The Crisis of Rome

by Gareth Sampson

  If such weakness in Italy could produce a slave revolt then Sicily was far more susceptible to one, given its recent history and the First Servile War of 135–132 BC (see Chapter 1). The perceived weakness of Rome thanks to the atmosphere created by Arausio was not the only factor that helped create an atmosphere for slave revolts in Sicily. As mentioned earlier (Chapter 7), when C. Marius was recruiting fresh forces from the Roman allies, the issue of foreign slaves was raised. This resulted in a Senatorial decree being issued that banned the enslavement of citizens of allied states. Both Diodorus and Dio inform us that this decree was enforced with some vigour by P. Licinius Nerva, the governor of Sicily, which resulted in at least 800 slaves being freed. It also created a general atmosphere of expectation and hope amongst the slave population in general. However, this in turn created a backlash from the slave-owning landowners, who forced Licinius to end the process of freedom.

  Naturally enough, this led to discontent and then rebellion across Sicily. An initial armed revolt soon began, led by a man named Varius and was able to take up a fortified position and hold off the governor’s forces. Once again, this fortified slave position was only taken through the treachery of a subordinate commander having been promised a pardon. Although this initial revolt had been crushed, others soon rose up near the city of Heracleia, which grew to a force of over 2,000 men. The governor dispatched one of his officers, M. Titinius, to deal with them, but Titinius soon found himself outnumbered and outmanoeuvred and was defeated and routed. This both acted as a call to arms to other disaffected slaves of the region as well as providing them with a large amount of weaponry. The slave army soon numbered more than 6,000. As occurred in the first war, command of this slave army soon fell to a mystic, a man named Salvius, who was proclaimed as king.

  We are told that Salvius’ army quickly grew to more than 20,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. Against them was the governor and his force of 10,000 allied troops. Battle took place at the city of Murgantia, during which the Roman forces were routed and control of the island’s interior fell to Salvius. To make matters worse, at the city of Lilybaeum another rebellion broke out, led by a man named Athenion, who also declared himself king of Sicily, again after claiming some mystical abilities, and raised an army of over 10,000 slaves. Thus by the end of 104, to add to Rome’s existing problems in the north, they had effectively lost control of Sicily to a number of slave armies.

  With military control of the island, Salvius set about establishing his rule, taking the royal name Tryphon (imitating a usurper king of Syria). He established a royal capital at a place named Triocala, complete with palace, and secured control over the slave army of Athenion, having him imprisoned. To oppose him, the Romans replaced Licinius Nerva as governor with L. Licinius Lucullus, who had successfully defeated the slave rebellion the previous year at Capua. With him came an army of 17,000 men: 14,000 Romans and Italians along with allied contingents from Bithynia and Thessaly, all of which were vital forces needed for the expected conflict with the northern tribes. To face the Romans, Tryphon (Salvius) freed Athenion and faced them in battle at his ‘capital’. On this occasion, even though outnumbered, Lucullus was able to rout the slave army, killing more than 20,000 if we are to believe Diodorus. Both Tryphon and Athenion survived and fled back to the rebel capital. Lucullus followed this victory up with a siege of the city but was repulsed.473

  For this failure, Lucullus was prosecuted in Rome and exiled. His replacement, and possibly prosecutor, was a man named Servilius who served as Governor in Sicily in 102 BC. Lucullus, in retaliation, disbanded his army and burnt his camp to ensure that Servilius was unable to profit by his actions. As a result, Sicily once more was dominated by the slave army, with Servilius ineffective. In the meantime, we are informed that Tryphon had died (through we are not told whether this was natural causes or murder) and was succeeded by Athenion.

  By 101 BC, the situation was so serious that Marius’ consular colleague of the year, M. Aquilius, was dispatched to Sicily to end the war. This move was made easier by the defeat of the Teutones and Ambrones at Aquae Sextiae the previous year. We are not told the size of the force he took with him to Sicily, but he was immediately effective. Florus tells us that he was able to cut off the rebel army and starve them, before forcing them to give battle. Both Florus and Diodorus record that Aquillius comprehensively won the battle that followed, destroying the slave army and effectively crushing the rebellion. Diodorus even records that Aquillius managed to kill the slave king Athenion in battle, though Florus stated that he was murdered whilst a captive.474

  The survivors fled to various strong points, which Aquilius then reduced one at a time, until he had re-established control of the island. As a postscript, Diodorus relates a story of the final group of survivors surrendering to Aquillius only to be taken to Rome to die fighting wild animals in the circus, but committed suicide rather than die entertaining the Romans. Whether this happened or not we will never know but it certainly made for a dramatic end to Diodorus’ evidence and gave the last of the rebel slaves a final dignity.475

  Thus, we can see that as the early Roman military defeats in Gaul led to rebellions in both Gaul and Spain, the defeat at Arausio inspired a number of slaves to rebel against Rome, believing that the time was right and that Rome was weak and might not survive. This was exacerbated by the Senate’s decree on foreign slaves, a price extricated by Rome’s eastern allies in return for military help. The war that followed lasted for four years and tied up vital Roman military resources and effectively saw Rome lose control of Sicily and its grain supplies, at a time when they most needed them. Thus we see that for Rome in this crucial period of 104–101 BC, the crisis only deepened.

  The Pirate War (102–100 BC)

  Throughout this period, it can be seen that Rome, not a natural naval power (at least in this period), suffered to a great degree from Mediterranean piracy. As we have already seen, in the 120s BC, Rome invaded and annexed the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean, removing the pirates’ main bases and apparently ending the threat. The eastern Mediterranean, however, was another matter, being less under Roman control. Here it has often been said that Rome herself was indirectly responsible for the rise of piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. The great Hellenistic powers had been humbled and had limitations on where their navies could roam. The lesser powers such as Rhodes and Cyprus had, too, been cowed by Rome, via diplomatic rather than direct military means and saw a decline in power also. This meant that there were fewer navies patrolling the region policing it from pirates. Furthermore, with the removal of Seleukid power from Asia Minor following the defeat of Antiochus III in 189 BC, the region of Cilicia, with its mountainous and coastal terrain, became a haven for pirates outside of any state’s control.

  We have no clear evidence for what caused Rome to act, but in 102 BC, with the northern tribes pressing on Gaul, rebellions in Spain and a massive slave revolt in Sicily, the Senate commissioned one of the praetors, M. Antonius, to deal with the pirate menace in the eastern Mediterranean. We have no clear narrative for the events of this war, merely a handful of scattered references in the sources. Our best sources of information come from several inscriptions, which record the transportation of a fleet across the Isthmus of Corinth, and a wintering in Athens during 102/101 BC. We also possess several versions of an anti-piracy decree that had been erected on stone markers across the eastern Mediterranean, notably Delphi and Knidos.476

  Preceding Pompey’s more famous pirate command by thirty-plus years, Antonius also apparently campaigned in the Cilicia region to rid it of pirate strongholds. He returned to Rome in 100 BC and celebrated a triumph for his activities, also being elected consul for 99 BC, possibly due to his Marian connections (see Chapter 7). Despite the triumph for his endeavours, it is unlikely that Antonius achieved anything more than a temporary lull in pirate activity given the grave threat it posed by the 70s BC. It was not until the more famous command of Pompey in 68/67 that this is
sue was resolved. Nevertheless, given the grave threats that Rome faced elsewhere in this period, it is interesting to note that they were beginning to take this growing threat seriously and act in military terms rather than regarding it as a local issue. Once again, we can detect the emergence of a more strategic view of the Mediterranean emerging in Roman thinking.

  Appendix III

  The Roman Manpower Question

  Throughout this work, the issue of the shortage of Roman manpower for military service has been a fundamental one. Yet despite all the evidence, the issue of available manpower and the reasons behind it have been a bone of contention amongst historians throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As it is such a fundamental issue, it is worth reviewing the principal problems that confront us.

  The Ancient Evidence

  The widely-held assumption that underlined the ancient accounts of the manpower issue that affected Rome in the second century BC, was one of a recruitment crisis caused by military overstretch. In short, the ever-increasing length and complexity of the wars in the second century BC, especially in Spain, meant that the soldiers were away from their farms for ever-increasing amounts of time, and that this neglect led to them falling into ruin and being bought up by the rich landowners who created great estates run by masses of slaves. This, they believed to lie behind the proposed reforms of Ti. Sempronius Gracchus in 133 BC, and was only solved by Marius’ supposed abandonment of the property qualification, which allegedly cut the ties between the landed farmer and military service.

  As we have already seen, not only were Gracchus’ proposals more complicated than that, but Marius’ actions did not mean a permanent abandonment of the property qualification needed to serve in the Roman military. As well as the narrative sources attributing these reasons to Gracchus’ actions and the underlying problems at the time, there are two other contentious areas of ancient evidence: the Roman census figures and whether the level of the property qualification for military service was lowered during the second century.

  Roughly every five years, the Roman Senate elected two senior members from their ranks, distinguished ex-consuls, to serve as censors. These two men served for up to an eighteen-month period and their primary duty was to conduct the census of Roman citizens.477 For the latter part of the second century BC, the given figures are as follows:478

  169/168 BC 312,805

  164/163 337,022 or 337,452

  159/158 328,316

  154/153 324,000

  147/146 322,000

  142/141 328,442

  136/135 317,933

  131/130 318,823

  125/124 394,736

  120/119 Unknown

  115/114 394,336

  109/108 Unknown

  102/101 Unknown

  There are immediately two problems with these figures. Firstly, we have no clear idea of the criteria used to register the citizens on this list, whether it was all male citizens or simply those of the first five property classes (those eligible for military service). Nor do we know how accurately the census recorded all the Roman citizens in Italy. The ancient sources record the penalties for failing to make oneself available to register, but it has been questioned how enforceable these were in a region the size of Italy.479

  The second problem is that we have no direct surviving source for these figures, merely the surviving narrative works, primarily Livy’s histories and its epitomes. This immediately leaves them open to mis-transmission throughout the 1,500 years between when they were written and the early modern period when the surviving manuscripts were analysed and standardized. Thus, despite the fact that the figures we have show a declining citizen population until 131 and then a massive jump, which is most widely ascribed to the Ti. Sempronius Gracchus’ land reforms, there have been enough reasons to argue against them.

  The other area of ancient evidence is centred on discussions over what the figure was for the lowest of the five census classes and thus what level of wealth a man needed to be eligible for military service. Here we have three different figures: 11,000, 4,000 and 1,500 asses. The figure of 11,000 asses comes from Livy and dates back to the supposed origins of this system, back in the sixth century BC (thus some 500-plus years before he wrote about it). The figure of 4,000 asses comes from Polybius. Several late Republican sources, including Cicero, give us the figure of 1,500 asses, and seem to backdate it to the period under discussion, the second century BC.480

  The most common arguments presented by modern historians of Rome are that at some point, most likely around the Second Punic War or soon after, the figure needed for military service was dropped from 11,000 to 4,000 and then again to 1,500 after Polybius, but predating Marius. The central problem with these theories is that there is no tangible shred of evidence to support them in the ancient sources. Again, as with Marius’ army reforms, much of the modern argument is built from an assumed event that took place in our sources. However, of the three figures, only Polybius’ can be treated as contemporary, and even that has the problem that the figure was given in drachmas (as he wrote for a Greek audience, in Greek) and has to be calculated back into asses by modern historians of Rome. We do not know how accurate Livy’s figure was for the sixth century, or even if the system dated back to the sixth century. Cicero’s figure may have been accurate for his day but we have no actual evidence that it was in force prior to Marius.

  There is one other possible reference to changes in recruitment practices and that comes from a fragment of Cato, which has been interpreted as advocating the recruitment of the proletarii (those who fell below the minimum qualification) into the military, but the source is too fragmentary to allow any clear meaning.481 Thus many of the arguments over this issue are built on houses of sand, and there is no actual evidence that the Romans did lower the minimum property qualification needed for service in this period.

  The Modern Theories

  With all these problems with the ancient evidence on this issue, many modern historians of Rome have searched for alternative fields of evidence to validate or invalidate the ancient evidence, notably archaeology and demography. For those who look to archaeology to shed light on this issue, the central argument is whether we can determine evidence of these large-scale slave estates that Gracchus talked of.482 In short, the answer appears to be a negative one, but that does not automatically mean that they did not occur, due to the vagaries of finding sites that would both give us the detail and the scale needed for such an exercise.

  Recent years have seen a growth in the use of demographic models of population growth and decline to see if they can shed light on this situation.483 Whilst such theoretical constructs do provide us with a new approach to studying the limited evidence we have, we must always be aware of their limitations, namely that they are indeed simply theoretical models, and should exercise extreme caution if they clash with our ancient testimony. Such an example can be found in one of the latest works in this field, by Keaveney, who criticizes an earlier work by Morley:

  There have, however, been attempts to discredit Tiberius on the part of scholars who share Rosenstein’s view that there actually was a population increase. Morley (2001) is one of those. Approaching it from the standpoint of the demographer, he comes to the conclusion, based on his own calculations, that Tiberius has got it wrong. I believe we may have a fundamental difference of approach. Morley’s calculations can sometimes seem complex, but this is because essentially they are mathematical exercises and cannot have anything more than a hypothetical value. Recognising this I believe, unlike Morley, that when offered a choice between clear-cut unequivocal ancient source and a fragile modern construct, we must surely choose our sources.484

  Amongst the many factors that may have been involved in this manpower issue in the period under review, two stand out. Evans pointed out the fundamental difference between the manpower theoretically available to Rome for military service, as seen in the census figures and the numbers who actually made themselves available
to serve. In short, he focused on the problem of draft dodging.485 Throughout history, it is a given that there will always be a large percentage of men who will avoid compulsory military service, made all the easier by the vastness of a pre-industrial Italy, no matter the harsh penalties for those caught.

  Rosenstein in a recent work has also done much to dispel the simplicities of the ancient model of extended military service resulting in the loss of farms and thus eligibility, from at least two areas. Firstly, he argues that extended military service was not unique to the second century BC and had in fact been a long-standing issue as Rome fought more complicated wars in Italy in third century BC. Secondly, he theorizes that Rome’s system of inheritance, whereby a father divides his property up equally between his children, meant that whereas the father might have enough wealth to be eligible for military service, by dividing it, his sons would all be ineligible. This in itself is an excellent theory, though he does then go on to postulate that despite the census figures the Roman citizen population actually rose in the second century BC, rather than falling.486

  These few examples are merely presented to illustrate what is one of the most complicated and historically fertile issues in Roman history. Two clear conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, it is clear that the picture presented in our few surviving ancient sources can present too much of a simplistic representation of what must have been an extremely complicated socio-economic phenomenon, one that the Roman recognized was having implications for their military system. The second conclusion is that modern commentators on the ancient world must always watch themselves for constructing false arguments where there is no ancient evidence or dismissing the testimony we already have.