FOR AN INDIVIDUAL Roman soldier, a battlefield was a narrow and constricted place, electric with fear and tension. As most fighting took place in the summer, the air would be filled with dust raised by thousands of tramping feet, the ancient equivalent of von Clausewitz’s fog of war. Rain brought no relief, for an army soon turned wet ground into a quagmire. Sharp and repulsive smells spread through the armies—caused by sweaty unwashed men, the panicked loosening of sphincters and bladders, and, in due course, the cutting open of guts. There was a tremendous noise of metal on metal, of war cries and screams, of regimental trumpet blasts. The soldier was surrounded by comrades but could not see anything that was going on beyond them, nor easily hear orders. He had no idea how the battle as a whole was going. At best, he might glimpse his general riding past, himself hardly able to descry events. In the middle of a crowd, our Roman was fearfully on his own.
In modern warfare, combatants are often more or less remote from their opponents, and so are insulated from the terrors of hand-to-hand fighting. For the Roman, a javelin could perhaps be thrown thirty meters, but once two armies collided he was in touching reach of his enemy. His duty was to try to kill or disable him with his trusty gladius, a short cut-and-thrust sword, and to avoid getting killed by use of his shield, or scutum, two and a half feet in width and four feet in height.
In the fourth century, military reforms improved the effectiveness of Roman arms but probably made the battlefield a more frightening place than it had previously been. Originally, a legion fought as a phalanx. A phalanx was a tight infantry formation, eight and, later, twelve or sixteen ranks deep. It was a Greek invention that the Romans copied. As if they were a single invincible organism, soldiers marched close together shield to shield. They carried long spears thirteen to eighteen feet in length that, like a lethal porcupine, presented an impenetrable thicket of shafts. The phalanx crashed into the enemy line and usually prevailed by virtue of its sheer momentum and perfect drill. Not for nothing is the word phalanx the Greek for “roller,” or heavy tree trunk.
However, the phalanx had weaknesses. It was vulnerable to attack from the sides and men found it hard to stay in formation on rough ground. Once broken up, this monument of human solidarity disintegrated into a collection of individual soldiers, easily picked off and put to flight. Except in the Po Valley, Italy is not a land of flat plains, and during the fourth century Rome found that the phalanx was at a disadvantage when confronting the loose, open tactics of the Celts, with their terrifying chariots, or the guerrilla tricks of Samnite mountaineers.
So the Romans abandoned the phalanx for a more flexible arrangement. Rather than form a single deep rectangle, a legion’s heavy infantry was divided into three successive lines. The first consisted of hastati, young soldiers; the second, principes, men in their prime; and, finally, the triarii, mature veterans in reserve. The hastati and the principes carried two throwing javelins a man, six feet long and made from wood and iron, and the triarii one long thrusting pike. Each line was broken down into ten subunits, or maniples (from the Latin manipulus, or “handful”) of about 120 men. Maniples were separated from one another by intervals equal to their own frontage. The gaps in the front line were protected by the maniples of the second, and those in the second line by the third.
The formation resembled a checkerboard and allowed fighters in the first line to withdraw and be replaced by fresh troops. The task of the triarii was defensive. If both the hastati and the principes had been forced to retreat, they were the last obstacle before an ignominious defeat. They knelt down beneath their banners, held up their shields, and pointed their pikes into the air, a kind of human barbed-wire entanglement. The phrase “to have come to the triarii” was a common expression that things were going badly.
Severity was essential if men were to be serious about fighting. We have no eye-witness testimonials to the experience of battle in classical times, but research into modern warfare offers findings that doubtless have a general application. It seems that comparatively few soldiers put their heart into fighting. Battles often have a rhythm, with waves of men pushing forward, feinting, and then rushing back. Men are usually capable of facing the danger they are in, but only a quarter of them actually attack with a will to kill. A paralysis of terror overtakes some soldiers; they are unable even to surrender, much less fight back, and are killed where they stand or lie.
Joy in combat and the taking of an almost sexual pleasure in killing occurs but is rare. In a modern survey, about one-third of combatant soldiers show strong or mild fear, another third are “in the middle ground of tension and concentration,” and about one quarter are “calm and neutral”: these last may be presumed to be the effective combatants. A small number are stunned or incapacitated.
According to a recent sociological study of violence, “in ancient and mediaeval warfare, there appears to have been a high degree of incompetence in the use of … weapons.” As is usually the case, most wounding and killing took place when the opposing forces were unequal—for example, during a rout or an ambush. “Forward panic” is a kind of fever that maddens advancing troops, who may then commit atrocities. Likewise, after victory in the field or the capture of a besieged city, soldiers allow themselves a temporary moral holiday. Individuals feel protected by the crowd and behave with great cruelty to the vanquished. When normal social controls have resumed, the same men may share their rations with surviving victims.
One way of reducing fear and tension has been to put troops into massed formations, such as the phalanx, where they must act in concert and there is little or no room for individual initiative. Rome’s new manipular formation offered more scope for individual initiative but also (it follows) for cowardice or, at least, ineffectiveness in the face of the enemy.
So it is no surprise that, to maximize fighting efficiency, discipline had to be fierce. Two centurions stood at either end of a maniple’s front row, each commanding one half of the unit, while a third officer, an optio, kept watch in the rear. Great care was taken in appointing men to these crucial positions. According to Polybius:
The Romans look not so much for the daring or fire-eating type, but rather for men who are natural leaders and possess a stable and imperturbable temperament, not men who will open the battle and launch attacks, but those who will stand their ground even when worsted or hard-pressed, and will die in defense of their posts.
It was an understood right of war for the winner to take as booty anything of value that could be found. A Roman soldier, both citizen and ally, could count on a fair share of the spoils. But the most persuasive encouragement to valor was the fact that Rome established a habit of winning its wars. Yes, there could be terrible setbacks and high casualties, but the Roman Republic now controlled most of central Italy; its territory had grown to more than 6,000 square kilometers at the turn of the century and ballooned to more than 15,000 square kilometers by the 280s. There was an unparalleled increase both in public and private wealth.
The wars of the fourth century made Rome into a warrior state. Campaigns took place more or less every year. The regular annual levy rose from two to four legions during the Samnite Wars—that is, about eighteen thousand men—and during the Sentinum crisis six legions were under arms, perhaps twenty-five percent of all adult male citizens. However nerve-racking the experience of battle, warfare paid, and there was now no other power in the peninsula that dared challenge Rome’s supremacy.
SO WHAT WAS it like to be a Roman, as the Republic found itself on the threshold of history and greatness? And how did he or she see the world? It is hard to be certain in the light of an unreliable written record that later imaginative historians tampered with and “improved,” but a recognizable personality begins to emerge into the light of day.
The vast majority of people were poor and scratched a hard living from the land. Although Latium was fertile, hostile marauders trashed crops and burned down huts and houses. Smallholders were often absent on service with the legio
ns. Women and children presumably worked the fields when not forced to make their escape to nearby strongpoints. However, with the expansion of Rome’s territories, fighting increasingly took place on the territory of others.
The problem of indebtedness remained endemic, and it was many years before the humiliation of debt bondage, the nexum, was outlawed. Economic hardship was never totally dispelled, but foreign conquests relieved its worst symptoms. As the Republic became wealthier, rural austerity, exemplified by the experience of Cincinnatus, came to be regarded with a certain nostalgia.
With migrants moving about the peninsula and rising populations, war was a way of life in central Italy. The Romans learned to be extraordinarily aggressive. There were few periods in their early centuries when the Republic was not invading its neighbors or resisting invasion by them. Little wonder that a constitution was devised which intermingled the military with the political.
A fierce culture of self-sacrifice developed, at least in the ruling class, illustrated not only by such legends as Brutus’s execution of his delinquent sons but also by the (apparently historical) deaths of Decius Mus père et fils—suicide for the greater good, negation of the individual for the deliverance of the collective.
Two factors kept the Roman’s instinct for aggression under control: religion and the law. Both were systems of regulation. Spiritual experience was regarded with deep suspicion; what was required was a ritual formula for ascertaining the will of the gods and averting their displeasure. Likewise, the Twelve Tables set out in grinding detail rules for managing relations between citizens.
These two systems helped to ensure good behavior, dutifulness, trust, fides. Bad faith brought with it divine disappproval and legal sanctions. But the Roman was crafty and, while very free with his condemnation of others, was willing enough to favor the letter rather than the spirit of the law in his own affairs; on occasion, he might even rewrite the letter.
Prescription is insufficient by itself; goodwill has to be added to the mixture. The remarkable story of how Rome’s class struggle was resolved is evidence that generation after generation of pragmatists were willing to compromise, to make do and mend, to strike deals with their political opponents.
THESE WERE THE people who were about to encounter, for the first time, the armed might of Greece.
III. HISTORY
10
The Adventurer
A YOUNG KING LAY DYING ON HIS BED IN BABYLON. On 29 May, he had given a splendid banquet in honor of one of his commanders and taken a bath, as he was accustomed to do. Then, uncharacteristically, for he enjoyed late-night drinking sessions, he wanted to go to bed. Perhaps he was feeling out of sorts. However, a friend of his invited him to a party and he changed his mind. He went on drinking all through the next day, at the end of which he felt feverish.
That night he slept in the palace bathhouse, for its coolness. The following morning, he returned to his bedroom and spent the day playing dice. By the night of 1 June, he was back in the bathhouse, and the following morning he discussed a projected military expedition with his senior officers. The fever intensified, and two days later it became clear that he was seriously ill. What, exactly, was the matter is unknown, but he had recently returned from a boating trip on the river Euphrates and may have contracted malaria; also, he had not fully recovered from a serious battle wound to his chest.
The king continued to fulfill his royal duties, leading the daily sacrifice, but by 5 June he was forced to recognize the gravity of his condition and issued orders for high officials to stay within reach of his bedside. Not many hours passed before he began to lose the power of speech and, in a bleak symbolic gesture, he handed his signet ring to his senior marshal. Authority was transferred.
The city was seething with rumors, and anxious soldiers gathered outside the palace, threatening to break down the doors. Eventually, they were allowed in and passed in an endless file one by one through the king’s bedroom. The king could not say a word and, as the men took their leave, he sometimes painfully raised his head a little and gestured to them with his right hand. Otherwise, only his eyes expressed awareness.
At some point during his illness, while he was still able to converse, the king was asked to whom he left his kingdom. He gasped, “To the strongest.” His last words reveal a cynical prediction that his generals would soon be at one another’s throats as they fought for their share of his empire. He added, “There will be funeral ‘games’ in good earnest when I have gone.”
So died Alexander the Great on 10 or 11 June 334, at the early age of thirty-two. While Rome was engaged in its long, slow struggle with the Samnites for control of central Italy, this boyking of Macedon had spent ten years in a whirlwind of triumphant campaigning against the vast Persian Empire; although he claimed to be leading a Hellenic crusade, he expropriated it for himself. One of the world’s great field commanders, he seems to have seen war as an end in itself. Homer’s Iliad was his bible, and he agreed with the indomitable warrior Achilles that the only reasonable purpose of life was the pursuit of personal glory. The cost in lives was of little concern to Alexander and hecatombs of men, women, and children were sacrificed to his vaulting ambition.
In his final months, he was planning new campaigns. According to his biographer Arrian, there were reports that he meant to make for Sicily and southern Italy in order to check the Romans, whose growing reputation was already causing him concern.
He would never have remained idle in the enjoyment of any of his conquests, even had he extended his empire from Asia to Europe and from Europe to the British Isles. On the contrary, he would have continued to seek beyond them for unknown lands, as it was ever his nature, if he had no rival, to strive to better his own best.
Alexander personified a human type, the legendary seeker for the world’s end, whose purpose, in Tennyson’s unforgettable phrase, is always “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The Macedonian king’s cynical view of a future without him was more than justified by the event. His empire was divided up among his generals and members of his family. Nicknamed the Diadochoi, or Successors, they immediately started squabbling among themselves and war succeeded war. Like players in a murderous game of musical chairs, almost every one of them came to a violent end. Alexander’s half-witted half brother and nominal successor as king; his formidable mother, Olympias; his wife, Roxana, and their posthumous son—all were eventually executed as the wheel of fortune whirled round.
THE GLAMOUR OF Alexander’s personality and the blinding afterglow of his achievements caught the imagination of many ambitious young men of the time and, indeed, later throughout the classical period. His example energized famous Greeks and Romans in their own pursuit of glory. (Not everyone was an admirer, it is worth noting. Cicero saw Alexander as a global menace and told of his encounter with a captured pirate. The king asked the man what wickedness drove him to terrorize the seas. He replied, “The same wickedness that drives you to terrorize the entire world.”)
One of the earliest emulators was Pyrrhus, king of the disputed throne of the Molossians. The Molossians were one of the tribes that made up the federation of Epirus (a territory in what is today northern Greece and southern Albania, which looks across a narrow stretch of the Ionian Sea to the island of Corfu); their monarch was the federation’s hereditary hegemon, or leader.
A rugged and mountainous region, Epirus is dominated by the high Pindus range and lay on the edge of the Hellenic world. The Greeks looked down on its inhabitants, as they did on the Macedonians, as being semi-barbarous. Epirotes spoke a sort of Greek but lived in scattered villages rather than cities, or poleis, like Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. Of course, after Alexander, northern outlanders were no longer beyond the pale.
Pyrrhus boasted a remarkable pedigree, for he was believed to be a descendant of Achilles, and bore the name of the hero’s son. As so often in this story, the elaborate tapestry of the Trojan War forms the backdrop of contemporary ev
ents and personalities. To us it may be legend, but to the Greeks and Romans it was reality. Achilles had been the invincible fighter on the Greek side (and, as a point of interest, had defeated Rome’s originator, Aeneas, in single combat), but in the last year of the war he fell victim to an arrow shot by Paris, whose love for Helen had set in motion the whole long, tragic saga. The original Pyrrhus (he was also known as Neoptolemus) was one of the stowaways in the wooden horse. He led the charge during the fall of the city and killed its aged king, Priam. On his return to Greece, he settled in Epirus and founded the Molossian dynasty.
The infancy of his descendant and namesake was disturbed. Born in 319, Pyrrhus was a baby when his father was forcibly removed from the throne and replaced by a relative, and he had a hair-raising escape from pursuers. He was in the care of three sturdy young men and a nurse. They had nearly reached a place of safety, but just as the sun was setting they came to a river swollen by rains. They could not cross it in the dark without help. They saw some local people standing on the far bank and shouted for help, but the noise of the torrent made them inaudible.
One of the youths had the bright idea to strip some bark from a tree and scratch a message on it with a buckle pin. He wrapped the bark around a stone and flung it across the river. Those on the other side read the message and quickly cut down some trees, lashed them together, and improvized a rough-and-ready rail that Pyrrhus’s party could grasp as they crossed the turbulent water.
The child’s final destination was a tribe in Illyria, to the north. This was a lawless land, and the Illyrians had a deserved reputation for sea piracy. The tribe’s ruler, a certain Glaucias, gave him asylum and resisted large bribes to hand him over to his enemies. This was where Pyrrhus grew up—in a wild world of heroic bandits who set a premium on physical bravery and personal honor.
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