Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Philip was left in control of his kingdom, but he was required to disband his fleet, withdraw his garrisons from the Greek cities, and pay a large indemnity of 1,000 talents, half immediately, the rest over ten years. (The size of the indemnity – only a tenth of that imposed on Carthage eight years before – is further evidence of Macedonia’s relative weakness.) Then, at the Isthmian Games in 196 BC, the trumpeter having called for silence in the stadium, the herald came forward to issue a special proclamation before the huge crowd of Greeks assembled there: ‘The Senate of Rome and Titus Quinctius Flamininus the proconsul, having defeated King Philip and the Macedonians in battle, leave the following states and cities free, without garrisons, subject to no tribute and in full enjoyment of their ancestral laws: the peoples of Corinth, Phocis, Locri, Euboea, Phthiotic Achaea, Magnesia, Thessaly and Perrhaebia.’(16) Polybius reports such euphoria that Flamininus was almost killed by the pandemonium around him. Many scholars since have been equally starry-eyed, claiming the Isthmian proclamation of 196 BC as prime evidence for ‘defensive imperialism’. If Rome was the aggressor, why this extraordinary decision to withdraw her armies and leave both Macedonia and the Greek cities free?

  But Philip, we have seen, was no real threat. So we are left with no explanation of the intervention in Greece lest it be that the Romans had selflessly cast themselves in the role of honest broker and impartial policeman. In truth, of course, no great power goes to war except in what its leaders perceive to be its own interest. The Romans attacked Macedonia not because it was a threat, but simply because in subjugating it they could expect a rich reward in military glory, hauls of booty and slaves, and, perhaps most importantly, indemnity payments. The text of the treaty between Rome and the Aetolian League in the First Macedonian War (a document dated 212–211 BC) has survived. It is a highly revealing document. Part of it reads: ‘If the Romans take by force any cities belonging to these people [enemies in war], the cities and their territories shall … belong to the Aetolian people; anything the Romans get hold of apart from the cities and their territories [i.e. portable valuables] shall belong to them. If the Romans and the Aetolians operating together take any of these cities, the cities and their territories shall … belong to the Aetolians; anything they get apart from the cities shall belong to them jointly.’(17) Booty, in short, was so important that the division of spoils had to be agreed between allies before hostilities began.

  Then there were indemnities. These had become established as one of the principal mechanisms by which surplus was pumped out of defeated states. By imposing them, Rome was, in effect, diverting revenue from local rulers by interposing her own claim to a share of the tribute paid by the peasants of other states. Without any of the cost involved in direct rule, the mere threat of a renewal of war was enough to guarantee payment of a large proportion of the available surplus – with the additional benefit, of course, that defeated ruling classes were kept weak and compliant. The indemnities make nonsense of any claim that Rome was not motivated by gain.

  Rome’s second major war in the East followed a similar pattern. Hegemony over Macedonia and Greece brought her into contact with the Seleucid kingdom. The Aetolian League, which had expected greater territorial gains in the Second Macedonian War, invited King Antiochus III to support them in challenging the Roman settlement of Greece. When Antiochus sent over a small army in 192 BC, the Romans counter-attacked, defeating Antiochus and the Aetolians at the Battle of Thermopylae the following year. The Romans then crossed into Asia, and in 191 BC fought and won a pitched battle at Magnesia against the main Seleucid army. Antiochus was stripped of his territories in Asia Minor, forced to surrender his fleet and his elephants, and required to pay a 15,000 talent indemnity, 500 immediately, 2,500 when the Roman government ratified the agreement, and thereafter 1,000 annually for 12 years. The Aetolian League also lost territory and faced an indemnity of 500 talents.

  In 189 BC, as these terms were being settled, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso launched a savage attack on the native peoples of Asia Minor, especially the Galatians, descendants of Gauls who had settled in central Anatolia about a century before, contingents of whom had served in the Seleucid army at Magnesia. The aim was plunder and Manlius’ army ran a form of protection racket. Examples were made of communities that resisted, and payments were then extorted to secure Roman ‘friendship’ (immunity from attack). Fifty talents was usually enough to save a city. Places that resisted were taken by force, comprehensively plundered, and their people sold as slaves. The capture of the Gaulish stronghold at Mount Olympus, for example, yielded 40,000 captives. ‘On a reasonable view,’ comments William Harris, ‘plundering was the main purpose of the war.’(18) Indeed, such were the spoils of 189 BC that even the Roman Senate was moved to question Manlius’ probity, and he was to be credited by later writers with first introducing luxuria (extravagant, conspicuous and morally corrupting consumption) to Rome; nonetheless, he was granted his triumph.

  Then, in 188 BC, just as they had done in 196 BC, the Romans withdrew, not only from Asia, where the territory confiscated from the Seleucids was divided between Pergamum and Rhodes, but even from Greece. Why should they stay? Huge annual revenues were now flowing into the Roman treasury. In just 14 years (202–188 BC) the Roman state had imposed indemnities worth at least 26,500 talents on defeated states (a figure which takes no account of small indemnities perhaps not recorded in the sources, and the countless hauls of booty, the distribution of which was tightly organized and included a fixed proportion for the state). There was personal enrichment, too. Manlius Vulso was not the only Roman politician who found empire-building profitable. Another was Scipio Africanus, victor of Zama. He had gone to Asia as military advisor to the Roman commander, his brother Lucius, and on his return to Rome a financial scandal broke around his head. After the Battle of Magnesia, it seems, Antiochus had been required to pay 18 million denarii for the upkeep of the Roman army as long as it remained in Asia: no adequate account of what happened to this money was ever forthcoming. So much eastern wealth was dropping into outstretched private hands, in fact, that Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the victor of the Third Macedonian War (171–168 BC), was considered poor among aristocrats in having a fortune of only 360,000 denarii at the time of his death.

  Not that his campaigns had been unprofitable. The Romans found cause for a renewed assault on Macedonia when Philip’s son and successor, King Perseus, attempted to rebuild his kingdom’s power. Whereas his father’s imperialism had left him friendless and isolated 30 years before, Perseus won support in the Greek cities, where democrats in particular were now hostile to the Roman hegemony. It did him little good. Though he was able to put 40,000 men into the field, even slightly outnumbering the Romans, the phalanx was defeated again at the battle of Pydna in 168 BC, where it was once more the victim of its own cumbersomeness. The pikemen charged in a solid mass, 20,000 strong – the Roman commander afterwards declared it the most terrifying thing he had ever seen – and the impact thrust the Roman line backwards. But the legionaries withdrew and reformed on rising ground, while the phalanx, surging forwards in the excitement of success, began to lose cohesion and split apart. The legionaries counterattacked, maniple by maniple, driving wedges into the gaps, where the gladius made short work of the pikemen close up.

  Perseus surrendered and his kingdom was dissolved. Its territory was divided into four separate republics, and to preclude attempts at reunification these were denied the right to enter into mutual diplomatic relations. The inhabitants were obliged to pay tribute to Rome. Pergamum and Rhodes lost territory: they had not participated in the war, but neither had they supported Rome, and their motives were suspect. There was a general purge of the Greek aristocracy. In particular, 1,000 leading citizens of the Achaean League were deported to Rome. (Among them was the former politician Polybius, who became, in detention, a close friend and advisor to Scipio Aemilianus; and thus had both the leisure and privileged access to source material – not to mention the motiv
e – to write his famous history.)

  The most terrible fate was reserved for Epirus (modern Albania). Though she had given no practical support, Epirus had supported Perseus in the Third Macedonian War. Paullus was therefore ordered by the Senate to liquidate the Epirote people. The Roman army went there in 167 BC, broke up into small detachments, and then fell simultaneously upon all the towns and villages. They made a haul of 150,000 men, women and children, all of whom were sold into slavery. Some may have been kept back for a victory parade in Rome, an important construction project, or simply for the enjoyment of soldiers. Most were probably sold immediately to the Roman army slave-dealers, who would have shipped them to a slave market, like that on the island of Delos in the Aegean. We have no reliable figures for the total numbers enslaved in the Roman Empire. One estimate is that by the late 1st century BC there were two or three million slaves in Italy and Sicily, and that 100,000 new slaves were required each year to keep the market supplied. Rome’s wars were in part giant slave-raids, in which entire populations were uprooted and dispersed across the Mediterranean to places where they were required to labour for the Roman ruling class. As for Epirus, where 25,000 peasant families had once lived, it was turned into sheep-pasture for the benefit of absentee landowners.

  Macedonia and Greece were to fight one final time. An adventurer called Andriscus, claiming to be the son of Perseus, made a bid to reunite Macedonia and restore the monarchy. Quintus Caecilius Metellus crushed the revolt with two legions in 148 BC, and Macedonia was then converted into a Roman province. At the same time, in Greece itself, the conflict between pro-Roman oligarchs – who were taunted in the streets as ‘traitors’ even by children – and the democratic citizenry boiled over in major street clashes. A Roman attempt to break up the Achaean League then provoked an open revolt centred on Corinth and led by a revolutionary democrat called Critolaus. Metellus rushed south from Macedonia to crush the revolt, but resistance was such that only a reinforced army of four legions under his successor Lucius Mummius was sufficient to restore Roman authority. An example was now made of the Greek ‘commune’ at Corinth: Mummius was ordered to destroy the city by handing it over to the soldiers. All the inhabitants, presumably many thousands, were either massacred or sold as slaves. The town was thoroughly looted, its great works of art shipped to Rome or simply destroyed. ‘I was there,’ declared Polybius. ‘I saw paintings trampled underfoot, and soldiers sitting down on them to play dice.’ When it was empty, the city was put to the torch. If you visit today, you find nothing of Classical Corinth save the ancient Temple of Apollo, which even the Romans were moved to spare; otherwise the ruins are those of a new Roman city of imperial times. The Achaean League was dissolved, oligarchy restored, the Greek cities forced to pay indemnities, and the Roman governor of Macedonia was authorized to intervene whenever necessary to maintain order.

  Corinth was not the only great city destroyed in 146 BC. Carthage had recovered somewhat from the disaster of the Second Punic War. The indemnity was paid off and the city’s trade prospered again. But hawkish politicians in the Roman Senate were bent on its destruction – Marcus Porcius Cato, known to us as Cato the Elder, became famous for ending every speech with the words delenda est Carthago (‘Carthage must be destroyed’). A pretext was found in Carthage’s half-hearted attempts to defend herself against the attacks of her neighbour, the pro-Roman King of Numidia, Masinissa. In 149 BC the Assembly of the Centuries voted for war. Carthage made a desperate appeal for peace, handing over hostages and all war matériel (including 2,000 catapults). But as each demand was fulfilled, the Romans added new conditions, until finally they required the Carthaginians to abandon their city on the coast and retire to an inland site: a sentence of extinction on a mercantile people. The Carthaginians then prepared for armed resistance, working feverishly to strengthen the fortifications, restock the arsenals, train for military service, and fill the warehouses. What the Romans had expected to be a one-summer campaign turned into a gruelling four-year siege (149–146 BC). Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus eventually assumed command. Son by blood of Aemilius Paullus, the victor of Pydna, and grandson by adoption of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal, he represented the union of two great aristocratic houses, Scipiones and Aemilii, who shared a similar vision of Rome’s imperial mission.

  Aemilianus drove the siege hard against a garrison weakened by hunger, finally breaking through the outer wall, and then, in a week of the most savage street-fighting, battling his way to the capture of the citadel. Dying Carthage fought back to the very end. The ancient writers describe apocalyptic scenes: the Roman soldiers deluged with missiles from roofs and upper windows; buildings torched and levelled with people still inside to make an approach ramp for the Roman assault; the Carthaginian commander’s wife, dressed in her finery, standing at the last redoubt on the highest part of the town, hurling her children into the flames of destruction before following herself. Of the 700,000 people supposed to have crowded into the city at the start of the siege, only 50,000 were left for the slave-dealers. The booty, though, was as rich as could be had anywhere in the world, and for several days the soldiers were free to plunder, saving only the gold, silver and votive offerings in the temples. This was reserved for official distribution – some to the soldiers, more to the generals, most to the state. The remaining buildings were then demolished. The great city of Carthage and its people – like Corinth, like the Epirotes, like so many others – ceased to exist.

  By the middle of the 2nd century BC, Roman military imperialism had reached peak intensity. Superior power enabled the Roman ruling class to plunder the peoples of the Mediterranean almost at will. But all was not well at home. Roman Italy was exporting soldiers and importing spoils of war – primarily bullion and slaves, but also base metals, rich cloth, fine tableware, works of art, perfumes, ointments, spices, and much, much else. The flood of wealth was destabilizing the old social order. Some became fantastically rich and flaunted luxuria. Many, having benefited to a degree, now chafed at traditional barriers to further advancement. Others did not do well at all. Military service and agricultural depression ruined many poorer citizens. Big landlords were buying up failed farms. Slave labour replaced free men on Italian farms. The dispossessed packed the slums of Rome. A great, prolonged, multi-faceted social crisis was brewing in the heart of the empire. The Roman Republic – whose violence and greed had conquered the Mediterranean – was about to be shaken to destruction by the forces it had unleashed.

  Chapter 3

  The Roman revolution, 133–30 BC

  A failed revolution: the Gracchi, 133–122 BC

  Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was a scion of one of the most illustrious families in Rome. He was grandson of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal in 202 BC; son of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who had ended the Second Spanish War in 179 BC and secured a quarter century of peace; and son-in-law of Appius Claudius Pulcher, the Senate’s most senior member, ‘the father of the house’. His brother Gaius, a close political ally, had also married well: his father-in-law was reckoned the richest Roman of his age. Tiberius the father, moreover, had earned a reputation as a stickler for traditional values when serving as censor, while the son had pursued a conventional yet distinguished career in the army – he had been first over the wall at the capture of Carthage, and later, in Spain, playing on his father’s good name, had negotiated an agreement with the Celtiberians that saved a Roman army from destruction. Nothing, in fact, about Tiberius Gracchus, his family or his connections gave any indication that he was other than a typically conservative member of the Roman ruling class. Yet, elected tribune of the plebs in 133 BC, he so enraged his senatorial opponents with the radicalism of his politics that within barely a year they had murdered him in the streets.

  His principal offence had been to propose a land reform bill, and, anticipating opposition in the Senate, to have taken it direct to the Assembly of the Tribes, where a large turnout by poor citizen-farmers had ensured
its passage. The Senate had then persuaded another tribune to veto the bill (this being the constitutional right of any tribune); but Gracchus had reconvened the Assembly, secured his fellow-tribune’s deposition, and then set up a land commission to implement the new law, its members being himself, his younger brother Gaius, and his father-in-law Claudius.

  Crisis point was reached when Gracchus, determined to maintain the political momentum, decided to stand for election as tribune for a second year. Argument flared over whether this was constitutional, and it was the struggle around Gracchus’s disputed candidacy that became violent. A leading senatorial conservative, the ex-consul and chief priest Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, mobilized his supporters and led a vicious armed attack on the land-reform party. Tiberius Gracchus and 300 of his followers were clubbed to death. A special senatorial commission executed many more in the weeks that followed.

  In the space of a year, Roman politics had been transformed by street violence, political assassination, and a bloody assize. Nothing like it had happened since the Struggle of the Orders over 200 years before. A deep fracture had suddenly opened in the Roman body-politic. This fracture would widen in the years to come and eventually destroy the Republic in a series of civil wars. Attempts to dismiss the conflicts of 133 to 30 BC as little more than factional infighting among rival aristocratic houses are unconvincing. The social forces mobilized on each side were different, and two opposing ideologies and sets of policies were in dispute. The events of this period cannot be understood except as the expression of a rising ferment of discontent and struggle in Italian society as a whole.

  The crisis was rooted in war and growth of empire. ‘War and conquest transformed the economy of Italy,’ explained Brunt, ‘and helped at first to resolve, later to exacerbate social conflict. Internal struggles and foreign wars were often entangled, and reacted on each other. Expansion in itself distorted the working of political institutions, the machinery would-be social reformers had to use. It even changed the very meaning of the term “Roman”.’(1)