The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  It is fair to say that army recruitment is rarely the subject matter of permanent public art in modern life. In the militarized society of republican Rome, things were different. This is precisely what is shown on a stone panel carved in the later 100s BC for some open-air monument in the ancient city, now lost.

  Two young men in civilian clothing stand before two seated officials, one of whom writes down the personal details as he hears them in the latest of a mounting pile of ledgers. An infantryman armed with shield and sword stands watching. The scene is a military census, and the details being recorded will be used to assign these men their places in the Roman army.

  The iron reality behind this marble scene of bureaucrats at work could once be viewed in the collections of Predjama castle in the highlands of south-west Slovenia. In the 1880s or thereabouts the princely owner started acquiring Roman weapons found on a nearby archaeological site, an ancient settlement of the indigenous people. Now in museums, the assortment of lethal devices includes barbed arrowheads, bolts from catapults, the heavy blades of the throwing spears favoured by Roman legionaries, and so-called incendiary spears. These have an opening in the head, like a bracket, for holding fireballs. This hoard of used weapons, unique for its date, ended up being buried during Roman wars against the population of the south-east Alps of the late third or early second century BC.

  The Roman army of the second century BC, which wielded weapons like these, was carefully described by that same Greek historian, Polybius, a contemporary. His description is a marvel of detailed information and must reflect his friendship with well-informed Romans of high rank. It also conveys what he thought his Greek readers would want to know – how it was that the Roman military machine had become so seemingly unstoppable.

  His description of Roman military discipline would surely have taken Greeks aback. There were military courts. In the event of a condemnation, the presiding officer

  takes a cudgel and merely touches the condemned man; whereupon all the soldiers fall upon him with cudgels and stones. Generally speaking men thus punished are killed on the spot; but if by any chance, after running the gauntlet, they manage to escape from the camp, they have no hope of ultimately surviving even so. They may not return to their own country, nor would any one venture to receive such a one into his house. Therefore those who have once fallen into this misfortune are utterly and finally ruined.

  The crimes resulting in a death sentence included cowardice, theft, lying and ‘misusing one’s body’ as the Ancient Greek puts it. That is, a fully adult trooper taking the passive role in sex with another male, whereby he compromised his soldierly virtue. Probably this was thought bad for morale.

  As a result of this culture of harsh discipline, wrote Polybius,

  it sometimes happens that men confront certain death at their stations, because, from their fear of the punishment awaiting them at home, they refuse to quit their post: while others, who have lost shield or spear or any other arm on the field, throw themselves upon the foe, in hopes of recovering what they have lost, or of escaping by death from certain disgrace and the insults of their relations.

  The professional-sounding army that Polybius describes had come a long way from the clan-based warrior bands that seem to have done much of the fighting in the early days of petty conflicts between archaic Rome and her neighbours. The fog that surrounds early Roman history makes the young republic’s successive wars in Italy, which won her effective control of the whole peninsula south of the River Po by 275 BC, hard to reconstruct in the detail, even if the outline story is clear enough.

  There was a series of sometimes overlapping struggles with Italic neighbours, Sabines, Volsci and Etruscans, proceeding to the Samnites of central Italy, the mixed Italian and Greek population of the Bay of Naples and its hinterland, and the Italic peoples and Greek cities of southern Italy, with the occasional invader thrown in – a band of Gauls who attacked Rome in 390 BC, and a Hellenistic king, Pyrrhus, who disembarked from his kingdom in north-west Greece in 280 BC to help a Greek ally, ancient Taras (Taranto), fight a non-Greek foe.

  The Romans were not alone in history in liking to claim that they fought their wars for reasons that were ‘just’ and ‘pious’, to use their own language. They believed that from earliest times their ancestors had performed a religious rite when opening hostilities. A specialist priest in these matters called a fetialis would physically enter enemy territory to demand redress for an alleged wrong. If this was not forthcoming, ‘It was customary for the fetial to carry to the bounds of the other nation a cornet-wood spear, iron-pointed or hardened in the fire.’ After uttering a formula ‘in the presence of no fewer than three grown men’, the priest ‘would hurl his spear into their territory’. The Romans took the observation of religious ritual seriously, whatever the real rights and wrongs in a quarrel with an enemy. So the custom of spear-throwing, even if the priest in so doing implied that blame lay with the enemy, does not in itself mean that the early Romans went to war only for defensive reasons.

  The Romans of the early and middle republic seem to have been always fighting wars. Historians are still unsure whether they were mainly defending themselves from outside aggressors or whether (on the contrary) they were more warlike than even the standards of the time; and then, if so, whether they had long-term strategies of domination, first in Italy, then further afield.

  So many actors over so many generations constituting the ‘rise of Rome’ warn against sweeping statements about Roman aims. It may be safest to assume a tangled knot of the defensive and offensive, of economic advantage and obligations to allies, along with a growing imperiousness as success followed success.

  As seen in Chapter 6, the Romans had little to go on for earliest times when they started to write down their own history around 200 BC. The first account from a Roman pen available to us today was written even later, in the twenties BC and thereabouts. The writer – Livy – was a towering cultural figure in his time. A century or so after his death, a Roman letter-writer included this story in a missive to a friend:

  Have you never read of the citizen of Gades [Cadiz in Spain] so moved by the reputation and fame of Titus Livius that he came from the edge of the world to set eyes on him, and as soon as he had done so, went home?

  It is impossible to imagine a historian today receiving such a tribute. Livy, as he is better known today, wrote patriotic history for a Roman readership ready for a version of the Roman past that would illustrate the peculiar virtues that had made the Romans great. He was certainly not averse to the truth, but he belonged to a society more tolerant than ours of embellishment, or even invention, of the facts, especially if, as here, the end product was a poetic vision of the past roughly consonant with what Romans thought they already knew, and in keeping with how they understood the Roman ‘character’.

  An example of Livy’s approach is the account of a humiliating defeat suffered by the army of the consuls at the hands of the Samnites. The victors then inflicted the ultimate shame on the Roman soldiers of forcing them to stoop down to pass beneath an arrangement of three spears, which imitated the yoke attached to the necks of a pair of pulling oxen:

  First the consuls, little better than half-naked, were sent under the yoke, then their subordinates were humbled, each in the order of his rank; and then, one after another, the several legions. The enemy under arms stood on either side, reviling them and mocking them; many they actually threatened with the sword, and some, whose resentment of the outrage showing too plainly in their faces gave their conquerors offence, they wounded or slew outright.

  In Livy’s account, the Samnites have acted treacherously, but he admits that the Roman generalship was poor. Nature conspired against the Romans too, as he conveys in a confident description of the lie of the land in which the Samnites ambushed them, the so-called Caudine Forks – a feature that has proved challenging to locate today armed with just this armchair history. Livy provides additional padding – no fewer than five speec
hes which he gives to various protagonists, Roman and Samnite. He serves up the whole episode as a lesson to the Roman reader, but also dovetails his unpalatable tale with a dramatic, almost theatrical, tit-for-tat by the Romans six years later (the battle of Luceria):

  There is scarce any other Roman victory more glorious for its sudden reversal of fortune, especially if it is true, as I find in certain annals, that Pontius the son of Herennius, the Samnite general-in-chief, was sent with the rest under the yoke, to expiate the humiliation of the consuls.

  The Romans expanded their sphere of influence not just by war but also by alliances and the use of treaties. Their diplomatic activity over the centuries can even be quantified. In AD 80 a fire at Rome destroyed no fewer than three thousand ancient records of ‘the acts of the people, relative to alliances, treaties and privileges granted to any person’. A Greek writer of the later first century BC gives what is probably the authentic gist of a very early example of one of these treaties, between the Romans and their fellow Latins, drawn up in 493 BC:

  Let there be peace between the Romans and all the Latin cities as long as the heavens and the earth shall remain where they are. Let them neither make war upon another themselves nor bring in foreign enemies nor grant a safe passage to those who shall make war upon either. Let them assist one another, when warred upon, with all their forces, and let each have an equal share of the spoils and booty taken in their common wars.

  This revealing agreement suggests how the Romans very early on involved their allies in their warring, expecting them to share the military effort and risks, but also the economic rewards. It hints at the scope for Romans to use the mutual aid agreement to embroil themselves in other people’s wars, as well as to offer protection. It looks forward to a future when Rome’s network of allies in Italy would give her a much greater pool of manpower to draw on than that provided by the population of one city-state, which is what republican Rome was.

  The Romans also gave us the word ‘colony’. They first started to gain control over large amounts of conquered territory from Italian neighbours in the fourth century BC. About 100 miles east of Rome, high up in central Italy, are the extensive remains of one of these colonies, a place called Alba Fucens. Today this is a scenic spot beneath the peaks of the Abruzzo range. You can see the rectangular layout which guided the future development of the settlement, and fortification walls of many-sided stone blocks which go back to the epoch of the colony’s foundation in 303 BC.

  A later Roman, Cicero, describes these old colonies in Italy as ‘suitable places to guard against the suspicion of danger’, so serving as ‘a bulwark of empire’. Alba Fucens does seem to fit this bill. It occupied a fortified position on a hill, and at some point the Romans extended one of their existing military roads out here. Archaeologists have also detected traces of the work of Roman surveyors in the surrounding countryside. Using simple instruments they overlaid a grid of roads, paths and lines on the properties of the previous, now dispossessed inhabitants. This they then subdivided into rectangular plots for the new settlers. Livy writes of six thousand families sent here, a mix of Romans and their Latin kinsmen. Colonies could satisfy land hunger as well as strategic needs.

  A recently renovated museum in north-west Greece, at Yannina, houses artefacts evoking kings related to Alexander the Great who ruled this part of the southern Balkans in the fourth and third centuries BC. One of them, called Pyrrhus, ruling from 319 to 272 BC, was the ‘king’ who had his Greek name and title punched into a shield of the Macedonian type, its remains displayed here. This shield must have been one of those that this Pyrrhus is said to have captured in 274 BC after a great victory over the next-door Macedonians, and taken home to offer to Zeus, in the sanctuary where archaeologists made this find.

  The warring king had ambitions to build up power and territory like his contemporaries, the Macedonian Successors of Alexander. Six years earlier this warmongering spirit caused him to answer an appeal from a Greek city on the instep of Italy, the old Spartan settlement of Taras, Roman Tarentum, a regional power now feeling threatened by the Romans, whose tentacles reached this far south after their decisive victory over central Italian enemies in 295 BC.

  While the Tarentine envoys made their speech, the king is said to have been thinking of the fall of Troy, ‘and hoping that he might repeat that victory: the descendant of Achilles fighting against a Trojan colony’. The lineage of Pyrrhus did indeed claim descent from the Homeric hero. He seems to have voiced this morale-boosting line in his dealings with his Greek allies in southern Italy. In turn they must have been familiar with the Greek legends of Trojan refugees finding new homes in the Italian peninsula. As seen in an earlier chapter, among these were the legendary ancestors of the Romans.

  Pyrrhus initially underestimated the Romans. The long-standing condescension of Greeks to ‘barbarians’ was a factor here. When he first encountered the orderliness of a Roman military encampment, the king supposedly commented, ‘These may be barbarians, but there is nothing barbarous about their discipline.’ In the campaigning that followed, there were successes on both sides. What daunted Pyrrhus was the constant stream of fresh troops with which the Romans and their allies seemed effortlessly to replenish their losses. Probably it was chiefly this that in the end prompted him to curtail his western adventure, and sail back across the Adriatic.

  Eleven years later (264 BC), the Romans began what Polybius called ‘the longest, most continuous, and most severely contested war known to us in history’. In a small archaeological collection in the Sicilian town of Castelvetrano I have seen for myself some of the exciting finds of war materiel from this conflict which divers and fishing nets have brought up since 2004 from the seas around the Aegates islands, today the Egadi group, off Sicily’s north-west coast.

  These finds comprise a group of well-preserved ‘beaks’, as the Romans called the bronze rams attached to the prows of their war galleys. Some still have the nails for attaching them to the ships’ timbers. This helps to disprove one modern theory that a Roman ram detached on impact, like a bee-sting. Ten of the rams have Latin inscriptions naming the Roman magistrates whose job it must have been to ‘sign off’ the work of the contractors.

  Unexpectedly, the names of these junior magistrates were actually cast with the ram itself, not merely engraved afterwards. This looks like an honorific gesture – as if there was personal kudos to be got from supervising these naval contracts successfully. Two magistrates had decoration added, a relief figure of a winged female who holds a crown. She is the goddess Victoria, and the reason for her invocation on these deadly weapons needs no comment.

  Polybius describes the battle that the Roman fleet won off the Egadi islands in 242 BC. It was their third attempt to win by sea a war that had dragged on for twenty-two years. The Romans doggedly clung to the strategy of turning themselves into a naval power. With an empty treasury, they now appealed in desperation to the rich to make a patriotic sacrifice and pay for a third fleet from private funds. As for the consul in command, he was determined that this last chance would not be lost to poor seamanship:

  He practised and drilled his crews every day in the manoeuvres which they would be called upon to perform; and by his attention to discipline generally brought his sailors in a very short time to the condition of trained athletes for the contest before them.

  The Romans needed sea-power because they were now at war with Carthage, the queen of the central and western Mediterranean. The history of Polybius, a first-rate informant, sympathetic to Rome but also, being Greek, somewhat more detached, covers this war. He gave his view as to how this clash came about between two states with a long history of treaty-relationships going right back, as we saw in an earlier chapter, to the years before 500 BC. The Romans, wrote Polybius,

  saw that the Carthaginians had not only reduced Libya to subjection, but a great part of Spain besides, and that they were also in possession of all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian Seas. They
were therefore in great apprehension lest, if they also became masters of Sicily, they would be most troublesome and dangerous neighbours, hemming them in on all sides and threatening every part of Italy.

  This is defensive imperialism in modern jargon. Polybius believed that these considerations persuaded the Romans to support an immoral cause: they answered an appeal for help from a force of undesirables causing mayhem in eastern Sicily. The activities of these rogue mercenaries were an obstacle to Carthaginian plans – as the Romans saw them – to rule the whole island. Propping up the mercenaries suited the Roman interest, even if some Romans had misgivings. Western realpolitik suggests modern parallels.

  The great Roman victory off the Egadi islands in 242 BC brought to an end this so-called First Punic War. Carthage now sued for peace. Rome required her to evacuate Sicily and gave her twenty years to pay a hefty, but not crippling, indemnity in silver. Just four years after the battle, the Romans seized the island of Sardinia, a Carthaginian domain.

  They justified this ‘theft’, as Polybius calls it, with claims that Carthage was going to use the island to launch attacks on Italy. Polybius believed that this unfair act, kicking Carthage while already down, rankled enough with the Carthaginians to be the underlying cause of their attack on Italy twenty years later (218 BC). A Carthaginian general of great talent, Hannibal, launched this premeditated undertaking from Carthage’s Spanish power base, boldly leading his army on a summer march across the Alps.

  The Roman tradition presents Hannibal as a formidable adversary. ‘To reckless courage in incurring dangers he united the greatest judgment when in the midst of them,’ wrote Livy. Like Mrs Thatcher and Mr Trump, he made do without much sleep. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Livy also gives him flaws: ‘His cruelty was inhuman, his perfidy worse than Punic; he had no regard for truth, and none for sanctity, no fear of the gods, no reverence for an oath, no religious scruple.’