SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  The Battle of Cannae and the whole history of the Second Punic War have mesmerised generals, pundits and historians ever since. Probably no war has been refought so often in so many studies and lecture rooms or been scrutinised so intently by the military men of the modern world, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Field Marshal Montgomery and Norman Schwarzkopf. Its causes remain as clouded in speculation and second-guessing as they ever were. Retrospectively it became for the Romans another clash of superpowers, and the stuff of epic poetry. Virgil’s Aeneid even gives it a mythic origin in Roman prehistory, when the Carthaginian queen Dido, abandoned by her lover Aeneas (on his way to found Rome), throws herself to her death onto a funeral pyre – cursing him and his whole race. In reality, it is hard to fathom either the Roman or the Carthaginian aims. Carthage, in its prime position on the North African coast, with impressive harbours and a grander cityscape than contemporary Rome, had wide trading interests in the western Mediterranean and might well have had reason to distrust the growing power of its Italian rival. Ancient and modern writers have pointed, in varying degrees, to Rome’s provocation of Hannibal in Spain and Hannibal’s grudge against Rome for its victory in the First Punic War. At the latest count, there are more than thirty versions of what really lay behind the conflict.

  For many analysts, the strategic choices of the Romans and Carthaginians have been particularly intriguing, and revealing. On Hannibal’s side, these go far beyond the favourite puzzles about what elephant route he might have taken across the Alps or whether his reported trick of breaking open Alpine rocks by pouring vinegar on them could ever have worked (probably not). The main issue has always been why on earth, after the stunning victory at Cannae, he did not go on to take the city of Rome while he had the chance but instead gave the Romans time to recover. Livy imagines one of Hannibal’s officers, by the name of Maharbal, saying to him: ‘You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you don’t know how to exploit it.’ Montgomery is only one of the many later generals who have agreed with Maharbal. Hannibal was a brilliant soldier and dashing adventurer who had the final prize within his grasp, but for some unfathomable reason (loss of nerve or some flaw of character) he failed to take it. Hence his tragic glamour.

  The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style, between on the one hand Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator – the last three names, ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism – and on the other Scipio Africanus. Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’). For some observers, this canny strategy largely won the day. Despite his close association with Africanus, Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy, and even the British left-wing Fabian Society adopted his name and example – the message being, ‘if you want the revolution to be successful, you must, like Fabius, bide your time’. But there have always been those who have thought Fabius a slowcoach or a ditherer rather than a clever strategist, in contrast to the much more dashing Scipio Africanus, who eventually took over the command and persuaded the senate to allow him to move the war into Africa and finish Hannibal off there. In describing that senate meeting, Livy scripts a largely imaginary debate between the cautious, elderly Fabius and Africanus, the energetic rising star. It polarises not only their different approaches to the war but also different ways of understanding Roman virtus. Did ‘manliness’ necessarily mean speed and vigour? Could it be heroic to be slow?

  Retrospective generalship can be misleading, however, especially when it comes to re-creating what happened in any individual battle. Talk of tactics, and all the splendid military diagrams that usually accompany it, offers a highly sanitised version of Roman warfare and suggests that we know more about the face of Roman battle than we do – even about such a momentous engagement as Cannae. It is true that there are lengthy accounts in Polybius (who may have consulted eyewitnesses), Livy and other historians, but these are incompatible in details, hard to follow and in places almost nonsensical. We do not even know where exactly the battle took place, and the different proposed sites are the result of trying to match up conflicting versions in ancient writers with the layout of the land, as it might have been then, not forgetting the changed course of the nearby river. What is more, despite the almost mystical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae, which are still on the syllabus of military academies, they amounted to little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy. This was the one trick that ancient generals always tried if they could, for it offered the best chance of encircling the opposition and the only reliable way of killing or capturing them in large numbers.

  Indeed, it is hard to see how more sophisticated tactics could have been deployed in an ancient battle with more than 100,000 men on the field. How the commanders could have issued effective instructions to their armies or how they could even have known what was going on in different areas of the fighting are almost complete mysteries. Add to that the polyglot forces, whether multinational mercenaries or non-Latin-speaking allies of the Romans, strange star turns (some of the Gauls apparently fought naked), cavalrymen trying to manoeuvre and fight without the benefit of stirrups (a later invention) and, in some engagements (though not at Cannae, as Hannibal’s had all died by then), wounded elephants running wild and charging back into their own lines, and the picture is chaos. Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.’ He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.

  Nevertheless, Cannae was indeed a crucial turning point in the Second Punic War, and in the longer history of Roman military expansion, precisely because the Romans lost so many men there and nearly ran out of cash. The basic bronze coin – the as – was reduced in weight over the course of the war, from almost 300 grams to just over 50. And Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis. Almost any other ancient state in that position would have been forced to surrender. Nothing underscores better the importance of Rome’s enormous reserves of citizen and allied manpower than the single fact that it continued to fight the war. To judge from Hannibal’s actions after Cannae, he perhaps saw this point too. It may not have been a loss of nerve that dissuaded him from marching on Rome. Realising that allied manpower sustained Rome’s strength, he directed himself to the slow process of winning over the Italian allies – with some success, but never in sufficient numbers to undermine Roman durability.

  That must also have been in Polybius’ mind when he chose to insert into his Histories a long digression on the strength of the Roman political system, as it was at the time of Cannae. His overall aim was to explain why the Romans had conquered the world, and part of that explanation lay in the strength and stability of Rome’s internal political structures. His account is the first more or less contemporary description of Roman political life to survive (Polybius was looking back fifty years or so but also mixing in observations of his own time); and at the same time it is the first attempt at a theoretical analysis of how Roman politics worked, one that sets the agenda even now.

  Polybius on the politics of Rome

  Polybius, who knew Rome as both an ene
my and a friend, was uniquely well placed to reflect on the rise of the city and on its institutions. Born into the political aristocracy of a town in the Peloponnese, he was in his thirties in 168 BCE, when Aemilius Paullus defeated King Perseus, and he found himself one of 1,000 Greek detainees taken to Rome as part of the political purge, or precautionary measures, that followed. Most of them were placed under a light-touch regime of house arrest and scattered among the towns of Italy. Polybius, who already had a reputation as a writer, was luckier. He quickly fell in with Aemilianus (they apparently met over the loan of some books) and his family and was allowed to stay in Rome, where he became the young man’s de facto tutor and as close as ‘father to son’. Snatches of Polybius’ advice to Aemilianus were still being quoted, or misquoted, more than two hundred years later. ‘Never come back from the Forum,’ he is supposed to have urged, ‘until you have made at least one new friend.’

  The surviving hostages were released around 150 BCE. Only 300 were still alive, and one outspoken Roman is supposed to have complained about the senate wasting its time ‘debating whether some elderly Greeks should be buried by undertakers here or in Greece’. But Polybius was soon back with his Roman associates, travelling with the army to Carthage and acting as an intermediary in the negotiations that followed the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE. He was also still writing his Histories, which ended up spreading over forty books, mainly focusing on the years 220 to 167 BCE, with a brief flashback to the First Punic War and an epilogue to bring the story down to 146 BCE. Whoever was Polybius’ main intended readership, Greek or Roman, his work became an important reference point for later Romans trying to understand their city’s rise. It was certainly on Livy’s desk when he was writing his History.

  32. This image of Polybius was put up in the second century CE in a small town in Greece by a man who claimed to be one of the historian’s descendants. His only ‘portrait’ to survive, it can hardly be a realistic likeness. In fact, it casts him in the guise of warriors from fifth century BCE classical Greece, 300 years before his time. To make things more complicated, the original sculpture has been lost and survives only as the plaster cast shown here.

  Predictably, modern historians have found it hard to know quite where to fix the boundary between Polybius the Roman hostage and critic of Roman rule and Polybius the Roman collaborator. He certainly sometimes performed a deft balancing act between his different loyalties, giving behind-the-scenes advice at one point to a distinguished Syrian hostage on how to slip away from his detention, while carefully insisting in his Histories that on the day of the great escape he himself was at home, ‘ill in bed’. But whatever Polybius’ political stance, he had the advantage of knowing both sides of the Roman story, and he had the opportunity to quiz some of the leading Roman players. He dissected Rome’s internal organisation – which he insisted underpinned its success abroad – from a vantage point that combined a couple of decades of first-hand experience with all the sophistication of the Greek political theory in which he had been trained back home. His work is, in effect, one of the earliest surviving attempts at comparative political anthropology.

  Not surprisingly, his account is a wonderful combination of acute observation, bafflement and occasionally desperate attempts to theorise Roman politics in his own terms. He scrutinised his Roman surroundings and his new Roman friends with care. He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or ‘fear of the gods’, in controlling Roman behaviour, and he was impressed with the systematic efficiency of Roman organisation; hence his important – but now often skipped – discussion of military arrangements, with its teach-yourself rules on laying out an army camp, where the consul’s tent should be pitched, how to plan a legionary baggage train, and the savage system of discipline. He was also sharp enough to see beneath the surface of various Roman customs and favourite pastimes to their underlying social significance. All those stories of Roman valour, heroism and self-sacrifice that he must have heard – told and retold around military campfires or at dinner tables – were not simply for amusement, he concluded. Their function was to encourage the young to imitate the gallant deeds of their ancestors; they were one aspect of the spirit of emulation, ambition and competition that he saw running right through Roman elite society.

  Another aspect of this – one that he makes into an extended, if slightly ghoulish, case study – was to be found in the funerals of ‘distinguished men’. Again, Polybius must have witnessed enough of these to draw out their deeper significance. The body, he explains, was carried into the Forum and placed on the rostra, normally propped up somehow in an upright position, so it was visible to a large audience. In the procession that followed, family members wore masks made in the likeness of the dead man’s ancestors and dressed in the costume appropriate to the offices each had held (purple-bordered togas and so on), as if they were all present ‘living and breathing’. The funeral address, delivered by a family member, started with the achievements of the corpse on the rostra but then went through the careers of all the other characters, who by this time were sitting on ivory, or at least ivory-veneered, chairs lined up next to the dead man. ‘The most important upshot of this,’ Polybius concludes, ‘is that the younger generation is inspired to endure all suffering for the common good, in the hope of winning the glory that belongs to the brave.’

  This is perhaps a rather rosy view of the competitive side of Roman culture. Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic. Even before that, it is a fair guess that for every young Roman inspired to live up to the achievements of his ancestors, there was another oppressed by the weight of tradition and expectation that fell upon him – as Polybius might have realised if he had chosen to reflect on all the stories in Roman culture about sons who killed their fathers. But it is a view nicely encapsulated in the words of another epitaph in the tomb of the Scipios, which it is tempting to think Polybius might have seen: ‘I produced offspring. I sought to equal the deeds of my father. I won the praise of my ancestors so that they are glad that I was born to them. My career has ennobled my family line.’

  At the heart of Polybius’ argument, however, lay bigger questions. How could you characterise the Roman political system as a whole? How did it work? There was never a written Roman constitution, but Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes) – represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people represented the democratic element. This was not democracy or ‘the people’ in the modern sense: there was no such thing as universal suffrage in the ancient world – women and slaves never had formal political rights anywhere. Polybius meant the group of male citizens as a whole. As in classical Athens, they – and they alone – elected the state officials, passed or rejected laws, made the final decision on going to war and acted as a judicial court for major offences.

  The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed. The consuls, for example, might have had full, monarchical command on campaign, but they had to be elected by the people in the first place, and they depended on the senate for funding – and it was the senate which decided whether the successful general should be awarded a triumph at the end of his campaign, and a vote of the people was required to ratify any treaty that might be made. And so on. It was, Polybius argued, such balances across the political system that produced the internal stability on which Roman external success was built.


  This is a clever piece of analysis, sensitive to the tiny differences and subtle nuances which distinguish one political system from another. To be sure, in some respects Polybius tries to shoehorn the political life that he witnessed at Rome into a Greek analytical model that does not entirely fit. Saddling his discussion with terms like ‘democracy’ is, for example, deeply misleading. ‘Democracy’ (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to ‘mob rule’. There is little point in asking how ‘democratic’ the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy. Yet, in another way, by nudging his readers to keep sight of the people in their picture of Roman politics and to look beyond the power of the elected officials and the aristocratic senate, Polybius sparked an important debate that is still alive today. How influential was the popular voice in Roman Republican politics? Who controlled Rome? How should we characterise this Roman political system?