by Andrew Marr
Many military leaders have known that striking terror into your enemies’ hearts is half the road to victory. Roman practice, as the city extended its influence through central Italy, was straightforward. It was terroristic, or at least terror-based. If a city surrendered, it would become a vassal. If any resistance at all was offered, it was to be completely destroyed and every living thing in it slaughtered – right down to children, domestic pets, even the rats. Roman citizens were conscripted for army service and, as with the free Greek hoplites, citizenship and war-making, solidarity and attack, became intertwined ideas. Fighting in tight phalanxes with long spears and short, stabbing swords, the ancestors of the imperial legions were a fearsome force by the early 200s BC.
Success bred success. Cities intimidated into surrendering could provide new citizens, and therefore new soldiers; slaves poured in to take on other work. The Romans did not have the huge military might needed to destroy and take over the rest of Italy in a flash. It was the propaganda of their terrorism – surrender fast or you will regret it – combined with their ability to put an arm around the shoulders of the local elites, reassure them, and rule through them – that did the trick. So almost every victory produced more manpower to fuel the next one. After defeating the invading Gauls, who had once managed to sack Rome itself, the Romans were able to subdue their old foes to the north, and then the Greek colonies further south.
In the end, the Greek world could no longer ignore the upstart bully-boy city in the west. And they had, it seemed, a terror weapon to terrify even the Romans. War elephants, as we have seen, had arrived in the Greek world from India. For a while they seemed a transforming military force. One of the Greek rulers who deployed them was Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, who borrowed them from the Greek rulers of Egypt. A dashing, silver-armoured leader, Pyrrhus was asked for help against the Romans by one of the Greek states in Italy under attack. He brought his elephants to Italy, the first time they had been seen there, and won two victories against Rome.
What is extraordinary, however, is that the Romans, though awed by the creatures – and not believing they were mortal until one had its trunk severed – did not break. They held these inheritors of Alexander’s power to such bloody draws that Pyrrhus famously declared: ‘Another such victory, and we shall be lost.’ Later, the Romans tried to frighten the elephants by covering pigs in fat, then setting them on fire and driving the screaming animals at them. Nasty – but it seems to have worked because Pyrrhus eventually withdrew back to Greece, where he continued to use elephants to fight, until killed when an angry woman threw a roof-tile at him.13
For the Romans, this all turned out to be good preparation. They were about to go to war with Carthage and would soon confront more of the beasts, this time led by the man synonymous with elephant war, Hannibal.
Carthage, a Lost Future?
Among the great speculations of classical history has been the thought that Carthage, not Rome, might have won the Punic wars. Its greatest general Hannibal came within a whisker of success. After the horrendous battle of Cannae in 216 BC, which left between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans dead, the road to Rome lay almost undefended. Roman allies defected. Romans panicked. Hannibal was urged by his cavalry commander to march south and finish the city off. He did not, but for a short time he had a huge advantage. Had he taken Rome, our world might have been very different.
Carthage, which had survived for six centuries on the North African coast protected by huge harbour walls, was essentially a sea power, whose navy at the time was as large by tonnage as those of Britain, Spain or France in the 1700s. Its merchant ships traded with the Canary Islands, sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa, picked up tin from Britain and criss-crossed the Mediterranean. Perhaps a Carthaginian West would have sailed to America centuries before the Europeans actually did. Carthage was a great manufacturing power too, producing the fabulously expensive purple dye that coloured so distinctively Roman senators’ togas, plus strong wine, ceramics and metalwork of all kinds, and many sorts of cloth. Its fleet was mass-produced and then assembled at speed, like modern flat-pack furniture, a trick that would be forgotten until the rise of Venice – and which allowed the Romans to reverse-engineer Carthaginian vessels and make themselves seafarers too.
Carthage had her theatres, her famous orators, and a constitution which, although run first by kings and later by oligarchs, gave a strong voice to the ordinary citizens. Many of them emigrated and set up colonies themselves. In his Politics Aristotle, writing nearly two hundred years before Carthage finally fell to the Romans, warmly praises Carthaginian institutions: ‘The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal to [it]. The Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.’14 By the time of its destruction Carthage was certainly one of the greatest cities on the planet; its population was much larger than Rome’s at the time. And of course, it was in Africa. A classical Mediterranean world whose dominant power was in North Africa, not on the Italian peninsula, would have felt different in ways we can barely imagine.
There were darker sides to Carthaginian life. Roman critics claimed the Carthaginians engaged in child sacrifice, as did their Phoenician forebears, though modern historians are sceptical and after Cannae, the Romans resorted to it too. The Carthaginian army, unlike the Roman, was mainly composed of mercenaries, from Spain, Numidia, Libya and the Balearic islands.15 Only around three thousand Carthaginians fought as infantry, in the so-called Sacred Band. It seems to have been a suspicious society, to the point of paranoia about would-be tyrants. Unlike Roman generals enjoying their triumphs, Carthaginian generals had to risk being plotted against and even executed when they returned from their victories. Yet with all that said, the utter destruction of Carthage when the Romans finally won the third Punic war leaves a terrible gap in the historical record of the Mediterranean. We have no detailed idea of what their buildings looked like – just some foundations and pillars to go on.
We have none of their writing, poetry, plays, art, histories, family stories or hopes. It is as if, after the Second World War, nothing written in German – no German poetry – nor any German music, or buildings, survived. Had the fortunes of war gone slightly differently, of course, there would have been no imperial Rome, either. Would schoolchildren now be brushing up on their Punic verbs, studying the epic sea voyages of Carthaginian heroes to the Caribbean, listing jokes made about Hamilcar by Carthaginian orators? Sometimes, seeking deep causes, we create the illusion of inevitability. It is possible that Carthage ultimately fell because it lacked the flexible and open attitude to citizenship and the sinewy political system of the Roman republic. It is equally possible that it fell because of a few bad decisions on battlefields. Apparently insignificant causes can trigger momentous changes.
At any rate, after long years of bloodbath and struggle across Italy, Sicily and North Africa, Carthage finally fell. After his epic crossing of the Alps, when it was his cavalry rather than his elephants that mattered most, and his bloody victories over the legions, Hannibal’s ravaging of Italy eventually ended when he was defeated by Scipio ‘Africanus’ and sent into exile by his own people. Carthage would finally be annihilated in 146 BC, wiped out in an orgy of Roman killing, rape and destruction.
Once Carthage had gone, Rome could turn on the Greek states that had inherited Alexander’s world, on Macedonia, and the Seleucid empire, which ran from present-day Turkey to the steppes. As a system of powerful military empires, the Greek world was starting to collapse. In its ideas about beauty, philosophy, the arts and mathematics it would have a very long half-life, almost as the conscience of the Roman world. Some of its greatest thinkers and inventions were yet to be born. But it is from the fall of Carthage and the Greek kingdoms to the Roman legions that we can date the real beginning of the imperial Roman world.
Money and Politics
Why? Because the Roman republic, with its boasted aus
terity and virtue, its all-in-this-together patriotism, could not survive its own success. The plunder that began to pour in, and would arrive in ever greater quantities, corrupted its political system. A sudden new source of wealth tends to corrupt any political settlement. The Roman system of taxation and spending was rackety, to say the least. The wars allowed massive personal fortunes to be accumulated over which the state had virtually no control. It is estimated that rich Romans were, for instance, about twice as rich as the wealthiest Han Chinese aristocrats. To start with, the poor were bought off with subsidized food and public entertainment. By 167 BC, direct taxes on Roman citizens went altogether, replaced by ‘tribute’ from Sicily, Greece, Spain and Africa.
Roman magistrates sent out to govern the equivalent in acreage of New South Wales were allowed to enrich themselves, returning wealthy enough to bribe and organize their way to greater power at home. Corruption became endemic in the politics of the city. Yet the poor, still paying indirect taxes, had a hard time of it. As the super-rich bought up farms and ran them with slaves, the peasants who had once been seen as the backbone of Roman virtue were displaced and sent jobless to the city. In this period we learn of a new disease, luxuria, or decadence, or simply ‘too much’. The long decades of constant fighting, and the arrival of ever more captives, cowed allies and slaves, resulted in the Roman armies ceasing to be militias of citizens serving their time and becoming semi-independent and dangerous bodies.
Class war began to brew. On the one hand, the new decadence was horrifying Roman moralists. Greek homosexuality seems to have become more acceptable and the price of boy lovers rocketed. Gladiatorial fights had always been popular in Rome – they went back to Etruscan models – but now the ‘games’ became ever more lavish, featuring exotic animals and fighters, as rich office-seekers tried to buy popularity. Yet at the same time, hordes of displaced peasants and city workers struggling to live, the easily mobilized mobs of Roman politics, crowded the streets. Radical orators, most famously the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, called for land reform and the cleaning-up of the political scene. Both were murdered in an orgy of violence, which started to sweep through Rome. Members of the aristocratic Senate seethed at the possibility of reform, though they were divided on the issue; eventually a military hard man, Sulla, took Rome to the edge of civil war before making himself dictator and increasing the powers of the senators and the army.
It is a sequence familiar in the capitals of other great empires: the extreme inequality created as loot from abroad pours in; the corruption of voting systems and of representative institutions; hoarse cries for change from the streets; the undertow of violence; the mailed fist as the army strides in to ‘clean things up’. The imbalance of power created by empire, unbalances the empire itself. Roman life spun out of order, out of all control. Senators continued to act as if they were living in the old republic, speechifying and plotting. But the armies could no longer be trusted and social unrest worsened. The huge slave revolt begun by the gladiator Spartacus in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius shook this slave society to its core. His 70,000-strong force of former gladiators and farmers defeated two armies in the year 71 BC. (They would finally be crushed by the combined forces of most of Rome’s available military power.) There was a rebel consul loose in Spain, and more trouble in Asia. But worse than all of this were the measures that had to be taken to restore order.
Returned from the east, Pompey was back in town – or rather, just outside Rome, waiting with his legions. The old Roman custom had been to award victorious generals a ‘triumph’, a processional parade through the city. The victor would ride in his chariot, a slave behind him reminding him that he was mortal. In front would be led his captives in chains, and perhaps some booty from the war. As Rome’s reach and appetite had grown, these triumphs had become more lavish and extreme, days of riotous civic partying. Pompey was awarded an unheard-of three triumphs, the last of which featured a jaw-dropping caravan of strange animals, glistening loot, defeated kings and priests, soldiers and money.
As it turned out, Pompey did not prove an adroit enough politician to seize power in quite the way his critics had feared. But there were now two other military aristocrats and super-rich rivals at large. Crassus, a thuggish soldier, was now a plutocrat, who in a hideous display of revenge after the Spartacus war had crucified on the main road north to Rome some six thousand captured rebels. The other was Julius Caesar.
Caesar is the most famous Roman, who gave us our calendars – indeed, our modern way of measuring time – and whose assassination is the climactic scene of Roman political life. Though hindsight is blinding and we must rely on Caesar-struck historians, it seems that he was extraordinary from an early age. A top-notch aristocratic youth allied to the wrong side, he had survived the murderous dictatorship of Sulla, when lists of those to be judicially murdered had been pasted up in the Forum. He became a soldier while still in his teens and made a name for himself, not least by taking revenge on pirates who had kidnapped him and then foolishly let him go. He zigzagged, double-crossed and bought his way upwards through the dangerous world of Roman politics, taking one position after another and paying for lavish games, until he finally reached what should have been the top, the consulship, in 59 BC. Caesar then plotted to bypass the Senate, using the money and connections of Crassus and Pompey to help fix a lucrative military command for himself afterwards. The greatest Roman orator, Cicero, who had thought he was playing Caesar along, was entirely outsmarted. Caesar got his way, evaded his many enemies, and began years of fighting beyond the Alps, slaughtering Gaulish and German tribes and reaching Britain, though not staying there very long.
Caesar knew that the route to power in Rome came from a combination of fame, of a kind only won on the battlefield, and great wealth, also best won by conquest. His campaigns abroad were also campaigns for power at home. As he fought – and he was a brilliant general – he wrote crisply propagandistic accounts of his campaigns so as to burnish his image. In them he reveals clear military thinking, an ability to bounce back from reverses, a close, if cold, attention to the habits and foibles of the enemy tribes, and an acute sense of his own mythology. What Caesar’s Gallic Wars do not properly explain is that he was engaged in destroying another civilization in order to improve his own position. This was not genocide, since he was prepared to do deals with tribes that knuckled under, and was interested in gathering slaves as well as mounds of corpses; but it was culturecide.
The Celts built mainly with wood. They had an oral culture, not a written one. Archaeological surveys during the latter part of the twentieth century suggest they were far more successful than once thought. They built roads, and possibly earlier than the Romans had. Celtic roads were often built across boggy land and forests, and were of oak bound together, so they have mostly vanished, except for fragments found in Ireland, Wales and Germany. Caesar would devote himself to reforming his calendar, but the Celtic calendar is argued by some to have been more accurate: the bronze find known as the Coligny Calendar is certainly sophisticated. Some Celtic historians argue that they had considerable urban centres, which we tend to call ‘tribal forts’ rather than ‘towns’ because we have swallowed Roman propaganda. Roman historians disagree, considering this an exaggeration. Some Celtic towns were round, while others in the south had long stone walls. Gaulish houses were certainly more than huts: they could have two storeys, and even courtyards. The Gauls seem to have had a system of counting populations.16
The Gauls mined gold and silver, produced their own worked gold ornaments, as complicated and heart-wrenchingly beautiful as any object made by Roman hands. They fought with sophisticated tactics – their chariots and large shields particularly impressed the Romans – and used iron ploughs and threshing-machines that were better than those most Roman farmers had. True, they were organized into archaic tribal groupings – but then so had the Latins been, until fairly recently. The Romans made much of their Druids’ dreadful habit of burning peopl
e alive in wicker baskets to appease the gods, and their head-hunting, and these practices were regrettable; but the rebel-crucifying Romans, addicted as they were to blood-soaked arenas, were hardly in a position of high moral authority.
Some Gauls, at least, were well travelled, serving in Greek and Egyptian armies and settling in those lands, too. Their women had greater freedoms than Roman women, including complex divorce rights if they were ill-treated. Unlike Roman women, some may have risen to become leaders, and the revolt of Queen Boudicca certainly suggests this; there are also richly ornate female graves in France and Germany. Rather like native Americans, they showed a deep thirst for booze sold to them by Greeks and Romans, though this was wine rather than whisky: it appears to have been a welcome novelty for drinkers of wheat beer. Of their poems and music we know next to nothing. Unlike the Carthaginians, however, they were always likely to be defeated. What they lacked was the civic system, the sheer organizational reach, of the Roman world. In a fight between a nation and tribes, the nation will win.
Caesar’s destruction of Gaulish culture involved not only the deaths in battle of more than a million people – 1.2 million according to his own bland accountancy – but also the starvation or taking into slavery of roughly the same number. This suggests that up to one in three people in Gaul disappeared, a slaughter rate that rivals the worst butchers of the twentieth century. To put it another way, Caesar had proportionately a similar effect to the Black Death, which killed between 30 per cent of people in the Middle East and anywhere between 30 and 60 per cent of Europeans. Unlike the bacterium Yersinia pestis, however, or the rat fleas that carried it, Caesar was mainly concerned with his own political career. The victories and his accounts of them, followed by processions of slaves and loot, built him an ever-growing popular reputation in Rome, while his personal wealth grew fatter. In effect, he had made himself warlord over a huge slab of Europe.17 When the time came for renewing his position he struck a cynical deal with Pompey and Crassus, sharing the spoils in return for a further extension of his murderous but highly profitable rule. When he responded to the deaths of seventy Romans in an attack by German tribesmen by killing some 430,000 men, women and children, even some Romans, such as Cato, were disgusted.