Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  There is a computer game called Rome: Total War, in which a player can theoretically play the role of Varus and win. The real Varus could not. On the fourth day, the Romans were finally overrun. Those who were not killed immediately were killed eventually, after torture. Some 30,000 people died in all. Before the end, P. Quinctilius Varus fell on his sword, as would have been expected of any noble Roman in the face of such dishonor. Only a handful of survivors made it safely to Haltern.

  It took weeks for news of the catastrophe to reach Rome. The impact is hard to overstate. Imagine a combination of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and Little Bighorn. In a single day three entire legions—the XVII, the XVIII, and the XIX, representing some ten percent of Rome’s invincible military—had been wiped out. The Romans could never bring themselves to use those legionary numbers again. It was all the worse for coming at a moment saturated with feelings of omnipotence: Rome had been about to hold a formal triumph to celebrate a series of military victories in the northern Balkans by Tiberius, the adopted son and presumptive heir of Augustus. Instead came word of the slaughter in Germany. Before long Augustus would also receive the head of Varus, severed by the Germans and forwarded through an intermediary for delivery into his hands.

  Were the Germans on the march? Would Gaul be next? Would the defeat embolden other enemies? Was the capital itself at risk? Public paranoia was inflamed by omens—the red and orange “threat level” warnings of their time. The Temple of Mars had been struck by lightning! Locusts had flown into Rome and been devoured by swallows! For decades German auxiliaries had served as loyal soldiers in Rome’s armies. Now, suddenly, they were viewed with suspicion. Augustus disbanded the German cavalry that had long helped to protect him. He sent troops into neighborhoods of Rome where German immigrants lived. He gave emergency powers to governors in far-flung provinces. He compelled free citizens to join a new armed force, which he sent north to the Rhine.

  In the aftermath of Teutoburg Forest the Romans forever lost their taste for ambitious expansion into free Germany. Yes, they would trade with the various German tribes, and put them to work, and attempt to manipulate them diplomatically, and absorb some of them into the armed forces, and if necessary fight them, but henceforward the northern Roman frontier would remain where it had been: more or less along the Rhine and the Danube. That frontier traces a cultural boundary to this day a dividing line between languages, liturgies, and eating and drinking habits. Europeans call it the “oil-butter line.” You could also think of it as the “wine-beer frontier.” Arminius himself is seen with some justice as a precursor of an independent Germany and his memory lives on in the common name Hermann. The name and the memory came to America with immigrants. An enormous monument to Arminius, erected a century ago by a group of German Americans called the Sons of Hermann, stands in a park in New Ulm, Minnesota. It is a city of brew pubs, not wine bars.

  What conclusions did the Romans draw from their defeat? It’s a hoary truism that people don’t learn the lessons they most urgently ought to heed. Some Romans blamed sheer incompetence by Varus, some the bad weather, some a supernatural judgment. No one at the time hinted at the true explanation, the strategic premise of the disaster, which was this: the Roman disinclination either to understand the minds or to credit the capabilities of people unlike themselves. “Underestimation of space was matched by the under-rating of people,” one historian concludes. Another writes, “The Romans simply could not believe that their military forces had been outfought by the northern barbarians.” Even if evidence of barbarian technological skill and organizational precocity had been presented in advance, he goes on, “Augustus and other Roman officials would not have been receptive.”

  According to Suetonius, after receiving news of the battle Augustus could be heard hitting his head against a door and lamenting aloud, “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

  Reality Check

  SPARTACUS MAY NOT be a historically fastidious movie, but it captures an actual state of mind. Right after the campy bath scene, in which Crassus (Laurence Olivier) is washed by the slave boy (Tony Curtis), Crassus takes the slave out to the balcony and shows him the legions passing by. “There, boy, is Rome—there is the might, the majesty, the terror of Rome. There is the power that bestrides the world like a colossus. No man can withstand Rome, no nation can withstand her—how much less a boy?” When I came upon those words recently, it was hard not to recall a remark made by a Bush administration official to the reporter Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  Among the people they ruled the Romans aggressively displayed the symbols of their power—like the well-known fasces, the wooden rods bundled around an ax and tied up with red straps. The fasces, once carried before consuls, eventually were carried before emperors; they were dipped ceremonially to show respect, as you dip a flag. They might be carried in reverse at a funeral, as boots are placed backward in the stirrups in a modern military cortege. To seize hold of the fasces was to proclaim an attempt at seizing power. As symbols, the fasces today seem relatively innocuous, the bundled rods often given the anodyne interpretation “strength in unity.” They were adopted as a republican symbol by a young America. Look behind the president when he gives the State of the Union address, and you’ll see fasces on the wall of the House chamber. You’ll see them on the massive marble seat Abraham Lincoln occupies in his memorial. But historians remind us what the fasces originally were: “a portable kit for flogging and decapitation.” At one time they were widely used as such. Carried before provincial governors, they exuded an “aura of latent violence” and were deeply resented by many non-Romans. Imagine if, instead of our flag flying over the entrance to an American embassy, you saw a bas-relief of stun guns and M-16s.

  The fasces epitomized a heedless arrogance that sometimes led to needless trouble. Punctuating a long history of great Roman military triumph stand dark moments of great military disaster. Behind virtually all of them lay an attitude that was “almost never cautious and often verged on the reckless,” as one historian concludes. Another, offering a catalogue of examples, cites “the old aggressive culture of the Roman army—eager to fight, impatient with tactics.”

  One of those disastrous moments involved that same Crassus played by Olivier—Marcus Licinius Crassus, the man who in 71 B.C. put down the slave revolt that the gladiator Spartacus had led, and crucified some 6,000 of the insurgents along the length of the Appian Way. Crassus was rich, and known to care deeply for his money. He controlled an extensive network of patronage, and became a member of the first triumvirate, with Caesar and Pompey. Unlike the other triumvirs, he had never been given credit for a true military victory against a worthy enemy—the slaves were seen as mere vermin—and he had never been awarded an official triumph. And so, in 53 B.C., “desiring for his part to accomplish something that involved glory and at the same time profit,” as Cassius Dio explains, he marched hastily and overconfidently against the Parthians, Rome’s longtime eastern foe. Crassus crossed the Euphrates with intelligence compromised both by its source and by his own wishful thinking—by an inclination, as a later age might say, to misunderestimate the capacities of the enemy. The Parthians were not the equal of the Romans in any strict military sense, but as horsemen in mobile warfare they were superior. Their ability to skillfully shoot arrows behind them while retreating at a gallop gave rise to the expression “Parthian shot,” meaning the last word in an argument, a decisive putdown. Crassus and his conventional forces were teased and bedeviled by the canny Parthians, and drawn deeper and deeper into an alien environment. Finally, at Carrhae, in what is now southeastern Turkey, his army was destroyed.

  The Parthians were well aware of the Roman general’s
love of money. “And not only the others fell, but Crassus also,” writes Cassius Dio, “either by one of his own men to prevent his capture alive, or by the enemy because he was badly wounded. This was his end. And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery.” What the Parthians certainly did do was to conduct a mock parade of the hated fasces, with the heads of Roman soldiers impaled upon them.

  A century and a half before Carrhae, in 216 B.C., during the Second Punic War, there was the disaster at Cannae, when, again, Romans with superior numbers proved “impetuous” (the word used by the historian Polybius), abandoning all caution and falling upon Hannibal and his Carthaginians, only to lose eight legions to the stratagem of “double entrapment,” now taught at war colleges everywhere as the oldest trick in the book. The Roman forces were led by two consuls. One of them, the seasoned Aemilius Paulus, seeing that the flat terrain gave advantage to Hannibal’s cavalry, urged prudence and delay. The other, the green and hotheaded Terentius Varro, who enjoyed the support of the rank and file and of public opinion in Rome, wanted to attack at once. Because the consuls alternated command from day to day, Varro needed only to let the earth spin to get his way. He led the Romans into the Carthaginian center and “advanced so far that the Libyan heavy-armed troops on either wing got on their flanks” and closed in for the kill. It was a defeat the Romans would never forget. And yet strategists in the capital entertained no second thoughts about what one modern analyst calls Rome’s culture of aggression: “Nor did the Romans entirely learn their lesson at Cannae,” he writes. “Subsequent Roman armies still threw themselves upon Hannibal and kept being defeated.”

  The Romans recovered from Cannae, but they never really recovered from the Battle of Adrianople, in 378 A.D., when the emperor Valens sought to contain a large force of Visigoths that had been allowed to cross the Danube in an area west of Constantinople and was now wandering about, hungry and dangerous. Valens had a substantial army with him, but was counseled by one of his generals, Sebastian, to avoid a frontal attack: with patience, the Goths could be harried and starved into surrender or retreat, as had often happened before. At the very least, Sebastian urged, why not wait for reinforcements from an additional Roman army that was on the way? The emperor would have none of it. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, Valens was seized with “a kind of rash ardor” and “determined to attack them at once.” He was emboldened in part by intelligence reports that had underestimated the number of Goths in front of him. Valens was also miffed: he had been insulted by the low rank of the barbarians who came to treat for peace. It may be, too, that he did not wish to share the glory with another commander and another army. As the chronicler Josephus wrote in a different context (explaining why, centuries earlier, the Roman general Titus had chosen to storm Jerusalem rather than let it come into his hands by a prolonged siege): “Time would accomplish anything, but for glory speed was necessary.” Fundamentally, though, the decision came down to the fact that Valens did not take the Goths seriously as military opponents. In the words of a modern analyst, “All the Roman commanders, with the possible exception of Sebastian, acted with the typical arrogance of a well-equipped, ‘civilized’ army dealing with what they saw as rabble.”

  The battle was joined, and the Romans, hemmed in by Gothic cavalry and blinded by brush fires, lost the freedom to maneuver. The rout was total. The body of the emperor was never found. Ammianus Marcellinus concludes, “The annals record no such massacre [in battle] except the one at Cannae.”

  A Clash of Caricatures

  THE ATTITUDE OF ROMANS toward non-Romans is not simple, and it’s not one-dimensional. For Americans, though, it does have familiar elements, starting with a sense of “exceptionalism,” of having been chosen for a special purpose. That word was first applied to Americans by Tocqueville, but the outlook it describes goes back to the moment of settlement. “Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill,” wrote John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1630. “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

  If they were arrogant, the Romans were also, like Americans, unabashedly syncretic—they borrowed heavily from others. They had come into their own while inhabiting a world in which certain foreign peoples—Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians—were by most cultural measures far more advanced than they were. As Rome expanded, it took these groups under its sway and adopted what they had to offer. “The Romans,” one historian writes, “thought of themselves not as a single ethnic group but as embracing all people.” It would take centuries, but eventually free inhabitants throughout the empire were granted Roman citizenship. The dress and grooming of faraway peoples, including even the barbarians, often enjoyed a Roman vogue—you see it in statuary and in the images on coins. The emperor Caracalla was named for the caracallus, the Gallic cloak he habitually wore. As ethnic pragmatists, the Romans would probably have understood certain aspects of modern America—for instance, the introduction a few years ago of a new picture of “Betty Crocker” on boxes of mashed-potato mix, to better reflect the American demographic reality. (A computer used images of several dozen diverse women to create a darker and more ethnically resonant Betty, in contrast to the original pallid, blue-eyed version of 1936.)

  At the same time, the Romans really did see themselves as distinct from, and superior to, non-Roman peoples, both those within and especially those beyond the pale of empire. Think schematically in terms of concentric circles. In the center is the city of Rome and its citizens. Next come others on the Italian peninsula, who only gradually are permitted to share in Roman citizenship and governance. Then come the freeborn among the conquered peoples. Finally, at the edge, in the thin halo remaining between the imperial frontier and the outside limit of the known world, lies barbaricum, the mysterious and forbidding barbarian domains. The word “barbarians” itself connotes incomprehensibility—it’s generally said to be an onomatopoeic term that originated with the Greeks, to whose ears the speech of outlanders sounded like a meaningless “bar-bar-bar.” One way of translating it would be as “gibberish people.” It is certainly true that in a broad zone along the frontiers, Romans and non-Romans knew one another intimately; Roman perceptions, whether friendly or hostile, would not have been the stuff of distant caricature. But personal attitudes of one kind (“some of my best friends are Quadi”) easily coexist with generic stereotypes of another. Fear only makes things worse. You find a lot of sentiments like the following, from an anonymous writer in the fourth century A.D.: “Wild nations are pressing upon the Roman Empire and howling round about it everywhere.” Or this, from Jerome in the early fifth century: “May Jesus protect the world in future from such beasts!”

  The Romans needed to be aware of the activities of specific groups, but unlike the Greeks—inveterate explorers and writers of travelogues—they didn’t have a burning curiosity about the unknown, and they didn’t methodically try to penetrate and understand neighboring cultures for national-security or any other purposes. Foreign “intelligence” was often haphazard—the result of serendipity rather than design. Ethnographic works like the portrait of the Germans and their culture by Tacitus, with all its insights and biases, are the great exception. The historian Susan Mattern notes that the Romans derived foreign policy from their own values and cultural identity, rather than from cold cost-benefit calculations. In the same vein she adds, “Their decisions were based more on a traditional and stereotyped view of foreign peoples than on systematic intelligence about their political, social, and cultural institutions.” To be sure, the Roman military took pains to gather whatever tactical information it could along the frontiers. Much information arrived willy-nilly, with a delegation from here, with some hostages from there, or on the lips of a trader who’d heard something from another trader. One historian writes, “The Romans acquired information that we would deem vital for the conduct of foreign relations only randomly through a variety of ad hoc sources”—the ancient equivalents of, say, CNN, Ahmed Chalabi, and “friends in t
he oil business.” In hindsight it’s fascinating to watch as the Romans try to figure out the ultimate catalyst for a rash of barbarian invasions in the late fourth century. What’s making so many different groups suddenly spill across the Rhine, the Danube? It takes the Romans quite a while to infer the existence of the Huns, still thousands of miles away, out on the far steppes, a place that was terra incognita—just like the mind of radical Islam to most Americans before 2001 (and maybe still).

  Intelligence collection was hampered partly, of course, by the general problem of communications. As good as Rome’s were for its day, they were slow. The overland trip from Rome to Antioch and back probably took two months; the fast boat from Italy to Alexandria and back, under ideal circumstances, took three weeks. Ironically, in an age of instantaneous communications, American intelligence often suffers from a time lag just as significant. American analysts amass far more information than they can digest. The FBI office in Phoenix sent a warning to Washington in June of 2001, noting that an “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” were signing up for lessons at American flight schools. The warning might as well have gone by cursus publicus from Rome to Antioch: no one saw it for more than two months, until after the 9/11 attacks proved it germane. Again: CIA and FBI agents met in New York in June of 2001 to discuss an individual who turned out to be one of the 9/11 hijackers, and who had been raising eyebrows for months. But crucial information was not shared, and no one was looking for this individual when he entered the country shortly thereafter. Bureaucracy is the new geography.