by Ian Morris
Catastrophic blunders could happen, and Rome went through phases of lurching from crisis to crisis. But in the long run, the pressures at work were inexorable. Warriors conquered small states, which forced them to turn into managers. Good management made states more efficient, safer, and richer, and the resulting efficient, safe, and rich states gave managers the tools they needed to compete with rival states. This, though, forced the managers to turn back into warriors who could put their rivals out of business—violently.
Can We All Get Along?
In April 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, just outside Los Angeles, reached a surprising decision. They had watched a videotape showing police landing fifty-six baton blows and six kicks on Rodney King during his arrest after a high-speed car chase. They had heard from doctors that King had suffered a facial fracture and broken ankle. They had listened while nurses reported that the police officers who brought King to the hospital had joked about his beating. And then they acquitted three of the defendants and failed to reach a verdict on the fourth.
That evening, riots broke out in Los Angeles and in the next few days spread across the United States. Fifty-three people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, and a billion dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. On the third day of violence, King went on television and asked one of the most famous questions of the decade: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible?”
It is a good question, which people must have asked in ancient times too. Instead of working their way toward peace through the violent, wasteland-making process of war, could they not have just sat down together, agreed to create larger organizations, drawn up rules, handed over taxes to fund enforcement, and got along?
Apparently not. “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill once said, but in all the archives of ancient history it is hard to find a single convincing case of people agreeing to come together in a larger society without being compelled to do so by violence, actual or feared.
Take the case of Philip of Pergamum, whose account of how war, piracy, and banditry had ruined the Greek world in the first century B.C. I mentioned a few pages ago. “With my pious hand I delivered this [history] to the Greeks,” he explained, “so that … by observing the sufferings of others, they may live their lives in the right way.” The Greeks, however, were unimpressed and went on killing each other. When they did stop, it was not because of Philip’s jaw-jaw; it was because of Roman war-war.
In 67 B.C., the Roman senate sent Gnaeus Pompey (known, with some cause, as “the Great”) to crush the pirates who infested Greek waters. As usual, they did this not out of benevolence but out of self-interest. The raids had gotten so bad that in 77 B.C. one band had kidnapped the young Julius Caesar (who joked with his captors that when he was ransomed, he would come back and crucify them, which, of course, he did). By the early 60s B.C., other bands were even raiding Italy’s harbors.
The Greek cities had completely failed to suppress the violence, but Pompey brought Roman organization and a surprisingly modern approach to bear. In 2006, bloodied by reverses in Iraq, the U.S. Army adopted a new counterinsurgency doctrine known as “clear, hold, and build.” Instead of focusing on killing or capturing troublemakers, soldiers switched to sweeping them out of an area, securing it, and reconstructing it, before moving methodically on to the next area. By 2009, violent deaths had fallen more than 80 percent. Pompey figured out the same strategy two thousand years earlier. He divided the Mediterranean into thirteen sectors and in a single summer worked through them one by one, clearing, holding, and building (Figure 1.5). Instead of crucifying the twenty thousand ex-freebooters he rounded up, Pompey imposed peace on them. “Wild animals,” his biographer wrote, “often lose their fierceness and savagery when subjected to a gentler existence; so Pompey decided to move the pirates from the sea to the land and give them a taste of civilized life by making them used to living in cities and farming the soil.”
Figure 1.5. Sweeping the seas: Roman marines getting ready to board an enemy ship on a relief carving of the first century B.C.
The sea secured, Pompey turned to the land. In five spectacular campaigns he led Roman armies through the cities of Syria to the mountain fastnesses of the Caucasus and the borders of Egypt, crushing foreign kings, rebellious generals, and riotous Jews as he went. Again, he cleared, held, and built, drawing up law codes, installing Roman garrisons, and overhauling finances. Cracking down on corruption and extortion, he simultaneously lowered taxes and raised Roman revenues. Peace reigned; several Greek cities, Athens among them, announced that Pompey was a god in human form.
Pompey resorted to violence not because Romans lacked the skills for jaw-jaw—the city was bursting with orators like Cicero—but because he, like a lot of other Romans, saw that jaw-jaw worked best when it followed war-war. Tacitus, for instance, tells us that after spending his first summer in Britain (A.D. 77) terrorizing the natives—“people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight,” Tacitus called them—Agricola devoted the winter to “getting them used to a life of peace and quiet by providing amenities. He gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares, and good houses.”
The Britons liked it. “The result,” says Tacitus, “was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favor and the toga was everywhere to be seen.” The political scientist Joseph Nye has called such an approach “soft power,” by which he means using “intangible factors such as institutions, ideas, values, culture, and the perceived legitimacy of policies” to win people over, as opposed to the coercive “hard power” of war and economics.
Tacitus understood the lure of the soft side. “The population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets,” he observed. “The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization,’ when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.” But he also knew that softness only worked in the wake of hard power—or, as Americans would put it in Vietnam nineteen centuries later, “Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” The Romans in Britain accomplished this much better than the Americans in Vietnam, winning hearts and minds because they had already robbed the Britons of their freedom to fight back. When Agricola came up against Britons who still had this freedom, like Calgacus, there was no talk of togas.
Archaeology largely confirms this. Roman goods, especially wine (transported in highly distinctive containers), were wildly popular far beyond the empire’s frontiers. According to hearsay, Gallic chiefs would willingly sell a man into slavery in exchange for a large jar of wine, and Roman writers unanimously agreed that barbarians near the frontiers, who had gotten used to soft Roman ways, fought less fiercely than far-off barbarians, who remained as savage as ever.
The most seductive softness of all was intellectual, and in the first few centuries A.D. the Romans perfected a string of compelling systems of thought. The most successful were Stoicism and Christianity. Neither started out as a form of imperial soft power; in each case, in fact, the founding fathers of the faith were critics of the status quo, penniless Greek philosophers and a Jewish carpenter speaking truth to power from the social and geographical margins. But as the generations passed, the hard, clever men who ran the empire did what such men always do. They subverted the counterculture. Instead of fighting it, they brought its best and brightest young men into the establishment. They picked and chose among its ideas, rewarding former radicals who said things the ruling class liked while ignoring those who didn’t. Little by little, they turned the critiques of empire into justifications for it. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” Jesus urged good Christians, “for,” Saint Paul added, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”
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bsp; Stoicism and Christianity assured the empire’s subjects that unauthorized violence was wicked, which was good news for Leviathan, and the empire then vigorously exported these intellectual systems to its neighbors. Yet for all the contagiousness of the new ideas, they did not by themselves persuade anyone to join the empire. Only war or the fear of war could do that. Soft power worked its magic later, binding the conquered together and giving the empire a degree of unity.
As so often, it is the apparent exceptions to the war-first principle that prove the rule. The little city-states of ancient Greece, for example, had lots of reasons to forget their differences and come together in a larger community. Within each city, Greeks generally pacified themselves very well: by 500 B.C., men no longer went about their daily business armed, and around 430 one upper-class Athenian even complained that he could no longer go around punching slaves on the street (it was, in fact, illegal). When cities were at peace, their rates of violent death must have been among the lowest in the ancient world. Most, though, went to war roughly two years in every three. According to Plato, “What most men call ‘peace’ is just a fiction, and in reality every city is fighting an undeclared war against every other.”
No surprise, then, that dozens of squabbling Greek city-states agreed to surrender much of their sovereignty to Athens in 477 B.C. But they did not choose this course out of love of peace or even admiration for Athens; they did it because they were frightened that the Persian Empire, which had tried to conquer Greece in 480, would gobble them up if they stood alone. And when, in the 440s, the Persian tide receded, several of the cities thought better of their submission to Athens and decided to go it alone—only for the Athenians to use force to prevent them.
In the third and second centuries B.C., a new wave of city-state amalgamations swept Greece. This time, groups of cities bundled themselves into koina (literally “communities,” but usually translated as “federal leagues”), setting up representative governments and merging their arrangements for security and finance. Once again, though, their prime motive was fear of wars they could not win by themselves—initially against the mighty Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great and then against the encroaching Romans.
The most peculiar stories may be those of Ptolemy VIII (nicknamed Fatso) and Attalus III, kings of Egypt and Pergamum, respectively. Ptolemy had been kicked out of Egypt by his brother (also named Ptolemy) in 163 B.C., and in 155 B.C. the dispossessed Ptolemy drew up a will leaving his new kingdom of Cyrene to the Roman people if he died without heirs. Attalus, though, went further; he actually did die without heirs in 133 B.C., whereupon his subjects discovered—to their astonishment—that they too had been bequeathed to the Roman Empire.
We do not know how the Romans felt about Ptolemy’s will, since the overweight monarch in fact lasted another four decades and, after seducing his own stepdaughter, left rather a lot of heirs. We do know, though, that the Romans were as surprised as the Pergamenes by Attalus’s bequest, and with self-interest strongly to the fore, competing factions in the senate fell into heated arguments over whether Attalus actually had the right to give his city to them.
Ptolemy and Attalus did what they did not because they loved Rome but because they feared it less than they feared war.3 Lacking heirs, both men dreaded civil war. The brothers Ptolemy had already tried fratricide and gone to war even before Fatso drew up his will, and Attalus’s position was worse still. A pretender to the throne, claiming to be Attalus’s half brother, was stirring up revolt among the poor (and might have begun a civil war even before Attalus died), and four neighboring kings were waiting in the wings to dismember Pergamum. No wonder a bloodless Roman takeover looked good to both kings.
This was the classical world’s answer to Rodney King: No, we can’t all get along. The only force strong enough to persuade people to give up the right to kill and impoverish each other was violence—or the fear that violence was imminent.
To understand why that was so, though, we must turn to another part of the world entirely.
The Beast
In a jungle clearing on a South Sea island, a boy named Simon is arguing with a dead pig’s head on a stick.
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!” says the head.
Simon does not reply. His tongue is swollen with thirst. A pulse is beating in his skull. One of his fits is coming on.
Down on the beach, his chums are dancing and singing. When these schoolboys first found themselves marooned on the island, all was fun and games: they swam, blew on conch shells, and slept under the stars. But almost imperceptibly, their little society unraveled. A shadow crept across their fellowship, haunting the forest like an evil beast.
Until today, that is. Today, a troop of teenage hunters impaled a screaming sow as she nursed her young. Whooping with excitement, the boys smeared each other with blood and planned a feast. But first, their leader recognized, there was something they had to do. He hacked the grinning head off the carcass and skewered it on the sharpened stick that they had used to kill the pig. “This head is for the beast,” he shouted into the forest. “It’s a gift.”
And with that, the boys all set off running, dragging the flesh toward the beach—all except Simon, who crouches alone in the dappled, unreal light of the clearing.
“You knew, didn’t you?” asks the pig’s head. “I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”
Simon knows. His body arches and stiffens; the seizure is upon him. He falls, forward, forward, toward the pig’s expanding mouth. Blood is darkening between the teeth, buzzing with flies, and there is blackness within, a blackness that spreads. Simon knows: the Beast cannot be killed. The Beast is us.
So says William Golding in his unforgettable novel Lord of the Flies. Cast away in the Pacific, far from schools and rules, a few dozen boys learn the dark truth: humans are compulsive killers, our psyches hardwired for violence. The Beast is us, and only a fragile crust of civilization keeps it in check. Given the slightest chance, the Beast will break loose. That, Golding tells us, is the reason why it’s no go. Why Calgacus and Agricola fought, not talked.
Or is it? Another South Sea island, perhaps not so far from Golding’s, seems to tell a different story. Like the novelist Golding, the young would-be anthropologist Margaret Mead suspected that in this simpler setting, where balmy breezes blew and palm fronds kissed the waves, she would see the crooked timber of humanity stripped of its veneer of civilization. But unlike Golding, who never actually visited the Pacific (although he was about to be posted there in charge of a landing craft when World War II ended), she decamped from New York City to Samoa in 1925 (Figure 1.6).
Figure 1.6. Lands of beasts and noble savages: locations outside the Roman Empire discussed in this chapter
“As the dawn begins to fall,” Mead wrote in her anthropological classic Coming of Age in Samoa, “lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.”
Pigs’ heads hold no terrors on Samoa. “As the sun rises higher in the sky, the shadows deepen under thatched roofs … Families who will cook today are hard at work; the taro, yams and bananas have already been brought from inland; the children are scuttling back and forth, fetching sea water, or leaves to stuff the pig.” The families gather in the evening to share their feast in peace and contentment. “Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests till dawn …
“Samoa,” Mead concluded, “is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends.” On Samoa, the Beast is not close at all.
Golding and Mead both saw violence as a sickness, but they disagreed on its diagnosis. As Golding saw things, violence was a genetic
condition, inherited from our forebears. Civilization was the only medication, but even civilization could only suppress the symptoms, not cure the disease. Mead drew the opposite conclusion. For her, the South Seas showed that violence was just a contagion, and civilization was its source, not its cure. Calgacus and Agricola fought two thousand years ago because their warlike cultures made them do it, and people carried on fighting in the twentieth century because warlike cultures were still making them do it.
In 1940, as France fell to Hitler, bombs rained down on London, and trenches filled up with murdered Polish Jews, Mead found a new metaphor. “Warfare,” she argued, “is just an invention.” Certainly, she conceded, war is “an invention known to the majority of human societies,” but even so, “if we despair over the way in which war seems such an ingrained habit of most of the human race, we can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention.”
Mead was not the only champion of this view, but she rapidly became the most influential. By 1969, when she retired from her position at the American Museum of Natural History, she was the most famous social scientist in the world and had proved, to the satisfaction of millions of readers, that humans’ natural state was one of peace. Swayed by the consensus, anthropologist after anthropologist came back from the field reporting that their people were peaceful too (anthropologists have a habit of calling the group among whom they do fieldwork “my people”). This was the age of “War,” love-ins, and peace protesters promising to levitate the Pentagon; it was only to be expected that Rousseau would seem at long last to have won his bitter, centuries-old debate with Hobbes.
This was what Napoleon Chagnon thought, at any rate, when he swapped graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the rain-forest borderlands of Brazil and Venezuela in 1964. He fully expected the Yanomami people,4 whose marriage patterns he planned to study, to live up to what he called “the image of ‘primitive man’ that I had conjured up in my mind before doing fieldwork, a kind of ‘Rousseauian’ view.” But the Yanomami had other ideas.
