This second war almost brought Rome to her knees. Roman fortunes reached their nadir in 216 BC near an ancient town called Cannae, in what is now the Puglia region of south-east Italy. Here Hannibal’s generalship allowed him to annihilate a Roman army of eight legions led by the consuls of the year. On modern estimates the Roman dead ran into the many tens of thousands, including one of the consuls.
If the war was protracted, one reason was that Hannibal had no siege train and did not attack cities. Instead he aimed to break up the Roman network of alliances. He made a point of releasing Rome’s allied soldiers, but failed in his aim of securing wholesale defections. As with Pyrrhus, Rome’s larger manpower pool allowed the city, despite huge losses, to man fresh armies and to fight back. At one point the Romans were desperate enough to send teenagers and picked slaves into the field. By 209 they were able to attack Carthaginian positions in Spain. When a fearful Carthage, unable or unwilling to reinforce Hannibal, finally recalled him, the Romans followed him across to Africa. Here, in 202 BC, a Publius Cornelius Scipio won a decisive victory which forced Carthage to make peace.
Polybius was born in the Peloponnese at around this time. He grew up in a Greek world in which the Roman victory over Hannibal and its aftermath – more shortly of this – made nervous talk about Roman intentions a commonplace. There are echoes of these second-century BC Greek debates in his histories. He records his disagreement with fellow Greeks who thought that Rome’s seemingly relentless rise was fortuitous and unplanned. His considered view was that the Romans were making a ‘bold stroke for universal supremacy and dominion’. They had a Plan, in other words.
Historians debate Roman imperialism to this day. If Greeks at the time could argue either way, modern experts are unlikely to do better. We too can follow some of the controlling behaviour of the Romans which came to the attention of Greeks after the defeat of Hannibal. This released Rome to declare war on Carthage’s Macedonian ally, Philip V, an aggressive expansionist in the usual mould of a Hellenistic king.
Among other signs of an imperialistic outlook Greeks, with the rest of the Mediterranean, had seen the Romans turn their overseas gains of territory from Carthage into provinces. First there was the Carthaginian half of Sicily, then Sardinia, then the Greek half of Sicily after a change of allegiance following King Hieron’s death. This brought over a Roman army (211 BC), which all the ingenuity of Archimedes failed to prevent from capturing Syracuse, the Greek capital. Then, in 197 BC, the Romans started sending a pair of governors to Spain. Along with these governors came Roman demands for tribute.
For all that recent successes now made the Romans insist on recognition of their superiority, Greeks also saw that they were not invariably grasping for territory. They witnessed this in their own case, after the Romans defeated Philip V on a battlefield in central Greece. This defeat (197 BC) prompted Polybius to try to explain to his Greek readers how it was that a Roman force of infantry legions could beat Macedonian foot soldiers fighting in the same style as the invincible Alexander’s men. These last lined up tightly so as to present the enemy with a bristling porcupine of long pikes of the distinctively Macedonian type.
Polybius thought that the Roman legionary had the edge because he was far more flexible. He fought in a more open order giving him space to deploy his shield and his different arms, either in the small units favoured by the Romans, ‘or even by himself’. Given that Roman legions would go on to defeat more Macedonian-style armies in the future, this is that relatively rare thing in ancient accounts of warfare, a persuasive analysis.
In the ensuing peace talks the victorious general, whose name was Titus Quinctius Flamininus, showed a Roman capacity for diplomatic adroitness, as well as a knowledge of Greek history. Under Greek pressure to finish off the Macedonian monarchy for good, he pointed out that it was in the Greek interest to preserve it, because Macedonian arms shielded southern Greece from northern barbarians. Evidently the Romans were in no hurry to assume this burden themselves, or to remove a thorn in the Greek side.
Flamininus also declared in Rome’s name that the Greek cities were to be free from Philip’s garrisons. Plutarch describes jubilant celebrations breaking out in Greece:
When [the Greeks] were tired of shouting about [Flamininus’s] tent, and night was already come, then, with greetings and embraces for any friends and fellow citizens whom they saw, they betook themselves to banqueting and carousing with one another.
In practice Greece remained under the ‘protection’ of the Romans. They substituted their own for Macedonian garrisons in three strategic strongholds. The stated reason, or pretext, was the need to protect Greek freedom from the rumoured ambitions of another, and no less ambitious, Hellenistic king.
This was Antiochus III, of the Seleucid lineage. He and his army had recently been operating far from his kingdom’s core lands in Syria and Mesopotamia. He aimed to recover territories in Asia Minor and Europe which his ancestors had lost to rival monarchs. Flamininus withdrew his army, but left Greece’s door open.
Antiochus did cross the Dardanelles. The Romans sent back the legions. They defeated the king and his Macedonian-style army in two battles. Rome required him to evacuate all his recent conquests west of a snaking mountain range that starts in what is now central Turkey. This was a serious blow for what had once been the largest of the empires formed by Macedonian generals on Alexander’s dismembered super-state.
Greeks in the space of a generation had to adjust to a new political landscape. The dominant power was non-Greek and did things differently. In the slower rhythms of life in ancient times, Greeks remained hazy about Roman customs in war. A Latin inscription on bronze, found in Spain, is a unique record of the Roman concept of unconditional surrender:
The people of the Seaenoci put themselves and all their worldly goods in the good faith of Lucius Caesius the son of Gaius, the conquering general . . . he ordered that they hand over the arms, hostages, deserters, captives, stallions and mares that they had taken. They handed these over. Then Lucius Caesius the son of Gaius the conquering general ordered that they should be free and restored to them the fields, and buildings, and all other things that had been theirs on the day before they handed themselves over.
The date, 104 BC, is given by mention of the consuls of the year. This Roman idea of ‘good faith’ left the capitulated enemy completely, and for all time, in the power of the Romans. It was new to the Greeks. In 191 BC, during the Roman war against King Antiochus, another Greek state hostile to the Romans entered peace talks with the Romans. The emissary of the general abruptly cut off the Aetolian representatives in mid-flow. Polybius describes what happened next:
The Aetolians, after some further observations about the actual situation, decided to refer the whole matter to Glabrio (the general), committing themselves ‘to the faith’ of the Romans, not knowing the exact meaning of the phrase, but deceived by the word ‘faith’ as if they would thus obtain more complete pardon. But with the Romans to commit oneself to the faith of a victor is equivalent to surrendering with no guarantees given to the surrendering party.
When the Romans finally made a treaty with these same Aetolians in 189 BC, they spelt out their insistence on their superiority in a bald statement of Aetolian dependence that must have surprised the Greeks, used to more temperate language in their own diplomatic traditions. The Latin word maiestas literally means ‘greater-ness’: ‘The people of the Aetolians shall in good faith uphold the empire and majesty of the people of Rome.’
After Scipio defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama, the grateful Romans bestowed on him an honorific byname, ‘Africanus’. A slew of these names taken by victorious generals from the site of their victories charts some of the chief theatres of Roman warfare in the course of the second century BC: Asiagenes, Macedonicus, Achaicus, Balearicus, Delmaticus, and so on.
The Roman appetite for these victory names was a function of the same contest for military glory among Roman aristocrats, as the vaun
ting epitaphs of those male Scipios. Looking back, a Roman writer in the first century BC described the extraordinary zeal for fighting once typical of this stratum: ‘There was intense competition among them for glory: each one of them hastened to strike down an enemy, to climb a rampart, and to be seen doing such a deed.’
The historian Livy even blamed these rivalries for what he saw as fake history in the displays of ancestral masks in Rome’s aristocratic houses:
The records have been vitiated, I think, by funeral eulogies and by lying inscriptions under portraits, every family endeavouring mendaciously to appropriate victories and magistracies to itself – a practice which has certainly wrought confusion in the achievements of individuals and in the public memorials of events.
How far this militarism of the great families fanned Roman warfare against other states for much of the second century BC is a modern debate. When consuls pushed for a declaration of war, and then received a command, one might feel entitled to make the connection. Livy wrote that Flamininus’s victory in Greece ‘commended’ him to the Roman voters when they went on to elect him to the career-pinnacle of a consulship.
So did the fact that he had ‘triumphed’. A Roman aristocrat in the second century BC could aspire to no higher expression of public esteem than the rare award by the Senate of a triumph. This centred on a public procession through the streets of Rome. Ancient writers indicate that there were criteria for an award. Among provisions at one time or another, we are told, a minimum number of enemy dead in a single battle (five thousand is the figure preserved) might be stipulated, and for the general to have left the theatre of war at peace. This meant that he could bring back his men, who were actors in the pageant almost as much as the general in his chariot.
In his details of Flamininus’s triumph, Plutarch focuses on another Roman crowd pleaser, the display of booty:
The amount of money exhibited was large. Tuditanus [a Roman historian] records that there were carried in the procession three thousand seven hundred and thirteen pounds of gold bullion, forty-three thousand two hundred and seventy pounds of silver, and fourteen thousand five hundred and fourteen gold coins bearing Philip’s effigy.
As this display suggests, the Romans saw the booty from a successful campaign as a communal good. Plundering was always part of the Roman ethos of war. The victorious general was allowed great latitude in distributing the more valuable booty. He could make additional cash payments to the men, an action understandably popular with the plebs, and hand over bullion to the treasury. He could also draw on the spoils to promote himself in the public esteem.
We hear of generals honouring battlefield vows by using booty to fund public games, or build temples. In the second century BC they started bringing back plundered artworks from the Greek world to advertise their victories. In 1952 archaeologists found an inscribed base for a lost statue in the ruins of Luna, a Roman colony on the Ligurian coast: ‘I, Manius Acilius son of Gaius, consul, took [this statue] from Scarpheia.’
This was Manius Acilius Glabrio who campaigned in Greece. In 191 BC he had sacked a Greek town called Scarpheia, a stronghold of Antiochus. His men must have loaded this statue onto a ship bound for Rome. Probably they purloined it from one of the town’s public shrines, favourite places for Greeks to set up offerings of sculpture. In its new life the statue was a trophy of victory. For aristocrats like Glabrio, booty was another weapon in their quest for personal glory.
In the archaeological museum at Delphi visitors rarely linger over a display of blocks carrying a sculptured frieze of men fighting. The theme is, after all, common enough in Greek art. The shields of the combatants hint at something unusual. Some wield a circular shield of Macedonian type, others the much larger oval shields, designed to protect the whole body, of the Roman legionary.
A Roman general had used this frieze to decorate an eye-catching pillar some 33 feet high, on top of which he placed his own statue. The frieze illustrated his victory over the Macedonian king Perseus, Philip’s son, in 168 BC. For pilgrims to Delphi, one of Greece’s holiest places, this monument was an unavoidable memorial to the final fall of the Macedonian monarchy.
Twenty-two years later, a Roman army invaded southern Greece in order to punish the disobedience of a Peloponnesian federation of cities, by now the only real military power left on the Greek mainland. The victorious army then razed to the ground the Greek city of Corinth. In the same year, another Roman army meted out the same treatment to the city of Carthage. Despite its being a shadow of its former self, the Romans mistakenly, but perhaps understandably, saw the African city as an existential threat.
As usual, Greeks were divided in their views of Roman behaviour. They included critics who thought that the Romans had been corrupted by power, just like (they said) the Athenians and Spartans before them. Their final war with Carthage, they said, was not fought in the honourable way of the Romans of old. They had employed ‘stratagem and deceit’, more like a Hellenistic king.
Polybius himself felt that the overseas wars of the Romans had started to change their character for the worse, whereas in the past they had ‘retained their own habits and principles uncontaminated’. In the present time, he thought, it was no longer unthinkable that a Roman general would accept a bribe. Even so, Polybius himself, though an ex-hostage of the Romans, retained his Roman loyalties. He strongly disapproved of the Greek politicians who triggered the Roman invasion of Greece in 147 BC. After the Roman victory, he placed his local knowledge at the disposal of Roman officials settling Greek affairs. This would be the pattern for Roman rule over subject peoples: working with those who welcomed them.
Greeks at this time now referred openly to the Roman mastery of ‘land and sea’. It is time to look at a by-product of this transformation – mounting tensions at home.
CHAPTER 15
HAIL CAESAR!
THE ADVENT OF THE AUTOCRATS
It is hard to forget a visit to the bare mass of limestone that is the Aegean island of Delos, either the brilliant blue sky, or (often) the wind and choppy seas beneath it.
When you step ashore, the island presents as a landscape of ancient ruins. Inscriptions abound, the island marble preserving their clarity. Visitors may well spot that letters are sometimes in the Latin alphabet, from which our own derives. Lying around is this Latin text, chiselled on a base for a lost portrait statue: ‘The Italians and Greeks who do business on Delos [honour] L[ucius] Munatius Plancus son of Gaius . . .’ Even before a Roman military presence appeared in the Greek Aegean, but especially after, businessmen followed. businessmen followed. From the later second century BC a true diaspora of Italians fanned out round the shores of an increasingly Roman Mediterranean. The ‘Greeks’ here may well have hailed from the old settlements overseas in southern Italy. These invading money-men had fingers in all sorts of enterprises, from viticulture to the art market. To ease their dealings, they took good care to oil relations with important Romans, like the senator Plancus.
The Romans had made Delos a free port (166 BC). This privilege meant that cargoes were not taxed on ships arriving or leaving. Well placed in the centre of the Cyclades for shipping from all directions, Delos now developed into a Hong Kong, an entrepôt between east and west.
Despite all that Aegean light, Delos had a dark side. The archaeologists who work here are not sure where the merchandise was displayed and handled, and the deals struck, in one particular trade described by a Greek writer around the birth of Christ. Unusually for an ancient, he condemned it as ‘villainy’: ‘Delos, which could both admit and send away ten thousand slaves on the same day . . . The cause of this was the fact that the Romans, having become rich after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, used many slaves.’
Pirates of the eastern Mediterranean were important suppliers of this market, bringing their victims to an emporium with a reputation for always providing a buyer. That many of these slaves did end up in Italy is known from an eyewitness. In the 130s BC a young Roman
nobleman travelling through Etruria was struck by what he saw. Where he expected to find free peasants doing the tilling and shepherding, instead he saw ‘barbarian’ slaves.
Addressing the citizens from the speaker’s platform in Rome, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the nobleman in question, later explained why this concerned him: ‘The men who fight and die for Italy . . . though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.’ Ancient writers were much interested in this Gracchus, because they saw his proposed remedy for this problem in the Roman farming economy as the harbinger of a protracted age of civil unrest at Rome.
By way of explanation, the writers told a story of small farmers being edged off the land by rich landowners who brought in slave labour to work their increasingly large estates. This was land conquered by the Romans from Italian enemies like the Samnites. It was the source of the small farms in Italy that the Roman state made available to colonists and others. With these dispossessed smallholders no longer able to meet the property requirement for military service, nor to raise families, the levy – the traditional way of recruiting a Roman army – was becoming less dependable. The writers suggest that this was the real worry for Gracchus, son and grandson of renowned generals.
Today’s historians are doing their job when they question whether Gracchus’s reading of Rome’s social ills was right. Creaky facts and figures about ancient Roman population size furnish fodder for lively discussion among experts, as does the inconclusive evidence from archaeologists for the existence of rural poor, or for slave quarters in farms.
What is certain is that the people egged Gracchus on. As seen, the voting procedures of the Roman public assemblies were weighed in favour of men of property and their concerns. For poor Romans, let alone Italians, protest took other forms – in this instance, one recalling the ‘Democracy Wall’ of the so-called Beijing Spring in the late 1970s. The Roman people, we are told, ‘posted writings on porticoes, house-walls and monuments, calling upon him [Gracchus] to recover for the poor the public land’.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 27
