Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The demands on Italian military manpower had remained high since the war against Hannibal. There had been wars of conquest in Africa, Spain, Gaul and the East, often followed by wars of subjugation when the recently conquered rose against their new masters. Rome faced national revolts in Cisalpine Gaul, Sardinia and Corsica, Macedonia and Greece, and, above all, Spain.

  The guerrilla war in Lusitania (Portugal) lasted more than ten years. In 141 BC, Viriathus, having defeated five successive annual invasions, trapped the sixth Roman army to be sent against him and extracted a peace agreement in return for its release. The Romans broke the agreement the following year, but remained incapable of defeating Viriathus. Instead, they bribed some of his men to murder him in his sleep, whereupon Lusitanian morale collapsed and the Romans were finally able to annex the territory in 139 BC. Elsewhere in Spain resistance continued, centred on the Celtiberian fortress of Numantia, which defied the Romans for nine years. The site is well known to students of the Roman army because both the fortress and nearby Roman siege-camps have been explored by archaeologists, while the Greek historian Appian offers a full account of the military operations in his Iberica (Spanish History).

  Numantia occupied a strong natural defensive position on a hilltop overlooking ravines and rivers: too strong to be taken in direct assault. Its defenders may have numbered about 8,000, the Roman siege forces – judging by the size of the succession of camps built between 142 and 133 BC – perhaps twice that. Despite the effort invested, the Romans made little progress; indeed, on one occasion, in 137 BC, the Numantines went on to the offensive, laid siege to the main Roman camp, and secured the surrender of the Roman army (this being the occasion when Tiberius Gracchus negotiated the army’s safe passage). Popular clamour secured an extraordinary command for a member of the Scipio family: Rome’s foremost soldier, Scipio Aemilianus, victor in the Third Punic War, was now sent to Spain. He restored army morale, reduced the outlying Celtiberian forts, and then, to seal Numantia off from the world and starve it out, surrounded the fortress with a 10 km-long stone wall and ditch, strengthened with 100 wooden interval towers and seven forts placed along the perimeter. Numantia surrendered after a few months in 133 BC. Its buildings were razed, its people enslaved.

  Though there was eventual victory over both Lusitanians and Celtiberians, the Third Spanish War (154–133 BC) had incurred terrible costs – in casualties, in wasted resources, in diminished imperial prestige, and, not least, in its effects on Italian peasant agriculture and the cohesion of Roman society. Ever since Rome first acquired interests there during the Second Punic War, Spain had needed a permanent garrison of first two, then four legions, totalling (when allied forces are included) between 17,000 and 34,000 men. For much of the time these men were bogged down in long sieges or fruitless counter-insurgency sweeps. The soldiers faced boredom, discomfort, a sense of futility, years away from home – and the real fear that they might perish, tortured and mutilated, in a remote ravine. Tiberius Gracchus, serving as a junior officer at Numantia, was shocked by the poor morale of Roman troops.

  At home, recruitment demands were necessarily high, and the draft was unpopular. The average size of the combined Romano-Italian army levied each year during the 35 years after the Second Punic War is estimated at 130,000 men. Overall, in the last two centuries of the Republic, an average of perhaps 13 per cent of adult male Roman citizens was serving in the legions at any one time. Thus, a majority of adult male Roman citizens must have spent at least seven years of their lives on campaign. In the 2nd century, moreover – in contrast to earlier practice, when armies campaigned in the summer and were demobilized in winter – troops were sent abroad and kept in the field without leave for years at a time.

  This level of mobilization was disastrous for Italian peasant agriculture. Family farms were deprived of essential manpower for long periods – or permanently if men were killed or disabled – and many went to ruin. War accelerated the long-term tendency of small farmers to lose out to big landowners. I discussed this above – in relation to the Struggle of the Orders – as a function of the small farmer’s lack of surplus to tide him over hard years, making debt, the mortgaging of farms, and the alienation of peasant land chronic features of rural life. Collective action – through the institutions of the city-state – was necessary to counteract this tendency. In the case of 2nd century BC Rome, however, a key mechanism had fallen into disuse. Brunt estimates that as many as 50,000 small farms may have been created in the generation after 200 BC, either in new colonies (coloniae) or through ‘viritane’ allotments (where farms were given to new settlers on an individual basis in existing communities). But after the 170s, agrarian resettlement virtually ceased; certainly there were no further colonies until the time of the Gracchi. So the draft was impacting on a situation where economic forces ruled unchecked. To have a man at the front could be just as devastating as drought, flooding or crop blight. Some peasants sold up and drifted into the city. Others struggled on but got into debt and were then evicted. Contemporary sources claim force was sometimes used to drive people off their land. So peasant land passed into the hands of the rich, sometimes speculators exploiting an emerging market in Italian real-estate, more commonly established local landowners keen to enlarge their holdings. The result was a profound change in the Italian countryside. In place of small land-units worked by peasant families for their own subsistence, there were now large estates (latifundia) producing cash crops or stock for a burgeoning market.

  The flood of new wealth into Italy from the empire fed this growth of estates. It had the direct effect of inflating land prices and creating an active real-estate market; and the abiding prejudice of Roman society for land as the only proper expression of elite status reinforced it. Generals, officials, tax-farmers, merchants, slave-dealers, anyone making money in the empire, wanted to invest in land at home. Italian estates conferred respectability. They were also profitable. A further consequence of imperial wealth was that it generated demand for agricultural produce by fuelling the growth of the army, the towns, the construction industry, and the luxury trades. Small, mixed subsistence-farms were replaced by extensive orchards, vineyards, olive groves, sheep pastures and cattle ranches. Agriculture became a business. Economies of scale on specialized latifundia conferred decisive advantages. Big operators could wield political influence to gain market access and secure public contracts. There were even manuals on estate management. Those by Cato, Columella and Varro have survived.

  Cato’s manual was aimed at the proprietors of medium-sized farms run for profit. The ideal was a holding of between 24 and 60 hectares – at least three times the size of a substantial peasant farm – which may have been fairly typical of the new commercial farms. It would have been difficult to build up single parcels of land substantially larger, and most top landowners probably had multiple holdings rather than one great estate. There were, anyway, limits to specialization and economies of scale: too violent a disruption of the traditional regime that kept the land in good heart risked undermining productivity. There was security, too, against the hazards of fortune in scattered holdings. When Pliny the Younger (c. AD 61–113), a rich senator with multiple holdings, wrote a letter to a friend seeking advice about a possible land purchase, he set out the pros and cons. The estate for sale adjoined his own – ‘the land runs in and out of mine’ – but the principal economy of scale he envisaged involved not greater specialization, but administrative downsizing: it would be necessary to maintain only one manager, household and work-force, he explained. The implication was that, if the purchase went ahead, the agricultural regime would remain much the same: ‘The land is fertile, the soil rich and well-watered, and the whole made up of fields, vineyards and woods which produce enough to yield a steady income if not a very large one.’(2)

  The chronology of Italian villa archaeology confirms the change. The town and territory of Cosa on the Etruscan coast 145 km north-west of Rome have been explored in detail. Though fo
unded as a colony in 273 BC, and reinforced with a further draft of colonists in 197 BC, evidence for rural settlement up to this point is sparse, and, as far as can be judged, urban buildings were modest in scale. Only during the 2nd century BC did this begin to change, with more elaborate houses in Cosa itself, and the first appearance of substantial residences in the countryside. A building excavated at Giardino Vecchio was 25 metres square, with some rooms grouped around a courtyard, including living-rooms with cement floors and plastered walls. The house at Giardino Vecchio was not, however, a true villa. It may have been the house of a rich peasant, and it is perhaps significant that it did not outlast the Republic. True villas appeared only in the early 1st century BC. A famous example is that at Settefinestre, probably built around 75 BC, its location on a low hill overlooking a valley and its façade of a wall decorated with miniature turrets designed to assert the status of the owner. The main residence measured 44 metres square and comprised an atrium (front court), a peristyle (colonnaded court), each with grand rooms leading off, and a loggia that ran the length of the house and commanded splendid views. Most rooms were decorated with sumptuous mosaics and frescoes. Settefinestre may have belonged to a well-known senatorial family, the Sestii, and if the estate, possibly in excess of 120 hectares, had specialized in viticulture, as seems likely, the yield could have been as high as 1.2 million litres a year; wine-amphorae stamped SES have been found at the port of Cosa just over two miles away. The Settefinestre estate is known to have been one of about a dozen on this scale in the territory of the town.

  The transformation of Roman agriculture may have been limited – more often multiple holdings than single great estates – but its social consequences were traumatic for the body-politic. ‘When Tiberius [Gracchus] went through Tuscany to Numantia,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘and found the country almost depopulated, there being hardly any free husbandmen or shepherds, but for the most part only imported barbarian slaves, he then first conceived the course of policy which in the sequel proved so fatal to his family.’(3) Here was the essence of a supreme contradiction. As Keith Hopkins pointed out, in effect, Roman peasant soldiers were fighting for their own displacement: their victories supplied the slaves, their ruined farms the land, and the two combined made possible the latifundia. The change, in other words – it might be called ‘the villa revolution’ – rested on the simultaneous dispossession of the Italian peasantry and the flooding of the market with cheap slaves, both consequences of continual warfare and imperial expansion. The economy and society of Italy were being transformed by war. The rich, explained Appian, the Greek historian of the Late Republic, ‘used persuasion or force to buy or seize property which adjoined their own, or any other smallholdings belonging to poor men, and came to operate great ranches instead of single farms. They employed slave-hands and shepherds on these estates to avoid having free men dragged off the land to serve in the army.’(4) The process was not complete – many small farms did survive – but the shift in land-ownership was sufficient to alter the character of Italy and plunge Rome into political crisis. A distinctive form of permanent war economy had created new social conditions, and, because the traditional institutions of an Italian city-state could not accommodate these conditions, mass struggles and civil wars erupted.

  Gracchus’s immediate concern was army recruitment and internal security. The problem was acute: previous tribunes, responding to popular clamour against conscription, are recorded impeding the levy in 151, 149 and 138 BC. The burden was falling too often on too few people – on a shrinking population group. The dispossession of the peasantry was draining Italy of its military manpower. Not only did slaves not fight, nor at the time did the free poor, notably the fast-growing population of Rome’s slums. Military service in the city-state was linked to the economic independence and social status afforded by property-ownership. Only at moments of extreme crisis – after Cannae, for example – had the capite censi (those counted only by head in the census) been enrolled in the legions. The reasons were simple enough. Originally, soldiers had supplied their own equipment, and the full panoply of a heavy infantryman had been expensive. In recent times, when the state supplied all or most equipment, the concern had been political: small farmers had a stake in the system, whereas the landless poor were a potential threat to property and were therefore best kept militarily and politically inert. The size of the citizen-farmer class – the assidui as they were sometimes called at the time – was therefore critical to military recruitment. Moreover, as the numbers of ‘stakeholders’ declined, and the proportion of slaves increased – reaching perhaps a third of the population in Italy as a whole, and perhaps half in Sicily and parts of the south – the countryside became dangerously insecure. There are scattered references to small localized slave revolts at various times during the 2nd century; then, in 136–132 BC, the resistance exploded. A hundred and fifty slaves staged an uprising in Rome itself; 450 were crucified after another outbreak at Minturnae; no less than 4,000 are reported participating in a third at Sinuessa. These abortive risings on the mainland were probably inspired by events on Sicily. Here, two independent but simultaneous risings, one at Enna in the centre of the island, the other at Agrigento on the south coast, spread rapidly and fused into full-scale slave revolution.

  The First Sicilian Slave War (136–132 BC) began on the estate of Damophilus, a leading citizen of Enna, ‘who surpassed the Persians in the sumptuousness and costliness of his feasts’. The brutality of Damophilus drove his slaves to the desperate decision to kill their master. The conspirators sought advice from a Syrian miracle-worker and prophet called Eunus. Encouraging the revolt, he led 400 slaves into Enna, where they were joined by much of the urban population and quickly seized control of the city. Damophilus was brought from his villa, tried before a large crowd in the theatre, and summarily executed. His yet more vicious wife was handed over to her former female slaves, who first tortured her and then tossed her from the battlements. (The daughter, by contrast, who had always attempted to shield slaves from her parents’ brutality, was given safe passage to the coast.) Other slave-owners were either executed or put to work manufacturing arms for the slave army that now began to form. Eunus was proclaimed king. He made the Syrian slave woman with whom he lived queen. And Enna itself – a towering natural fortress never taken in direct assault – made an excellent base. The army of the embryonic slave state soon numbered 10,000. Meantime, a slave herdsmen from Cilicia in Asia Minor called Cleon had raised a second revolt at Agrigento. When Eunus invited him to assume command of the combined slave army, he accepted and united his 5,000 men with those massing at Enna.

  The revolution spread across much of the island. Eunus won control of Morgantina, which, like Enna, is near the centre of the island, and, more spectacularly, Taormina and possibly Messina on the east coast. His army is said to have numbered 60 or 70,000 at the height of the revolt, defeating several local Roman armies sent against it. The slave state was highly organized. It seems to have been modelled on the Hellenistic monarchies with which most of the slaves were familiar in their former homes: Eunus called himself ‘Antiochus’, the most popular name among the Seleucid monarchs; he wore a diadem and other regal insignia; and he minted coins depicting the corn goddess Demeter (who was especially revered at Enna) and inscribed with an abbreviation of his assumed name. Cleon, his commander-in-chief, was styled strategos, the Greek word for general; and there was a royal council, a royal bodyguard, and a royal household complete with butcher, baker, bath-attendant and buffoon. Sound orders were issued for the conduct of the war and the administration of liberated territory: not to burn down farmhouses, for example, or destroy agricultural tools and crops, or kill farm labourers. We should resist, therefore, the temptation to dismiss the Hellenistic trappings of the slave regime as mere farce. Revolutionary slaves had little choice but to construct a state, since the act of rebellion plunged them into war with their oppressors. The Sicilian slaves, faced with this task, simply used the
only alternative to the Roman model that they knew. Form – that of a Hellenistic monarchy – and content – a struggle against slavery – may have been in contradiction, but the two could have co-existed well enough for the short period that the revolution lasted.

  A third feature of the slave movement – for which we have only the most shadowy hints – was perhaps some sort of messianic-nationalist religious ideology. Our sources describe Eunus as a prophet of the Syrian goddess Atargatis. She was a primeval fertility deity, a great Earth Mother, and it seems likely that Demeter, the Greek corn-goddess worshipped at Enna and depicted on Eunus’s coins, was equated with her. In the East, the cult of Atargatis, like other eastern ‘mystery’ cults, involved ecstatic forms of worship. Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, gives a vivid description of a troupe of her eunuch priests parading through a village in Thessaly, ‘all dressed in different colours and looking absolutely hideous, their faces daubed with rouge and their eye-sockets painted to bring out the brightness of their eyes. They wore mitre-shaped birettas, saffron-coloured chasubles, silk surplices, girdles, and yellow shoes. Some of them sported white tunics with an irregular criss-cross of narrow purple stripes.’(5) The priests went about with bared shoulders, wielding great swords, wailing to the sound of pipes and horns, throwing their bodies about like dervishes, lacerating themselves with sharp knives, and lashing their own backs with whips strung with knuckle-bones. It is easy to imagine how the frenzy of the fertility cult that Apuleius describes could fuse with the mystical vision of a land cleansed of oppressors and restored to those who worked it – the devotees of Atargatis-Demeter, the followers of the prophet-king Eunus.