The Sword of Rome

by Jeremiah McCall

  Marcellus, however, did not live even to witness the victory of Scipio over Hannibal. Indeed, it would be very interesting to know, had Marcellus lived – he would have been in his seventies – whether he would have claimed the right to command the invasion of Africa and what opposition that might have inspired. Ultimately, though, Roman tradition and writing preserved his name and glory alongside Scipio’s. Most immediately, of course, his story was critical to his descendants. Through his deeds, Marcellus firmly established his family in the highest ranks of the aristocracy. Though there had been significant gaps in the office-holding patterns of the family before our subject – his father, it may be recalled, seems not to have held any major political office – Marcellus’ son held the consulship several times, and his son after that. By the mid-first century BC and the very end of the Republic, the Claudius Marcellus family was a very distinguished branch of the Roman aristocracy. Members of the Marcellus family continued to hold consulships until the very end of the Republic: a Marcus Claudius Marcellus was consul in 50BC and a great rival of the Gaius Julius Caesar who, the next year, would march against Rome and begin the rounds of civil wars that would dismantle the Republic. Despite siding against Caesar, the Marcelli continued to prosper. Indeed, Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar who would come to be the first of the Roman emperors, was tied through his sister’s marriage to the Claudius Marcellus family. He had a nephew and son-in-law named Marcus Claudius Marcellus, whom he particularly favoured as a potential heir before the young man’s untimely death in 23 BC. When the young man died, the grief-stricken Octavian – Augustus, as he was now titled – delivered a eulogy that drew upon the story of the famous patriarch from the third century.64

  These descendants, as all aristocrats hoped to do, capitalized on the fame of the great warrior and commander. While the war against Hannibal continued on, Marcellus’ son made sure that the temples to Honos and Virtus were dedicated, and he sponsored the playwright Naevius as he completed and staged the play Clastidium, which told of the spectacular victory won against the Gauls in 222. These feats were surely commemorated at least once a generation at funerals for members of the Marcellus family. Nor was this the only time. On at least two occasions in the last century of the Republic, relatives of the family who happened to be officers in charge of the mint, issued coins referring to Marcellus’ achievements. One issued around 100 referred back to the victory over Syracuse. The other, issued perhaps in the late 40s BC, had the likeness of the general on the obverse and a picture of the spolia opima in the temple of Jupiter on the reverse.65 Coins like this provided easy self-promotion for the latest generation of the Marcellus family.

  Then, of course, there was the treatment of his deeds by the historians and poets of the Augustan age and beyond, which we have encountered regularly in these pages. Livy and Augustus, both interested in reviving what they saw as ancient Roman morality, were particularly interested in heroes like Marcellus. He was the last – and possibly the first – to win the spolia opima, the one who bought the Romans time after Nola, the virtuous aristocrat without peer, symbol of the grit and fortitude that Augustus, Livy, and so many other Roman writers wished to praise after decades of upheaval and civil war. Although it is far from clear that Marcellus would have recognized himself underneath the layers of celebrity, this portrayal continued in later histories for as long as the Empire lasted. He had, in many ways, the consummately successful career of an aristocrat in the middle Republic.

  Conclusion

  The man died and the legend lived on. Ultimately, it is the man that concerns this book most. In the end, he had one of the most spectacular military and political careers of all when it came to aristocrats of the middle Republic. It is important to point out, however, that it is not at all clear that Marcellus was categorically a sounder strategist or tactician than other Roman generals of the period. Certainly, his cavalry victory at Clastidium suggested he was, at the very least, competent as a commander; elsewhere, as these chapters have explored, he clearly made some sound strategic and tactical decisions in the field. The same, though, could be said for others. Fabius had managed to conduct a successful war of attrition against Hannibal in 217, shadowing his enemy closely but only engaging at what seemed to be the most opportune of moments. His actions bought the Republic time to rally from the first two catastrophic defeats Hannibal inflicted. Claudius Nero was clearly also a sound strategist. As consul in 207, he kept Hannibal at bay in the south with the bulk of his army while marching with a portion hundreds of miles north to join his colleague Livius Salinator, defeating the invading Hasdrubal, and then returning to face Hannibal in the south. The Scipios in Spain made significant progress in that theatre until their demise, and, of course, Scipio Africanus concluded the war skillfully. These are only the most famous commanders from the period; a number of lesserknown generals executed their commands skillfully.

  One can go further. Regardless of his skills, Marcellus arguably had a military record no better than many of his rivals. Triumphing against the Gauls was spectacular, but others had done so, and would continue to do so. Indeed, his assault on Syracuse failed and he was forced to capture the city through treachery. Nothing unusual there; Fabius had to do the same with Tarentum, as did many other Roman commanders. Marcellus was defeated by Hannibal in at least one battle and never won a decisive victory against his army, however critical to morale the victory at Nola in 216 was. Marcellus certainly had a more respectable command record than most, but the evidence does not compel one to believe he was categorically a better general than his rivals.

  Indeed, command skill, however desirable, was not essential to political success in the middle Republic. It was noted previously that one of the foundations of aristocratic competition, the great leveler, was the critical assumption that any aristocrat possessed the technical skill necessary to command armies. It is worth considering that this was more than empty rhetoric designed to secure the interests of the aristocracy. There was truth to the claim that it did not require spectacular military skills for an aristocrat to command an army successfully. The best evidence is in the record: Roman armies were regularly commanded by amateurs in the Republic, yet the Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean. How was this possible? What role did a commander’s skills have in determining success in battle and war? The answer, of course, is that it depended. One could make poor strategic decisions and issue commands that were counterproductive if not destructive. Conversely, one could be a brilliant commander able to get every last bit of performance out of one’s troops and resources.

  One of the keys that enabled amateurs to command successfully in the Republic was the way that individuals and groups at several points within the system had input on important elements of strategy and tactics. Some decisions were ultimately left to the individual general, but the general would have many opportunities, if he chose, to gain insight from others. Generally speaking, in any given year, the senate determined the province in which a commander would be active. In the war against Hannibal, this was often tantamount to determining the enemy the general would fight. So the senate as a group played a role in hammering out the bare outlines of a commander’s strategy for the year. Sometimes they provided more than that: explicit instructions for cities to capture or garrison, regions to support or suppress, etc. None of this prevented generals from acting very independently in the field, and they often did so. The point is simply that a less-skilled strategist had the structure of the senate’s commands to follow as a guide.

  When it came to tactics, the great strength of the Roman military system came into play and offered a considerable edge to otherwise less-than-spectacular commanders. There were certainly more and less advantageous battlegrounds one could choose, and Roman commanders who made critical miscalculations assuredly contributed greatly to the death of thousands of Romans. Nevertheless, the manipular army refined over the many decades was a tactically sophisticated and effective system that functioned on a
basic level independently of the commander. The division of infantry into velites, hastati, principes, and triarii was firmly established by Marcellus’ day. The veteran soldiers could coach the new recruits, the experienced centurions and standard bearers kept the maniples in order, and the system perpetuated itself through several centuries. It was the collective wisdom of the veteran soldiers and centurions that must have kept the maniples functioning in their generally highly effective fashion. A consul might not have been in battle for a decade or more; an infantry soldier was liable to serve sixteen years in total,1 and, consequently, there would have been a great deal of collective experience in the ranks. Though we know far less than we would like to about the standard formations of the Roman infantry and their normal procedures of rotating maniples into and out of combat, these formations and procedures were clearly highly effective against the less articulated and less manoeuvrable phalanxes and war-bands of the Gauls, Greeks, and other Mediterranean powers.

  Furthermore, even though consuls might well be complete amateurs when it came to commanding field armies, they were certainly familiar with how the manipular system worked. In the middle Republic, Polybius asserts, anyone seeking political office first had to complete ten years of military service, or rather serve in the army in ten separate campaigns, since soldiers were not professionals who regularly served for continuous years at a stint.2 These years in military service, cavalry service more specifically, would give most any office holder a firm appreciation of how the army worked. Enough appreciation – and this was all that was required – to order the army into positions and set it into operation. Again, a brilliant strategist or tactician could certainly do great things with such an army. The procedures and experience contained in the system, however, made it possible for the merely adequate consul to succeed if he did not actively work against the system – like Varro, for example, when he packed the Roman legions too closely together at Cannae.

  So Marcellus may have been an excellent strategist or tactician – and at the least he was clearly skilled – but there is no reason why he had to be in order to win victories, and there is insufficient evidence to suggest he was qualitatively better than his chief rivals in this respect. He clearly did outshine his fellow aristocrats, however, when it came to his personal skill and daring as a warrior. His record for single combat was largely without parallel and the spolia opima was an extraordinary capstone to decades of distinction in this regard. Marcellus knew how to fight. Equally as important, however, he seems to have known how to leverage his personal skill and courage in battle to boost the morale of his soldiers. These were two of his critical skills.

  The leverage granted by his personal skill as a warrior laid the foundation for his extraordinary political success. As noted frequently, Marcellus was not unique in that he pursued his own self-interest, sought opportunities to advance his own status and reputation. Rather, he was uncommon in how good he was at the game. Successful aristocrats developed the rhetorical and spectacular displays of virtus to a fine point, but few could match Marcellus’ claims. His initial honours and commendations won as a single combatant; the spolia opima gained through slaying a commander and the subsequent dedication of the temple to Honos and Virtus; his sacking of Syracuse, culminating in a triumph and ovation; all of these actions catapulted him to greater glory.

  Certainly, Marcellus seems to have been more assertive than some, advancing claims to prizes that went beyond what might be seen as the normal limits of aristocratic competition. The spolia opima was one of these. Bolder still was the maneuver to shift a lynchpin in the Republican system itself and become the second of two plebeian consuls. The celebration of two victory ceremonies for one success was probably the least of the three in terms of innovation, but still one that went beyond the normal rules of competition. Then there was the coup de grace – personally receiving the patronage of a foreign city and island and being honoured as a Hellenistic-style god-king by the inhabitants of Syracuse.

  With the exception of the last honour, which Marcellus could easily and perhaps honestly note he never actually sought from Syracuse and could not prevent the Syracusans from granting, there is a common thread in these seemingly excessive grabs for honour. In most cases, he could claim to be drawing upon the ancient customs of the Romans, keeping the traditions of the Republic alive. This was certainly the case for the spolia opima, the ovation, and the triumph Monte Albano. In every case, Marcellus could claim that he was simply acting in the service of the Republic and following the will of the gods. Whether it was claiming victories in battle, serving in offices beyond the norm, even in ransacking an enemy city and bringing the wealth to aggrandize his temple, Marcellus seems to have claimed that he only acted as the servant of the Republic and its people and its gods.

  Indeed, who could gainsay him? It may seem to some modern readers that Marcellus must have been disingenuous in his claims to have served the Republic – that these were simply pretexts to clothe his ambition for offices and honours. That misses the point. Service to the Republic was the arena in which these aristocrats competed. It has been argued on more than one occasion that the Republic itself was founded so that aristocrats could gain more glory than they could under a king. As noted before, the danger was always that intense competition between these aristocrats would go too far and one or a few would come to dominate the state, effectively hoarding all the offices, glories, and honour, and turning the Republic back into a monarchy, in fact, if not in title. The means of preventing this was to harness competition to the needs of the Republic, to define the field of competition as the needs of the Republic. That way, aristocrats had their glory and honour but the system persisted. This was not a system scientifically engineered to remain balanced. It was a set of conventions, customs, and practices that developed over time and led to the behaviours seen in the aristocrats of the middle Republic.

  On several occasions throughout this biography, we have looked at limits to competition, the ways that the aristocracy as a whole, or individual rivals, put the brakes on their opponents to keep them from getting too powerful. Marcellus’ career provides such an exceptional means of examining this behaviour precisely because he was so successful in general and because many of his successes took place during the Roman struggle for existence in the second Punic War. One might suppose that if ever there were a Roman so successful in promoting his reputation that could ignore the attacks of his rivals, it was Marcellus, and if ever there were a time when the demands of the Republic were so great, its need so dire, that the aristocracy would cease infighting and band together, it would be the Second Punic War.

  Neither was the case. Marcellus was exceptional in his achievements, yet perfectly regular in the setbacks he suffered from the challenges of rivals and opponents. They invoked the displeasure of the gods, claimed he had violated technical points of law and religious propriety, and even challenged his virtus. It is too much, of course, to assert that Roman senators saw themselves as caretakers of a system of competition, that they saw themselves in any way as parts of a whole, as this modern analysis suggests. Rather, they simply behaved as Roman aristocrats of their time when they checked Marcellus, but this behaviour was a critical part of the system. In checking Marcellus, they promoted their own interests, limited his ability to realize his ambitions, and no doubt largely unconsciously, kept the system functioning. In short, as a number of historians have noted, the Roman aristocrats of the middle Republic shared an essentially unconscious consensus that there were rules to competition, limits to the glory one could seek, and legitimate channels by which to seek and block glory. Marcellus’ claims to honours illustrate the many ways one could claim glory in the name of service; his rivals’ challenges illustrate some of the many ways those claims could be thwarted.

  It is notable how flexible the Romans were in the rules and points they produced for their competition. Roman aristocrats tended to produce, as established points of law, points that were anything but e
stablished, depending on the particular issue and, more importantly, particular political rivalries at stake. Just as the common threads for Marcellus’ claims were service to the Republic and respect for the traditions, mostly, the common thread for opposition to Marcellus was the claim that he had or would violate the established order of things. The pattern is clear: the argument was raised that Marcellus had not satisfied the requirements for a triumph, when there were no such formal requirements; some aristocrats claimed his election as the second plebeian consul offended the gods, though the electoral assembly seems to have had little qualm about casting their votes for him; some complained he had violated the rules for the treatment of enemies in wartime, when such rules were highly fluid; the priests declared that dedicating a temple to two gods would disrupt the normal ability of the Romans to detect the will of their divine benefactors, but only did so more than a decade after the initial vow of the temple.

  It will not do, however, to conclude that these arguments were purely superficial, able to be bluntly reduced to: ‘I don’t like Marcellus/I don’t want Marcellus to get more glory, therefore I oppose motions that would do so.’ These debates were not simply squabbles over the distribution of honours. The Romans did not seize upon the importance of tradition and custom because they made useful tools for political competition. Rather, it was because Roman culture so valued tradition and custom that these were important measuring sticks for framing debates in the political arena, particularly when it came to the claims of an individual. When senators disapproved of Marcellus, it appears they tended to argue that he had been untraditional, immoderate, un-virtuous, and unlawful. When Marcellus defended himself, he argued in the same framework.