Rome

  A political storm raged around Scipio in the winter of 206–205 BC. He was elected consul by the popular vote, but it was for the Senate to assign provinces and commands. The final compromise was for Italy to be given to his colleague – denying the young superstar the chance to form an invasion force from its legions – but for him to have Sicily as his province, with the authority to attack Africa ‘if he judged it to be in the public interest’ – and so long as no state expenditure was involved. If he wanted an army for an invasion, therefore, he was going to have to build it himself. This he did, starting with the several thousand survivors of Cannae – whom Scipio now inspired with a chance of redeeming glory – and some 7,000 volunteers, many of them his Spanish veterans. He spent 205 BC encamped at Syracuse, recruiting, arming, drilling. With his command prorogued (extended beyond its normal term), he sailed early the following year in a fleet of 40 warships and 400 transports, carrying a small but highly trained and motivated army of 26,000 men. His African campaign was as brilliant as his Spanish. He established a new coastal base at Castra Cornelia, won the allegiance of the Numidian prince Masinissa, and, with his assistance, ambushed and destroyed the local Carthaginian cavalry. The following year he destroyed a combined Carthaginian-Numidian army by having his men set fire to the enemy camps in the night and then massacre the panic-stricken fugitives issuing from the gates. And when the Carthaginians and their Numidian allies began to build a second army in the hinterland, Scipio marched inland and destroyed it at the Battle of the Great Plains. The desperate Carthaginian government then recalled Hannibal.

  Attempts at reinforcement in Italy had failed. An alliance with King Philip V of Macedon had yielded no practical support. The revolts of Capua, Tarentum and Syracuse had long since been suppressed. Hasdrubal, after his defeat in Spain in 208 BC, had marched to northern Italy, hoping to effect a junction with his brother in the south, but his army had been destroyed at the battle of the Metaurus in 207 BC (the first that Hannibal knew of the disaster was receipt of his brother’s severed head). By 203 BC Hannibal, in control of only an enclave around the city of Croton in the toe of Italy, had been reduced to little more than a chief of brigands and mercenaries. The Italian campaign was at its lowest ebb, whereas the homeland was in mortal danger. Even now, though, the Romans feared the great general: such was his reputation that they made no attempt to interfere with the evacuation of his small army, content merely to see him go. (Or perhaps the Fabii secretly hoped he would destroy Scipio.)

  Taking command in Africa, Hannibal did not move until he was ready, needing time to build a new army around his core of Italian veterans. But in the spring of 202 BC he set out for the Bagradas Valley, determined to bring Scipio to battle, and the two armies, each close to 50,000 men, met at Zama. Hannibal’s was by far the weaker: he was heavily outnumbered in cavalry, and most of his infantry were either demoralized by earlier defeats or newly recruited and without battle experience. Even his huge corps of 80 elephants was poorly trained. Only the ‘Old Guard’ of Italian veterans was first-rate. Scipio, by contrast, commanded an army of seasoned volunteers, laurelled with victory and supremely confident; the only nagging doubt, perhaps, was that they were now to be tested for the first time by the master of war himself.

  Hannibal’s plan took full account of his own weaknesses. He knew he would lose the cavalry action on the wings, and his aim was to crush the Roman infantry in the centre quickly, before their cavalry had a chance to join in. But the Roman infantry were first-class troops, so his only hope was to wear them down before he committed the Old Guard. His first line was formed of elephants, but their charge miscarried: met by trumpet blasts and javelins, many stampeded back on their own men; others passed through gaps opened by Scipio’s highly drilled legionaries and were then dispatched in the rear. The Roman hastati then closed with Hannibal’s first line of infantry and broke it. As the fugitives streamed to the rear, they disordered and panicked the men in Hannibal’s second line, and as the hastati pressed forwards this line also collapsed. The Old Guard forming the third line had been held well back to keep it clear of any débâcle in front. So there was a lull and a period of mutual readjustment. The hastati were reformed and kept in the line, while the principes and triarii were moved up either side of them. Then there was a further pause as the two lines faced each other across a few dozen yards of African plain: some tens of thousands of veteran soldiers who perhaps sensed that this was a supreme moment of historical decision. Then the lines charged, and for a time hacked and lunged and crashed shield against shield in the chaos of heavy-infantry collision. But it was an unequal contest. The Roman infantry had not been weakened: the principes and triarii were fresh, the hastati had their blood up, and together they greatly outnumbered Hannibal’s Italian veterans. Then the Roman cavalry, returning from the fight on the wings, joined the infantry action, charging into the Carthaginian rear. The Old Guard disintegrated – and with it, the Carthaginian cause.

  Hannibal Barca had launched a total war to destroy the Roman state. But the mercenary and barbarian army of a mercantile empire was no match for Rome’s Italian confederation. A combination of local self-government, widespread citizenship rights, shares in land and booty, and consistent Roman support for city oligarchs gave to the confederation a mass social base solid enough to withstand the shock of 100,000 casualties at Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae – a shock that in Livy’s view ‘no other nation in the world could have suffered and not been overwhelmed’. Because of this, Hannibal could not drain away that huge pool of manpower reserves that enabled Rome to put up to 200,000 men into the field each year regardless of losses. Hannibal had launched a total war, but only Rome had the resources to fight one.

  The Carthaginian Empire was destroyed by the peace terms now imposed: the loss of Spain and all overseas territories; a financially crippling indemnity of 10,000 talents payable over 50 years; a navy reduced to ten ships; and a ban on waging war without Roman consent. Zama thus reduced Carthage from a first- to a third-rate power. Rome, by contrast, was left the only superpower in the Mediterranean. As events would soon show, the Hellenistic states of the East, her nearest rivals, were hollow by comparison, and none would offer the sustained and bloody resistance that ancient Carthage had done in the First and Second Punic Wars. The pivot on which Roman imperial history turned was the war against Hannibal. Before it, Rome could still perhaps have been stopped; afterwards, the power and dynamism of her imperialism could not be checked, and she was propelled inexorably to supremacy in the Mediterranean and Europe.

  The conquest of the Mediterranean: the Macedonian Wars, 200–146 BC

  A different kind of state from Rome might have sunk back exhausted after the exertion of the Second Punic War; in fact, military mobilization continued at a similar level, even reaching in 191–190 BC the same peak as in the gravest crisis of that struggle. It was not that any single enemy posed a comparable threat; indeed, none of the enemies engaged in this period posed any substantial threat. Rather, Rome chose to fight wars because it was profitable to do so, and, wielding greater power than any other state, was able to fight two or three wars simultaneously.

  The interrupted conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was resumed in 203 BC, and by 191 BC the main resistance – that of the powerful Boii tribe – had been overcome. During the 180s BC, to control this territory, the Romans built a new road, the Via Aemilia, and founded several new colonies. Then, in a series of campaigns in the 170s, they pushed west from the Po plain into Liguria, and east to the Istrian peninsula.

  Also, having driven the Carthaginians out in 206 BC, the Romans set about organizing and exploiting their new territories in Spain. They provoked a widespread revolt, however, one that began in the new Roman provinces in the south-east, but quickly drew in the unconquered tribes of the interior. The ‘Spanish ulcer’ was destined to suppurate for two centuries: the terrain was difficult, distances were huge, the tribes decentralized, and the Spanish first-rate guerrilla fighters. The Second
Spanish War (taking the First as that of 217–206 BC against Carthage and her Celtiberian tribal allies) lasted from 197 to 179 BC, ending well short of total conquest. Victorious on the battlefield, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus offered moderate terms to secure peace, leaving the Celtiberian tribes semi-independent though obliged to pay tribute to Rome. The Lusitanians of the far west, by contrast, who had also participated in the war, remained wholly unconquered.

  The Gracchan settlement held for 25 years, until Roman oppression provoked a new generation to revolt. The Third Spanish War (154– 133 BC) was more bitter than the Second. The first phase, against the Celtiberians, was ended quickly by conciliation (153–151 BC), but acts of genocide in Lusitania (modern Portugal) detonated a grim guerrilla war in the mountains there. A full-scale invasion under Servius Sulpicius Galba persuaded the Lusitanians to sue for peace. He demanded wholesale transplantation of highland populations to lowland sites, but when the Lusitanians gathered on the appointed day at three separate assembly-points, they were disarmed, surrounded and massacred – men, women and children. The atrocity reignited the resistance. Among those who took up arms again was a shepherd called Viriathus, who proved to be a brilliant guerrilla fighter, and had by 147 BC become the leader of the Lusitanian struggle. Between 146 and 141 BC he won an almost unbroken series of victories over five successive Roman commanders. The example – of native forces beating the imperial power – inspired the Celtiberians of the interior to a renewed attempt to throw off foreign rule. The 130s BC began with demoralized Roman soldiers defeated by Lusitanian guerrillas in the south-west and by Celtiberian defenders of the fortress of Numantia in the north. The Spanish ulcer would soon infect the core of the Roman body-politic. Certainly, there was little glory or gold to be had in the peninsula’s interminable wars. Roman generals preferred the East.

  The contrast between the barbarian cultures of the West and the ancient urban civilization of the East was extreme. The Hellenistic kingdoms built by Alexander’s Successors had existed for a century. Many of the Greek cities they encompassed were 500 years old. Some of the cities of Asia Minor, Syria, the Levant, Egypt and Mesopotamia now ruled by Greeks were thousands of years old. Rich irrigation agriculture; hundreds of cities; a wealth of exotic trade goods; great centres of learning, art and refined living: the East offered dazzling spoils to the conqueror. Nor was eastern wealth particularly well defended. A relatively stable system of Hellenistic states existed around 200 BC. The major kingdoms were Macedonia in the Balkans (ruled by the Antigonid dynasty), Pergamum in western Asia Minor (under the Attalids), Syria and Mesopotamia (the Seleucids), and Egypt (the Ptolemies). The minor states included Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, the Achaean League (in the northern Peloponnese), the Aetolian League (in north-west Greece), and Epirus-Illyria (in the far north-west). But even the greatest of these states was more pomp and glitter than substance. Their kings might control large and densely populated territories; they might draw huge tax revenues; but the social roots of Seleucid Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt were shallower than those of the Roman Republic. The Greeks were organized in small, privileged, urban enclaves. The mass of native people in the countryside felt little affinity with their Hellenistic monarchs. Greek armies comprised a professional military elite rather than a citizen-militia. Tactics had changed little since the time of Alexander. Moreover, though Macedonia was sociologically more cohesive than the other Hellenistic monarchies, it was a relatively small mountain kingdom – with none of Rome’s reserves of manpower and treasure.

  The earliest Roman ventures across the Adriatic had occurred before the Second Punic War. The First and Second Illyrian Wars (229–228 and 221–219 BC) had been fought ostensibly to suppress piracy, but the interference with a minor state in Macedonia’s backyard had alarmed King Philip V sufficiently for him to form an alliance with Hannibal in 215 BC. The First Macedonian War (215–205 BC) proved a damp squib, however: Philip never sent support to Hannibal in Italy, and the Romans left their Aetolian allies to fight alone in Greece. But this reflected not pusillanimity on Philip’s part so much as his preoccupation with the Aegean – where his war with Pergamum and Rhodes provided a pretext for Roman intervention against him in 200 BC. The alliance with Hannibal, and his wars against fellow Greeks, including Roman allies, made it easy enough to portray Philip’s Macedonia as a dangerous ‘rogue state’.

  In fact, Philip was no threat to Roman interests. The very fact that he did not send troops to Italy in the wake of Cannae is proof enough of that; Philip’s fighting front was to the south and the south-east, not towards the Adriatic. The Roman decision to back Pergamum and Rhodes and intervene in an eastern war was an act of aggression. Significantly, when the consul to whom responsibility for Macedonia had been given proposed a declaration of war, the Assembly of the Centuries turned it down. When he next summoned the assembly, he deployed a new concept: that of pre-emptive aggression against a would-be (and in fact imaginary) enemy. The decision was not ‘whether you will choose war or peace; for Philip will not leave the choice open to you, seeing that he is actively preparing for unlimited hostilities on land and sea. What you are asked to decide is whether you will transport legions to Macedonia or allow the enemy into Italy; and the difference this makes is a matter of your own experience in the recent Punic Wars … It took Hannibal four months to reach Italy from Saguntum; but Philip, if we let him, will arrive four days after he sets sail from Corinth.’(14) The Assembly now voted for war. A real hatred of the draft had been overcome by an invented fear of invasion. For invented it was, the speciousness of the consul’s argument apparent from the most superficial review of the events of the Second Macedonian War (200–196 BC). The largest Roman army sent to Greece was only 30,000 strong – a mere 2.5 per cent of Rome’s total military manpower, or 7 per cent of her maximum mobilized strength in the Second Punic War. Yet this small army was sufficient to bring Macedonia to defeat – a defeat Philip anticipated judging by his interim peace offers and initial avoidance of battle. Hannibal, by contrast, had destroyed a Roman army of 80,000 – and still lost the war. These simple calculations demonstrate how suicidal a Macedonian invasion of Italy would in reality have been: doubly so, since not only would the invaders have been crushed, but Philip’s kingdom would meantime have been overrun by his enemies in Greece.

  The first two years of the war were inconclusive, but in the spring of 197 BC Titus Quinctius Flamininus invaded Thessaly, and Philip, finally resolved to risk battle rather than prolong a war of attrition he knew he could not win, marched towards him with 25,000 men. The ground was unsuitable for battle where the armies first met, and both withdrew along parallel routes separated by low hills, each soon unaware of the other’s progress. A messy encounter battle then developed unexpectedly at Cynoscephalae when Macedonian and Roman detachments clashed in the mist on the heights overlooking a pass between the main armies. As more units were drawn into the fight for the high ground, a general engagement began. The Macedonian right reached the top of the pass before the Romans. When Philip saw this, he ordered the right phalanx to close up into a deep formation, increasing its shock power, and then to charge. Flamininus, seeing the desperate struggle that had begun on the Roman left, ordered in turn an attack by his right, which struck the left phalanx before it was properly deployed and routed it. The battle divided into separate halves, with the Macedonian right pushing down one slope, the Roman right down the other, such that a wide gap opened. At this point, a Roman military tribune seized the initiative. Taking the 20 maniples of triarii forming the rear line of the legions on the right, he reformed them and charged into the rear of the phalanx attacking the Roman left. The effect was devastating. The right phalanx was also routed. The battle had been hard-fought but decisive. About 8,000 Macedonians had been killed and 5,000 captured for a loss of 700 Romans. Philip V’s only army had been destroyed and he was compelled to make peace.

  Polybius was fascinated by the clash between phalanx and legion. The whole fate of the Hellenistic
world – his world – had seemed to hinge on it. The outcome appeared paradoxical, for the compact formation and projecting pikes of the phalanx meant that in close-quarters combat each Roman legionary, fighting in a much more open formation, faced no less than ten spear-points. ‘What is the factor which enables the Romans to win the battle and causes those who use the phalanx to fail? The answer is that in war the times and places for action are unlimited, whereas the phalanx requires one time and one type of ground only in order to produce its peculiar effect.’ Broken ground disordered the phalanx, creating fatal gaps in the hedge of pikes. To be effective, it had to operate in a large block, making it slow, cumbersome and unresponsive to a changing battlefield situation. The Roman formation, by contrast, was flexible and mobile. While part could pin a phalanx frontally, other parts could manoeuvre to attack flank and rear. ‘Every Roman soldier, once he is armed and goes into action, can adapt himself equally well to any place or time and meet an attack from any quarter. He is likewise equally well-prepared and needs to make no change whether he has to fight with the main body or with a detachment, in maniples or singly.’(15) Cynoscephalae illustrated these dictums. It showed that the legions were coming of age, that a complex evolution of the Roman military tradition under Etruscan, Greek, Samnite, Gaulish, Punic and Spanish influence was now producing the finest fighting formations in the ancient world.