The consuls possessed imperium or ‘power’ which included the right to command soldiers and to dispense justice, but this lapsed when their office expired. The citizens as a whole met in formal assemblies presided over by a consul or other magistrate to make declarations of war and peace, to pass laws and for elections. Unlike in Athens and other democracies, these Popular Assemblies simply voted yes or no on proposals put to them and were not permitted to debate issues or to propose votes of their own. Such discussion occurred in the Senate, the permanent council of some 300 members whose task it was to advise the consuls. Senators were men of mature years – one of their other names was the patres or ‘fathers’ – and wealth. They were not elected, but enrolled by the censors, the pair of magistrates who every five years carried out a census, listing every citizen and his property.
The Senate supervised all foreign affairs, as well as much domestic business. They received delegations from rulers, peoples or states when these travelled to Rome. (In the ancient world no state maintained permanent embassies with even the most important external powers.) The Senate decided what the main tasks of the consuls would be for the year, allocating to them provinciae or ‘provinces’. At this stage the province was not a geographical entity but a sphere of responsibility, such as ‘the war with the Samnites’. The Senate also decided what resources would be given to the consuls, announcing how many troops would serve for the year. Its decisions on all of these matters reflected the current influence of distinguished members and especially the consuls as much as a pragmatic assessment of the good of the Republic – something which was inevitably often a matter of opinion. It is a mistake to think of the Senate pursuing clear and consistent long-term policies, although there was obvious consensus on some broad aims, most notably guarding and expanding Roman power.
Legio or legion originally meant ‘levy’ and referred to the entire army raised from the Roman people. Over time, as the numbers of citizens grew, each consul was given his own legion and by the third century BC it was normal for them to command an army of two legions. The legion had become the most important unit of the army. It varied in size from at least 4,000 men to more than 5,000, reflecting senatorial opinion of the scale of the military problem. Each legion was also normally supported by a similarly sized ala or wing of allies, named because the two Roman legions would deploy in the centre of the line with one ala on either side.
Citizens were eligible for service with the legions on the basis of their property as registered in the census, since men were expected to provide their own equipment. The richest, able to afford a horse, acted as cavalry, while the strength of the army consisted of the equivalent of hoplites, armoured infantrymen fighting in close order. The young and the poor served as skirmishers. Military service was a duty to the Republic, and the pay issued by the state was modest, providing little more than subsistence level while a man was on campaign.
Legionaries were men of property – overwhelmingly farmers – who were felt to have a stake in the success of the Republic and who, when the army was disbanded, would return to their homes and normal lives. In the early centuries warfare was often little more than a brief seasonal interruption to the agricultural year, fought against similar enemies and most likely occurring when both sides could be spared from their farms. As Rome expanded, wars were fought further afield and on a larger scale, so that a man might find himself serving with the legions for much longer periods of time. At some point a law was passed stipulating that no citizen should be required to serve for more than sixteen years or sixteen individual campaigns if more than one was fought in a single year.
Romans – and their allies, who appear to have raised contingents in a similar manner – willingly accepted this obligation to their Republic. The levy worked because year after year men presented themselves to be selected by the officers tasked with raising new legions. Romans of all classes appear to have identified strongly with the state, and thus the Roman army was in a very real sense the Roman people under arms, commanded by leaders it had elected.14
OVERSEAS
By the early third century BC the Republic controlled by far the greater part of the Italian Peninsula south of the River Po. In 282 BC the Greek city of Tarentum, made nervous by this, attacked a squadron of Roman ships, claiming that their presence was a violation of treaty. Two years later they enlisted King Pyrrhus of Epirus to fight on their behalf. Pyrrhus was a famous general, a man thought exceptionally talented even in an era when Alexander the Great’s veteran generals were battling for power. He brought with him a Macedonian-style army of high-quality cavalry, pike phalanxes and war elephants, but although he beat the Romans in battle they refused to accept a peace imposed by the enemy. The war dragged on, Pyrrhus’ strength was slowly eroded – the expression a ‘pyrrhic victory’ for a battle won at too high a cost to the victor is modern, but appropriate – and in the end he gave up. All of Italy was now Roman or allied, apart from the Gallic and Ligurian tribes in the north.15
In 264 BC the Romans intervened in Sicily, sending an army outside the Italian mainland for the first time. It was a provocative act, challenging the Carthaginians in what they considered to be their sphere of influence, and soon led to the First Punic War. (Carthage was a settlement originally founded by Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon, hence the Latin name for them of Poeni and our Punic.) The Carthaginians were a great maritime and trading people, but their empire was based on conquest as well as trade. Their fleet was famous and powerful, while the Romans had little experience or knowledge of naval warfare. In spite of this the Romans constructed hundreds of warships – the design of the first famously copied from a Carthaginian ship which had run aground – and learned how to defeat the enemy. Twenty-three years of war proved appallingly costly to both sides, but the Romans persevered and won.
Victory brought them their first province as we would understand the term, encompassing much of Sicily – the rest was made up of allied communities. A few years later the Romans cynically exploited Carthaginian weakness and seized Sardinia and Corsica as well. Resentment at their defeat and humiliation led the Carthaginians to expand their presence in the Iberian Peninsula. It was from his base there that Hannibal began his invasion of Italy in 218 BC, determined to restore what he felt was the proper balance of power. Within two years he had killed fully one-third of the Senate and over 100,000 Roman and allied soldiers. Some of Rome’s allies defected, most stayed loyal, and the Romans refused to negotiate for peace, but kept raising new armies, learning all the time from their defeats. They contained Hannibal in Italy – he was not to leave until 203 BC – and prosecuted the war in other theatres, eventually landing in Africa and threatening Carthage itself. Hannibal was recalled to defend his homeland, only to suffer his first real defeat at Zama, forcing the Carthaginians to accept the peace imposed on them in 201 BC.16
Two new provinces were created in the Iberian Peninsula in the wake of this conflict – Nearer Spain in the east and Further Spain in the west – and over time these initially small regions grew larger. In the early decades of the second century BC a concerted effort broke the power of the Ligurian and Gallic tribes and extended Roman control up to the Alps. During the Second Punic War they had also found themselves at war with the kingdom of Macedonia. This was one of three great powers to emerge after the break-up of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the others being the Ptolemaic kingdom based around Egypt and the Seleucid Empire with its heartland in Syria. There were also smaller kingdoms and leagues of city-states forming the wider Greek world. Rome attacked and defeated Philip V of Macedon in the Second Macedonian War (200–196 BC), and the Seleucid Antiochus III in the Syrian War (192–189 BC). By this time the Ptolemies were the weakest of the three, internally divided and under a young and ineffective king, but they had a long-standing alliance with Rome, having supplied the Republic with grain during the Punic Wars. As the Ptolemies wasted their strength in internal power struggles, over time it became clearer that
the Romans were the dominant partner in this relationship, and only Roman backing prevented the kingdom from being carved up by the others.17
No new provinces came from these conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean, and after each success the Roman armies withdrew. Roman influence was maintained by alliance and the threat of renewed force. A sense of recovering Macedonian strength led the Romans to declare and win the Third Macedonian War against Philip V’s son Perseus. He was deposed in 167 BC and the kingdom of Macedonia dissolved, but once again no province was created until after a final conflict when a pretender to the throne appeared in 149 BC. In the same year Roman suspicion of an economically strong, if militarily weak, Carthage caused them to provoke the Carthaginians into the Third Punic War. In 146 BC Carthage was eradicated as a state, the city physically destroyed and its population removed. In the same year Corinth in Greece suffered a severe, if less total destruction at the hands of the legions.
The provinces of Africa and Macedonia raised Rome’s total to six – Corsica and Sardinia were treated as a single appointment. Slowly the idea of the province as a clearly defined territory emerged, but with the exception of Nearer and Further Spain none of the other provinces were physically adjacent. The Romans do not appear to have thought of their empire as a unit and instead each individual province was connected to Rome at the centre. At this stage there was virtually no settlement of any province by colonists. (Cisalpine Gaul, the area of Italy north of the River Po, was in some respects viewed as a province, but increasingly was treated much like the rest of the Peninsula and did see extensive colonization.) Apart from the provinces there were large areas where Roman influence was provided by allied rulers and states.18
Later in the second century BC the Romans added Asia – bequeathed by its last king to the Roman people and eventually accepted – and Transalpine Gaul (modern-day Provence) to the list of permanent provinces. This last addition hints at a growing sense of the strategic advantage of linking provinces together, since it provided a land bridge to Spain. Yet, as in the earlier period, annexation and direct rule did not automatically follow a successful Roman war, and areas such as Numidia in North Africa, defeated in 105 BC, were left in the hands of allied rulers.
The creation of this empire had profound consequences for Rome’s political system, economy and society, but on the surface the Republic appeared to change remarkably little. Two consuls were inadequate for all the tasks that needed to be done, and so a greater role was given to the praetors, the college of magistrates junior to the consuls. Traditionally there was just one praetor, who remained in Rome and had largely judicial and administrative responsibilities. Around 242 BC a second praetor was created, and two more added to the college a few years later. This reflected not simply growing judicial activity, but also the need to provide governors for Sicily and Sardinia and Corsica. Another two praetors were introduced at the start of the second century BC so that there were sufficient magistrates to deal with the two Spanish provinces. There were few other visible changes, such as an increase in the number of quaestors, the most junior magistrates who came to have a largely financial role assisting provincial governors. Army service now often involved long years spent in more or less active garrison duty in one of the provinces. Yet no substantial bureaucracy was created to administer the empire, and in every region almost every aspect of administration was left to local leaders and communities.
Changes were happening in spite of this, and the imperial role created severe strains on the Republic, so that in the course of the first century BC it began to break down. In 91 BC a substantial number of Rome’s Italian allies rebelled, resenting the limited rights many still possessed and the often arrogant behaviour of Roman magistrates. The war was fought on a large scale by armies as aggressive, disciplined, and well equipped as each other, and led to heavy losses on both sides. By 89 BC the Romans had won, as much by rapid grants of full citizenship as by force. Soon, all free inhabitants south of the Po were citizens. A year later a dispute between rival senators turned to civil war when a consul led his legions against Rome itself. Stability never really returned and civil wars followed one after another until the future emperor Augustus won the last one in 30 BC. Alongside the chaos and political violence, these years were also times of rapid conquest, as men like Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar carved out great swathes of new territory. Rome survived these decades of crisis, and the empire would grow stronger and more prosperous.
II
WAR
‘. . . the young state, once liberty was won, waxed incredibly strong and great in a remarkably short time, such was the thirst for glory that had filled men’s minds. To begin with, as soon as the young men could endure the hardships of war, they were taught a soldier’s duties in camp under a vigorous discipline, and they took more pleasure in handsome arms and war horses than in harlots and revelry. . . . Their hardest struggle for glory was with one another; each man strives to be the first to strike down the foe, to scale a wall, to be seen while doing such a deed. This they consider riches, this fair fame and high nobility.’ – Sallust, middle of the first century BC.1
MASSACRE
Late in 150 BC, several groups of Lusitanians came down from the hill country to make their peace with Rome in the person of the governor of Further Spain, Servius Sulpicius Galba. He was waiting with his army, the heart of it legionaries and Italian allies. Most of these soldiers were heavily equipped with long oval shields, mail armour and bronze helmets topped with either three tall feathers or a billowing horsehair crest. They carried the heavy throwing spear known as the pilum, and wielded a well-balanced cut-and-thrust sword which they knew as the gladius hispaniensis – the ‘Spanish sword’ – because they had copied the type used by Iberian warriors.
They were typical of the men who served the Republic out of duty, mainly farmers or the sons of farmers, and most were probably under thirty, for other than in emergencies the recruiters seem to have preferred to enlist the young. These men served out of a strong sense of duty to the state and because the wider community expected it of them. Many no doubt saw it as a chance for adventure away from the cycle of sowing and harvesting, and hoped to profit from the spoils of victory – their pay remained modest – before they returned home and became civilians again. Some may have come to the army with dreams of glory, of winning praise or one of the military decorations designed to encourage such spirit. Awards for valour were worn each festival day, so that brave former soldiers could be honoured by their fellow citizens.2
In many ways the Roman and Latin soldiers in the middle of the second century BC were much like plenty of other young men sent off to war in other ages and other countries. They were ordinary men by the standards of the times, and certainly had a lot in common with the citizens of most cities in the wider Mediterranean world. Citizenship brought legal and political rights and also obligations to the wider community. They served because they were citizens, and if they died it was as citizens and not soldiers that they would be commemorated. There were no permanent army bases or institutions, and even the legions were renumbered every year if the Senate decided to keep them in service. This meant that the two consuls always commanded the First, Second, Third and Fourth Legions. The Roman army is almost invisible archaeologically in this period, its soldiers merging back with the wider population at the end of each campaign.
A hint of professionalism came from a growing tendency for some men to seek prolonged service as centurions, the officers who commanded the basic administrative and tactical units of the legion, but even this was informal and we do not know how common it was. Most senior officers were like the men they led, citizens who interspersed spells of military service with normal civilian life. At the head of an army was the provincial governor, a magistrate elected by an Assembly of the Roman People. Either a consul or praetor, these were men successfully pursuing a career in public life. They were always wealthy and usually aristocrats, but eminence imposed even greater ob
ligations on them – a man had to serve for ten years or as many campaigns in the army before he could offer himself as a candidate for even the most junior magistracy. Although a fellow citizen, the governor held imperium and along with his greater responsibilities had the opportunity to win far greater fame and wealth than ordinary legionaries.3
Great glory came to a magistrate who led an army of the Roman people to victory in war. There was also profit to be made from plunder and the sale of captives as slaves, and the prestige and wealth of a victor were great benefits to a man for the rest of his career, giving him an advantage over all the other senators jockeying for office in the fiercely competitive political culture of Rome. Since the tenure of each magistracy was brief, so was the window of opportunity for a man to make his name and fortune. Sometimes the Senate chose to extend a provincial command into a second year – in which case the man was given the title of proconsul or propraetor. A third year of command was almost unheard of in the second century BC. With ambitious new governors arriving so often, the system encouraged them to behave very aggressively.
In Lusitania in 150 BC the dreams of glory and rich plunder had turned sour both for the soldiers and Galba. The year before they had been badly mauled by these same Lusitanian tribesmen, or at least by men who looked much like them in their dark tunics and with long hair hanging down their backs – the custom was to plait it when preparing for battle. The Lusitanians were not a nation, but one of the three main groups of indigenous peoples in the Iberian Peninsula. The Iberians lived to the south, while the Celtiberians held central and much of northern Spain, their culture showing elements of Celtic and Iberian influences, but being clearly distinct from both. The Lusitanians were in the west, covering an area very roughly equivalent to modern Portugal. None of these peoples were politically united, and it is doubtful that any of them thought of themselves as Iberians, Celtiberians or Lusitanians. These were labels imposed by Greek, Phoenician, Carthaginian and Roman outsiders – in the last two cases by imperial powers expanding into the Peninsula. More important to each people were tribal groupings, and especially the close communities of each walled town or village.4
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