Chapter Ten
Metus Hostilis
Much Greek political thought was devoted to the place of warfare in the constitution, originally focusing on the obvious question of which type of constitution was best at war. The Romans never doubted that theirs was, and those who were drawn to the Greek sort of constitutional speculation found a ready-made explanation in Polybius: Rome had produced the perfect mixed constitution. Cicero tried to develop this idea in On the Republic, but few members of the Roman elite were interested in such theorizing. Despite all the borrowing of Greek terms, Roman political discourse was fundamentally different in quality. As T. A. Sinclair put it, the Roman state
depended for its working not on what the Greeks called nomoi, but on such notions as imperium, consilium, auctoritas, notions not indeed foreign to Greek thought, but having little or nothing to do with constitutions of any type. Personal rule, personal influence, personal dependence of the lesser folk on the great—these were the things that counted in Roman political life. Hence Roman political thought expressed itself in such terms.1
As has been discussed, Roman historiography never became an instrument for the exploration of political or constitutional issues. It did, however, develop its own terms for explaining constitutional developments, and one of its major organizing concepts deserves attention here. In brief, it was widely believed that Rome had been kept united and virtuous by war and had declined in peacetime: Hence, the end of republican expansion was thought to mark the beginning of decline in the Roman constitution, with particular significance attached to the date 146 B.C., when Carthage was destroyed.
About that time, there were many who feared foreign contact was rotting the moral fiber of Rome. Polybius believed that the decline began with the importation of Greek luxuries following the conquest of Macedon in 168 B.C. (31.25). In the years before the Third Punic War (149-146 B.C.), there was a running debate in the Senate between Cato the Censor, who urged that Carthage be destroyed, and Scipio Nasica, who wanted Carthage preserved on the grounds that Rome needed enemies: He “would have had the fear of Carthage to serve as a bit to hold the contumacy of the multitude” (Plutarch, Life of Cato 27, Dryden trans.; compare Appian 8.10.69, Florus 1.3.5). After the destruction of Carthage in 146, Scipio’s prediction seemed fulfilled, for Rome soon fell into recurrent civil strife. During the last century of the republic, the main subject of the Roman historians and annalists was not glorious foreign war but tragic domestic upheaval, and Roman moralists had to find some way to explain this disaster.
One explanation, already dealt with in a previous chapter, emphasized Rome’s relations with the allies: It was claimed that before the sack of Carthage, Rome had treated its allies justly but afterward became a harsh tyrant. This idea seems to have been popularized by the Histories of the Stoic Posidonius, circa 100 B.C. It stems from traditional Greek notions about just and unjust hegemonies.2
But the more influential and more Roman version, adopted by Sallust around 40 B.C., emphasized domestic affairs rather than foreign: Before 146, Rome had enjoyed harmony but, after the removal of Carthage, fell into civil war.
Now the institution of parties and factions, with all their attendant evils, originated at Rome a few years before this [the war with Jugurtha, which began in 111 B.C.] as the result of peace and an abundance of everything that mortals prize most highly. For before the destruction of Carthage the people and senate of Rome together governed the republic peacefully and with moderation. There was no strife among the citizens either for glory or for power: fear of the enemy preserved the good morals of the state [“metus hostilis in bonis artibus civitatem retinebat”]. But when the minds of the people were relieved of that dread, wantonness and arrogance naturally arose, vices which are fostered by prosperity. Thus the peace for which they had longed in time of adversity, after they had gained it proved to be more cruel and bitter than adversity itself. For the nobles began to abuse their position and the people their liberty, and every man for himself robbed, pillaged, and plundered. Thus the community was split into two parties, and between these the state was torn to pieces. (War with Jugurtha 41 [trans. J. C. Rolfe])
But when our country had grown great through toil and the practice of justice, when great kings had been vanquished in war, savage tribes and mighty peoples subdued by force of arms, when Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for money first, then for power, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils. (War with Catiline 10 [trans. Rolfe])
Now the idea that warfare is good for the citizen body was known to the Greeks. It was in fact the essence of the civic militarist ideal. But the Greeks expressed this differently. Plato in the Laws writes that fear of the enemy had united Athens in the Persian Wars, but he makes it clear that it would have been far better if the Athenians could have been united by fear of their own laws, and in his own ideal state, the citizens will have no need of the first sort of fear (Laws 3.698-699). Aristotle is even more suspicious of those who rely on fear of the enemy, claiming it is a weakness in military states like Sparta that they need warfare to preserve morale and in peacetime lose their temper like an unused blade (.Politics 1334a). Polybius makes a comment that is closer to the view of Sallust when he says that as a general rule, constitutions tend to decay once they are freed from external threats; but he does not regard this process as inevitable and hopes that a mixed constitution like the Roman can escape this tendency (6.18, 57). No Greek writer seems to have said that the constitution needs fear of the enemy. Taken literally, this seems a contradiction: If virtue must be imposed by external threats, how can it be virtue? Yet the Sallustian doctrine of the metus hostilis (the epigram just quoted, that the city was kept in good character by fear of the enemy) became axiomatic among Romans.
It is interesting that Sallust’s descriptions of moral corruption at Rome are modeled upon Thucydides’ well-known passages describing the stasis on Corcyra (Thucydides 3.82-83). Sallust’s epigrams express the same sense of the corruption of language: “But in very truth we have long since lost the true names for things. It is precisely because squandering the goods of others is called generosity, and recklessness in wrong doing is called courage, that the republic is reduced to extemities” (War with Catiline 52 [trans. Rolfe]). He delights in Thucydidean antitheses contrasting moral appearances with base realities:
Against these men [the popular party] the greater part of the nobles strove with might and main, ostensibly in behalf of the senate but really for their own aggrandizement [“senatus specie pro sua magnitudine”]. For, to tell the truth in a few words, all who after that time assailed the government used specious pretexts, some maintaining that they were defending the rights of the commons, others that they were upholding the prestige of the senate; but under the pretence of the public welfare each in reality was working for his own advancement [“bonum publicum simulantes pro sua quisque potentia certabant”]. (Catiline 38 [trans. Rolfe])
But in Thucydides’s Corcyra, stasis was caused by war. In Sallust’s Rome, it is caused by peace.
This nostalgia for the expansionist republic was continued by Livy and Tacitus and became a dominant theme of Roman historiography. These authors saw the history of Rome as essentially a story of decline, explained in moral terms that helped to block realistic political analysis; at the same time, the assumption that virtue and solidarity had been the results of, and dependent upon, constant warfare imparted to the Roman version of civic militarism an open aggressiveness unknown to the Greeks.
Many Greeks, especially Stoics, did not, of course, accept the metus hostilis theory: They continued to speak of civil strife as something associated with war, not peace, and deplored both foreign war and civil war as aspects of the same greed and ambition. Dio Chrysostom, in an address to the Rhodians, praised them for the courage they had shown in their wars of the past, but he did so only to make the point that now they could display the same virtue in peacetime (Oration 31; compare Dio, Oration 17.10; Epictetus, Discourse 1.22).
The metus hostilis theme did not always emphasize civil war. Sometimes it was Roman virtue, rather than Roman solidarity, that was ruined by peace. A locus classicus is Juvenal’s Sixth Satire:
In the old days poverty
Kept Latin women chaste: hard work, too little sleep,
These were the things that saved their humble homes from corruption—
Hands horny from carding fleeces, Hannibal at the gates,
Their menfolk standing to arms. Now we are suffering
The evils of too-long peace. Luxury, deadlier
Than any armed invader, lies like an incubus
Upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel.
(287ff. [trans. Peter Green])
The glorification of war is stronger in the Latin—nunc patimur longae pads mala (now we suffer the evils of long peace).
The Legacy of Vegetius
Under the principate, civic militarism naturally became an ideal associated with the long-vanished republican past. A vestige of it survived in the frequent complaints, especially from writers who favored expansion, that the army, now a standing professional army recruited largely from noncitizens, needed the discipline of war. Peace was thought to be bad for the soldiers. Tacitus wrote that at the start of Nero’s Parthian war, the Syrian legions were so demoralized by years of peace that many soldiers owned no helmets or armor and found ramparts and ditches novelties (.Annals 13.35). One of the reasons for praising an emperor who sought conquests was the belief that this revived the morale of the troops.3
But the most important contribution of the Latin tradition to the ideal of civic militarism came at the very end of the western empire. In the late fourth or early fifth century A.D., a Christian bureaucrat named Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus wrote Epitome of Military Affairs (Epitoma rei militaris), which has been called the “most influential military work written in the western world” before the nineteenth century.4 It was the only classical military treatise that remained continuously popular throughout the Middle Ages, and its reputation increased in the Renaissance. Vegetius wrote after the disastrous Roman defeat at Adrianople in A.D. 378— not long after, if the emperor to whom the epitome is addressed was Theodosius the Great, as many think—and though Vegetius himself was a civil rather than a military bureaucrat, he hoped to promote desperately needed reforms in the Roman army, which was increasingly composed of barbarian mercenaries. The influence of this treatise in later centuries owes much to the fact that it is a piece of deliberate antiquarianism that holds up an idealized picture of the ancient Roman army as a model for military reform.
Vegetius claims that what he describes is the military organization of the Roman republic, based on sources going back to the time of Cato the Elder, who wrote the first Latin treatise on the art of war in the second century B.C.:
So once the recruits have been tattooed the science of arms should be shown them in daily training. But neglect due to long years of peace has destroyed the tradition of this subject. Whom can you find able to teach what he himself has not learned? We must therefore recover the ancient custom from histories and (other) books. But they wrote only the incidents and dramas of wars, leaving out as familiar what we are now seeking. The Spartans, it is true, and the Athenians and other Greeks published in books much material which they call tactica, but we ought to be inquiring after the military system of the Roman People, who extended their Empire from the smallest bounds almost to the regions of the sun and the end of the earth itself. This requirement made me consult competent authorities and say most faithfully in this opuscule what Cato the Censor wrote on the system of war, what Cornelius Celsus, what Frontinus thought should be summarised, what Paternus, a most zealous champion of military law, published in his books, and what was decreed by the constitutions of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian. (1.8 [trans. N. P. Milner])
Cato the Elder, since he was unbeaten in war and as consul had often led armies, thought he would be of further service to the State if he wrote down the military science. For brave deeds belong to a single age; what is written for the benefit of the State is eternal. Several others did the same, particularly Frontinus, who was highly esteemed by the deified Trajan for his efforts in this field. These men’s recommendations, their precepts, I shall summarise as strictly and faithfully as I am able. For although both a carefully and a neglectfully ordered army costs the same expense, it is to the benefit of not only the present but of future generations also if, thanks to Your Majesty’s provision, August Emperor, both the very strongest disposition of arms be restored and the neglect of your predecessors amended. (2.3 [trans. Milner])
Vegetius may have known these earlier writers only through epitomes like his own, and the organization he describes is in fact a hodgepodge containing elements from several different periods.
Nevertheless, he grasped correctly the essential fact about the republican army: It had been a heavy infantry army whose secret lay in intensive discipline and drill. He saw correctly that the problem with the Roman army of his day was the neglect of heavy infantry and of discipline. “In every battle it is not numbers and untaught bravery so much as skill and training that generally produce the victory. For we see no other explanation for the conquest of the world by the Roman People than their drill-at-arms, camp-discipline and military expertise” (1.1 [trans. Milner]). Vegetius notes that the Roman infantry wore heavy armor from the founding of Rome down to the reign of Gratian (died 383) but had now abandoned it:
On this subject [armor] ancient practice has been utterly destroyed. For despite progress in cavalry arms thanks to the example of the Goths, and the Alans and Huns, the infantry is well-known to go unprotected … Why else was the infantry army called a “wall” among the ancients [perhaps Iliad 4.299], if not because the serried ranks of legions shone in their shields, cataphracts [cuirasses] and helmets? (1.20 [trans. Milner])
Vegetius was right in thinking that the tradition of disciplined heavy infantry had been lost, but he was just as important for what he got wrong. He did not understand that the republican army was a citizen army. He knew that recruitment was as essential as training, that heavy-infantry discipline could never be revived unless soldiers were recruited from the right population; but he thought that it would be sufficient to recruit the troops from “Romans,” that is, from free inhabitants of the empire, virtually all of whom were citizens in his time, rather than from barbarians outside the frontiers, as was increasingly the case after Adrianople:
A sense of security born of long peace has diverted mankind [from military service] … Thus attention to military training obviously was at first discharged rather neglectfully, then omitted, until finally consigned long since to oblivion … Therefore recruits should constantly be levied and trained. For it costs less to train one’s own men in arms than to hire foreign mercenaries. (1.28 [trans. Milner])
Because Vegetius did not understand that Roman citizenship in the Christian empire meant something very different from what it had meant in the Rome of Cato, the imaginary army he described for posterity was more a national than a civic army, the army of a monarchy rather than a republic. For this reason, Vegetius would seem immediately relevant to Renaissance Europe. He showed how the military ideals of the classical city republics, the disciplined heavy-infantry tactics, might be adapted to a world of national monarchies and professional armies.
A final point about the legacy of Vegetius: He was not a great supporter of the offensive in either tactics or strategy. He was cautious about the decisive battle, recognizing that it offered the chance for total victory, yet advising generals not to risk this unless the odds were highly favorable (3.9, 3.11). The most famous maxim in Vegetius is “He who desires peace, let him prepare for war” (3, preface). This is another turn on the ancient commonplace that one must be both warlike and peaceable, but earlier versions of it assume that being always prepared for war entails actually going to war on occasion (for example, Thucydides 4.92). Vegetius seems to imply that if one is sufficiently well prepared for war one may never have to go to war: “No one dares challenge or harm one whom he realises will win if he fights” (3, preface); “no one dares to challenge to war or inflict injury on a kingdom or people whom he knows is armed and ready to resist and revenge any attack” (4.31 [trans. Milner]). These statements do not deny the possibility of preventive strikes, and even Vegetius can fall into the ancient rhetoric of imperialism—he tells his readers that the art of war not only preserves their liberty but extends their frontiers (3.10). But in fact, this was a farcical thing to say in the crumbling empire he lived in, and the republican ideology behind it was alien to him. The passages quoted herein are among the clearest statements of a theory of deterrence to be found in classical literature, and on the whole, Vegetius probably acted as a moderating influence on the classical cult of the offensive.
Notes
1. T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought, 2d ed. (Cleveland, 1968), 280.
2. Diodorus of Sicily (34/35.33.5-6, in a section based on Posidonius), says Rome became harsh to its allies after the fall of Carthage. See Peter Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley, 1984), 351 ff.
3. J. B. Campbell, The Emperor and the Roman Army, 31 B.C.-A.D. 235 (Oxford, 1984), 190ff., 300ff., 409ff.
4. T. R. Phillips, Roots of Strategy (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 67. See the commentaries by L. F. Stehen, ed., Flavius Vegetius Renatus Epitoma Rei Militaris (New York, 1990), and N. P. Milner, trans., Vegetius (Liverpool, 1993).