No matter how pressed the Campanians were, it is unlikely that any of Rome’s neighbors were begging for absorption; this “First Samnite War” was the next move in Rome’s imperial game. The gambit was not particularly successful. By 341, the First Samnite War was stalemated, and the two sides agreed to a treaty.
69.1 Roman Enemies and Allies
The second war, the Latin War, broke out right on the heels of the first. The cities of the Latin League, watching Rome’s activities in the south, had finally decided that no treaty was going to halt Roman expansionism. Complicated political maneuverings resulted in the Latin cities attacking Rome, with the Samnites joining in the Roman side in order to keep Latin power from spreading farther to the south.
This war, Livy writes, was particularly difficult for the Roman army because the Latins marching towards them “were the same as themselves in language, customs, type of arms, and above all in military institutions.” This concerned the consuls who were in command of the Roman army. In fear that the Roman soldiers would lose track of who were the allies and who the enemy, they “issued the order that no one was to leave his position to fight the enemy.”8
The Latin soldiers and the Roman-Samnite troops met near Capua, in a savage battle. The Romans “broke up their enemy’s formation with such slaughter that they left scarcely a quarter of their opponents alive,” while the “entire army” of the Romans had been “cut to pieces…. before the standards and behind them was equally a bloodbath.”9 Even after so much bloodshed, the two armies regrouped and clashed again. This time the Romans were victorious.
After the Latin surrender, the Romans claimed an empire’s worth of Italian land: not only Latium, but the north of Campania and southern Etruria as well.10 The various peoples pulled within the Roman sphere were treated according to their loyalties. The Latins, Livy says, “were deprived of their rights to intermarry and trade with each other and to hold councils amongst themselves,” which cut the ties between the League cities. The people of Campania who had fought on Rome’s side “were granted citizenship without the vote,” as were the residents of several other allied cities.11 This was an odd category of privilege, the civitas sine suffragio; the new semicitizens were protected by the Laws of the Twelve Tables, but given no voice in Rome’s decisions.
Rome also began to plant new colonies with increasing speed, spreading its boundaries by building as well as conquest.12 The fledgling empire, however, was anything but stable; Livy uses the phrase “bad peace” to describe its relations with its newly conquered members and as-yet-unconquered neighbors.
In 326, even the bad peace ended, and the Samnites once again rose up in arms. Once again the aggression was on the Roman side; the Romans had crossed over that old boundary, the Liri river, to build a colony in Samnite land.13 The “Second Samnite War” dragged on for over twenty years, in a series of dreary repetitive clashes between the two armies.
As Romans and Samnites battled, another fight was brewing offshore. With the Romans busy in Samnite territory, an ambitious Sicilian named Agathocles had seized the chance to do a bit of empire-building of his own. Agathocles was a Syracusan ex-potter who had married well and hired himself an army. In 317, he took Syracuse by force and made himself its tyrant, using the good old Merodach-baladan/Napoleon/Sargon II/Cyrus justification: “He declared that he was restoring to the people their full autonomy,” writes Diodorus Siculus,14 a claim which rang a little hollow when he then went on to conquer most of the rest of Sicily.
This involved shoving Carthaginians off the island, and Carthage did not ignore the challenge to its power in the Mediterranean. By 310, the Carthaginian navy had blockaded Syracuse. In response, Agathocles sent a Syracusan force to attack Carthage itself.15
The Carthaginians were so alarmed by this unexpected assault that the city fell into a panic. The priests of Carthage, who still followed a version of the old Canaanite religion brought over from Tyre centuries earlier, sacrificed as many as five hundred children to the Carthaginian deities in order to assure victory.16 “They believed they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers,” Diodorus tells us, and were anxious to make amends for the shortcomings that had brought Agathocles’s invasion on them: “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus [the Greek name for Baal, a Phoenician male god], extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”19317
This horrific ritual didn’t bring victory. Although Carthage did not fall, neither did Syracuse, and by 306 the two sides had to sign a treaty. Agathocles stayed on the throne of Syracuse, but Carthage kept control of the west part of the island.18
Just afterwards, in 304, the Romans finally made peace with the Samnites (again). Meanwhile, they had embarked on yet another empire-building project. Cyrus had laid out his Royal Road to link his original heartland with conquered territory, and the Romans, following suit, had begun to construct an official road to link the city with their own outlying lands. The consul Appius Claudius Caecus began the project in 312, and the road, which eventually ran along the coast all the way down to Capua in Campania, took his name: the Appian Way.
The peace with the Samnites lasted all of six years. In 298, just after the consular elections, Livy writes that a rumor began to spread through Rome: “the Etruscans and Samnites were enlisting huge armies…. The enemies of Rome were preparing for war with all their own might and that of their allies.”19 The anti-Roman coalition assembling across the Liri included not only Samnites and the remaning Etruscans, but also a contingent of Gauls down from the north and Umbrians, a federation of tribes from the Apennines northeast of Etruria. These disparate peoples were willing to band together to fight against Rome: a clear reflection of the growing sense of crisis over Rome’s ongoing expansion.
The Roman campaign against this federation, the “Third Samnite War,” began with three years of hard fighting that finally culminated at a huge battle in Sentinum, just across the Apennines in Umbria itself; the farthest away, in all likelihood, that the Roman army had ever campaigned, and the first time that many had ever crossed the mountains. “Great is the fame of that day on which the battle was fought in Sentinum,” Livy says.
A day was fixed for the battle, the Samnites and Gauls were chosen to engage in it, and during the actual fighting the Etruscans and Umbrians were to attack the Roman camp. These plans were upset by three deserters…who came over secretly by night to [the commanding consul] Fabius and told him of the enemy’s intentions.20
The Romans, who had been seriously outnumbered by the four-way alliance, sent a detachment to go raid Etruscan and Umbrian land, at which point the Etruscan and Umbrian contingents went home to defend their families and farms. So when the battle began, the Romans were lined up against the Gauls and Samnites. They were “equally matched,” Livy says; the Roman cavalry scattered in terror when the Gauls charged down in chariots, which many Romans had never seen before, and one of the consuls was killed; the Gauls, in turn, fell in such numbers that the heaps of bodies took days to remove. At last, with thousands dead on both sides, the Gaulish and Samnite line was breached, their camp invaded, and their retreat blocked.
Now the Romans had control of the countryside, but “there was still no peace” in the countryside, as Livy concludes. The worst of the fighting ended in 295, at Sentinum, but raids, battles, revolts, and rebellions continued for another five years. Another treaty in 290 brought an end to the Third Samnite War. But even afterwards, Roman soldiers marched out every year to fight in the north and center of the Italian peninsula; the Roman fist, closing over the countryside, was armored.
Chapter Seventy
Alexander and the Wars of the Successors
Between 336 and 272 BC,
Alexander the Great makes most of the world part of one empire,
which his generals then divide
AFTER THE DEA
TH of Philip of Macedonia, his son Alexander had taken his place as king of Macedonia and head of the Corinthian League. But with Philip gone, various Greek cities declared their secession from the League, Thebes and Athens among them; Athens even had an ill-judged festival day and bestowed a posthumous gold crown on Pausanias.1
Alexander marched straight for the rebels with his Macedonian troops, reconquering Greeks as he went. When he arrived at the gates of Thebes, he offered to reinstate the city in his favor if the Thebans would just hand over the two noblemen responsible for leading the secession. Thebes refused, and Alexander ordered his men to break down the gates. “The city itself, being taken by storm,” writes Plutarch, “was sacked and razed, Alexander’s hope being that so severe an example might terrify the rest of Greece into obedience…. Thirty thousand were publicly sold as slaves…. upwards of six thousand were put to the sword.”2
He then made the same offer to Athens, which agreed as quickly as possible. “Whether it were, like the lion, that his passion was now satisfied,” Plutarch adds, “or that, after an example of extreme cruelty, he had a mind to appear merciful, it happened well for the Athenians; for he…forgave them all past offences.”3 The Athenians did their best to keep his good opinion by sending off into exile all the men who had opposed joining the Corinthian League.
After this, the rest of the Corinthian League fell into line within two months. Alexander marched down to the Isthmus of Corinth and there held a gathering of the League in which (as his soldiers stood by) the League’s delegates hastily elected him to the position of leader in his father’s place.
This show of democracy, backed up by force, would be characteristic of Alexander’s dealings. Almost everything he did, he did by force of arms; yet somewhere in him there was a longing to be acclaimed by the free will of the conquered. The old idea of conquest by force, and the new idea that men could be bound together without coercion, by a shared loyalty or a joint identity, sat uneasily together in him.
ALEXANDER WAS NOW KING of the Greeks, which was something that no Spartan or Athenian hero had ever managed to pull off. He had behind him his elite Macedonian fighters, plus around forty thousand Greek troops; he was ready to brave the Persian lions.
Over in Persia, the eunuch Bagoas had come to a bad end. After the death of the prince Arses, Bagoas had chosen as his next puppet an impressive-looking (six and a half feet tall) but reputedly mild-mannered distant relative of Artaxerxes III, a man named Kodomannos.
Bagoas had not thought to get much resistance from Kodomannos, who had no experience of courts. He had underestimated his man, though. Once Kodomannos had been crowned under the royal name Darius III, he invited Bagoas into his throne room for a cup of wine. Bagoas, who knew what was coming, tried to beg off by pleading that he was getting sick, but the king suggested that, in that case, he’d better drink his medicine. An hour later Bagoas was dead, and Darius III was in control of Persia.4
In 334, Alexander marched over into Darius’s realm with thirty-two thousand men; Diodorus says that almost fourteen thousand of these were Macedonian, the rest drawn from subject cities.5 He had moved faster than the Persians expected, and the Persian army could not reach him in time to prevent this army from crossing the Hellespont.
70.1. Alexander the Great. Greek marble bust of Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia 336–323 BC. Museo Barracco, Rome. Photo credit Alinari/Art Resource, NY
Having lost their first advantage, the Persian commanders put their heads together for a new strategy (Darius III was not with them; he had just gotten rid of Bagoas and likely wanted to keep his royal eye on Susa a little longer). The Persian general Memnon suggested avoiding a land battle altogether. Instead, he said, the Persians should retreat while burning all of the supplies, luring Alexander’s army across land bare of food and water, and meanwhile send ships around to attack the Macedonian homeland.6
This was a good plan, a combination of the Roman strategy against the four-way alliance in Italy and the Scythian strategy which had defeated the first Darius. But he was shouted down. Instead, the Persian army moved to the banks of the Granicus river, near the old site of Troy, and made its stand.
Against the advice of his own commander, Parmenio, Alexander drew up his forces and charged across the river at the Persian line. The first Macedonians who came up out of the water were slaughtered, but the weight of Alexander’s attack soon pushed the Persians back. The Greek military historian Arrian chalks this up to the experience of Alexander’s men and “the advantage of the long cornel-wood spear over the light lances of the Persians,”1947 but Alexander’s presence undoubtedly had something to do with the Macedonian ferocity as well. Unlike Darius, he was right in the middle of the first charge and fought on the front line until the end. In fact, he survived having a spear driven into his breastplate, and lost his helmet to an axe-blow from behind. He was saved from losing his head by one of his commanders, Cleitus the Black, who managed to cut off the attacker’s arm at the shoulder before he could get his weapon up for a second blow.8
Ancient accounts record a Macedonian loss of around two hundred men, while the Persians lost something like four thousand; Darius’s son, son-in-law, and brother-in-law were among the dead. The surviving Persians fled, and Alexander declared the Ionian cities liberated (which mean that they were now under his rule). He marched on towards Sardis, but Arrian says that he was still “eight or nine miles away” when the city’s governor came out to surrender.9 Asia Minor was his.
On his triumphant march through it, he stopped at the city of Gordium, Midas’s old capital. There he saw, in the Temple of Jupiter, the cart that Midas’s father Gordius was said to have used when he first entered the country: “its remarkable feature being the yoke,” according to the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, “which was strapped down with several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened.” The locals said that the man who untied it would be king of all Asia, an irresistable challenge to Alexander. “For some time Alexander wrestled unsuccessfully with the knots,” Rufus says. “Then he said: ‘It makes no difference how they’re untied,’ and cut through all the thongs with his sword, thus evading the oracle’s prophecy—or, indeed, fulfilling it.”10
70.1 Alexander’s Empire
Darius, meanwhile, had grown worried enough to travel (with his wives, children, and most of his court) to Babylon, which would serve as his center of operations against the invader. Here he collected an absolutely mammoth army: over a quarter of a million Persians, Medes, and tribute fighters from various parts of his empire, according to Rufus. With this earth-shaking army, he then marched up from Babylon to open country in the old Assyrian heartland, where the Persian forces could spread out and crush the Macedonians.
But Alexander had grown ill with a high fever, and was delaying in Tarsus until it passed. Darius, impatient at his enemy’s constant non-appearance, decided (against the advice of a Macedonian deserter who had shown up at the Persian camp) to make straight towards Asia Minor. As a result, the armies met at the Issus river, in Syria, where the huge Persian numbers gave no advantage; the troops couldn’t all fit onto the smaller battlefield.11
Once again the Macedonian forces pushed through the Persian lines.195 Darius, seeing that the battle was going against him, took to his heels: “He even stooped to throwing off his royal insignia so that they could not betray his flight,” Rufus says.12 Bagoas had not been entirely mistaken in Darius’s mildness; he was frightened enough to leave his wife, his aged mother, and all his children behind. When Alexander arrived at the center of the Persian camp in victory, he found them all there, kept prisoner by the Macedonians in the royal tent to await his arrival. “They kept asking on which wing Darius had stood,” Rufus says; they were convinced that Darius must be dead, if he had given up defending them. The news of his flight was a shock.
Alexander, who was generally kind to captives as long as they hadn’t been part of a siege (which always
put him in a bad mood), spared them. Darius got far enough away to make camp safely, and then sent a letter to Alexander offering to become Alexander’s ally, and also asking to ransom his wife and children.
By return letter, Alexander refused to make any treaties unless Darius came in person and addressed him as “Lord of the Continent of Asia.” “In the future,” his own letter ended, “let any communication you wish to make with me be addressed to the King of All Asia. Do not write to me as an equal.”13
This pretty much guaranteed that talk of a treaty was at an end. Darius remained east of the Euphrates; Alexander provided for Darius’s relatives to live in well-guarded comfort, and then began to campaign through Syria. In 332, he reached the city of Tyre, which refused to surrender and held out for seven months. When the siege finally ended, Alexander was so enraged by the delay that he allowed his men to massacre a good many of the thirty thousand people inside.
After this he marched down to Egypt and was proclaimed pharaoh in the place of Darius III, who had claimed the title as a matter of course when he reached the Persian throne. And then, in 331, he came back up to deal with Darius. Darius made another attempt to avoid war; he offered again to buy back his family, and also promised Alexander that he could have all the land west of the Euphrates without opposition, not to mention a Persian princess as wife, if Alexander would only agree to make a treaty of friendship. Alexander’s general Parmenio thought this was a perfectly good idea which would allow everyone to go back home. “I would accept, if I were you,” he told Alexander, to which Alexander retorted, “And if I were you, so would I.”14
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 61
