The Rise of Rome (Penguin Classics)

by Plutarch

  Both men exhibited the same high-mindedness in so far as money was concerned, one of them by accepting none of the gifts offered him, the other through his generosity to men in need, when at his own expense he ransomed the prisoners of war.24 Admittedly, the sum he paid was not a steep one but only around 6 talents.25 As for Pericles, one should observe how, although he could easily have enriched himself at the expense of the allies and kings who, on account of his extraordinary stature, endeavoured to cultivate his friendship, he nevertheless kept himself honest and incorruptible.26

  At last we come to Pericles’ grand public works,27 his construction of the temples and other monuments with which he adorned Athens. These so far excel all of Rome’s proud edifices, everything built before the time of the Caesars, that no comparison is even possible, so pre-eminent are they in their sheer magnificence and splendour.

  MARCELLUS

  * * *

  Introduction to Marcellus

  Warrior and Philhellene

  Marcus Claudius Marcellus was one of Rome’s paramount military leaders during the late third century BC. His victory at Clastidium in 222 became legendary, and in Roman accounts of the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) he is routinely paired with Fabius Maximus, the one acting as the shield of Rome, the other its sword, in the formulation recorded by the Greek writer Poseidonius (ch. 9). He famously captured – and sacked – the wealthy Greek city of Syracuse. And he fell in combat against Hannibal. A thoroughly Roman hero, then, though one whose subsequent reputation was sometimes sullied by complaints about his violence, ruthlessness and recklessness. Not so in Plutarch’s Life, however, where Marcellus, for all his martial disposition, exhibits the first signs of Rome’s true promise as a mighty nation imbued with Greek values and ideals. For Plutarch, he is Rome’s first practical philhellene.

  History

  Marcellus was born around 270 BC into a family of plebeian nobility: the Claudii Marcelli attained their first consulship in 331 BC, and the son of the consul of 331 was himself consul in 287 BC. Presumably these are the grandfather and great-grandfather of our Marcellus. Nothing is known of his childhood. His youth is similarly obscure: after serving in the First Punic War (264–241 BC), Marcellus was inducted into the college of augurs and elected aedile and praetor, all at dates unknown to us.

  Marcellus bursts into history as consul in 222 BC, at a time when the Romans were at war with the Gauls of northern Italy.1 Marcellus won a major victory near the town of Clastidium, where he killed a Gallic king in single combat, a deed unparalleled in Rome since the fifth century BC. After a second decisive battle, he was awarded a triumph (chs. 7–8). Marcellus’ triumph was an extraordinary affair. Because he had slain the Gallic chief in personal combat, he could lay claim to the spolia opima – the best of trophies – the despoiled armour of his opponent destined for consecration to Jupiter Feretrius, a ritual established in the mythical past by Romulus when he struck down Acron of Caenina (ch. 8). In the intervening centuries, only the elusive Aulus Cornelius Cossus had equalled Romulus’ feat, when, as consul, he cut down Lars Tolumnius, king of Veii. By putting himself forward as the third Roman warrior to win the spolia opima, Marcellus revived – to some degree, perhaps, invented – and in any case exploited an ancient custom that marked him out as the embodiment of pristine Roman valour.2

  The outbreak of the Second Punic War brought Marcellus to prominence once again.3 In the aftermath of Hannibal’s early victories in Italy, Marcellus offered a stout resistance, gaining some notable if not spectacular successes. In 215 he saved the city of Nola from falling into enemy hands (chs. 10–11), and in the following year, in cooperation with Fabius Maximus, regained some of Rome’s losses to the Carthaginians. Marcellus’ energetic response to Hannibal’s menace, even if it fell short of decisive victory, was nonetheless instrumental in stymieing Hannibal’s strategy in Italy – and it marked him out as the right man for securing Sicily from a renewed and vigorous Carthaginian offensive there.4

  Although Marcellus’ Syracusan campaign consumes a large portion of this Life (chs. 13–21), Plutarch presents his reader with an almost confusingly abridged account of its background and prosecution. Sicily had been the prize of the First Punic War, when Rome wrested control of the island from Carthage. Its territories, apart from the kingdom of Syracuse, an independent but subordinate ally, served as sources of revenue and grain whose value only increased amid the scarcities entrained by Hannibal’s invasion. It was natural, then, that Carthage should attempt to recover the island. At the start of the war, however, Roman interests in Sicily were tenaciously guarded by her ally, Hiero II, the king of Syracuse, a rich and mighty city. But he died in 215 BC, leaving his fifteen-year-old grandson, Hieronymus, as heir.

  Political convulsions supervened. The new king’s advisers took the view that Carthage was in the ascendant and urged a reconsideration of the city’s Roman alliance. Hoping to exploit this fresh opportunity, Hannibal sent two brothers – Hippocrates and Epicydes, who were half-Carthaginian and half-Syracusan – to persuade the new king to side with him. It was under these circumstances that the senate, late in 214 BC, sent Marcellus to take over affairs in Sicily.

  Syracuse was ridden with intrigue, and Hieronymus, out of his depth, was soon assassinated, an event which led to widespread civil disruption, marked by a failed coup and the execution of the residue of the royal family. The city then reverted to a republican-style government. Nonetheless, this new regime remained open to negotiations with Rome, and Marcellus was soon involved in diplomatic exertions to restore the old alliance.

  All attempts at a peaceful settlement collapsed, however, when Hippocrates and Epicydes took control of Leontini, a large city that was Syracuse’s most important dependency. Leontini then revolted against Syracuse and, at the same time, declared its hostility to Rome. In reaction, Marcellus stormed the place. This turned to the advantage of Hippocrates and Epicydes, however, who made their way back to Syracuse and inflamed anti-Roman feelings by claiming that Marcellus was committing atrocities against the Leontines. They then seized control of Syracuse, plunging the city into a war against Rome.

  After a siege lasting two years, Marcellus captured Syracuse. He then handed the city over to his soldiers, who looted the place. Marcellus himself took little by way of personal plunder – only, we are told, a single sphere that had once belonged to Archimedes (Cicero, The Republic 1.21) – but he arranged for the dispossession of an astonishing quantity of fine artwork, which he transferred to Rome. He quickly dealt with what little Carthaginian resistance remained in Sicily, and soon the island was almost entirely pacified. The recovery of Sicily was a major victory and an important turning-point in the war, but when Marcellus returned to Rome in 211 BC, his opponents in the senate refused him a triumph, for reasons both technical and invidious.

  No degree of political sharp practice, however, could deny Marcellus all recognition, and the senate was forced to concur in his demand for an ovatio, a lesser triumph. Marcellus’ skill in self-advertisement did not forsake him. On the day before his ovation, he celebrated a private triumph on the Alban Mount, an allegedly ancient ceremony that had in fact only recently been invented, in 231 BC, by the consul Gaius Papirius Maso.5 The combination of these pageants, unprecedented and never repeated, was designed to thrill the public and foil the envy of Marcellus’ rivals, and it was a spectacular success. In his ovation, Marcellus paraded the splendid Greek art he had plundered in Syracuse, spoil that was now the property of the Roman people. He furthermore advertised his glory in the Greek world as well as in Rome, setting up dedications in Sicily, in Samothrace, in Rhodes and in Delphi.6

  Despite opposition against him in the senate, Marcellus was swept into the consulship for 210 BC. He campaigned in Italy against Hannibal, not without effect, but in 208, when he was again consul, Marcellus was ambushed and fell in the fighting, an inglorious ending that is the focus of Plutarch’s criticism of the man in this Life.

  Reputation


  Marcellus’ remorseless valour became legendary at Rome.7 His heroic stature reached its zenith during the reign of Augustus: as the ancestor nonpareil of the emperor’s nephew, son-in-law and likely heir (ch. 30), the victor at Syracuse constituted indisputable proof of the young Marcellus’ native brilliance, and of Rome’s irreplaceable loss in the tragedy of the young man’s early death.8 When Augustus pronounced his funeral oration, he naturally rehearsed the history of the Claudii Marcelli – including the career of their greatest general – and the emperor’s praise secured Marcellus’ imperial reputation.

  The historian Polybius, by contrast, was unimpressed, even hostile. Of spolia opima or Marcellus’ triumph he makes no mention (2.34). Marcellus’ removal of Syracuse’s artwork he deems a blunder: Polybius does not object to plundering the city’s wealth – that, after all, is the fuel of empire – but in taking their art the Romans gained no real profit and incurred only resentment and envy (9.10). He is nothing short of severe in his condemnation of Marcellus’ final and fatal campaign against Hannibal: ‘He stumbled into this destructive misfortune because he conducted himself with childlike simplicity and not as a general ought to act’ (10.32–3).

  Livy’s treatment of Marcellus, although mostly favourable, nevertheless preserves Polybius’ reproaches – and adds others. Livy does not disguise Marcellus’ harsh treatment of the vanquished (23.42–3, 24.37–8; cf. Cassius Dio 15.31), and he acknowledges claims asserted by other writers that Marcellus’ early victories against Hannibal were exaggerated (23.16). Like Polybius, Livy (25.40.2) disapproves of Marcellus’ removal of Syracuse’s art, but on the very different grounds that such luxuries were morally corrupting.9 Livy will not attribute Marcellus’ death to incompetence, but he objects to his unnatural obsession with defeating Hannibal, which was unsuitable to his age and attainments (27.27.11).10

  Plutarch’s Marcellus

  Plutarch does not ignore these controversies, but in this Life they are either repudiated or dismissed – apart from the charge of rashness that resulted in Marcellus’ unfortunate death. Plutarch’s Marcellus exhibits valour and industry, and combines his spirited passion for battle with high-mindedness (Pelopidas 2; Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1). At the same time, his merits are not confined to combat. Marcellus possesses the prized quality of philanthropia (ch. 10), the exquisite humanity which Plutarch bundles with kindness and generosity – and which he esteems as the essential virtue of Greek civilization.11 Consequently, and despite a tradition inclined to emphasize his ruthlessness and severity, Plutarch’s Marcellus exhibits moderation and compassion, and it is Marcellus, first of all the Romans, as Plutarch claims explicitly, who stands as proof to the Greeks that Rome is capable of more than brute violence (chs. 19–20). On this point Plutarch is so insistent that he repeats it in his Fabius Maximus (ch. 22), where he contrasts Marcellus’ humanity with the injustice of Fabius’ violence at Tarentum.

  This moral superiority cannot derive from philosophical instruction: such a thing did not yet exist in a Rome that Plutarch likens to the primitive world of the Homeric epics (ch. 1). Marcellus was, nevertheless, deeply affected by a temperamental fondness for the Greek learning he could never obtain:

  He had enough regard for Greek culture and literature to make him honour and admire those who excelled in them, but he himself never found the leisure to master or even study these subjects to the extent that he would have wished.

  (ch. 1)

  This is a Marcellan instinct that is entirely his biographer’s invention, but it constitutes the crucial element of Marcellus’ true excellence, which Plutarch manages to detect even in the sacking of Syracuse.

  This is why Plutarch commends, where others censure, Marcellus’ controversial ovation, when he flooded Rome with Greek works of art. Although Livy connects Marcellus’ imports with the Romans’ tradition of a moral decline – and Plutarch is honest enough to include this brand of criticism in his Life – for Plutarch this occasion marks nothing less than a transformation in the cultural fabric of Rome, which he emphasizes by way of an unrealistically exaggerated contrast between Roman conditions before and after the ovation (ch. 21).12 The older generation in Rome disapproves, but Marcellus remains confident that he is inculcating in the Roman public a salutary admiration for Greek art (ch. 21), an attitude which, like his own nascent Hellenism, is a crucial step forward in Rome’s cultural evolution.

  Marcellus and Pelopidas

  Plutarch’s Marcellus is nearly flawless – nearly. His failure lay, as Polybius recognized (10.32), in the recklessness of his death, an end not merely inglorious but positively dangerous, because so many lives and designs depend on the safety of a leader. In throwing away his life, Marcellus threw away all his gifts and qualities (Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 3), and it is around this poignant tragedy that Plutarch constructs both this Life and its pairing with the Greek Pelopidas.

  Plutarch matches Marcellus with a Boeotian hero, the Theban general Pelopidas (c. 410–364 BC), who, with the brilliant Epaminondas, was a leading figure in the struggle to liberate Thebes from Spartan control. Pelopidas won a victory over the Spartans at the battle of Tegyra (375 BC), and, in command of the Theban Sacred Band, helped Epaminondas to defeat the Spartans decisively at Leuctra (371 BC).13 Pelopidas ended his life in battle against Alexander of Pherae, a tyrant whom he endeavoured to slay in hand-to-hand combat. In spite of Pelopidas’ death, however, Pherae was defeated, and Pelopidas was honoured with a statue erected at Delphi.14

  The prologue to this pairing is an exposition of the principle, also enunciated by Polybius, that a general must not act with the impetuosity of a subaltern (Pelopidas 1–2), and Plutarch returns to the same point in his conclusion to the work. In this respect, both Pelopidas and Marcellus behaved unreasonably. How different, Plutarch observes, as Polybius (10.33) had done before him, was Hannibal, who, for all his many battles, remained unwounded and in command (Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 3).

  The diagnosis of their common failure is straightforward: each was a man of bold spirits and passion (thumeidēs: see Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1), a martial advantage but one requiring temperance. Plutarch routinely criticizes commanders who fall in battle because they are unable to restrain their passions, always a debacle owed to want of reason.15 As Plutarch makes clear in Coriolanus, in order to put even noble passions to their best purposes, one requires education (paideia).16 Now, although he was a Greek, Pelopidas remained uninterested in philosophical pursuits (Pelopidas 4), whereas Marcellus, for all his philhellenic tendencies, was raised in a Rome where a proper education was impossible (ch. 1). Nevertheless, Plutarch’s treatment of both Pelopidas and Marcellus is encomiastic: their sole deficiency, he insists, should not vitiate their life’s work (Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 3). At the same time, because each man’s nearness to perfection underlines the disaster of his fall, this pairing reveals how even the best of men can fall prey to their passions if insufficiently educated.

  It is easy to forget, when reading this pairing, that Pelopidas lived more than a century and a half before Marcellus, so primitive is the atmosphere of the Roman’s Life: he and his generation are, from the beginning, described in Homeric terms (ch. 1), they resort to human sacrifice (ch. 3) and they dwell in a city ‘filled with bloodstained arms and the spoils of barbarian tribes’ (ch. 21).17 But Marcellus began to change all that, and this is unmistakably illustrated in the last sentence of his Life, when Plutarch describes how Rome memorialized Marcellus’ descendant, Augustus’ nephew and son-in-law: ‘It was in his honour and to his memory that Octavia dedicated a library and Caesar a theatre, both of which bear his name to this day’ (ch. 30). The ultimate expression of Marcellus’ natural philhellenism is imperial Rome, shaped by the quintessentially Greek institutions of libraries and theatres.

  Sources

  An abundance of potential sources was at Plutarch’s disposal, and he cites by name several authorities: the first-century BC polymath Poseidonius (chs.
1, 9, 20, 30), Livy (chs. 11, 24, 30), the emperor Augustus (ch. 30 and Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1), the biographer Cornelius Nepos (ch. 30 and Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1), Polybius (Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1), Valerius Maximus (ch. 30) and Juba, the learned king of Mauretania and friend of Augustus (Comparison Pelopidas–Marcellus 1), who composed, among many works, a history of Rome (in Greek) which is now lost (FGrH 275). In more than one instance in this Life, Plutarch cites his sources inaccurately or even entirely erroneously (these are indicated in the notes to the translation), evidence of haste or carelessness in composition that must qualify any attempt to arrive at his main sources. Still, there can be no doubt that Plutarch studied Polybius closely, and there is no reason to doubt his claim that he consulted Livy.18 The belief that Plutarch relied heavily on the lost histories of Coelius Antipater19 or Valerius Antias20 is long-standing, though it is not entirely compelling. There is, however, no reason why he could not at least have looked at them.

  It would be especially helpful to know the source of Plutarch’s Poseidonian information. Poseidonius’ lost History, a continuation of Polybius, covered world history – by then mostly Roman history – from 146 down to sometime in the 80s BC. Although the work apparently teemed with digressions, it is difficult to see how Marcellus could have crept into it in any important way. It has been suggested that Poseidonius composed a monograph of some sort that was devoted to Marcellus, and one can well imagine the Claudii Marcelli of the late republic commissioning such a work. After all, Cicero’s distinguished friend, Atticus, at the behest of the same family, penned a detailed history of the Claudii Marcelli (Nepos, Letters to Atticus 18.3). But this can never be more than a surmise, and any item of the Poseidonian material in Plutarch, even the famous metaphor of the shield and the sword, could originate in a digression or a passing remark in another work.21