66.1 The Gaulish Invasion
The tribunes and Tables did not entirely soothe Rome’s internal aches, but these reforms served to hold the population together long enough for the city to fix its gaze outwards. In 437, Rome began a long war with its old enemy Fidenae, upstream on the Tiber. Fidenae had first attacked the Latin upstart city back in the days of Romulus; Romulus had fought both Fidenae and Veii, the Etruscan cities, but had not destroyed either. Now the war with Fidenae began and dragged on until 426.
The next two decades were filled with minor battles, until the year 405, when Rome mounted a siege against Veii. This proved to be another drawn-out campaign; the Romans were still camped around the walls five years later, when news of another threat trickled down from the north. The Celts, whom the Romans knew as “Gauls,” had been pushing south for a century now. They were drawing closer and closer to Rome.
But the Romans, busy claiming surrounding territory, do not appear to have paid much attention. Veii finally fell, in 396; it had been a bitter fight on both sides, as Veii was the richest and most resourceful of all the Etruscan cities.10 The city of Veii, Livy writes, had “inflicted worse losses than she suffered,” which means that the siege had significantly weakened the Roman army. And Veii had not been the only fish the army was frying; Roman soldiers had been all over the countryside, terrorizing farmers and seizing villages to add to the growing Roman territory.
The overstretched army was just taking a breath when a plebian named Caedicius came to the tribunes with an eerie warning. He had heard, “in the silence of the night,” an inhuman voice saying, “Tell the magistrates that the Gauls are coming.” The warning was “laughed off, partly because Caedicius was a person of no consequence”11 Rome was still suffering from its patrician complex.
But hard on the heels of this vision came a message from the city Clusium to the north, the old home base of the fearsome Lars Porsena. Thousands of Celts had suddenly shown up at the city gates, waving weapons. “It was a terrible situation,” says Livy, “and in spite of the fact that the people of Clusium had no official ties with Rome or reason to expect her friendship…they sent a mission to ask help from the Senate.”12
The danger must have been extreme for Clusium to imagine that it would override the past hatred between the two cities. But the Gauls were an enemy that tended to unite the peninsula. If Rome had been able to send troops to fight them, it would have. But after the constant fighting of the last thirty years, the Senate had no real aid to give.
Instead, they sent ambassadors to convince the Gauls to settle peacefully in the area, rather than overthrowing Clusium by force. This might have been a fruitful discussion except that the Roman envoys lost their tempers when the Gauls defied them. The Romans drew their swords; the Gauls, who needed little encouragement, took this as a challenge. “They flamed into the uncontrollable anger which is characteristic of their race, and set forward, with terrible speed, on the path to Rome,” Livy writes. “…And from all the immense host, covering miles of ground with its straggling masses of horse and foot, the cry went up ‘To Rome!’”13
The Roman commanders hastily lined up their army at the Tiber, but the line was so thin that the Gauls at first held back, suspecting a trap since the Roman soldiers were so few. But when it became clear that these men were all that the overextended army could muster, the Gauls plunged into the front ranks of Romans. It was first a slaughter, and then a rout. Roman soldiers, fleeing, drowned in the Tiber, pulled down by the weight of their armor. Half of the survivors got to Veii and shut themselves in. The rest made it back to Rome, but their number was so obviously insufficient to defend the city that the whole population retreated into the Capitol, leaving the rest of the city unguarded.186
The Gauls flooded into it, killing anyone who had trailed behind in the flight to the Capitol and burning houses indiscriminately. The Romans, meanwhile, “could hardly believe their eyes or ears as they looked down on the barbaric foe roaming in hordes through the familiar streets…. nowhere, now there, the yells of triumph, women’s screams or the crying of children, the roar of flames or the long rumbling crash of falling masonry…. not shut with in their city but excluded from it, they saw all that they loved in the power of their enemies.”14
Trapped in the Capitol, they could not fight back. On the other hand, the Celtic warriors down below could not get to them. Presumably a long enough siege could have starved them out, but the Gauls had no way of knowing how much food and water were inside the Capitol. And although conditions inside the Capitol were wretched, conditions down in the city soon grew just as bad. Food was limited, and the Gauls had camped on low ground, in a spot with little ventilation. Clouds of ash and dust from the fires of burning Rome blew over them and settled, in a lowland miasma that produced hacking coughs and lung infections. Eventually the crowded conditions led to epidemics. They started to die in tens and then in hundreds, until there were too many bodies to bury; the living burned them in huge heaps instead.15
So they were ready to listen when the Romans made a proposition: they would pay the Gauls off with gold, if the besiegers would back away from Rome’s walls. In this, the Romans had been encouraged by an offer of help from an unexpected source. The Massalians, from the old Greek colony up on the southern coast of Europe, had had their own encounter with roving Celts, who had shown up and camped around Massalia’s walls. The Massalians had bought them off, and the Celts had gone away. According to the Roman historian Pompeius Trogous, the Massalians then sent envoys to the shrine at Delphi to thank Apollo for their deliverance; Massalia had kept distant ties with the pan-Hellenic shrines of the homeland.
The envoys were on their way back when they heard news of the siege of the Capitol.16 They took this news back to Massalia, where the city leadership decided that future good relations with Rome were worth cultivating. The Massalians raided their own treasury, convinced wealthy citizens to make private contributions, and added their gold to the ransom. The Gauls took the total and retreated back to the north, where the mountainous cool was a little more congenial than the hot south of the Italian peninsula.
The Romans emerged from the Capitol to rebuild, hastily, in case the enemy should return. “All work was hurried,” Livy concludes, “and nobody bothered to see that streets were straight…. and buildings went up wherever there was room for them. This explains why…the general lay-out of Rome is more like a squatters’ settlement than a properly planned city.”17 The first barbarian sack of Rome had not only smudged Rome’s imperial ambitions, but left a permanent mark on the city itself.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
The Rise of the Ch’in
In China, between 403 and 325 BC,
Jin divides and Ch’in dominates
AFTER DECADES OF UNENDING BATTLES against neighbors, barbarians, and its own noblemen, the northern state of Jin finally cracked apart. Its fall is recorded by Sima Qian in cryptic terms: “In the twenty-fourth year of King Wei-lieh,” he writes, a year that works out to 403 BC, “the Nine Tripods shook. The king appointed Han, Wei, and Chao as feudal lords.”1
Han, Wei, and Chao were three battling families of the Jin state who had each claimed part of the Jin territory for themselves. When they demanded that the Eastern Zhou monarch recognize them as lords over their three newly defined lands, he had no power to refuse. The Nine Tripods shaking is a very bad metaphor indeed; the Eastern Zhou king had now lost his authority even over his own sacred sanction.
The Jin state, as such, ceased to exist. A tentative reconstruction of the map of China at the onset of the fourth century shows that the thirteen states of the Spring and Autumn Period had now become nine, with the Zhou territory still perched uneasily at the center. Chu had claimed the two states to its east, nearly doubling its size. Sung and Qi had survived, as had the Lu state, although Lu had shrunk. The three new states of Chao, Wei, and Han overflowed the old Jin territory to swallow the old states of Hsü, Cheng, and the old Wey; Yen had lost some of
its western territory, but had made up for it by spreading east along the coast.
But the state that emerged as the biggest winner was Ch’in, which at least quadrupled its original size. Evenutally, the eastern border of the Ch’in stretched from the Yellow river all the way down to the Yangtze.
THE WARRING STATES PERIOD, which began with these nine states, continued as one might expect from the name: with constant wars. It would be weary to recount all of them in detail, but between 403 and 361, the unending interstate squabbles slowly shook the nine states out into a pecking order. By 361, the most powerful states on the plain lay in a three-state line, from east to west: Qi, Wei, and Ch’in. The massive Chu, down to the south, was temporarily preoccupied by the two eastern states which it had swallowed, the Wu and Yueh; both were struggling to break away.
67.1 The Warring States
The Qi state was the most prosperous; it had an unusual run of competent dukes, who collected taxes in an orderly manner and also managed to corner a salt monopoly.2 The Wei had the edge in military might. The Ch’in, all the way to the west, had a huge amount of territory, but it was a backwater state, far from the center of power, with a ridge of high lands separating it from the older Chinese states.3 These still regarded the Ch’in as semibarbaric. “The feudal lords of the Central States…treated Ch’in as an uncivilized Yi or Ti people,” Sima Qian comments.4 Even a hundred years later, a Wei nobleman could sniff of Ch’in, “It is greedy, untrustworthy, and ignorant of polite manners, proper relationships, and upright behavior.”5
This began to change in 361 BC, when a nobleman named Shang Yang arrived at the court of the lord of Ch’in, offering to help make Ch’in into a major power.
Shang Yang was born in the new state of Wei, the son of a royal concubine and so barred from rule. He felt himself deserving of more power than his birth allowed, so when the news worked its way east that the new lord of Ch’in, Duke Hsiao, had sent out an invitation to all capable men to join him in making Ch’in stronger, he left his native land and journeyed to the west.187
Duke Hsiao was so impressed by Shang Yang’s ideas that he gave the man free rein to make whatever changes he thought necessary. At once, Shang Yang began a new regime by instituting strong penalties for treason and feuds; even private quarrels were punishable by law. To enforce this, he ordered Ch’in divided into a whole network of small squares, each containing not more than ten households, with each household given the responsibility of informing on any wrongdoing committed by the others. The people of Ch’in were, in the words of Shang Yang’s biographer, “mutually to control one another and to share one another’s punishments. Whoever did not denounce a culprit would be cut in half.”6 Nor was anyone allowed to escape the watchful eye of officials and neighbors by disappearing into the distance; innkeepers were forbidden to offer rooms to travellers unless those travellers carried official permits.
With this control mechanism in place, Shang Yang set about making Ch’in into a meritocracy. Rather than aping the ranks and privileges of the noble-dominated states to its east, Ch’in would turn its weakness—its lack of aristocracy, its blended heritage of Chinese and non-Chinese—into a strength. Titles would from now on be awarded by the duke solely on the basis of “military merit,” and aristocrats who couldn’t fight would be aristocrats no longer: “Those of the princely family, who had no military merit, could not be regarded as belonging to the princely clan.”7 Anxious to show that noble birth gave no privileges, Shang Yang even insisted that the duke’s own son Huiwen be punished when he commited a minor infraction of the new laws. This seems to have created a bit of trouble in the palace; Shang Yang finally admitted that it wouldn’t be a good idea to inflict capital punishment on the duke’s heir, and instead consented to executing one of Huiwen’s tutors and branding the other (or, according to some accounts, cutting off his nose).8
Furthermore, from now on no Ch’in citizen would be allowed to duck the task of performing useful labor for the good of the state. As far as Shang Yang was concerned, merchants were parasites who sold goods made by other men and took a cut of the proceeds. “Everyone had to assist in the fundamental occupations of tilling and weaving,” writes Sima Qian, of Shang Yang’s reforms, “and only those who produced a large quantity of grain or silk were exempted from labour on public works. Those who occupied themselves with trade were enslaved, along with the destitute and lazy.”9
On the other hand, those who worked hard could look forwards to being rewarded with tracts of land. This was a new idea, and probably the first officially sanctioned private ownership of land in all of China.10 This new private ownership was backed up with its own set of regulations: no one could now move to a new home without official permission, meaning that farmers could not exhaust their land and then shift to new farms. They had to manage their lands properly or else starve.11
Not everyone was pleased with the reforms. Shang Yang’s biographer remarks that the protestors who “came to the capital and at first said that the laws were not appropriate could be counted by the thousands.”12 But the new importance given to farming meant that much of the Ch’in land now lying waste could be put into crops. And despite the severity of Shang Yang’s penalties, his policies (which also allowed convicted criminals to earn their freedom by farming previously untilled land) attracted more and more poor peasants from other Chinese states. In Ch’in, they at least had the opportunity to rise in the hierarchy through military service. A hundred years later, the philosopher Xun Zi visited Ch’in and remarked on this: “The man who returns from battle with five enemy heads,” he writes, “is made the master of five families in his neighborhood.”13
Most ancient historians disliked Shang Yang intensely, but even Sima Qian had to admit that all this legislation established a kind of stability in a previously lawless state. He writes that, ten years into the new regime, “there were no robbers in the mountains; families were self-supporting and people had plenty…. great order prevailed throughout the countryside and in the towns.”14
Despite this, Sima Qian thought the despotic Ch’in state a wretched place to live. The people were enslaved, if prosperous. Other worries had replaced the fear of thieves and riots: “None of the people dared to discuss the mandates,” he notes, since Shang Yang had ordered malcontents to be banished.15 Music and poetry were dismissed as unproductive; philosophy was scorned. As part of his campaign to make Ch’in strong, Shang Yang burned all of the teachings of Confucius that he could find.
BY 344 CH’IN had grown strong enough for Duke Hsiao to exercise one of the privileges of the Hegemon and summon the other feudal lords into his presence. Sima Qian, who records this request, does not tell us how they reacted. He does add that, in 343, the Eastern Zhou king formally recognized Duke Hsiao of Ch’in as the Hegemon. It was the first time in a century that a duke could lay claim to the title, and the first time in history that a Ch’in lord had won it.16
Now the ultimate goal of all Shang Yang’s reforms became clear. The new laws had produced a well-fed and growing population, and had made military service one of the most attractive careers for the new crop of young Ch’in men. In 340, Ch’in began to fight its way towards conquest of its neighbors.
Shang Yang’s first target was Wei, and the new state fell to the Ch’in armies without too much of a struggle. But this victory was Shang Yang’s last triumph. Duke Hsiao died and was succeeded by his son Huiwen—the Huiwen who had watched his tutors executed and disfigured, some twenty years ago, for his own trespassess. He had hated Shang Yang ever since. As soon as power was in his hands, he ordered Shang Yang arrested.
The minister disguised himself and fled from the Ch’in court, but when he sought shelter at an inn, the innkeeper refused to admit him. Neither would anyone else. He had no permit, as the law required.
Deprived of any hiding place, Shang Yang was soon overtaken by Huiwen’s men and taken back to the Ch’in capital. There, he was sentenced to be tied to four chariots which were driv
en off in different directions, tearing him apart.
With Shang Yang’s irritating presence gone, Huiwen decided not to revoke any of the minister’s reforms. They had, after all, made Ch’in more powerful than it had ever been; so powerful, in fact, that in 325 he proclaimed himself king.
The other feudal lords reacted as you might expect: “Thereafter,” Sima Qian writes, “all the feudal lords became kings.” The wars of the Warring States continued as before, except that now they were conducted by kings rather than dukes.
IN THIS continually disrupted world, teachers of philosophy continued to try to understand their lives and to ask the central question of their times: how can men be whole, in a world constantly torn apart?
The teachings of Confucius, which Shang Yang found so damaging to his own purpose, were carried on by his most famous pupil, Mencius (a Latinized form, like Confucius, of the name Meng-tzu). Mencius’s writings paid particular attention (as is hardly surprising) to the relationship between a ruler and his people. The ruler governs by the will of Heaven, Mencius wrote, but since Heaven “did not speak,” the ruler had to measure whether or not he was in fact carrying out the will of Heaven by listening to the opinions of the people.17 If he listened closely enough, he would learn that warfare was never Heaven’s will. “One can guess what your supreme ambition is,” he writes, addressing an imaginary king. “To extend your territory, to enjoy the homage of Ch’in and Chu, to rule over the Central Kingdoms…. Seeking the fulfillment of such an ambition [by force of arms] is like looking for fish by climbing a tree.”18 This was not a philosophy welcomed by kings, who preferred tree-climbing; Mencius, who offered to become an advisor to the dukes of several different states, was turned down by all of them.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 58
