Rome spent its first 250 years as just another minor kingdom in Italy. As records from these early days were nonexistent, later Roman historians relied on the oral tradition of “The Seven Kings of Rome” to explain the early evolution of their city. Though the evidence was slim, the Romans believed that most of their core public institutions traced their roots to this semimythical monarchy. The first king, Romulus, organized the legions, the Senate, and the popular Assembly. The second king, Numa, introduced priesthoods and religious rituals. The sixth king, Servius Tullius, reformed the Assemblies, conducted the first census, and organized the citizens into regional tribes for voting. But though the later Romans credited the kings with laying the political and social foundations of the city, they also believed that kings were anathema to the Roman character. The Roman Kingdom ended abruptly in 509 when a group of senators chased the last king out of the city and replaced the monarchy with a kingless republic.7
The new Roman Republic was not a freewheeling democracy. Families that could trace their lineage back to the original senators appointed by Romulus were known as the patricians and by both custom and law these families monopolized all political and religious offices. Anyone outside this small aristocratic clique was called plebeian. All plebeians—whether poor farmer, prosperous merchant, or rich landowner—were shut out of power. It did not take long for the plebs to agitate for equal rights. As the historian Appian says: “The plebeians and Senate of Rome were often at strife with each other concerning the enactment of laws, the cancelling of debts, the division of lands, or the election of magistrates.” The running battle between patrician and pleb became known as the Conflict of the Orders.8
About fifteen years after the founding of the Republic, a debt crisis among the lower-class plebeians finally led to a great showdown. Incensed at arbitrary patrician abuse, the plebs refused to muster for military service when called to face a looming foreign threat. Instead the plebs withdrew en masse to a hill outside the city and swore to remain there until they were allowed to elect magistrates of their own. The Senate yielded and created the Plebeian Assembly, a popular assembly closed to patricians. This Assembly would elect tribunes who acted as guardians against patrician abuse. Any citizen could seek sanctuary with a tribune, at any time, for any reason. By sacred oath the tribunes were declared sacrosanct—within the city limits of Rome not even a consul could lay a hand on them. They became sentinels against the tyranny of the senatorial aristocracy.9
But though tension between patrician and pleb helped define the early Republic, Roman politics was not a class affair. Roman families organized themselves into complex client-patron networks that worked down from the elite patrician patrons through an array of interconnected plebeian clients. Patrons could expect political and military support from their clients, and clients could expect financial and legal assistance from their patrons. So though the conflict between patricians and plebs occasionally led to explosive clashes, the client-patron bonds meant Roman politics was more a clash of rival clans than a class war.
What truly bound all Romans together, though, were unspoken rules of social and political conduct. The Romans never had a written constitution or extensive body of written law—they needed neither. Instead the Romans surrounded themselves with unwritten rules, traditions, and mutual expectations collectively known as mos maiorum, which meant “the way of the elders.” Even as political rivals competed for wealth and power, their shared respect for the strength of the client-patron relationship, the sovereignty of the Assemblies, and wisdom of the Senate kept them from going too far. When the Republic began to break down in the late second century it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of mos maiorum.10
THOUGH SOMETIMES DIVIDED internally, the Romans always fought as one when faced with a foreign threat. Romulus stamped the Romans early with a martial spirit and rarely did a year go by without some kind of conflict with a neighbor. Occasionally these seasonal skirmishes erupted into full-blown wars. Starting in 343, the Romans became locked in a long war with the Samnites, a nomadic people who populated the hills and mountains of central Italy. Waged over the next fifty years, the Samnite Wars eventually sucked the rest of Italy into an anti-Roman coalition. When Rome defeated this coalition in 295 they became undisputed masters of the peninsula.11
But that victory only led to an even greater conflict: the Punic Wars. As Rome grew in strength during the 300s, the prosperous merchant city of Carthage had been rising in North Africa. By the time the Romans conquered Italy, the Carthaginians had pushed their way onto the island of Sicily and would soon be moving over to Spain. The two budding empires inevitably clashed, and for the next hundred years Rome and Carthage battled for control of the western Mediterranean.12
Rome was nearly defeated in 218 when the great Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy, but the stubborn Romans refused to surrender. In fact, they were soon able to spread the conflict throughout the Mediterranean. In an attempt to shut down Hannibal’s supply lines, the Senate sent legions to attack Carthaginian lands in Spain. When they discovered Hannibal sought an alliance with King Philip V of Macedon, the Senate ordered a fleet to Greece. Finally the great hero of the war, Scipio Africanus, led an invasion of the Carthaginian homeland in North Africa. There he defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202. Carthage surrendered.13
Emerging from the crucible of the Punic Wars, Rome was no longer merely a regional power—it had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean. But the Senate resisted taking direct imperial control over the territories they now commanded. The final treaty with Carthage was surprisingly lenient. It stipulated a number of punitive clauses—the Carthaginians owed an annual cash indemnity and were forbidden from fielding an army or a navy—but other than that, Carthage retained its traditional domains in Africa and was free to govern itself.14
The Senate also wanted no part of ruling the Greeks and Macedonians. Having successfully kept Macedon out of the war, the Roman fleet withdrew back across the Adriatic. The plan was to leave Greece to the Greeks but, much to the Senate’s consternation, King Philip V of Macedon intentionally violated a treaty obligation and Rome was obliged to send legions east again. In 197, Philip paid for his provocative miscalculation when the legions crushed him at the decisive Battle of Cynoscephalae. Philip agreed to confine himself to Macedon and not make further trouble. But though Greece was now at their mercy, the victorious Romans declared in 196: “The Senate of Rome and T. Quinctius, their general, having conquered King Philip and the Macedonians do now decree and ordain that these states shall be free, shall be released from the payment of tribute, and shall live under their own laws.” The Romans had not come to conquer the Greeks, but to set them free.15
But though the Senate eschewed direct imperial rule over the “civilized” Carthaginians and Greeks, they showed little hesitation annexing “uncivilized” Spain. Attracted by lucrative silver mines, Rome kept its legions in Spain after the Punic Wars to ensure Spanish silver made its way into Roman temples. Roman conduct in Spain was riddled with double-dealing, extortion, and periodic atrocities. This led to rapid cycles of insurrection and pacification that in turn led the Senate to formally organize the Spanish coast into two permanent provinces: Nearer Spain and Further Spain. In 197, they joined Sicily and Corsica as some of the earliest overseas provinces of the Roman Empire.16
THIS WAS THE world into which Publius Scipio Aemilianus was born in 185 BC. The son of an ancient patrician family, Aemilianus was adopted by the childless head of the Scipione family—making him legally the grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Adoptions like this were a common way to cement alliances inside the Roman aristocracy, and Aemilianus grew up inside the most powerful family in the most powerful city in the world. Raised to expect a distinguished public career, Aemilianus never doubted that it was his destiny to be a great leader. In time he would serve with distinction in all three of the Republic’s principal imperial sphere
s—and then serve as one of the principal authors of Rome’s ultimate imperial triumph.17
Aemilianus’s first taste of action came in Greece when his natural father, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, brought his seventeen-year-old son along on campaign to observe how Rome conducted a war. In June 168, Paullus’s legions crushed the Macedonians, deposing its young, ambitious king, Perseus, who had tried to overthrow the hegemony of Rome. He watched as his father seized the Macedonian royal treasury, enslaved upward of three hundred thousand people, and literally erased the Kingdom of Macedon from the map. What had once been the Kingdom of Alexander the Great was now divided into four small republics.18
After this harsh settlement, however, the Senate returned to their habit of ruling with a light hand. They demanded the inhabitants of the four new Macedonian republics continue to pay taxes, but at half the rate they had been paying to the kings of Macedon. If you managed to survive the war and not get sold into slavery, life under the Romans was pretty good.19
In the midst of his conquest, Aemilius Paullus also took a thousand prominent Greeks hostage to secure the good behavior of their kin. Among them was a brilliant politician and scholar named Polybius. A civic leader from the city of Megalopolis, Polybius had counseled neutrality toward the Romans in its wars with Macedon, which was enough to mark him as a dangerous element. But though Polybius was now slated for banishment it would prove a fortuitous calamity. When the Roman senior command passed through Megalopolis, the teenage Aemilianus borrowed books from Polybius, and their subsequent discussions created a friendly bond. Paullus arranged for Polybius to spend his exile in Rome and tutor his son in rhetoric, history, and philosophy.20
Under Polybius’s tutelage Aemilianus embraced a new Greco-Roman spirit that was sweeping the age. The flood of educated Greek slaves into Italy led an entire generation of young nobles to become fully steeped in Greek literature, philosophy, and art. Some more conservative Romans railed against the importation of Greek ideas and believed they eroded the austere virtues of the early Romans. But while young leaders like Aemilianus reveled in Greek culture, they never questioned Rome’s right to rule the world. And despite conservative moral agonizing, there was nothing soft about Scipio Aemilianus, who believed that obedience was taught with a whip hand. He would be in a prime position to be that whip hand when those who chafed under Roman rule began to rise up and the Senate decided to finally teach the Mediterranean obedience.21
WHILE POLYBIUS SPENT his exile in Rome, he came to admire the Roman Republic—or at the very least came to believe that Roman power was irresistible and that his fellow Greeks better get used to it. An energetic observer of the world, Polybius took endless notes and maintained extensive correspondence that allowed him to make a thoroughgoing investigation of these obscure Italian barbarians who were now masters of the universe. Eventually Polybius would write a history of Rome to explain how and why the Romans had risen so far so fast. Polybius argued that beyond their obvious military prowess, the Romans lived under a political constitution that had achieved the perfect balance between the three classical forms of government: monarchy—rule by the one; aristocracy—rule by the few; and democracy—rule by the many.22
According to Aristotelian political theory, each form of government had its merits but inevitably devolved into its most oppressive incarnation until it was overthrown. Thus a monarchy would become a tyranny, only to be overthrown by an enlightened aristocracy, which slid to repressive oligarchy until popular democracy overwhelmed the oligarchs, opening the door for anarchy, and so back to the stabilizing hand of monarchy again. Polybius believed the Romans had beaten this cycle and could thus keep growing when other cities collapsed under the shifting sands of their own inadequate political systems.23
The monarchical element of the Roman constitution was the executive consuls. Thanks to the Roman aversion to kings, the Republic did not have a single executive and instead elected a pair of consuls who would share supreme military, political, and religious authority. To limit the risk of a tyrannical power grab, each executive partner had the ability to veto the decisions of his colleague. But even more importantly, the term of office was just a single year. At the end of their year in office, the consuls would return to the ranks of the citizen body and a new pair of leaders would replace them.24
The practical Romans, however, did create an emergency office called the Dictatorship. In times of crisis, the consuls could pass power to a single man who would hold absolute power in order to deliver Rome from danger. And this did not just mean foreign threats: the first dictator was appointed due to plebeian unrest in Rome rather than threat from a hostile neighbor. But, critically, the Dictatorship expired after six months. As the Romans held an implacable hatred of kings, the Senate authorized any citizen, at any time, to kill another citizen caught seeking regal power. For nearly five hundred years Roman dictators never failed to lay down their power.25
The aristocratic element was, of course, the Senate. Originally one hundred old men organized by Romulus to act as a council of state, the Senate numbered about three hundred old men in Polybius’s age. Drawing its members from the richest and most powerful families in Rome, the Senate had evolved into the central political institution of the Republic. With the Senate composed of former magistrates, it served as the principal adviser for the annually elected leaders. Rarely did consuls pursue a policy without the Senate’s deliberative input.26
Finally, the democratic element was found in the Assemblies, which were open to all Roman citizens. By the time of Polybius there were three principal Assemblies: the Centuriate Assembly, which elected senior magistrates; the Tribal Assembly, which elected junior magistrates, passed laws, and rendered legal judgment; and the Plebeian Assembly, which had many of the same powers as the Tribal Assembly but which elected the tribunes and were open only to men of plebeian birth. The democratic element of the Roman constitution is often underrated, but the Assemblies were incredibly powerful. Only an Assembly could enact a law or pass capital sentence on a citizen. And while a citizen could always appeal a verdict to the Assemblies, there was no appeal from the Assemblies. (Because the Greek and Roman literary sources are not always clear which of the three Assemblies they are talking about, hereafter they are referred to collectively as “the Assembly.”)27
In Polybius’s construction, the three elements of the Roman constitution existed in a balance that prevented any one element from dominating. But though Polybius was a gifted theorist, by the time he was writing his history in the mid-100s the balance he admired had already been disrupted. The Senate had emerged from the Punic Wars stronger than it had been since the First Secession of the Plebs in the 400s. During the Punic Wars the annual changeover of senior military commanders became a hindrance to war planning and the Senate collectively began to take the lead in developing and executing policy. The senators also became adept at ensuring subservient clients were elected tribunes. By the end of the Punic Wars the consuls, the tribunes, and Assemblies no longer acted as a check on the Senate, but as an extension of it. Even as Polybius wrote his paean to Roman constitutional balance, the senatorial aristocracy was sliding into repressive oligarchy.28
ONE OF THE ways the Senate wielded power was by keeping tight control on who would be elected to the highest magistracies. By the mid-200s the Conflict of the Orders had destroyed most distinctions between patrician and pleb. But as one elite aristocracy falls, another is always right there to take its place, and a new distinction emerged: any family—patrician or pleb—that could claim a consular ancestor was now referred to as nobile. Men born without consular ancestors were derisively called novus homo, or New Man. This new patrician/pleb nobility worked hard to ensure that their families continued to monopolize the consulship, and New Men were almost never allowed to attain a consulship. Lucius Mummius was among those who felt the effects of this slide toward oligarchy. He was an ambitious young man. He was also novus homo.29
Almost nothing is known about Mummiu
s’s early life—even his year of birth is a mystery and can only be calculated to have been somewhere between 200 and 190. Assuming he followed a standard trajectory, Mummius would have joined the legions after finishing his education sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Ten years’ service in the legions was a prerequisite for public office, and Mummius would have served as a cavalry officer at various provincial garrisons. After his ten years’ service, Mummius qualified to begin his ascent up the cursus honorum, the “path of honors” that comprised the hierarchy of elected magistracies.
The first step in the cursus honorum was quaestor. Each year the Assembly elected ten quaestors who were tasked with the Republic’s finances, accounting, and record keeping. Usually acting as an assistant to a senior magistrate, the quaestors spent their year in office learning the ropes of Roman administration. Election to quaestorship also qualified a man to be enrolled in the Senate—though as junior officers in their early thirties they were typically seen and not heard during great senatorial debates. Mummius might have spent his year as quaestor assigned to the state treasury in Rome or placed on a provincial assignment to Sicily, Sardinia, or Spain.30
Above the quaestors were aediles. Each year the Assembly elected four aediles who were tasked with overseeing public works and games. A year as aedile was a great way for a rising politician to cultivate name recognition and popularity by throwing lavish games or overseeing a high-profile project like a new road or aqueduct. Ambitious young men often took on enormous debt to fund these projects—on the understanding that their future political success would afford them opportunities to pay back their creditors.31
When former quaestors and aediles approached their fortieth birthdays they were allowed to run for praetor and cross the threshold from junior to senior magistracies. Since the two annual consuls could not be everywhere, each year the Assembly elected four praetors who held sovereign power when the consuls were not present. Praetors helped shoulder the responsibilities of provincial administration, military operations, and judicial proceedings. Undoubtedly with the help of noble patrons who saw promise in the young officer, Mummius was able to secure election as praetor for 153 BC. Given his novus homo status, however, this was as far as Mummius could reasonably expect to rise. The consulship, after all, was not a place for a New Man.32
The Storm Before the Storm Page 2
