SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  It is a world we can still glimpse in an extraordinary discovery made in the 1870s in excavations at what would have been the edge of the ancient city of Rome: a tantalisingly small fragment of painting, from a tomb, probably dating to the early third century BCE. Originally much more extensive, covering a whole wall, it is arranged in a series of registers, one above the other, which are thought to feature scenes from these conflicts between Rome and the Samnites. If so, this is the first surviving painting in the West to show an identifiable, real-life military campaign – unless a rather generic scene of combat painted on a tomb in South Italy is actually, as some archaeologists have optimistically imagined, a proud depiction of the Samnite victory at the Caudine Forks (see plate 6).

  The interpretation of the painting has been hugely controversial, and it is now sadly eroded, but the main outline is clear enough. The lowest register depicts hand-to-hand fighting, dominated by a man whose elaborate helmet extends into the scene above; higher up some imposing battlements still stand out. Each of the two best-preserved scenes shows a man in a short toga holding a spear. One of these, and possibly both, is named ‘Q Fabius’, plausibly the Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus who was commanding officer at Sentinum and who gave Barbatus his only known cameo role in the battle, instructing him to ‘bring up the reserves from the rear’. Here he is shown – with a retinue of hangers-on behind him on a distinctly smaller scale – apparently in negotiation with ‘Fannius’, a warrior with no weapons, dressed in military kit including heavy leg guards and in one case a plumed helmet, who is extending his bare right hand. Is Fannius a Samnite, surrendering to a representative of ‘the race that wears the toga’ – here, already in the third century BCE, depicted as exactly that?

  Seen in these simple, stylised images, the Romans may not look much of a match for Alexander the Great. But whether or not they would have been is precisely the issue Livy raises in the long digression in his History just after the description of the impressive Roman recovery from the humiliation at the Caudine Forks. It did not escape his notice that the Samnite Wars were taking place in Italy at the end of the fourth century BCE, which was more or less when the Macedonian king was on his devastating campaigns in the East. By Livy’s day, Roman generals had long been keen to emulate Alexander. They had imitated his distinctive hairstyle, they had called themselves ‘the Great’ and both Julius Caesar and the first emperor, Augustus, had made a pilgrimage to Alexander’s tomb in Egypt, Augustus – so it was said – accidentally breaking off the corpse’s nose as he paid homage. So it is perhaps not surprising that Livy pondered a classic counterfactual question: who would have won if Alexander had turned his army westward and faced the Romans instead of the Persians?

  Alexander, he concedes, was a great general, though not without his faults, drunkenness among others. But the Romans had the advantage of not depending on a single charismatic leader. They had depth in their command, supported by extraordinary military discipline. They also, he insisted, could call on far greater numbers of well-trained troops and – thanks to Roman alliances throughout Italy – summon reinforcements more or less at will. His answer, in short, was that, if given the chance, the Romans would have beaten Alexander.

  Expansion, soldiers and citizens

  In his roundabout way, Livy – who sometimes seems rather plodding in his analysis – offers a perceptive answer to the questions of what made the Roman armies at this period so good at winning and how it came about that Rome extended control so rapidly over so much of Italy. This is one of the few cases in which he looks beneath the surface of the narrative, to underlying social and structural factors, from the organisation of Roman command to Rome’s resources of manpower. It is worth pushing Livy’s point a little further, to think harder about what was, in retrospect, the beginning of the Roman Empire.

  Two things are clear and undermine a couple of misleading modern myths about Roman power and ‘character’. First, the Romans were not by nature more belligerent than their neighbours and contemporaries, any more than they were naturally better at building roads and bridges. It is true that Roman culture placed an extraordinarily – for us, uncomfortably – high value on success in fighting. Prowess, bravery and deadly violence in battle were repeatedly celebrated, from the successful general parading through the streets and the cheering crowds in his triumphal procession to the rank-and-file soldiers showing off their battle scars in the middle of political debates in the hope of adding weight to their arguments. In the middle of the fourth century BCE the base of the main platform for speakers in the Forum was decorated with the bronze rams of enemy warships captured from the city of Antium during the Latin War, as if to symbolise the military foundation of Roman political power. The Latin word for ‘rams’, rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word ‘rostrum’.

  Yet it would be naïve to imagine that the other peoples in Italy were different. These were very disparate groups, much more varied – in language, culture and political organisation – than the shorthand ‘Italians’ implies. But to judge from the comparatively little we know about most of them, from the military equipment found in their graves or the occasional passing references in literature to their spoils, warfare and atrocities, they were just as committed to militarism as the Romans and probably just as greedy for profit. This was a world where violence was endemic, skirmishes with neighbours were annual events, plunder was a significant revenue stream for everyone and most disputes were resolved by force. The ambivalence of the Latin word hostis nicely captures the blurring of the boundary between ‘the outsider’ and ‘the enemy’. So too does the standard Latin phrase for ‘at home and abroad’ – domi militiaeque – in which ‘abroad’ (militiae) is indistinguishable from ‘on military campaign’. Most of the peoples in the peninsula no doubt shared that blurring. To be off one’s home turf was always (potentially) to be at war.

  Second, the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps. What this implies for how they, or any other ‘precartographic’ people, conceived the world around them, or just over their horizons, is one of history’s great mysteries. I have tended to write of the spread of Roman power through the peninsula of Italy, but no one knows how many – or, realistically, how few – Romans at this date thought of their homeland as part of a peninsula in the way we picture it. A rudimentary version of the idea is perhaps implied by references in literature of the second century BCE to the Adriatic as the Upper Sea and the Tyrrhenian as the Lower Sea, but notably this is on a different orientation from ours, east–west rather than north–south.

  These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory. Of course, Rome’s growing power did dramatically transform the landscape of Italy. There was little that was more obviously transformative than a brand-new Roman road striking out across empty fields, or land being annexed and divided up among new settlers. It continues to be convenient to measure Roman power in Italy in terms of geographical area. Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion.

  There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition
that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.

  The results may well have been unintended, but they were ground-breaking. For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory. Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war. Or as one Roman poet put it in the 130s BCE, ‘The Roman people has often been defeated by force and overcome in many battles, but never in an actual war on which everything depends.’

  There were, however, other far-reaching implications of the way the Romans defined their relations with other peoples in Italy. The ‘allies’, who were committed to no more than supplying manpower, were the most numerous, but they were only one of the categories concerned. To some communities over wide areas in central Italy, the Romans extended Roman citizenship. Sometimes this involved full citizen rights and privileges, including the right to vote or stand in Roman elections while also continuing to be a citizen of a local town. In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio. There were also people who lived on conquered territories in settlements known as colonies (coloniae). These had nothing to do with colonies in the modern sense of the word but were new (or expanded) towns usually made up of a mixture of locals and settlers from Rome. A few had full Roman citizenship status. Most had what was known as Latin rights. That was not citizenship as such but a package of rights believed to have been shared since time immemorial by the Latin towns, later formally defined as intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement and so on. It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis.

  How this complicated mosaic of statuses had originated is again hard to know. Roman writers of the first century BCE, followed by modern legal scholars, tended to treat them as part of a highly technical, carefully calibrated system of civic rights and responsibilities. But that is almost certainly the product of later legal rationalisation. It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a ‘Latin’ colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity.

  The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.

  Causes and explanations

  There is no more vivid symbol of Rome’s changed relationship to the outside world in the early fourth century BCE than the vast wall erected around the city in the years after the Gauls left, with a perimeter of 7 miles and in places as much as 4 metres thick. It was simultaneously a mammoth building project (more than 5 million manhours of labour in the construction, according to one estimate) and a boastful symbol of Rome’s prominence and place in the world. There is no doubt, as both ancient and modern historians agree, that it was around this time that Rome’s military expansion outside its immediate neighbourhood began. Nor is there any doubt that the expansion, once started, was sustained more than anything by the resources of manpower that came with the alliances that followed its victories.

  But what caused the change in the first place is a tricky question. What happened in the early fourth century BCE to start this new phase of Roman military activity? No ancient writer hazards an answer, beyond the implausible idea that the seed of world domination had somehow been planted. Maybe the invasion of the Gauls produced in the Romans a determination not to be caught out like that again, to take the offensive rather than being forced on to the defensive. Maybe it took only a couple of lucky victories in the endemic fighting of the region, followed by a couple of alliances and the extra manpower they brought, to ignite the process of expansion. Whatever the case, it seems likely that the dramatic changes in domestic politics had some part to play.

  So far in exploring this period, I have largely kept the internal history of Rome separate from the story of its expansion. It makes for a clearer story, but it tends to obscure the impact of politics at home on relations further afield, and vice versa. By 367 BCE, the Conflict of the Orders had done something far more significant and wide-ranging than simply end political discrimination against the plebeians. It had effectively replaced a governing class defined by birth with one defined by wealth and achievement. That is partly the point of Barbatus’ epitaph: patrician though the Scipio family was, what counts here are the offices he held, the personal qualities he displayed and the battles he won. No achievement was more demonstrable or more celebrated than victory in battle, and the desire for victory among the new elite was almost certainly an important factor in intensifying military activity and encouraging warfare.

  Equally, it was power over increasingly far-flung peoples and the demands of a conquering army that drove many of the innovations that revolutionised life in Rome itself. One important example of this is coinage. From early in its history, the city had a standard system of determining monetary value by weight of metal; this is evident in the Twelve Tables, which assess penalties in units of bronze. But there was no coinage as such until the end of the fourth century BCE, when ‘Roman’ coins were first minted, in South Italy, probably to pay for warfare or road building there.

  More generally, if we were to ask what transformed the relatively simple world of the Twelve Tables into the relatively complex world of the year 300 BCE, the most influential factor would surely be the sheer size of Rome’s dominion and the organisational demands of fighting on a large scale. Simply the logistics of transport, supply and equipment entailed in mounting a campaign of 16,000 Romans (to use Livy’s estimate), plus allies, would have demanded an infrastructure unthinkable in the mid fifth century BCE. Although I have tried to avoid such modernising terms as ‘alliance’ and ‘treaty’ when referring to Roman activity in the fifth century BCE, the network of Roman connections throughout the peninsula and the different definitions of Rome’s relations with different communities by the end of the following century make those terms much less inappropriate. Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

  The family tomb of Scipio Barbatus now looks grandly archaic, and – with its coarse local stone, rather crude
ly carved decoration and slightly antiquated spelling (consol instead of consul, for example) – it might well have seemed quaintly old-fashioned to any Roman who entered it in the first century BCE. But in his day, Barbatus was part of a new generation who defined a new way of being Roman and a new place for Rome in the world. His descendants took that even further, and it is to them we now turn.

  CHAPTER FIVE

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  A WIDER WORLD

  The descendants of Barbatus

  SCIPIO BARBATUS BUILT his tomb on a grand scale, and over the next 150 years around thirty of his descendants joined him there. The Scipio family included some of the most famous names of Roman history, as well as its fair share of also-rans and ne’er-do-wells. Eight of their epitaphs survive more or less complete, and several of those commemorate the kind of Romans usually hidden from history: the ones who did not quite make the grade or who died young, and the women. ‘He who has been buried here was never surpassed in virtus. Just twenty years of age, he was entrusted to the tomb – in case you ask why no political office was entrusted to him,’ the text on one sarcophagus of the middle of the second century BCE explains slightly defensively. Another has to fall back on the achievements of the young man’s father (‘his father crushed King Antiochus’). But others had more to boast of. The epitaph of Barbatus’ son proclaims: ‘He captured Corsica and the city of Aleria, and in gratitude dedicated a temple to the Gods of Storms.’ A storm had nearly wrecked his fleet, and this was his thank offering to the appropriate gods for the happy outcome.

  Other members of the family would have had even greater boasts. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a great-grandson of Barbatus, was the man who in 202 BCE secured the final defeat of Hannibal: he invaded the Carthaginian’s home territory in North Africa and at the Battle of Zama, near Carthage, routed his army, with some help from Hannibal’s elephants, who ran amok and trampled over their own side. Africanus’ grave lay on his estate in South Italy and became something of a pilgrimage site for later Romans. But it is almost certain that among the memorials in the family tomb were once those of his brother Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, the man ‘who crushed King Antiochus’ of Syria in 190 BCE; his cousin Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus, a consul in 176 BCE; and his grandson Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. An adopted member of the family, Aemilianus invaded North Africa and finished Africanus’ work: in 146 BCE he reduced the ancient city of Carthage to rubble and sold most of its surviving inhabitants into slavery.