The Sword of Rome

by Jeremiah McCall

  Certainly, though, the consuls were not in a position to ignore the will of the senate. One need only imagine the reception a consul that had abused the senate would receive when his year of office had ended and he returned to the ranks of that same senate. The practice of remaining a senator for life, punctuated by some one-year tenures in office, was hardly conducive to a true separation of government branches. Still, one consulship, for those few aristocrats who could win it, was generally the capstone of a political career – exceedingly few held the office more than once. Since there were only two consulships every year, competition for that office was that much more fierce than for the lower ranks of praetor, aedile, and tribune.

  Special mention should be made of the proconsuls and, less common, propraetors. When the senate wished to extend the term of elected officials, usually because they were in the middle of a campaign, it could grant them the ranks of proconsul or propraetor. Normally, when such an extension occurred, a consul became a proconsul and a praetor a propraetor. These appointments carried the military authority of consuls and praetor, respectively, without the civil powers. They tended to expire after one year but could be renewed by the senate as it saw fit. Because these appointments usually brought military authority with them, they provided important opportunities for Roman aristocrats to increase their prestige. Since appointment to one of these posts almost always required election first to the consulship or praetorship, these fell outside the normal arena of competition for elected office.

  The assemblies of Roman citizens voted to elect officials every year.6 The plebeian officials – the ten tribunes and the plebeian aediles – were elected by the tribal assembly. This assembly consisted of all eligible voters, the full Roman citizens who showed up to vote, grouped into the assigned voting blocs the Romans called tribes. The curule (as opposed to plebeian) aedile, praetors, consuls, and censors, on the other hand, were elected by the centuriate assembly. In the late third century, this voting body consisted of considerably more than 300 voting centuries ranked according to wealth. Whatever the majority in a century voted became the vote of the whole century; no matter how many individual voters in a century, each century cast a single vote in the assembly. This is vaguely similar to a modern bicameral legislature, although instead of two total votes, one from the upper house and one from the lower, there were several hundred. The Romans organized the centuriate assembly so that the wealthier citizens, though a minority of the population, had more centuries representing them. Consequently, the wealthier theoretically had a disproportionate amount of influence in elections so long as they voted for the same candidate. Whether in practice the system amounted to rule by the wealthy or functioned in a more egalitarian way, however, continues to be a matter of debate.7

  Beyond the benefits elected office might bring an aristocrat during his year in power, it also conferred ranking in the senate. When there were up to 300 voices that might be heard on an issue brought before the senate and not enough time for all to be heard, the order in which senators had the right to give their opinion was particularly important. The consulars, those who had held the consulship, had the right to speak first. First of all among the consulars was the princeps senatus, or ‘first man of the senate’, chosen for his distinguished record and age by one of the censors. Then those who had held the praetorship spoke, and so on. It is far from clear whether the priority in speaking associated with each rank was set in stone and the extent to which the presiding magistrate, usually a consul, could play favourites and circumvent the normal order of speaking. Still there is sufficient evidence demonstrating that rank in the senate was highly dependent on the offices one had held.8

  Such a system in which the members of the political class competed fiercely for the honours of high office was fraught with potential problems. First, from the competitors’ point of view, came the problem of sharing the political wealth – how could newcomers and men of lower status within the elite effectively compete with sons of established aristocratic families who benefitted from the fame and prestige of their ancestors? Then there were the problems inherent in maintaining such a competitive system. Too much focus on competition and the essential administrative and military needs of the Republic could not be fulfilled. Or, equally undesirable, too much competition could lead to infighting that might tear the Republic apart. These are problems that continue to plague modern republics whose officials have made politics a career rather than a temporary service. Modern career politicians tied to political parties are often criticized – at times justly so – for devoting more energy to defeating their opponents than to addressing the pressing needs of their societies.

  Despite the potential dangers and instability inherent in such a highly competitive political system, the Republic survived and even thrived for centuries. This is a result, returning for the moment to our metaphor of politics as a game, of the ruling class developing a number of rules that placed limits on how aristocrats could compete for offices and honours. These rules governed by-and-large the intensity of competition. First was the annuality of office. With the exception of the censors, who served several months longer, the elected officials of the Republic served one-year terms, and this limited their ability to overcapitalize on the power of any given office. Second was the collegiality of offices. With the exception of the dictator, a supreme political and military commander chosen to lead the Republic in times of emergency, there were at least two of every official every year, each with the power to veto his colleagues. This practice served to check the power of any individual official. Other rules were matters of custom and subject to lapsing, reviving, and bending through negotiation. Generally speaking, for example, one had to hold lower offices before holding the consulship – though this was not formalized in law until after Marcellus’ day.9 Generally speaking, one did not usually hold offices in consecutive years, having to wait for two years between offices – though this was certainly not a practice followed during the war against Hannibal. Collectively, these practices distributed offices among a wider number of aristocrats rather than limiting them to the few most successful competitors. There were other rules of play that focused on obstructing individuals from gaining honours, but these will be considered in due course as they were used against Marcellus.

  This was the system in which Marcellus played his role. A bit of historical detective work and some arithmetic, however, suggests his initial entry into politics was delayed. To begin, a rough date for Marcellus’ first known elected office needs to be established. Plutarch provides a passing reference to Marcellus as a curule aedile, the most junior office he can be said to have held. More specifically, Plutarch notes that during Marcellus’ aedileship, he accused his colleague Capitolinus of making inappropriate advances toward his son, also named M. Claudius Marcellus. At that time, again according to Plutarch, the younger Marcellus was ‘in the flower of youthful beauty’, which would mean somewhere between 13 and 16 years old.10 Combined with several more pieces of evidence, a rough date for Marcellus’ aedileship can be calculated with reasonable certainty. First, the younger Marcellus held the consulship in 196 during a period when the average age for plebeian consuls was around 40 and perhaps several years older.11 The younger Marcellus had, so far as we know, a regular and highly successful career, climbing steadily up the cursus honorum and eventually reaching the censorship.12 The regularity of the younger Marcellus’ career suggests he was probably of the average age when he was plebeian consul, say 45 to be conservative. This would make his birth year 241 and the year of his father’s aedileship, when the son was 13 to 16, somewhere between 228 and 225.

  This means that Marcellus, who was over 60 years old when he died in 208 and thus born no later than 268, was at least 40 when he held the aedileship. This figure gives cause for pause. The average age of Romans holding the curule aedileship in that period was a bit over 30.13 One could reasonably expect that Marcellus, coming from a family of consular rank should have been able to win
election to the aedileship at the typical age for Roman aristocrats. Instead, he was a decade or more behind his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, this initial delay bubbled through the rest of his career. When Marcellus won election to the consulship in 222 he was at least 46 years old, when the normal age of plebeian consuls was 36 to 39.14 In other words, Marcellus began his rapid political ascent late in life. Why would this have been so? Certainly, he was willing to serve in high offices; after all, the man won election to the consulship five times in the span of fourteen years. Unfortunately, any attempt to answer this question requires considerable speculation. His career from the consulship forward was marked by his ability to capitalize on opportunities for glory and honour, even when those opportunities – in his opponent’s eyes – contradicted if not broke the rules of aristocratic competition. Perhaps this tendency to stretch the limits and inspire opposition manifested itself at an earlier age when Marcellus’ political career was less secure. Perhaps Marcellus rubbed one or more powerful aristocrats the wrong way, slowing his political career in the process. This certainly is possible, but the absence of clear evidence demands caution.

  What can safely be said is that Marcellus’ father, either dead or politically insignificant, was in no position to help his son’s career. Normally, a young Roman aristocrat’s father would have played an important role in fostering the youth’s political career. A politically established father provided connections with the upper class that made up an influential part of the centuriate assembly. Through his father’s sponsorship a young man could become known to his elders, certainly important at election time. A father’s good reputation might also serve as insurance of proper behaviour on the part of his son when he reached office. Long before a young Roman aristocrat entered the senate and learned its traditions, customs, and values, he learned about Roman political life and values from watching and listening to his father. The good reputation of the father would reflect favourably upon the son.

  If any Claudius Marcellus held office between 287 and ca. 226, however, the sources are silent on the matter. So it is certain that Marcellus’ father did not hold the consulship, and he may not have won election to any political office at all. Perhaps he died at a young age. Whatever the case, the absence of his father from the political scene certainly would have disadvantaged Marcellus. Perhaps this was enough to delay his entry into the aedileship, especially since the Claudii Marcelli themselves were relatively new to politics and as many as sixty years had passed since one had held high office.

  Perhaps, too, the newness of the family and this large hole in Marcellus’ political pedigree helps explain what followed. When Marcellus entered the consulship seven to ten years later than the average, he clearly seized several uncommon opportunities that laid the foundation of a reputation lasting well after the Republic collapsed. The scene for this ascent was set in 225, three years before Marcellus’ first consulship. Later writers particularly noted the Roman panic that year when news came that the Insubrian Gauls and their allies had declared war. There certainly had been enough precedents to strike fear into Roman hearts. Though it is misleading to speak of Gauls as a collective since the label refers to a variety of Celtic tribes stretching from north Italy through France and into Britain, the Romans often did just that, and the relationship between the Romans and the Gauls had been shaky under the best of circumstances. Nearly two centuries earlier, in 390, the Gallic Senones had sacked the city of Rome itself, burning it to the ground, an event branded into the Roman psyche, judging from the references to the event made by writers centuries later. Then in a far more recent event that the very oldest Romans of Marcellus’ day would well remember, Gallic tribes in north Italy had capitalized on the invasion of southern Italy by King Pyrrhus of Epirus in the 270s and invaded Roman territory. From the Roman perspective the Gauls were an imminent danger, simply waiting for an opportune time to eradicate the Republic.15

  There were, however, other legitimate perspectives. Sometime in the decade before 225, probably 232, the tribune Gaius Flaminius passed a proposal to parcel out the region of Picenum, once held by the Gauls, to Roman citizens.16 This act in Polybius’ judgment sparked a renewed war with these Gallic tribes after almost half a century of peace.17 His reasoning holds up well; the confiscation and settlement of lands that had once been under the control of the Gauls were ominous signs that the Roman presence in north Italy was there to stay; the ultimate victims of Roman expansion here were to be the Gauls. That the critical fertile farmlands of the expansive valley of the River Po were likely to be next on the Roman list after Picenum could not have settled Gallic fears any. The course of Roman expansion in Italy in the previous century provided a clear enough portent to any who cared to look; the Etruscans, the Latins, and the Samnites had all been major regional powers; all had been eclipsed by the Romans. The Greeks of the south had been humbled and even the Carthaginians defeated in their first war with the Romans. Modern historians have, rightly, spent a great deal of energy trying to determine whether the Romans intended to carve an empire from these peoples or simply acquired it through a series of defensive wars and entangling diplomatic commitments. For the Insubres and the Boii, however, such a question, if it ever even occurred to them, was beside the point: the Romans would keep coming so long as nothing stopped them.

  So, spurred by the latest Roman encroachment, this time in the form of farmers ploughing under the meadows of Picenum, the Insubrians and Boii chose to make war on the Romans. Nor did they mean it to be a minor threat. They hired the services of the Gaesatae, a Gallic people known to fight for pay.18 A great force was mustered and headed south into the Roman heartland. According to Polybius, this was the largest Gallic invasion force ever, consisting of 50,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry and chariots – numbers that are certainly extremely large though within the realm of possibility.19 The invaders marched south across the River Po, the unofficial boundary between Roman and Gallic lands, and into Etruria, laying waste to the countryside as they marched.20 These were lands the Romans had dominated for far more than a century; they were facing a large-scale invasion on their veritable doorstep.

  News of this invasion must have reached Rome after the consuls of the year had received their military assignments. One of the consuls, Gaius Atilius, had already been dispatched to Sardinia with legions – no doubt to continue pacifying the island the Romans had seized from Carthage at the end of the First Punic War more than a decade before (238/7). This helps explain the heightened concerns at Rome – a massive invasion force on the move and one of their consular armies was not even in Italy. The senate crafted an initial defensive strategy. A missive called Atilius back from the island. Meanwhile, the other consul, Lucius Aemilius took a force to Ariminum, a city in northern Umbria on the Adriatic coast. Finally, one of the praetors of the year, officials who were still judges as much as they were military commanders at this point in Roman history, was sent to Etruria.21 Presumably the plan was for the praetor, as the junior commander, to hold in Etruria pending the return of the Consul Atilius to the west coast. Aemilius, then, would head east either to flank the Gallic army or defend the eastern side of the peninsula.

  When the Gauls reached Clusium in central Etruria they had passed the praetor’s position. He subsequently led his forces to cut off the Gaul’s return route. The Gallic army turned to do battle with the Roman force and defeated it soundly, killing thousands and trapping the remnants on a hilltop.22 Laden with spoils from their adventures, the Gallic king, Aneroestes, ordered the host to return home for the season. Meanwhile, Aemilius had marched his forces from Ariminum into Etruria. He received word of the dire straits the praetor’s army was in and managed to relieve the hilltop survivors, adding them to his own forces. Aemilius at this time decided to avoid a pitched battle, preferring to wait and observe the Gallic army as it moved north. With the arrival of Atilius’ legions imminent, time could only improve the Roman position. 23

  As the Romans’ good fortun
e had it, Atilius soon landed his army at Pisa and began the march south along the coastal plain of Etruria toward Rome. Essentially, this meant that the Gallic army was trapped between the forces of Atilius and Aemilius, though neither the consuls nor the Gauls seemed immediately aware of this. Soon, though, Atilius’ vanguard soldiers captured some Gallic foragers near the River Telamon in Etruria – midway between Rome and Pisa – and reported the position of both the Gallic army and Aemilius’ force.24 Atilius must have been amazed by his luck or, perhaps, by the gift the gods had handed to him. Here was a chance to trap the entire enemy force between two Roman armies, a commander’s dream. According to Polybius, Atilius ordered his tribunes ‘to put the legions in fighting order’ and marched to intercept the Gallic forces.25

  Polybius’ casual reference to ‘fighting order’ underscores the fact that ancient writers, when they were not ignorant themselves, tended to assume their readers were familiar with the realities of ancient infantry battle. This leaves the modern reader at a disadvantage, since ancient battlegrounds were far different from modern ones and the details have not always been represented accurately. Since the functioning of the late third century Roman army is central to a full account of Marcellus, it will be well worth the time to explore the characteristics of that army and of ancient infantry battle in the third century Mediterranean world.26