by M. J. Trow
Spoiled and indulged, the boy was obsessed with a married woman, Lucretia, who was given a straight choice – submit to Sextus’ lust or be branded a whore for having sex with a slave. Lucretia chose to live but then, racked with guilt, committed suicide (that fine, Roman end). Led by a hardliner, Lucius Junius Brutus, the city’s population forced Tarquin and his son out and set up a Republic that was tottering to its own fall at the time of Cleopatra.
The government of the Republic was complicated. It was designed to prevent a return to the despotism of Tarquin but at the same time was nothing like a modern democracy nor even the original Athenian form of that style of government. Service to Rome was essential – Res Publica meant public matters and everyone, high and low, was expected to bear responsibility. The only problem was that, anxious to avoid tyranny, various officials only held office for a year and could not stand again for a decade. Such novices were expected to control the mob (always a problem), provide bread and circuses (to keep the mob happy), feed, clothe and water the city and fight whichever enemy took the field against Rome.
The role of the Praetor (there were sixteen of them by Cleopatra’s time) was to administer justice as a magistrate. The Praetor Urbanus had jurisdiction in the city limits; the Praetor Peregrinus kept watch on the endless stream of foreigners trickling to the magnet that was Rome. It was expecting a lot of a man that he could cope with the finer points of the Twelve Tablets of Roman Laws as well as taking the field against enemies as dangerous as, say, Hannibal the Carthaginian (see Chapter 7). Those who did well went on to become consuls; those who did not often became governors of provinces as the ‘empire’ spread before it even had an emperor.
The Aedile was responsible for supervising the various markets throughout the city, as well as maintaining the temples, aqueducts and baths. The markets, of course, were the city’s lifeblood and it was here that the grain of Egypt was sold long before the two peoples recognized each other politically. Aqueducts carried water supplies from the Tiber and its tributaries and were astonishing works of engineering, a lasting complement to Roman know-how.
As far as the temples were concerned, the religion of Rome was complicated and became more so as the ‘empire’ grew. The pantheon of gods was passed on from that of the Greeks; only the names had changed to Romanize them – Zeus became Jupiter, Artemis was Diana, Ares turned into Mars, and so on. Cults came and went depending on the trend of the time – the Greek god Dionysus, worshipped by the Ptolemies, never really took off; Dionysus became Bacchus, a lascivious, useless drunk whose orgies were actively discriminated against in Cleopatra’s time. Above all, however, the Aedile organized games that ran for days and commemorated the feast of one god or another. The gladiatorial contests that were a regular part of these ceremonies were immensely popular wherever the eagles flew.
The Quaestor was a record-keeper and controller of the treasury. He had to be at least twenty-five and to have served as an officer in the army. There were forty of these under Julius Caesar. The Quaestor worked hand in glove with the Censor, who held a very wide remit. Cicero described his job:
[The Censors] shall divide citizens into tribes and list them according to wealth, age and rank. They shall assign young men to the cavalry and infantry. They shall discourage the unmarried state, guard public morality and suspend from the senate anyone guilty of improper conduct.25
The Censor checked the suitability of plays (in Shakespeare’s England Antony and Cleopatra would have been checked by a similar busybody called the Master of the Revels), supervised public gardens and had the power to demote the social rank of anyone who broke the law.
Lastly, the Pontifex Maximus was the bridge builder between gods and men. He was not actually a religious leader, but appointed the sisterhood of the Vestal Virgins (the perfection of chaste Roman womanhood) and disciplined transgressing priests. The job was for life (unlike any political posts of the Republic) and the title was passed centuries later to the Pope.
The best known aspect of the Republic’s government was the Senate, with its famous initials still found on Roman public buildings today – SPQR; Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and the people of Rome. It was composed of about 300 men of the patrician class (women were accorded no official power under the Republic) and the image we have from various men who were there is of toga-clad politicians sitting on their curved marble seats and hurling abuse at each other. In fact, some of Rome’s finest oratory came from that platform. In a clever nod to inclusivity, plebeians were allowed in from the fourth century, but in practice, only those with administrative experience could join, so that in effect, only the patricians held sway. Unlike its modern American counterpart, the senate was not actually a legislative body, but it controlled finances, tax collection and foreign policy, so its advice was always taken seriously.
Four sub-committees operated within the Senate. The Comitia Curiata (household assembly) represented the twenty wards of the city set up under the kings. It was a court of appeal and supervised the election of the Consuls, but by Cleopatra’s day, most of its work was carried out by the Comitia Centuriata. This was originally made up of ex-army men but by about 200 had become largely civilian. It had 193 seats, eighty-eight of them belonging to the wealthiest patricians. It could approve laws and peace treaties, declare war and decide issues of exile, life and death. The Comitia Tributa was open to all citizens and elected minor officials; its powers were a throwback to the earliest days of the Republic and very limited. Finally, the Concilium Plebis, the People’s Council, represented thirty-five outlying districts, but its decisions covered the whole city.
Like any institution as complex and powerful as Rome, it was a mass of contradiction. All Romans respected the concept of the wife and mother, but women had no political voice and prostitution was rife in every major Roman town. Millions of men, women and children toiled as slaves in the latifundia, the fields that fed Rome, and they were bought and sold as cattle. There was no law against killing a slave. Candidates for election bribed those with the vote and shamelessly made promises they could not possibly keep. Money talked – Marcus Licinius Crassus who ran Rome with Pompey and Caesar when Cleopatra was a young woman bought up so much derelict property in the city that he was given the nickname ‘Dives’ – the rich one.
In reality, the story of the Roman Republic was one of powerful men vying with each other to become more powerful still. And the best way to do that was to control the army, the most formidable fighting force of the ancient world.
7
MARS VICTOR
ROME, 753
The Roman army could be defeated. In 321 the Samnites won a famous victory over them in the convoluted valleys of the Caudine Forks. Livy wrote:
The consuls, half-naked, suffered the ignominious ordeal of being sent under the yoke. They were followed by their officers, in descending order of rank; then, one after the other, by the legions themselves, while the enemy, fully armed, stood around, hurling insults and cracking jokes.26
Between 71 and 69 Spartacus destroyed six different armies that Rome sent against him. Not only were they beaten at their own game, they were beaten by an army of slaves, the lowest of the low. The man who defeated them, Marcus Licinius Crassus, was only awarded an ovation by Rome, not the full-blown triumph given for victory over a conventional foreign enemy.
In the Teutoberg Forest in north Germany in AD 9, Publius Varus was completely outfought in a series of ambushes over several days. Varus himself committed suicide and his three legions, perhaps 15,000 men, were massacred.
It could happen, but not often. What marked Roman military conquest was the sheer tenacity of the Roman soldier. The Samnites were eventually defeated thirty years before Cleopatra’s birth. Spartacus was killed in battle by Crassus in the year of her birth and 6,000 of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way into Rome as a reminder of the fate that awaited anyone who took on the city of the seven hills. The Teutoberg disaster was a mere glitch in
the conquest of the southern part of Germany, which would not be wiped out for 400 years.
Rome was at war for an astonishingly long time and was the most aggressive military force in Italy. We have already seen that her armies destroyed the Sabines, the Aequians and the Volsci, and in 370 Marcus Camillus defeated the Cisalpine Gauls on the River Arno. Thirty years later Valerius Corvus destroyed Satricia, the Sabine capital. Thirty years after that, Lucius Scapula beat the Etruscans.
The army that won these victories was still a citizen army, composed of farmers who served their city voluntarily, but as the defensive battles became offensive and the campaigns were fought ever further afield, the structure of the Roman war machine had to change. What also changed was the means by which the army marched.
Think Rome – think roads. They were dug straight as arrows to cover the miles quickly – the very name miles derives from the Latin word for soldier – and they had firm surfaces and drainage ditches to allow the rainwater to run off. The Appian Way, which ran south from Rome, was the road that saw the legions of Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius march for Egypt. It was built by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus (the Blind) as early as 312 and was originally 152 miles long, extending to the port of Brundisium later. Such roads spread the tentacles from Rome and were built wherever the legions had permanent camps.
The biggest obstacle that Rome faced outside the Italian peninsula was Carthage, the North African empire covering modern Tunisia. Rome fought Carthage three times – the Punic Wars – over a long period, which cost thousands of lives, destroyed whole tracts of countryside and almost wiped out some of Rome’s most powerful families. The geographer Strabo estimated that the Poeni (the Roman name for Carthaginians – hence Punic) had a population of 700,000 and nearly 300 colonia, cities that made up their empire. The Carthaginians traded slaves, tin, gold, corn, bronze, iron, dyestuffs and perfumes, and they saw the islands of the Mediterranean, especially Sardinia and Corsica, as outposts of their empire.
The first Punic War focused on the sea. For twenty-three years, war-galleys grappled together in a bid for supremacy. The army sent to Sicily in 264 succeeded in taking the island, but the invasion of North Africa under Marcus Atilius Regulus fell apart when his fleet was destroyed with huge loss of life. Hamilcar Barca was unable to follow this up with a swift counter-attack and two years of sieges on Sicily itself gave the Romans time to rebuild their fleet and effectively starve the Carthaginian garrisons out. Barca surrendered, ceding Sicily permanently to Rome.
It was the second Punic War that terrified Rome because this time the fighting came to them. It produced one of the finest generals in the ancient world – Hannibal. Legend says that as a boy of nine he swore an oath to oppose Rome and spent his adult life keeping that oath. Ignoring the endless war of manoeuvre and fleets that had cost his country Sicily, he invaded Italy from the north, marching into the Po Valley with his war elephants, which terrified the Romans who had never seen anything like them before. In a whirlwind series of battles – Trebia, Lake Trasimene and above all Cannae – he put the legions to the sword. At Cannae, the consuls Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus drew up their battle formations of 80,000 men and attacked head-on in the usual Roman way, the legions marching in grim silence, shield to shield through Hannibal’s centre of Spaniards and Celts. They realized too late that this was a Carthaginian feint and Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry closed in on their flanks like a giant crab’s claw. Paullus was killed along with half his command.
The problem for Hannibal was Rome itself. The city was inevitably well fortified and Quintus Fabius Maximus and Claudius Marcellus prevented Carthaginian alliances with local tribes so that Hannibal had to get his supplies from Carthage itself. Since Rome once more commanded the sea, this was a major obstacle and by 208 Rome had taken Spain from Carthage. Four years later Scipio, later named Africanus for his success, invaded Carthage itself and faced Hannibal at Zama in 202. This time the Romans were ready for the elephants and the braying of Roman trumpets seems to have unnerved the animals who were lured into cul-de-sacs of infantry and slaughtered. The treaty of Scipio brought the war to a close and Hannibal ended his days as a wandering freak before finally committing suicide.
The third Punic War was very much a mopping-up operation. It lasted for only three years and ended with the sacking of Carthage itself. An estimated 200,000 suits of armour and 3,000 siege engines found their way to Rome and the survivors of the smouldering city were sold into slavery. ‘Delenda est Carthago’ Cato told the Senate in 153 – ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ – it was and everybody breathed a sigh of relief.
In a speech to his troops before Zama, Scipio Africanus told his men they were fighting not merely to defeat Carthage, but to dominate the world. Like peoples before and after them, the Romans had a divine right, they believed, to conquer. It was a grim mindset, but it was held universally by a nation that believed implicitly in its own superiority and was prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it. Fifty years before Cleopatra’s birth, the empire with no emperor extended from Iberia (Spain) in the west to Bithynia and Pontus (Turkey) in the east and included Greece and Alexander’s own Macedonia.
Much of the aggression of Roman conquest came from the political system we looked at in the last chapter. Government was dominated by the elite and ambitious men at the top who followed the cursus honorum, the path of honour to the consulship if they could. There were only two consuls at any given time and they only held office for a year, so there was a need to impress and quickly. The greatest method of doing this was to be awarded a triumph for feats of arms, riding in a chariot through Rome’s streets, thronged with flower-throwing fans who marvelled at the spoils taken in war and the defeated enemies dragged in chains behind the legions. Each triumph was accompanied by games and was expected to be more lavish than the last.
A rational analysis of most of the wars of conquest fought by the Romans before the birth of Christ shows a recurring pattern. Early days of each campaign were characterized by embarrassing losses and some humiliation, especially when charismatic enemies like Hamilcar, Hannibal, Vercingetorix and Arminius led their men with brilliance. It is not true to say that Rome fought every year or that her consuls always went to war. The stop-go military policy led to quiet periods in which experience was lost and the legions had to learn to fight all over again. There was a need, above all, to improve the quality and consistency of the Roman soldier; to move, in effect, from the amateur to the professional. The man generally held to be responsible for this transition is Gaius Marius who died, probably from a stroke, sixteen years before Cleopatra was born. Hugely influential though Marius was, the changes were already under way when he was a boy and were more gradual than historians used to accept.
The army recruit was increasingly a labourer, without ties to his own farmland in the latifundia, and was bound to make for an improvement. A man who is constantly worrying about his wife, children and the harvest makes a poor soldier unless he is specifically fighting to defend them. Flavius Vegetius Renatus was writing nearly 500 years after Cleopatra, but he used earlier Roman sources, including Julius Caesar, and describes a recruit of the first century BC:
A young soldier who is chosen for the work of Mars should have alert eyes and should hold his head upright. [He] should be broad-chested with powerful shoulders and brawny arms. His fingers should be long rather than short. He should not be pot-bellied or have a fat bottom. His calves and feet should not be flabby; instead they should be made entirely of tough sinew ...smiths, carpenters, butchers and hunters of deer and wild boar are the most suitable...27
Old distinctions of recruitment, based on age and property ownership, disappeared and the focus of the army became the legion. In theory 6,000 strong, on campaign the unit usually mustered about 4,800 and even that could be reduced by sickness and secondment. The old sub-division of the maniple, stolen from the Greek hoplite armies of Alexander, became the cohort, of 480 men, divided into six f
urther subunits of eighty, commanded by a centurion. The senior officers were the tribunes, six per legion, each with a specific role. The senior centurion was the primus pilus (first spear), a reminder of the tactical weapons soldiers carried. Each soldier carried two spears, the javelin (pilum) for throwing and the hasta for stabbing. By Cleopatra’s time, only the javelin remained. The legionary carried a short, straight, double-edged sword (gladius) and a pugio (dagger) and usually wore the overlapping breast and back plates made famous by Hollywood, the lorica segmentata.28 The head was protected by a helmet with ear flaps and a neck flange for maximum protection and a large curved angular shield (scutum) served as both a defence mechanism and a weapon. An advancing unit would bat the enemy aside with these shields before stabbing their falling or fallen bodies with the sword.
On the battlefield the cohorts advanced in silence, in the triplex acies (three-line) formation, which could easily change direction and deploy in one, two or four lines. Endless training led to perfection of these tactics and most opponents, especially the Gauls and Britons, tried to smash the formations with a wild, headlong charge. This was usually ineffective and led to exhaustion and a lack of cohesion on which the legions capitalized.
The old emblems of Rome’s citizen armies – the boar, the wolf, the horse – which could be found in most armies of the ancient world were replaced in the legion by the silver eagle and carried by the aquilifer with his distinctive lion or wolf-skin headdress. The eagle, of course, had been pinched by the Romans from the personal badge of Ptolemy II.
But if the heart of the new professional army was the legion, the cavalry (alae) were often recruited from former enemies, especially the Iberians. They were deployed on the wings of battle formations to harass the enemy and turn a retreat into a rout. The auxiliaries served as light infantrymen, in some cases being virtually indistinguishable from the legions themselves. Specialist troops were used to build roads and bridges and to fire the highly effective ballistic weapons used in siege operations. For example, when Julius Caesar reached the River Thames in the summer of 54, he had Batavian troops with him who were experts in river crossings.