SPQR

by Mary Beard

  This story of the Conflict of the Orders adds up to one of the most radical and coherent manifestos of popular power and liberty to survive from the ancient world – far more radical than anything to survive from classical democratic Athens, most of whose writers, when they had anything explicitly to say on the subject, were opposed to democracy and popular power. Taken together, the demands put into the mouths of the plebeians offered a systematic programme of political reform, based on different aspects of the freedom of the citizen, from freedom to participate in the government of the state and freedom to share in its rewards to freedom from exploitation and freedom of information. It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.

  But just how accurate is the story that the Romans told of this conflict? And what light does it shed on Rome’s ‘great leap forward’? Here the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle become hard to fit together. But the outlines of a picture, and some probably crucial dates, do stand out.

  Many aspects of the story as it has come down to us must be wrong, heavily modernised by later writers or, especially towards the beginning of the period of the conflict, still much more myth than history. Virginia is probably no less a fictional construct than Lucretia. There is an awkward mismatch between the surviving clauses of the Twelve Tables and the elaborate story of the decemviri. Why, if the compilation came directly out of the clashes between patricians and plebeians, is there just one reference to that distinction (in the marriage ban) in the clauses preserved? Much of the argument, and even more of the rhetoric, of the early plebeian reformers is almost certainly an imaginative reconstruction by writers of the first century BCE, drawing on the sophisticated debates of their own day rather than being a product of the world of the Twelve Tables – and it may well be better evidence for the popular political ideology of that later period than for the Conflict of the Orders. What is more, despite Roman certainty that the exclusion of plebeians from power in the state went back to the fall of the monarchy, there are hints that it developed only in the course of the fifth century BCE. The standard list of consuls, for example, however fictionalised it may be, includes in the early fifth century BCE plenty of recognisably plebeian names (including that of the first consul, Lucius Junius Brutus himself), which completely disappear in the second half of the century.

  That said, there is no doubt that long periods of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were fractured by social and political struggles between a privileged, hereditary minority and the rest. More than half a millennium later, the formal distinction between patrician and plebeian families still survived, as one of those ‘fossils’ I discussed earlier (p. 79), with a whiff of snobbery attached to it and not much more. It would be hard to explain why the distinction existed at all if the difference between the two groups had not once been a significant marker of political, social and economic power. There are also strong reasons to think that the year 367 BCE was a major turning point, even if not in quite the way Roman historians imagined it.

  For them, this was the revolutionary moment when it was decided not only that the consulship should be open to plebeians but that one of the two consuls must always be a plebeian. If so, the law was flouted as soon as it was made, as on several occasions in the following years two patrician names are recorded as consuls. Livy noticed the problem and unconvincingly suggests that the plebeians were satisfied with getting the right to stand and not so bothered about being elected. Much more likely is that there was no obligatory plebeian consul but that this was the year when the consulship as the major annual office of state was established on a permanent basis, presumably open to both patricians and plebeians.

  That would certainly fit with two other significant clues. First, even in the traditional Roman record, the entries for most of the years between the 420s and the 360s BCE name the mysterious ‘colonels’ as the chief officials of the state. That changes once and for all in 367 BCE, when consuls become the norm for the rest of Roman history. Second, it may well be that the senate was given its definitive form at this time. Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of ‘old men’ (senes), and that by the fifth century BCE it was already a fully fledged institution operating much as it did in 63 BCE. One highly technical entry in an ancient Roman dictionary implies a very different version, suggesting that it was only around the middle of the fourth century BCE that the senate was established as a permanent body with lifelong members rather than being just an ad hoc group of friends and advisors to whatever officials were in charge, with no continuity from one year, or even one day, to the next. If this is correct (and, of course, not all arcane pieces of technical information necessarily are), then it backs up the idea that the Roman political system took its characteristic form in the mid fourth century BCE. Whatever the precursors, whatever elements such as assemblies or the census, may long have been in place, Rome did not look distinctively ‘Roman’ for more than a century after 509 BCE.

  That means that what we find outlined on Barbatus’ tomb is not a traditional career of a traditional member of the Roman elite, though that is how he was later seen. Buried sometime in the early third century BCE, Barbatus was in fact a representative of the relatively new Republican order at home – and, as we shall now see, outside.

  The outside world: Veii and Rome

  The expansion of Roman power through Italy was dramatic. It is easy to be dazzled, or appalled, by Rome’s later overseas empire, which eventually amounted to more than 2 million square miles, while taking for granted the idea that Italy was Roman. But the transformation of the small town by the Tiber in 509 BCE into a polity of more than 5,000 square miles in the 290s BCE, with effective control over at least half the Italian peninsula, and more to come, is almost as striking. How did that happen? And when?

  Rome’s relations with the outside world were entirely unremarkable, so far as we can tell, until around 400 BCE. Its trading relations with the wider Mediterranean had been no more than typical for an Italian town. Its direct interactions were mainly local, above all with the Latin communities to the south, which shared a common language, a sense of common ancestry and several common festivals and sacred sites with Rome. The most that can be said is that by the end of the sixth century BCE the Romans probably had some kind of control over some of the other Latins. Both Cicero and the historian Polybius (a shrewd Greek observer of Rome, who features prominently in the next chapter) claim to have seen documents, or ‘treaties’, from that period suggesting that Rome was then the leading player in this small, local Latin world. And, as we have seen, the story of the fifth century BCE suggests more or less annual bouts of fighting but on a limited scale, in whatever grandiose terms it was later lauded. Quite simply, if there had been serious casualties every year for decades, the little town of Rome would not have survived.

  The moment of change came near the start of the fourth century BCE, with two events that play a leading, and hugely mythologised, role in all ancient accounts of Rome’s expansion: the Roman destruction of the nearby town of Veii under the heroic Camillus in 396 BCE, and the destruction of Rome by Gauls in 390 BCE. What lay behind Rome’s clash with Veii is completely unknown, but it was written up as if it were Italy’s equivalent of the Trojan War: the ten-year siege that it took to capture the town, equalling the ten-year siege of Troy; and the victorious Romans eventually popping up inside the city from a tunnel under the Temple of Juno, as the equivalent of the Trojan Horse. The reality of the ‘conquest’ (which is probably too grand a term) must have been much more modest. This was not a clash of superpowers. Veii was a pros
perous town, a little smaller than Rome, and just 10 miles away across the Tiber.

  Yet the consequences of Roman victory were significant, even if not in the way suggested by Roman writers, who emphasised the enslavement of the population, with all their goods and chattels taken as spoils, and the total destruction of the town. Three hundred and fifty years later the poet Propertius conjured up a desolate picture of Veii in his day, as the home of no more than sheep and a few ‘idle shepherds’. This is much more a moral lesson in the perils of defeat than an accurate description (Propertius may never have been to the place), for the archaeology of the site points to a very different truth. Although there may have been vicious looting, enslavement at the moment of Roman victory and an influx of new settlers, most of the local sanctuaries remained in operation as they had been before, the town remained occupied, even if on a smaller scale, and such evidence as we have of the countryside farms points to continuity rather than rupture.

  The important change is of a different kind. Rome annexed Veii and its land, instantly increasing the size of Roman territory by about 60 per cent. Soon after, four new geographical tribes of Roman citizens were created, to include Veii, its indigenous inhabitants as well as new settlers. There are hints of other important developments at roughly the same time, possibly connected. Livy claims that it was in the run-up to the siege of Veii that Roman soldiers were first paid, from Roman taxes. Whether literally true or not (and whatever they were paid in, it was not yet coin), this may well be an indication of a move towards a more centralised organisation of Roman armies and the decline of private warfare.

  Defeat soon followed victory. The story went that in 390 BCE a band of Gauls – possibly a tribe on the move looking for land or, more likely, a well-trained posse of mercenaries looking for work further south – routed a Roman army on the river Allia, not far from the city. The Romans apparently did little more than run away, and the Gauls marched on to take Rome. One apocryphal tale describes how a virtuous plebeian, the aptly named Marcus Caedicius (‘disaster teller’), heard the voice of some unknown god warning him that Gauls were approaching, but his report was ignored because of his lowly status. It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too.

  Roman storytelling gave extravagant coverage to the capture of the city, with various acts of heroism mitigating the widespread destruction. Another poor man gave proof of plebeian piety when he threw his wife and children out of his cart and gave a lift to the Vestal Virgins, who were evacuating their sacred emblems and talismans to safety in the nearby town of Caere. Many elderly aristocrats decided simply to face the inevitable and sat patiently at home waiting for the Gauls, who for a moment mistook the old men for statues before massacring them. Meanwhile, Camillus, briefly in exile for the alleged embezzlement of spoils, returned just in time to stop the Romans from paying a large ransom to the Gauls, to dissuade his compatriots from simply abandoning the city and moving to Veii and to take charge of refounding the city. Or that at least is one version. A less honourable telling of the story has the Gauls triumphantly carrying off the ransom.

  This is another case of Roman exaggeration. The various stories, which became commonplaces of Roman cultural memory, offered important patriotic lessons: in placing the claims of country above family, in bravery in the face of certain defeat, and in the dangers of measuring the worth of the city in terms of gold. The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate. There is, however, no archaeological evidence for the kind of massive destruction that later Romans imagined, unless those traces of burning now dated to around 500 BCE are in fact, as archaeologists once thought, the remains of a Gallic rampage a hundred years later.

  28. An early twentieth-century drawing (from an earlier photograph) of the remains of the Servian Wall near Rome’s central train station. Sections of this fortification still greet travellers emerging from Roma Termini, though they are now rather bleakly enclosed behind railings.

  The one clear surviving mark of the ‘sack’ on the Roman landscape is the vast defensive city wall, of which some impressive sections are still visible, constructed after the departure of the Gauls and built with some particularly durable stone that was one of the products of Rome’s new territory around Veii. But there were powerful reasons why this defeat was a useful episode for Roman historians to stress. It set the scene for Roman anxieties about invaders from over the Alps, of whom Hannibal was the most dangerous, but not the only one. It helped to explain why so little hard information survived for early Rome (it had gone up in flames), and so it marked the start, in ancient terms, of ‘modern history’. It answered the question of why in the later Republic the city of Rome, despite its world renown, was such an ill-planned rabbit warren: the Romans had had to rebuild hurriedly when the Gauls left. And it opened a new chapter in Rome’s relations with the outside world.

  The Romans versus Alexander the Great

  What followed was a revolution in the size, scale, location and consequence of Roman conflict. True, the basic pattern of more or less annual warfare continued. Ancient writers thrilled to a long list of Roman battles fought in the fourth century BCE, celebrating, and no doubt exaggerating, heroic victories while lamenting a handful of shameful defeats and humiliating walkovers. The Battle of the Caudine Forks, in 321 BCE, at which the South Italian Samnites trounced the Romans, became almost as resonant as the Battle of the Allia or the sack of Rome seventy years earlier – even though it was not really a battle at all. The Romans were trapped in a narrow mountain gully, the Forks, with no water, and they simply surrendered.

  Yet between the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE, the manpower involved in these conflicts increased dramatically. Campaigns were fought further and further from Rome. Whereas Veii was 10 miles up the road, Sentinum was some two hundred miles away, across the Apennines. And the arrangements made between Rome and the defeated had far-reaching consequences for the future. The military impact of Rome by the end of the fourth century BCE was so great that Livy felt it worthwhile to compare Roman prowess with that of the world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India. Livy wondered who would have won, the Romans or the Macedonians, if they had come head to head, a military conundrum that armchair generals still ponder.

  There were two particularly significant conflicts in Italy in this period. First was the so-called Latin War, fought against Rome’s Latin neighbours between 341 and 338 BCE. Shortly after followed the ‘Samnite Wars’, the occasion of Barbatus’ victories. They were fought in phases between 343 and 290 BCE against a group of communities based in the mountainous parts of southern Italy: Samnites, who were much less rough and primitive than it suited the Romans to portray them but less urbanised than those in many other parts of the peninsula. Both of these ‘wars’ are rather artificial constructions, isolating two enemies and giving their names to the much more widespread, endemic fighting of the period, from a decidedly Romano-centric point of view (no Samnite ever fought a ‘Samnite War’). That said, they do spotlight some important changes.

  According to the usual story, the first was prompted by a revolt of the Latins against the dominant position of the Romans in the region. It remained a local conflict, but it was notable, even revolutionary, for the arrangements made afterwards between the Romans and the various Latin communities. For these gave Roman citizenship to vast numbers of the defeated, in numerous towns throughout central Italy, on a scale that went far beyond the precedent set at Veii. Whether this was a gesture of generosity, as many Roman writers interpreted it, or a mechanism of oppression, as it may well have seemed to those who found Roman citizenship imposed upon them, it was a crucial stage in the changing definition of what it mean
t to be ‘Roman’. And it brought, as we shall soon see, enormous changes to the structure of Roman power.

  Almost fifty years later, the decades of Samnite Wars ended, with more than half the peninsula under Rome’s thumb in various ways, from treaties of ‘friendship’ to direct control. Roman writers presented these wars as if they were a struggle between two states for Italian supremacy. They were certainly not that, but the scale of the conflict was something new and set the stage for the future. At the Battle of Sentinum, the Romans faced a large group of enemies (‘alliance’ may be too formal a word for it): the Samnites themselves, as well as Etruscans and Gauls from the far north of the peninsula. The sheer number of combatants seems to have attracted the attention of Duris of Samos, who recorded a vast but implausible total of 100,000 Samnite and allied casualties. Roman writers saw this as a particularly heroic victory. It even became the theme of a jingoistic Roman tragedy two hundred years later, complete with a tragic chorus of Roman soldiers and featuring one of the Roman commanders who gave up his life to ensure his army’s success. But they too debated, as modern scholars have continued to do, just how big this biggest of all battles was. Livy had no patience with estimates on the scale of Duris’ or with even more inflated figures he came across in his researches. Whether his estimate of Roman forces at around 16,000 men (plus as many allies) is correct, it is impossible to know. One thing is certain, however: this was a different military world from the low-level skirmishes of the fifth century BCE.