The Rise of Rome (Penguin Classics)

by Plutarch

  So the conspirators decided that there must be no delay and that they could not afford to wait to discover the feelings of the people. The boldest of them raised the cry that the Volscians must not listen to this traitor, nor allow him to keep his command and play the tyrant among them. Then they rushed upon him in a body and cut him down, and not a man stepped forward to defend him. But it soon became apparent that the conspirators did not carry the people with them. From every one of their cities crowds flocked to Antium to see Marcius’ dead body, and he was buried with full honours, and his tomb hung with arms and trophies as the monument of a hero and a successful general.

  When the Romans heard of his death, they took no action either to honour his memory or to condemn it, but simply gave their permission to the women of his family to wear mourning for him for ten months, as was the custom when any of them lost a father, a son or a brother. This was the longest period that was allowed for mourning and it was fixed by Numa Pompilius as I have mentioned in his Life.94

  It was not long before the Volscians had cause to regret Marcius’ death. First of all they had a dispute with the Aequians,95 who were their allies and friends, over which of the two nations should command their armies, and carried the quarrel to the point of bloodshed. Next, they were defeated by the Romans, and in this battle Tullus was killed and the flower of the Volscian army perished. After this disaster they were content to accept the most humiliating terms, become the subjects of Rome and pledge themselves to obey her commands.96

  CAMILLUS

  * * *

  Introduction to Camillus

  Birth of a Legend

  The Romans’ conquest of Veii constituted a turning-point in their early history – or at least that is how the event was remembered. Rome’s nearest rival, Veii (modern Isola Farnese), lay only 10 miles to the north and had by the fifth century BC become a flourishing and formidable competitor. Rome’s ultimate victory, traditionally dated to 396 BC, brought the Romans such gains in land and manpower that they were able not merely to survive the Gallic invasion of 390 BC, but even to thrive in the years immediately following this catastrophe. The importance of the fall of Veii was never forgotten and over time was elaborated into an epic event recalling the grandeur of the Trojan War. Thus the siege of Veii was extended to ten years, and its resolution entailed a full apparatus of divine support and religious justification, all of which underscored the episode’s momentousness. Furthermore, the annexation of Veii came to be viewed as the stimulus for an early and profound struggle over the preservation of the Romans’ cultural identity. After the Gallic sack, the devastated site of Rome was very nearly abandoned in favour of resettlement in Veii. In the end, of course, the Romans elected to rebuild their city, and this escape from cultural annihilation was neatly credited to the wisdom of the very general who had conquered Veii in the first place, Marcus Furius Camillus, who thereby became a second founder of Rome.1

  Naturally, his achievements were expanded by an admiring historiographical tradition.2 It is the indispensable Camillus who defeats the Gauls, not once but twice (chs. 24–30, 40–41). He stymies the tyrannical aspirations of Marcus Manlius Capitolinus (ch. 36), and, after bringing to an end the political strife between patricians and plebeians, he dedicates a temple to Concord (ch. 42). Camillus accumulates offices and triumphs on an extraordinary scale and over a lengthy career: he was censor, consular tribune six times and dictator five times.

  Now most of this record is fictitious, though as always in the case of early Rome, controversy is unavoidable. There is no obvious reason to doubt Camillus’ victory at Veii, nor can it be excluded that he held more than one successful command during his lifetime, even if the particulars of his career have by now been obscured by the shadow of his legend. His heroic actions during the Gallic invasion, however, are later fabrications designed to mitigate the Romans’ shame over their disgrace at the Allia. The same can be said for his second triumph over the same foe. And there are other components of his story that are demonstrably untrue, such as his temple of Concord.3 Nevertheless, by the end of the republic Camillus’ stature as Rome’s saviour had been well established.4 Plutarch’s biography drew on a rich and celebratory record of a truly larger-than-life Roman hero.5

  Gauls and the Gallic Sack of Rome

  Around 390 BC a host of Gauls, a tribe known as the Senones, crossed the Apennines, routing the Romans at Allia and ultimately penetrating into southern Italy. Their purpose can only remain a matter of speculation.6 The Romans believed that this horde sacked their city and spared the remnant guarding the Capitol only when bought off by gold. According to Polybius (2.18.1–4, 2.22.4–5), the Gauls came, saw and conquered – and returned to their own country undefeated by the Romans. Later tradition removed this intolerable disgrace by putting forward various avengers of Roman honour, but, in the end, it came to be widely accepted that it was Camillus who recovered the Romans’ gold and expelled the Gauls from Roman territory.7

  The Gallic sack became a fundamental and defining moment in the Romans’ conception of themselves and their place in history. Throughout the republic, the Romans confessed their fear of Gauls, as if they remained an existential threat to the city, and this idea persisted into imperial times.8 But the cultural memory was not exclusively a dark one. For Polybius (1.6.3–4), the sack of Rome was the starting point of Rome’s rise to empire, and Roman writers routinely saw it as the second foundation of their city. Owing to the sheer destruction said to have been wrought by the Gauls, the Romans believed that their earlier history was, if not entirely lost, certainly never so accessible as Roman history after Allia. Only the Roman temples on the Capitoline Hill offered continuity with that distant past, and so the Capitol came, more and more, to symbolize Rome’s eternal power.9 This amplification of the consequences of Allia is also of a piece with the accretion of legends, not all of them consistent with one another, surrounding the sack of Rome, the most important of which for Plutarch’s Life was the emergence of the figure of Camillus as Rome’s saviour: it was a late development, unknown to Aristotle, who believed that he knew a different name for the man who saved Rome (ch. 22), or to Polybius, writing in the second century BC.10

  The Gauls play an important if stereotypical role in this Life. Greeks and Romans alike tended to accumulate the peoples of northern Europe under the rubric of Gauls or Celts (Plutarch, like most Greek writers, tends to use these terms interchangeably), with little in the way of further discrimination, although it was known that so-called Gallic peoples differed in customs and in language. Like Scythians or Ethiopians or Indians, Gauls represented a basic barbarian type, whose natural habitat lay in the extreme regions of the world. Consequently, Gauls were rarely the subject of anthropological investigation, but instead remained useful as stereotypes that could be deployed in order to develop a stark and defining contrast with civilized peoples.

  Gauls dwelt in cold climates – which made Italy or Greece an unnatural setting for them. They were big, brave and belligerent. They were also simple-minded and undisciplined, and here resided their only vulnerability. Romans and Greeks deemed themselves superior to Gauls because they were, in a word, cultured: smarter by nature and better educated. Therefore Gallic invasions of Italy and Greece had to fail in the end because Gauls lacked the temperament and training to sustain their advantages or master the material luxuries acquired by their martial successes. Put differently, Gauls were not merely uncivilized: they were unfit for civilization. Naturally there were exceptions to this depiction of the Gauls, especially as Gallic peoples became part of the Roman empire. But this hostile and negative characterization persisted, and it was typically put, as it is in this Life, to moralizing purposes: in his Camillus – and here Plutarch is following his sources – the Romans are defeated by the Gauls on account of their own moral failures (chs. 17–18).11

  The Life of Camillus, its Sources and Structure

  Camillus is paired with Themistocles (c. 524–459 BC), the dynamic hero o
f the Second Persian War (480–479 BC). It is almost certain that the beginning of the Themistocles and Camillus has been lost, and this pairing is also one of the very few lacking a closing comparison.12 Nor is it possible to be entirely certain about Plutarch’s specific sources for his Camillus. None is identified, apart from a solitary reference to Livy at chapter 6, a rare alternative version which inaccurately reports what Livy in fact wrote. Still, there is no reason to disbelieve Plutarch when he claims to have read Livy, and there are other traces, large and small, of Livy in this Life (see, especially, ch. 5).

  It is not at all obvious, however, that Livy was Plutarch’s sole or principal source. Another likely candidate is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on whom Plutarch relied for his Coriolanus (see Introduction to that Life). He had similar incentives to do so here. In this instance, however, the assertion is impossible to prove because Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities breaks down at this point in his narrative of early Roman history; instead we have only a smattering of Byzantine excerpts, in varying degrees of paraphrase. Still, even in this condition, Dionysius’ influence is unmistakable.13 And of course Plutarch will have turned to additional historical and antiquarian sources as well.

  What Plutarch lacked was personal and anecdotal material suitable to a biography, and it is obvious how extensively he had to rely on purely historical narratives in his sources. As a consequence of this, Camillus actually disappears from his own Life in chapters 15–23, which rehearse in detail the origins of the Gauls, their incursion into Italy, the reasons for their hostility to Rome, the disaster at Allia and the Gauls’ capture of the city itself, all of which elaborate the crisis for which Camillus was Rome’s only solution. We learn little of Camillus’ youth and are allowed only a solitary glimpse into his private life, when we are told of his debilitating grief at the death of his son (ch. 11). This biography is thus conspicuously unadorned by anecdotes or confidential moments – or flashes of wit or charm on the part of its subject. Instead, whenever Camillus is on stage, he is every inch the formal Roman magistrate: dignified and serious, and permitted to speak only by way of commands, orations and prayers to the gods, none of which opens the door to much in the way of personal characterization.

  The contrast with Themistocles is striking. There Plutarch condenses or even eschews historical narrative (he assumes his readers’ familiarity with the events of the Persian Wars), preferring to record a vast assortment of anecdotes and bon mots. Themistocles is accordingly both an impressive historical figure as well as a personality who is witty, abrasive, eloquent or envious. Whereas Camillus rarely appears outside his official capacities, much of Themistocles recounts private moments and especially the adventures of its subject’s exile. It is stunning to find, within a single pairing, such different approaches to structure and presentation. Camillus, inscribed in Rome’s larger historical narrative, is, for all his grandeur, less an actual historical agent than a model of Roman perfection: he is the recurring and mostly conservative answer to Rome’s recurring problems. Even when he plays a part in the transformation of Roman society, by presiding over the decision to admit plebeians to the consulship (ch. 42), his true role lies in preventing social conflict and breakdown, not in securing any particular reform. Themistocles, less a paradigm and more human in his depiction, is unmistakably an agent of historical change, a man who did not simply preserve but gave new shape to the destiny of Athens (Themistocles 4).

  Plutarch’s Camillus

  Camillus’ character is made clear from the start: ‘His readiness to cooperate with others stemmed from his moderation [metriotēs], which let him exercise command without reproach, and it was his intelligence [phronēsis] that gave him the undisputed first place’ (ch. 1). The political application of these same qualities, Plutarch points out, is reflected in the fact that, for all his many magistracies and commands, Camillus never held the office of consul, because his career was played out during the Conflict of the Orders, during which the consulship was itself a contentious matter (ch. 1). Glorious and unexcelled in war, Camillus sought to be a conciliatory statesman, and it is in resolving the struggle of the orders over plebeian admission to the consulship that Camillus concludes his brilliant career (ch. 42).14

  In Plutarch’s telling, however, in the opening chapters of the Life Camillus comes very near to failure. His gentler qualities are clearly innate and disclose themselves early in his biography – he treats the Falerians mercifully (ch. 10) and he is overwrought with grief at the death of his child (‘for he was by nature a gentle and kind man’, ch. 11). Nevertheless, he was also prey to corrosive and aristocratic passions. In celebrating his first triumph, Camillus succumbed to conceit and presumption, inner states illustrated to everyone in his decision to ride in a chariot drawn by four white horses (ch. 7), and during the initial political debates over the possibility of dividing the populace between Rome and Veii, ‘it was Camillus who, more than anyone else, took a stand against the preferences of the multitude, for he was in no way inclined to evade public hatred by surrendering his freedom of speech’ (ch. 11). His uncompromising opposition to this measure overwhelmed the Roman public – but left it resentful. When he was subsequently indicted before the people, Camillus refused to endure the indignity and, like Achilles, angrily withdrew into exile (ch. 12). But when disaster struck and Rome was sacked by the Gauls, Camillus, unlike Achilles, was not distracted by his anger. Thereafter, in this Life, he carefully avoids inciting envy in others, and endeavours to keep clear of open conflict (e.g. chs. 24 and 37), preferring cooperation to strife, conduct that culminates in his vow to build a temple to Concord (ch. 42). Which is not to say that Camillus becomes a political weakling: it is he who is responsible for the ultimate suppression of Manlius’ sedition (ch. 36). Political harmony is here represented as a source of strength and stability. Plutarch’s Camillus is thus a very different Camillus from Livy’s, who remains stern and formidable – even frightening – in his authoritarian dealings with the common people.15

  Camillus ages before our eyes in his continual offices. He is uniformly, perhaps monotonously, successful in battle, less so in managing domestic conflicts. Still, throughout the latter chapters of his Life, he remains the constant champion of social harmony. He is not always master of the situation when events turn critical (chs. 39 and 42), nor is he often the agent who finally delivers the resolution. Instead, his presence, his stature and his imperturbability signify to his contemporaries and to the reader the necessity – and the grandeur – of cooperation and compromise in the face of extremism. Camillus dies full of years and achievements, and his passing is mourned by the Romans (ch. 43), although it must be admitted that his obituary is singular in Plutarch for its brevity.16

  Camillus and Themistocles

  Plutarch had not yet written his Coriolanus and Alcibiades when he began this pairing.17 But he was plainly uninterested in exploiting the correspondence traditionally drawn by Romans between Coriolanus and Themistocles, preferring instead to match the saviour of Greece with Camillus, a far greater hero. Themistocles, the champion of Panhellenism, he paired with the Roman embodiment of concordia, political harmony (for which the Greek word is homonoia): for Plutarch Panhellenism and political harmony were twin virtues, precious and essential to preserving Hellenic culture in imperial Rome.18 There were also unmistakable similarities between the lives of Themistocles and Camillus: each man rescued his city from a barbarian invader, and did so after his city had been sacked; each suffered, in the aftermath of a great victory, the envy of others (chs. 7–8 and 11, after the capture of Veii; Themistocles 19–23, after the battle of Salamis); and each retired into exile. And one can detect further if perhaps less striking parallels: each is said to spring from a modest family (ch. 2; Themistocles 1), each is connected with various goddesses (chs. 5–6 and 36; Themistocles 22 and 30), each was tried in absentia (ch. 13; Themistocles 23), and each played a part in the rebuilding of his city (ch. 31; Themistocles 19).

  At the same time,
however, striking differences obtrude. Like Camillus, Themistocles was highly intelligent, but instead of phronēsis he was endowed with synēsis, a keen and quick capacity for grasping the best course of action (Themistocles 2). It was this quality that gave him his profound foresight and his crucial powers of persuasion – and rendered him adaptive, cunning and witty. And it was owing to these traits that Themistocles became influential enough to preserve the freedom of the Greeks.