by John Keegan
Yet Roman warfare, for all its episodic extremism, never achieved the levels of inhumanity and destructiveness reached later by that of the Mongols and Timurids. The Romans worked by piecemeal annexation and consolidation of territory — Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was an isolated exception — and after the Punic wars they did not set out to rampage, terrorise and destroy as Tamerlane was to do. They built no pyramids of skulls; and if they set up military colonies on the boundaries of their possessions, as in Liguria in the third century BC, Roman citizens willingly settled this land, not displaced subject populations shifted from their homelands as a punishment for untrustworthiness — the practice instituted by the Assyrians and carried on by Mongols, Turks and eventually Russians.
The comparative restraint of their imperial method has several explanations. The first was that the Roman army lacked mobility of the order displayed by the horse peoples. A Roman legion of the fourth century BC included a sizeable cavalry contingent, but thereafter it declined to an auxiliary fragment, for both social and material reasons: Italy, like Greece, will not bear a large horse population, while the original knightly class progressively abandoned campaigning in the field to pursue politics in the city.51 On the march, the legions displayed from the start of the era of expansion a remarkable ability to cover ground at a regular pace, day after day, and the state to provide it with pay and matériel. By its nature, however, an infantry army proceeds deliberately, not by dynamic surges, as conquering nomads do, so that Rome’s expansion was cumulative rather than cascading in character.
Moreover, the cumulative pattern of expansion was determined by the nature of the Roman army itself, which became ‘regular’ and bureaucratic at an early stage and, by the time of the Punic wars against Carthage, had achieved a form from which it was not to diverge until the onset of the empire’s troubles with the Teutonic barbarians in the third century AD. Historians credit Assyria with having inaugurated the regular system, and it indeed seems probable that the practices it instituted, including those of regular payment of full-time servicemen, establishment of arsenals and depots, building of barracks and centralised manufacture of equipment, did set a pattern for that of other, later empires; it percolated from the Middle East to zones of intense military activity farther west during the sixth and fifth centuries BC, partly through the Persians’ contact with the Greeks, partly through the rise of the market in mercenaries who had to be supported from state treasuries. No army before that of the Roman republic, however, achieved its level of legally and bureaucratically regulated recruitment, organisation, command and supply. From the Punic wars onward, it stood apart from all other institutions in the civilised world — perhaps its only, though invisible, equivalent was the Chinese mandarinate — as a phenomenon of confident self-sufficiency.
Its ability to persist successfully in unrelenting warmaking, whether in wars thrust upon Rome or deliberately undertaken, derived in large measure from the state’s solution of all centralised governments’ besetting military difficulty: that of assuring a steady source of reliable and effective recruits. By the time of the Punic wars, the militia obligation, though theoretically still in force, had lapsed and the legions were manned by a selection process, the dilectus, by which the best of willing citizens who presented themselves were enrolled for a six-year term of service (which might be extended to as many as eighteen years). The adoption of the dilectus reflected a worsening of the small farmers’ circumstances, and indeed the expanding estates of the rich were extinguishing the basis of smallholding; nevertheless, paid voluntary service seems to have been a popular enough alternative to farming for there to have been no need for laws reducing the term of service until the late second century BC.52 There was no need to apply the dilectus to those assigned high rank in the legions since the Roman political system, at least until then, made it a condition of candidature for elective political office, leading to that of the ruling consulate, that young men of good birth must have first completed a statutory period of duty as a tribune, of which there were six to each legion; ten years of service, or ten campaigns, seem to have been the qualifying norm. In the later empire, and particularly during the military crises of the third century AD, the imposition of the qualification would lapse, but neither republic nor empire ever shed the view that right to rule was ultimately legitimised by ability to command in the field.53
Yet the ultimate strength of the Roman army, and the characteristic that made it the model, a millennium later, for those raised in the dynastic states of Europe, following the revival of classical learning at the Renaissance, from which the great modern armies descend, was supplied neither by its system of recruitment nor by its high command but by its legionary encadrement, the centurionate. The Roman centurions, long-service unit-leaders drawn from the best of the enlisted ranks, formed the first body of professional fighting officers known to history. It was they who imbued the legions with backbone and transmitted from generation to generation the code of discipline and accumulated store of tactical expertise by which Roman arms were carried successfully against a hundred enemies over five centuries of almost continuous warmaking.
The Roman historian Livy has preserved for us the record of service of a republican centurion which exactly conveys the ethos of this remarkable body of men, and it emphasises how revolutionary was the institution of the centurionate in a world where hitherto military service had been largely an intermittent, emergency or mercenary business; indeed, it might, with appropriate substitutions, stand as that of a regular warrant officer in any great modern army. Spurius Ligustinus told the consulate of 171 BC:
I became a soldier in the consulship [of 200 BC]. In the army which was taken over to Macedonia, I served two years in the ranks against King Philip; in the third year because of my bravery [I was given] a post as centurion in the tenth maniple of the hastati [a term, with those of triarii and principes, surviving from the original ranking of legionary maniples by property qualification]. After Philip’s defeat, when we had been brought back to Italy and released, I immediately set out for Spain as a volunteer with the consul M. Porcius [195 BC]. This commander judged me worthy to be assigned as centurion of the first century of the hastati. For the third time I enlisted again as a volunteer in that army which was set against the Aetolians and King Antiochus [191 BC]. By Manicus Acilius I was made centurion of the first century of the principes. When Antiochus had been driven out and the Aetolians subdued, we were brought back to Italy. And twice after that I served in campaigns where the legions were in commission for a year. Then I campaigned twice in Spain [181 and 180 BC] … I was brought home by Flaccus along with the others whom he brought with him from the province to take part in the Triumph because of their bravery. Four times within a few years I held the rank of primus pilus [centurion of the first century of the triarii]. Four and thirty times I was rewarded for bravery by my commanders. I have received six civic crowns. I have served out twenty-two years in the army and am more than fifty years old.54
Ligustinus, who had six sons and two married daughters, was petitioning for further office or promotion, and, on the strength of his record, was made primus pilus, senior centurion, in the First Legion.
With an officer corps of the quality represented by Ligustinus, formed of men whose life was soldiering, who entertained no expectation of rising into the governing class, and whose ambitions were entirely limited to those of success within what could be perceived, for the first time in history, as an esteemed and self-sufficient profession, it is not surprising that Rome’s boundaries came to be extended from the Atlantic to the Caucasus; it succeeded, by whatever means, in transforming the warrior ethos of a small city state into a true military culture, an entirely novel Weltanschauung, one shared by the highest and the lowest levels of Roman society, but rooted in and expressed through the values of a separate and subordinate corporation of specialists. Theirs was not a privileged life by any material test. For all the mechanistic efficiency of the legion in ba
ttle, Roman warfare remained a bloody and intensely dangerous business. The centurion, quite as much as the legionary, fought at close range to the enemy, often hand to hand, and accepted the danger of wounding as an inescapable hazard of the life he had chosen. Julius Caesar, for example, writing of his battle against the Nervii on the River Sambre in modern Belgium, in 57 BC, describes the critical moment:
The soldiers were crowded too closely together to be able to fight easily, because the standards of the Twelfth Legion had been massed in one place. All the centurions of the first cohort had been killed, together with its standard bearer, and its standard had been lost. In the other cohort almost all the centurions were dead or wounded and the chief centurion, Sextius Baculus, a very brave man, was so exhausted by the wounds, many and severe, that he had suffered, that he could hardly stand up.55
This graphic depiction of the reality of legionary warfare, in which the unvarying daily order of the camp, with its set duties of guards and fatigues and the regular comforts of the kitchen and the bath-house — no different at all from the routines maintained by European garrison armies a hundred years ago — could be suddenly interrupted by confrontation with a yelling crowd of unshaven and unkempt strangers, perhaps daubed with paint, brandishing deadly weapons, reeking of dirt and fear and sweating with the intense exertion of muscle-power warfare, conveys without the need for further demonstration that the Roman professional soldier did not serve for the monetary rewards enlistment brought him.56 His values were those by which his fellows in the modern age continue to live: pride in a distinctive (and distinctively masculine) way of life, concern to enjoy the good opinion of comrades, satisfaction in the largely symbolic tokens of professional success, hope of promotion, expectation of a comfortable and honourable retirement.
As the empire grew and as the army revised its terms of enlistment to admit recruits who were not of Italian origin, whether as legionaries or as cavalry or as light infantry auxiliaries, the military profession became multinational in character, its members united largely by the duty they owed to Rome. In a remarkable survey that was made of the careers of ten Roman soldiers who died in the service of the empire during the first two centuries AD, as revealed by their gravestones, we find a cavalryman from Mauritania (modern Morocco) who died on Hadrian’s Wall; the standard-bearer of the II Legio Augusta, born at Lyon, who died in Wales; a centurion of the X Legio Gemina, born at Bologna, who was killed in Germany at the disaster of the Teutoburg forest; a veteran of the same legion born near the headwaters of the Rhine, who died on the Danube at modern Budapest; and a legionary of the II Legio Adiutrix, born in modern Austria, who died at Alexandria.57 Perhaps the most touching of funerary records that show how widely the legions were recruited comes from the gravestones of a wife and her soldier husband found at opposite ends of Hadrian’s Wall: she was a local girl; he had been born in Roman Syria.
It was a regular army, nevertheless, made for regular, not dynamic, empire-building. The process by which the legions came to serve at such distance from the Roman army’s birthplace and to embrace so wide a range of recruits as members — many from localities which lay in ‘barbary’ at the start of Rome’s rise to empire — began in earnest during the Punic wars with Carthage. That city, a colony of the Phoenicians, first fell into conflict with the Romans when the latters’ success in subduing their Italian neighbours drew them south to Sicily, which Carthage regarded as within its sphere of influence; Rome’s confrontation with Pyrrhus, also an enemy of Carthage, weakened its position in the island. In 265 BC the two powers found themselves at war over it, and the war rapidly extended, by both land and sea, until the Carthaginians were obliged to concede defeat and the establishment of Roman control over western Sicily. While Rome added Corsica and Sardinia to these beginnings of its overseas empire, and made its first inroads into the lands of the Gauls, Carthage responded by campaigning along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, against cities that were Rome’s allies. The siege of Saguntum in 219 BC brought on war afresh; it lasted for seventeen years, ended in Carthaginian defeat only after Rome had stared catastrophe in the face, and established the Romans as the dominant power in the Mediterranean world.
Carthage, with a large fleet, depended principally on mercenaries to provide her army, recruited from the North African coast and paid from the revenues of her trading empire, whose connections extended as far as the tin-producing regions of Britain. Fortuitously, she was during the Second Punic War to produce two commanders of outstanding ability, the brothers Hannibal and Hasdrubal, whose powers of leadership and tactical innovation transcended the limitation which the mercenary character of their soldiers imposed on their capacity to operate at long range from base. Hannibal opened operations with what was to become one of the most famous campaigns in history — his lightning march from Spain through southern Gaul, across the Alps and into central Italy, bringing with him a train of elephants. Defeating one Roman army at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, he bypassed Rome, found allies in the south, rode out a delaying campaign by Fabius Maximus and took up a position in which he hoped to be joined by the Macedonian King Philip V, one of Alexander’s successors. The Romans had now lost patience with Fabian tactics, and in 216 BC their field army advanced to contact with the Carthaginians near the Apulian town of Cannae. There on 2 August, sixteen legions, comprising some 75,000 troops, advanced to the attack. Varro, the Roman commander, had put his infantry mass in the centre, with cavalry at each wing, the standard classical deployment. Hannibal reversed arrangements, leaving his centre weak but massing his best infantry on either flank. When the Romans came forward, they were swiftly enveloped, their line of retreat cut off by a cavalry charge across their rear and the fugitives, to the number of 50,000, massacred as they fled. It was from the example of Cannae that the nineteenth-century French tactical analyst Ardant du Picq first proposed the important perception that it is in retreating that an army exposes itself to disabling losses.
By a stroke of diversionary strategy the Romans were able to ride out the disaster at Cannae. At home new legions were formed from the propertyless, normally exempt from service, and even from slaves, which provided enough force to confine Hannibal to southern Italy, where the Carthaginians had allies. In Spain, where the consul Cornelius Scipio had presciently stationed two legions to prevent Hannibal’s drawing reinforcements from that region, the Romans went over to the offensive. In 209 Scipio’s son, later to be famous as Scipio Africanus, launched a lightning attack against Cartagena, where the atrocities his troops committed had the effect of drawing the city’s uncommitted neighbours to his side. When Hasdrubal beat a fighting retreat to the Adriatic, along the route his brother Hannibal had followed eleven years earlier, he was run to ground and defeated at the River Metaurus. His successor in Spain, another Hasdrubal, suffered the indignity of being beaten in a battle where Scipio applied against him the tactics that had won Cannae. This setback, from which Scipio profited to cross to Africa, impelled Carthage to call Hannibal home, and at Zama, in modern Tunisia, their two armies met in 202 BC. A Carthaginian elephant charge was nullified by the chequerboard formation in which Scipio disposed his troops; when he launched them in a counter-attack, the Carthaginian army was overwhelmed and Hannibal fled the field.
The final destruction of Carthage was to wait fifty years, during which Rome’s military energies were consumed by interventions in Greece and the rest of the Hellenistic world. By 196 BC the Greek cities accepted a Roman protectorate, and when the Hellenistic kingdom of Syria intervened to reverse events, Rome transferred the legions first there and then to Asia Minor, most of which shortly fell under its control; Ptolemaic Egypt, most important among the surviving kingdoms once controlled by Alexander’s generals, also fell by 30 BC.
By that date the most famous of Romans, Julius Caesar, had added Gaul to the empire, in a series of campaigns that lasted from 58 to 51 BC. Following its earlier expulsion of the Gallic tribes from northern Italy as early as 121 BC, Rome had gained a
foothold in Gaul by expanding its province in Spain. In 58, to forestall the first recorded large-scale migration the Romans had encountered, that of the Helvetii from modern Switzerland, Caesar set up blocking positions in the Rhône valley and accepted help from the Gauls to resist the invasion. Having defeated the Helvetii, he now found his new area of control threatened by another invasion, that of a Teutonic tribe under Ariovistus, and he marched north to the Rhine to turn it back. His success, though welcome to the Gauls of the south, alarmed those of the north, whose tribal systems extended across the Rhine into Germany. Against these extremely warlike people he fought for four years, interrupted by expeditions against the Veneti of Brittany and their Celtic cousins in Britain (56–4 BC), but eventually he succeeded in imposing nominal peace throughout Gaul. Then, in 53 BC, the pacified Gauls rebelled en masse in a desperate effort to avoid incorporation into the empire and, under the leadership of Vercingetorix, obliged Caesar to repeat his efforts. This final stage of the Gallic wars, fought against an enemy who had learned much from Roman methods, lasted a year, when Vercingetorix retired into a vast fortified camp at Alesia, near the source of the Seine. This decision was a mistake; the Romans had formidable experience of and skills in siege warfare — it may be that some of the techniques they knew had been transmitted to them at several removes from their Assyrian inventors, via the international market in military science that had permeated the Middle East for centuries — and they quickly insulated the Alesian camp from any prospect of relief by constructing an even larger encirclement of fortifications (lines of ‘circumvallation’ and ‘contravallation’), each about fourteen miles in circumference, to enclose it. Legionaries were masters of the spade; on the march in hostile territory, a legion automatically threw up for itself an entrenched camp of uniform pattern each night. When a relieving Celtic army appeared, estimated to have been a quarter of a million strong, Caesar supplied his 55,000 out of the stores he had accumulated within his own fortifications, held the attackers at bay, and persisted with his investment of Vercingetorix’s position. Eventually, after three attempts to break out, the Gallic chieftain offered his surrender, was taken to Rome for Caesar’s triumph, and then executed. With his death, native resistance to the inclusion of Gaul within the Roman empire collapsed.