.14.24)
This is not, of course, the impression that Cicero intended. The argument of Philus is not there to promote either Thucydidean worldliness or Augustinian otherworldliness. It is an example of Greek sophistry presented for refutation. Another speaker in the dialogue, Laelius, follows it immediately with the defense of just warfare and just imperialism reviewed in the previous chapter—an argument also based on Greek philosophy, but here it is the sound moral teachings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
One decade later, Cicero treated the laws of war more fully in On Duties. He makes some attempt in this work to follow the common Greek distinctions among the several causes of war, a distinction perhaps found in his Stoic source. There is one kind of war that is fought for survival and freedom and another kind that is fought for hegemony (de imperio): The Roman wars against the Celts were of the first type; the Roman wars with Italians, Greeks, and Carthaginians belonged to the second. But in Cicero’s opinion, the rules of the just war apply to both kinds of warfare (1.12.38).4 Later in the treatise, he argues at length (departing from his Stoic source) that there can be no possible conflict between morality (honestum) and expediency (utilitas). He points out that the Senate has never resorted to tactics such as assassination, regardless of the consequences. The Roman commander in the Pyrrhic War refused a chance to poison King Pyrrhus and instead turned the would-be assassin over to the king for punishment, though the deed would have put an end to a long and destructive war (3.22.86). Many other examples from Roman history are brought up, especially the case of Regulus, the hero of the First Punic War, who surrendered himself to the Carthaginians to keep his oath, although he knew it would mean death by torture (3.29.108). In Cicero’s view, Romans who failed to follow this high standard were aberrations or belonged to the corrupt period of the recent civil wars. One such was Scribonius Curio, consul in Cicero’s youth, who, in judging the claims of certain colonists, was guilty of uttering the pernicious Greek formula that these claims, though just, were not expedient for the republic (3.22.88).
Cicero is able to prove—to his own satisfaction—that morality and prudence can never diverge; he rehearses commonplaces about how just conduct wins the loyalty of allies and overawes enemies and therefore is both just and expedient. Thus, he claims, it was the strict adherence to the fetial code that Rome displayed even in the dark times after the disaster at Cannae that caused Hannibal to lose heart (3.32.114). We can admit the obvious core of truth in these commonplaces. All ancient orators recognized the supreme importance of morale in wartime and how essential to morale the sense of being in the right is. But Hannibal did not lose heart after Cannae; and that a mind as subtle as Cicero’s was so incapable of dealing with hard and obvious questions in this area says much about the Roman aristocratic mentality.
These expressions of contempt for Greek trickery are common in Latin literature.5 The terms for “trickery” cover a variety of things: diplomatic chicanery, improper motives for warfare, any use of treachery in dealing with enemies such as assassinations or oath breaking, any use of tactical surprise and any kind of battle other than direct frontal assault, and an implicit suspicion of rational strategic planning and utilitarian thinking about warfare at any level. As will become clear, this was not the only Roman military tradition, but it was sufficiently powerful to inhibit the Roman elite from publicly adopting Greek realism in the discussion of foreign affairs.
Roman Historiography6
It is therefore not surprising that so little Thucydidean realism is to be found in Latin oratory and Latin historical writing. The peculiar development of Roman historiography is particularly significant, as this was the main genre for the discussion of military affairs.
The tradition of writing history began at Rome in the third century B.C. as an imitation of Greek historiography, and for a long time histories at Rome were written in Greek. But what the Romans adopted was a special variant of Greek historiography: not the epic military history of Herodotus and Thucydides but the local history, or “horography,” an account of a single city following a year-by-year chronicle format, hence called annales in Latin. The works of the early annalists are lost to us except for fragments, but much of their content has been passed down by Livy and other late historians. It was an inward-looking tradition, focused entirely on the city of Rome, and though it was largely concerned with the wars of Rome, the world was viewed through Roman eyes, without the Greek historians5 tradition of impartiality.
Roman historiography focused not only on Rome but also on the Senate. Down to the time of Augustus, it was written entirely by members of the senatorial elite, whereas Greek historiography tended to be written by exiles. This was considered a laudable aristocratic pastime, the self-conscious aim of which was the preservation of the old Roman values. The writers seem to have worked with a limited group of patriotic and didactic themes— the examples of virtue set by great men, the good faith of the Romans in all their dealings with other cities.
Some were aware this was different from what the Greeks usually meant by historia. Sempronius Asellio, who wrote a history of Rome in the late second century B.C., wrote that “annals” are different from “histories” in that annals merely record events as they happened, as in a story for children, without inquiry into causes. This suggests that the Roman annals contained none of those discussions of the causes of wars that are such a prominent feature of Greek historiography, except presumably for the recitation of the grievances declared by the fetial priests. Sempronius himself was clearly trying to produce a “history” in the Greek tradition, but he had no intention of departing from the patriotic and moralistic aims of the annalists: In the fragment to which I refer, he says that the deficiency of annals is that they cannot inspire people to fight for their country as history can (Aulus Gellius 5.18.9). The main attraction of Greek historiography was its literary art.
In the Augustan Age, historiography was raised to a higher level by Sallust and Livy, who wrote literary histories in the Greek fashion and created Latin versions of the two main narrative styles of Greek historiography, the Herodotean and the Thucydidean. But both authors remained faithful to the introverted and didactic traditions of the republic.
The prose of Livy resembles the fluid expansive narrative mode of Herodotus, Xenophon (who was particularly popular at Rome for his moralism and didacticism), and many Hellenistic historians. Livy explains in his preface that the function of history is to display models for people to imitate and to avoid, and that Roman history is the best subject, offering as it does the largest number of the first and the fewest of the second. His efforts at historical explanation are mostly concerned with the mental states of his characters, and his concept of causation is practically limited to the motives of the leaders. Livy relies heavily on fictional speeches, the main function of which is psychological characterization, not strategic analysis as in Thucydides. The speeches are imaginative and dramatically effective—the critic Quintilian said that everything in the speeches of Livy is perfectly fitted to the speakers and to their circumstances—but characters remain stereotypes fitted to the expectations of Livy’s senatorial audience. He explains the Second Punic War simply by blaming it on Hannibal, ignoring the complex discussion of causation he has read in Polybius. His battle descriptions have exercised a largely malign influence on the rhetoric of military historians to the present day: Each Livian battle is a series of disjunctive actions in which all soldiers act and think in unison, with much emphasis given to their emotional reactions and to the personal achievements of generals, all described in epic and poetic terms, with slight attention paid to topography or tactics.7
More might have been expected from the realistic narrative tradition introduced into Latin literature by Sallust, who was called the Roman Thucydides (Quintilian 10.101). The style of Sallust is indeed Thucydidean, terse and epigrammatic, filled with antitheses and unexpected variations. He was drawn to this style because it suggested pessimism, satire, and subversion, in deliberate contrast to the smooth and balanced prose of Livy and Cicero. It was a style fit for a story of imperial decline, with Rome replacing Athens. But the imitation is only stylistic. The decline that Sallust portrays in his War with Jugurtha and War with Catiline is moral, not political; his main theme is not the struggle of intelligence to master fortune as in Thucydides, but the corruption of virtue by ambition and greed. His adaptation of the great Attic historian is a striking testimony to the general tendency of Roman thought “to represent political crises as moral ones.”8
In Thucydides, the debates are the hinges of the narrative. In Sallust, there is only one comparable debate, that between Caesar and Cato the Younger in War with Catiline (51-52), which is modeled on the Mitylenean debate in Thucydides. As in the Mitylenean debate, the issue is whether rebels should be treated leniently or harshly, with Caesar taking the role of Diodotus and Cato that of Cleon (Sallust had been in Caesar’s party in the civil war). But the issue here is a purely domestic matter, the punishment of Roman citizens, not a problem of interstate relations like the Athenians’ dealings with Mitylene. Neither speaker makes any distinction between justice and expediency, the keynote of the Mitylenean debate; and when they talk of justice, they make no distinction between justice to Rome’s own citizens and justice to other states. All the philosophical subtleties of the Mitylenean debate have disappeared.
The battle descriptions of Sallust may seem less stereotyped than those of Livy and most other Latin historians, but they owe this air of realism partly to the fact that they copy the battle scenes in Thucydides. Two of the battle descriptions in War with Jugurtha (60, 101) are based upon the famous account of the battle in Syracuse harbor in the seventh book of Thucydides.
A century later, the style of Sallust was revived by Tacitus, the last of the senatorial historians. His tone is even more censorious and bitter than Sallust’s, his tale of decline and corruption even darker. He has relatively little to say about external affairs because he wrote entirely about the principate and his constant theme was the relationship between the Caesars and the Senate. The introspective quality of Roman historiography reaches its peak in Tacitus: The tradition had always focused almost exclusively on the senatorial elite, and the elite had now narrowed to one man. The moralism of the tradition reaches a dead end: Historians were supposed to portray moral examples, but practically all the examples available to Tacitus were bad. “It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty is to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil deeds and words with the fear of posterity’s denunciations. But this was a tainted, meanly obsequious age [the Julio-Claudian period]” (Annals 3.65, trans. Michael Grant). Within this tradition, historians had nothing left to write about.
It is odd, therefore, that this atypical, narrowly focused, unmilitary historian9 came to be considered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the great classical model of Machiavellian raison d’état. This was partly for reasons of style rather than content. To Renaissance humanists, the antithetical style of Sallust and Tacitus connoted truthfulness, candor, the stripping away of pretense and illusion, making the marmoreal perfection of Livy’s prose look artificial and empty beside it; it seemed the perfect vehicle for writing about affairs of state in the new Machiavellian manner. But the preference for Tacitus was also due to the simple fact that almost alone of the major classical historians, he wrote about a world of absolute monarchy, which the men of the Renaissance saw as a mirror of their own society. It mattered littie that Tacitus wrote almost exclusively about internal affairs: He still provided plenty of pungent maxims and memorable examples illustrating the politics of absolutism, and they could be applied readily to foreign affairs.
Roman Strategies
The fact that the Roman historians record so little high-level strategic discussion raises the question of whether there existed much to record. Here again emerges the problem of the so-called “grand strategy” of Rome.
There are good reasons to think the political culture of the Roman elite was never very conducive to such a thing. Under the republic, the Senate was secretive in its deliberations, and there was no tradition of open debate before assemblies of the people. We know the Senate was always riddled with factions and family rivalries and that military command was regarded as an aristocratic prerogative. Factional politics and family connections—not what we think of as strategic considerations—determined who got the chance to win laus and gloria in any particular year. Furthermore, all classical city-states were devoted to the principle of amateur leadership, as rotation in office was essential to their notion of citizenship, and none was more determined in its amateurship than the leadership of Rome, which cherished to the end the belief that a Roman gentleman could handle anything in war or peace. Roman commanders were expected to learn the art of war from the examples of their ancestors and on-the-job training, not from books; there was a continuing prejudice against those who spent much time reading Greek treatises on strategica and tactica, and the like.10 The short tenures of office would have strengthened these attitudes. Provincial governors, who held the key military positions, were left very much on their own: Their “provinces” were open-ended assignments rather than territories with definite boundaries, and as we have seen, it was more or less expected that they would pick quarrels with their neighbors and try to expand their frontiers. The fact that the Roman republic found it necessary to pass a law (the lex Julia) forbidding provincial governors to start wars without authorization by the Senate shows that this was a common practice.11
All this changed, of course, with the establishment of the principate. Now there was central and unified control over external relations. The principate had a relatively huge bureaucracy by ancient standards; it had many emperors deeply interested in warfare and expansion, and historians assume that they discussed such questions with their close advisers, mostly drawn from the upper classes.12 But we do not know what they discussed, nor what terms and arguments were thought cogent when a Caesar asked his counselors if he should go to war that year. The imperial secretariat, though divided into many specialized staffs, never included any group of officials specifically concerned with diplomacy or external relations, or with military affairs, apart from problems of supply. The imperial army never developed any equivalent to the officer corps of a modern European army, which is capable of exercising long-term influence on government policy both in war and peace. To the end of the empire, Roman governors and commanders remained much the same valiant amateurs they had always been. It was a world without experts. In some ways, the elite of the principate seems to have been even less capable of realistic political discussion than that of the republic. If the Senate had any tradition of realistic oratory, it died under Augustus; and what happened to senatorial historiography has already been described.
In addition, we tend to forget how dependent our modern concepts of strategic thinking are upon readily available and precisely detailed maps. It seems doubtful that Roman cartographic techniques were sufficiently advanced to allow large-scale strategies. Generals thought in terms of peoples and cities and armies, not territory. In the civil war of A.D. 68, Vespasian planned to first seize Africa so as to cut off the grain supply of Rome: Tacitus thought it necessary to explain to his readers that this made sense because Africa was “on the same side” of the Mediterranean as Italy (.Histories 3.48). An even more startling testimony to the vagueness of the Roman geopolitical sense is Tacitus’s statement that Ireland lay between Britain and Spain (.Agicola 24). This was told him by his kinsman Agricola, a brilliant general with long experience in the British Isles, who was then planning the invasion of Ireland on the basis of such data as this.13
The Greeks and Romans were accustomed to clear descriptions of battle tactics and, sometimes, of campaign strategies. But they never described anything that we would call a “grand strategy,” and those who think they had one are simply assuming “without further ado that the Romans were capable of realizing in practice what they could not define verbally,”14 by a sort of intuition. This hypothesis is based upon an unspoken parallel with modern army organization and its general staffs and map rooms. This is not to deny that the inner circle of the Senate and the council of the emperor were capable of strategy in the sense of long-term conscious direction of policy, only to doubt that it was very grand and to question whether the principles behind it were as rational and utilitarian as many assume. What looks like a coherent defense system can as easily be explained as the result of a series of ad hoc reactions to crises, and what sound like strategic reflections amount to no more than obvious commonsense maxims, often expressed in moralistic terms.
The hegemonial “strategy” of the republican imperium, which was to maintain a cordon of client states around Italy, required no particular theory, reflection, or debate. Most ancient empires started out with such a hegemonial organization because they could do nothing else. They understood well enough what these clients were for. It was said by one of his supporters that Julius Caesar made “friends” of Oriental kings so that they could “guard the provinces” of the Romans.15 I have argued before that we should not read into such language any distinction between offensive and defensive strategies. The Caesars, like their republican predecessors, were expected to guard the provinces of Rome by taking the offensive whenever possible, and the common motives they gave for going to war were honor and glory.
By Hadrian’s time, the Romans did shift to perimeter defense, but again, that was because they had no choice. When the client states were absorbed and became Roman provinces, the Roman frontiers, in J. C. Mann’s phrase, “arose by default.” The frontiers arose where the legions stopped, not results of a deliberate defense strategy but a frozen line of advance, like a tank that breaks down in the desert and is converted into a blockhouse.16 We have seen that many of the elite by the Antonine Age did convert to a genuinely defensive mentality, meaning that they thought of the imperium as a vast fortification, which was the only way they could conceive of pure defense. But we have also seen how little rationalized this rhetoric is and how indifferent it is to elementary strategic questions such as whether a frontier should follow this line or that.
By Constantine’s time, the Romans had abandoned perimeter defense, but once again, that was because they had no choice. The blockhouse had finally been overrun. The empire fell back upon such expedients as were available, all of which had the effect of exposing the provinces to barbarian invasion and abandoning the concept of the unitary territorial empire, ringed by an encamped army like a rampart, as Aelius Aristides had said. This cost the Caesars the loyalty of much of their elite. But to the end, the problem was discussed in the traditional moral terms. Practically the only significant literary comment on the military crisis of the late empire comes from Zosimus, one of the last pagan historians, who accused Constantine of “removing the greater part of the soldiery from the frontiers to cities that needed no auxiliary forces. He thus deprived of help the people who were harassed by the barbarians and burdened tranquil cities with the pest of the military, so that several straightway were deserted” (2.34 [trans. J. J. Buchanan and H. J. Davis]).
Roman Stratagems
The Romans never developed a political culture that made possible realist strategic discussion on the classical Greek level. But they did develop what may be described as a countertradition that persistently undermined the moralistic assumptions of the official ideology. This was the Greek tradition of “stratagems” or ruses de guerre, adopted into Latin literature by Frontinus in the Antonine Age.
By the first century B.C., many Romans did not share the anti-intellectual attitudes toward military literature described earlier. Sallust portrayed the famous soldier Marius making a speech in which he attacked the military incompetence of the old nobility: Marius says that they got all their knowledge of war from books, from histories of Rome and Greek military treatises, and that they did not begin to read these until they were elected consul, whereas a “new man” of humble origins like himself had learned the art of war in the field (War with Jugurtha 85.12-14). Augustus Caesar combed Latin and Greek literature to find useful precepts with anecdotes attached, and he circulated collections of such passages among his generals (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 25, 89). The examples given are precepts such as “I would rather have a safe commander than a rash one,” which one imagines the generals found of slight practical value. But there were more practical things in the Greek military literature. There was a revival of interest in it under the principate, and several Greek treatises on tactica have survived, all of them derived largely from Polybius.17 None of these could have been of much use to a Roman general, either, because they are antiquarian exercises concerned with the drill techniques of the Macedonian phalanx, a formation long obsolete. But Greek military literature also included a great deal of information about stratagemata. This word was related to strategika, or generalship, and originally meant “deeds of generals,” though by the Augustan Age it had taken on a different connotation and meant “clever tricks of generals,” or ruses de guerre. Collections of these had been popular ever since the military encyclopedia of Aeneas the Tactician. In the second century A.D., another such collection of anecdotes with the title Stratagemata was written in Greek by Polyaenus and was dedicated to the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius. This dedication may seem surprising, because stratagemata were well-known examples of the sort of Greek trickery that pious Romans like Marcus were expected to scorn. But that is why the “stratagem” tradition deserves attention here: It provided an avenue through which a sanitized version of raison d’état could be made acceptable to Romans.
In the preface to his Latin Stratagemata, Frontinus explained that the Greeks used the word strategika for all the qualities of a general, whereas stratagemata referred to the sollertia, the clever plans, of a general. Latin writers did not use stratagemata much, but they had a sizable vocabulary of equivalents, which E. L. Wheeler has collected and analyzed: dolus, fraus, sollertia, insidiae, furtum, all terms with the connotation of trickery, traps, intrigues, secret actions; but they could also use as equivalents terms like consilium (planning or prudence) and ars (craft or skill), which did not necessarily suggest deceit except in certain military contexts. In the works of Latin historians, these terms occur frequently and normally suggest the use of deception or surprise in interstate relations. These deceptions might be practiced in peacetime diplomacy or in warfare. In warfare, “stratagems” might be used either in strategy or in tactics, and the commander might use them either to deceive the enemy or to fool his own troops. For the most part, the historians use these terms in a favorable sense, sometimes with allusions to Greek commonplaces about the usefulness of surprise and indirection in warfare (for example, Thucydides 5.9; Xenophon, Cyrus 1.6.27). But in view of the Roman traditions noted earlier in this chapter, it is hardly surprising that there is also much ambivalence about trickery.
Valerius Maximus’s anthology of Memorable Deeds and Words included in the seventh book a collection of stratagems of war, the earliest that has survived in Latin. The anecdotes concern ploys involving surprise, and commanders are unequivocally praised for practicing them, especially when they allow a city to be taken without the need for a costly siege or assault, as when King Tarquin of ancient Rome took a city by sending his own son inside the gates disguised as a refugee (“he thought cunning stronger than weapons,” 7.4.2). But in the ninth book, a collection of evil deeds, Valerius assures his readers just as unequivocally that all treachery (perfidia) is evil (9.6). Perfidia is always a bad word. But the group of words just listed could be used with commendation when speaking of military affairs.
How did the Romans tell the difference between wicked treachery and commendable trickery? Sometimes one suspects that when Greeks acted this way, it was Greek fraud but when Romans did, they were exhibiting Roman prudence. But we can find in Roman authors, if not a serious discussion of this distinction, at least passages suggesting an awareness of tensions.
One approach was to treat stratagems as permissible under certain circumstances but still as contemptible, un-Roman, and greatly inferior to pitched battle. That seems to be the implication of Julius Caesar’s rhetoric. In a prebattle oration, he told his troops that the Germans they were about to fight were not as formidable as their reputation: They had won their recent victory over the Gauls not through bravery but merely through a surprise attack, and tricks of that sort, he said, would not work against Romans anyway (Gallic Wars 1.40). He describes how a besieged Gallic town tried to counter the bravery of the Romans with siege devices like mines and sorties, but the Romans proved better at such things than the Gauls (7.22). The Romans may affect to despise stratagems, but they know how to use them.
Another approach was to treat stratagems as evil only when they violated the rules of just warfare. In the epitome of Livy written by the second-century historian Florus, Mark Antony is condemned for a surprise attack on the Parthians, but apparently what is blameworthy is not the stratagem itself but the fact that it was not preceded by a declaration of war (Florus 2.20).
Despite this attitude, even a writer as moralistic as Cicero could admit that there were extenuating circumstances when the restrictions of the just war could be lifted. His treatment of the sack of Corinth in On Duties is extraordinary. Earlier, in the speech to the Roman assembly quoted in the preceding pages, Cicero had not hesitated to boast of this deed. In a philosophical work like On Duties, he is forced to admit that it was totally unjust (1.11.35, 3.11.46). The rules of war do not allow such barbarities unless the enemy has stooped to them: On those grounds, the sack of Carthage might be excused, but the destruction of Corinth the same year could not be. Yet, he suggests that the act might be condoned because of the advantages (<opportunitas) of the site of Corinth, perched on its isthmus connecting the seas—“the place itself might someday encourage someone to make war.” The Corinthians are blamed not because of any injustice they have practiced but simply for their location (compare 2.22.76, where the conqueror of Corinth is praised). This comment, frankly acknowledging the existence of a kind or degree of advantageousness that is totally free of the demands of morality, contradicts everything else in On Duties on the subject of international relations. Cicero’s political thought could not absorb this idea, yet he could not resist expressing it.
Finally, it was possible for the Romans to moralize the stratagems themselves. The most striking example of this tactic known to me is Seneca’s On Wrath. Here, we are told that the barbarians are characterized by unthinking rage in warfare, like wild animals. Their rage leads them to violate the laws of nations and start unjust wars, and in battle, it leads them to fall headlong on the enemy without forethought. When they fight Romans, Seneca explains, they are undone by their own anger, for the Romans know that war should not be fought in blind rage. The model of a Roman commander he uses is Fabius Maximus the Delayer, who defeated Hannibal by refusing to give him battle: He was able to conquer Hannibal because he had first conquered his own anger (1.11-12, 3.2). Seneca has turned the usual moralistic rhetoric upside down. The tactics of decisive battle, normally associated with honor and glory in classical literature, are here identified with injustice, bestial rage, lack of self-control, and barbarism; stratagems that avoid battle, often thought wicked and cowardly, are associated with rationality and Stoic virtue.
But there was at least one Roman—an author of great importance for later European military thought—who was unequivocal in his acceptance of stratagems and unusually clearheaded in recognizing their implications. Sextus Julius Frontinus (circa A.D. 35-103) had a distinguished ancestry and a distinguished career—three times consul, governor of Britain—but he also had an interest in technical matters unusual in his class. He built roads in Britain and wrote a lost treatise on surveying; he served as water commissioner of the City of Rome and wrote an extant treatise On Aqueducts, which is one of the most competent technical works to survive from the ancient world; and his military commands inspired him to become the first Latin military writer of significance. Frontinus produced a theoretical treatise called The Art of War.; which is lost, and followed it with a collection of Stratagems, which has survived. The opening passage is worth quoting:
Since I alone of those interested in military science have undertaken to reduce its rules to system, and since I seem to have fulfilled that purpose, so far as pains on my part could accomplish it [referring to his lost Art of War], I still feel under obligation, in order to complete the task I have begun, to summarize in convenient sketches the adroit operations of generals, which the Greeks embrace under the one name stratagemata. For in this way commanders will be furnished with specimens of wisdom and foresight, which will serve to foster their own power of conceiving and executing like deeds. There will result the added advantage that a general will not fear the issue of his own stratagem, if he compares it with experiments already successfully made.
I neither ignore nor deny the fact that historians have included in the compass of their works this feature also, nor that authors have already recorded in some fashion all famous examples. But I ought, I think, out of consideration for busy men, to have regard to brevity. For it is a tedious business to hunt out separate examples scattered over the vast body of history; and those who have made selections of notable deeds have overwhelmed the reader by the very mass of material. My effort will be devoted to the task of setting forth, as if in response to questions, and as occasion shall demand, the illustration applicable to the case in point. (1.1 [trans. C. E. Bennett])
There is a noticeable self-confident claim to originality here. Frontinus wants to present the lessons of warfare in a more systematic way than anyone before him. He understands, like Thucydides and Polybius but like few Romans, that the point of presenting historical examples is not that they might be directly copied, as though history were to precisely repeat itself, but rather to enlarge the experience and stimulate the imagination. Most anecdotes had been presented haphazardly by previous authors, but Frontinus organizes them by subject (“On leading an army through places infested by the enemy,” “On laying and meeting ambushes while on the march,” and so on). Most anecdotes gave examples of moral behavior, like those of Valerius Maximus; Frontinus focuses on political causes.
The most original aspect of his method is his practice of organizing examples dialectically, so as to present arguments for and against a particular policy. In Book 1.3, “On Determining the Character of the War,” he asks whether a general ought to try to engage the enemy in a pitched battle. On the positive side, he lists the examples of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; among the counterexamples, he cites Fabius Maximus, who avoided battle with Hannibal, and Themistocles and Pericles, both of whom took to the sea rather than defend the land of Attica from invaders. The reasons for these decisions are given: Alexander and Caesar only sought decisive battle when they knew they had strong armies; Fabius knew he could not risk battle with Hannibal, and neither could Pericles with the Spartans.
Finally, Frontinus treats moral actions as if they were stratagems. In his section “On Ensuring Loyalty,” we read of the chivalry that Alexander and Scipio displayed to captive women and the clemency that Germanicus showed to certain Germans: These acts are commended not because they were noble in themselves (though it is not denied that they were noble) but because they won over the enemy and accomplished more than could have been done by battle. These examples are preceded by several others in which the same end of ensuring loyalty was achieved through treachery and deceit: “Gnaeus Pompey, suspecting the Chaucensians and fearing that they would not admit a garrison, asked that they would meanwhile permit his invalid soldiers to recover among them. Then, sending his strongest men in the guise of invalids, he seized the city and held it” (2.11.2 [trans. Bennett]). The chivalry of Scipio is placed on the same moral level as the treachery of Pompey, and both are commended: Justice happened to be a workable stratagem in Scipio’s case, but it would not have worked for Pompey, so he was correct to employ treachery. The acceptance of raison d’état, though left implicit, is unmistakable. Other stratagems include the burning of a temple (3.2.4), bad faith in negotiations (3.2.6), and the poisoning of a town’s water supply (3.7.6). A whole section is devoted to “On Inducing Treachery” (3.3). The fourth book of the Stratagems, probably not by Frontinus but added later by an unknown imitator, contains a chapter “On Justice” (4.4), the political realism of which is as blunt as anything Frontinus wrote. Two examples of justice are offered in the stories of the Roman heroes Camillus and Fabricius, both of whom refused to practice treachery upon an enemy and were rewarded with victory. But in the case of Fabricius we are told that he refused to poison King Pyrrhus because he saw that would not be necessary to achieve victory, implying that if it had been necessary he would have done it. This anecdote came from Cicero’s On Duties (3.22.86), which attaches to it exactly the opposite interpretation: The expedient thing to do, according to Cicero, would have been to poison Pyrrhus, but Fabricius did the honorable thing at great military cost.
Frontinus’s Stratagems was probably the most influential text in the transmission of classical realism in war and diplomacy. His method seems to have strongly influenced Machiavelli, who copied the chapter “On Justice” in Discourses 3.20 and expanded upon its lessons.18
Notes
1. F. W. Walbank, “A Note on the Embassy of Q. Marcius Philippus, 172 B.C.,” Journal of Roman Studies 31 (1941), 82-93.
2. J. L. Ferrary, “Le discours de Philus (Cicerön, De Re Publica, III, 8-31) et la philosophie de Carnéade,” Revue des études latins 55 (1977), 128-156.
3. Much of the argument is summarized by Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5-6.
4. This passage has sometimes been interpreted to mean that wars for glory and hegemony belong in a different category from the just war; see, for example, Anthony Pagden, lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995), 96. But it seems clear that Cicero, like Aristotle and most other philosophers, thought of warfare de imperio as another type of just war.
5. Passages are collected by E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden, 1988), a monograph to which this chapter owes much.
6. For Roman historians in general, see Charles Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, 1983); Latin Historians, ed. T. A. Dorey (New York, 1966); Mark Toher, “Augustus and the Evolution of Roman Historiography,” in Between Republic and Empire, ed. K. A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher (Berkeley, 1990), 139-154.
7. See the comments on the rhetoric of military history in the first chapter of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (New York, 1976). He uses Julius Caesar as an example of the Latin tradition, but the features of the stereotyped battle description are common in Latin literature.
8. D. C. Earl, The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge, 1961), 44. See also T. F. Scanlon, The Influence of Thucydides on Sallust (Heidelberg, 1980).
9. Theodor Mommsen called Tacitus the most unmilitary of historians, but for a more positive assessment, see K. Wellesley, “Tacitus as a Military Historian,” in Tacitus, ed. T. A. Dorey (New York, 1969), 63-98; for a general introduction, see Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (New York, 1992), for his political thought, see Ronald Syme, “The Political Opinions of Tacitus,” in Syme, Ten Studies in Tacitus (Oxford, 1970).
10. Brian Campbell, “Teach Yourself How to Be a General,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987), 13-29.
11. P. A. Brunt, “Charges of Provincial Maladministration Under the Early Principate,” Historia 10 (1961), 189-223.
12. On the decisionmaking process of the principate, see Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337 (Ithaca, 1977). For Roman provincial administration, see Andrew Lintott, Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration (London, 1993), 22ff., 53.
13. Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford, 1990), 372-418. The interpretation of the Roman frontier policy I follow here is based mostly on the work of Isaac and J. C. Mann, “Power, Force and the Frontiers of the Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 69 (1979), 175-183 (see n. 16 to follow). For a more positive evaluation on Roman strategy, see E. L. Wheeler, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy,” Journal of Military History 57 (1993), 7-42, 215-240.
14. Isaac, Limits of Empire, 374-375.
15. This occurs in the Alexandrian War (65.4)—a continuation of Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil Wars, written by a Caesarean. A. N. Sherwin-White has called this “the first formal expression in Latin historical literature of the doctrine of the buffer-state” (Roman Foreign Policy in the East, 168 B.C. to A.D. 1 [Norman, Okla., 1983], 301). But is not the Roman describing a client state rather than a buffer state? “Buffer state” normally means a state that is nobody’s client, and Sherwin-White uses the phrase in that sense himself (54).
16. J. C. Mann, “The Frontiers of the Principate,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römisches Welt, II, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1974), 513ff.
17. A. M. Devine, “Aelian’s Manual of Hellenistic Military Tactics: A New Translation from the Greek with an Introduction,” Ancient World 19 (1989), 31-64.
18. Neal Wood, “Frontinus as a Possible Source for Machiavelli’s Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), 243-248, suggested this thesis to me.