The Rise of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Unfortunately, there was no evidence, so Perseus manufactured some. He produced a forged letter from Flamininus spelling out Demetrius’s treasonable plans. The king was taken in, and in 180 arranged his son’s murder. At a dinner party, poison was added to Demetrius’s drink. Draining the cup, the boy instantly realized what had happened and before long the pains began. He withdrew to his bedroom and raged against his father and brother, whom he correctly blamed for his death. The noise was embarrassing, and a man was sent in to smother him.

  Too late, Philip became convinced that the letter was a fabrication. He blamed Perseus, who was fortunate that the king soon died. Apparently, his final illness was psychological rather than physical: he could not sleep for remorse.

  Safely enthroned, Perseus did all he could to calm any fears the Senate might harbor about him. But he was an energetic ruler, determined to turn over a new leaf after his father’s long reign. His aim was to reestablish Macedon’s good name in Greece and the wider East. Openness and generosity marked a break with his father’s caustic machtpolitik. Measures such as an amnesty for debtors signaled support for the democratic masses rather than the local aristocracies with whom the Senate preferred to do business. His marriage to Antiochus’s daughter and his half sister’s union with the king of Bithynia improved his international standing. While keeping carefully to the terms of the treaty with Rome, the king built up and trained his army.

  All this activity disturbed the Senate. In recent years, it had become much more aggressive in Greece, irritated by the city-states’ endless sniping at one another and, in particular, the ambition of the Achaean League to take over the entire Peloponnese. But Perseus’s new popularity was a sign of something much more serious. Pergamum still had the Senate’s ear, into which it continually whispered far-fetched accusations, and did all it could to turn opinion against the king.

  Was a revived and renewed Macedon preparing a fresh challenge to the Republic? Yes and no. Perseus certainly wanted to improve his kingdom’s political position, but Philip had recognized that Macedon could not compete with Rome, and so, surely, did his son. The Romans reacted evasively to requests for dialogue and agreed to a deceitful truce to allow time to recruit troops. It was as if they wanted war however weak the case for it. Eventually, in 171, the Senate sent an expeditionary force to Greece.

  As in the conflict with Philip, the campaign got off to a desultory start, but in 168 Perseus, who was not a confident commander, lost a decisive battle at Pydna. This was the end of Macedon as a political entity. The kingdom was split up into four self-governing republics and its former ruler walked in his victor’s triumphal procession. Perseus spent the rest of his days under house arrest in a small hill town not far from Rome. He was allowed to live in some comfort, supplied with palace furniture from Macedon and served by former court attendants. A disappointed man, he lasted for only a couple of years, starving himself to death in 166.

  By an irony of fate, his throneless son was named Alexander, a sad echo of the most glorious of Macedonian monarchs. He was left to make his own way in the world. He learned Latin, and made a living as a skilled metalworker in gold and silver and as a public notary.

  THE MAN WHO broke the phalanx at Pydna was a veteran Roman general, Lucius Aemilius Paullus. On his way back to Rome, he received an appalling instruction from the Senate. Epirus had not distinguished itself greatly since the days of its glamorous king Pyrrhus, and had unwisely favored Perseus in the war now ended. In order to supply the legions with booty, the Senate instructed Paullus to pillage every Epirote city, town, or settlement that had come out for Macedon. The general was a connoisseur of all things Hellenic and had just finished a sightseeing tour of Greece, but he set his hand to this new task with a will.

  Leading men from each community were ordered to bring out the silver and gold in their houses and temples; legionary detachments spread out across the territory to collect this treasure. This they did, and then simultaneously and without warning overran and sacked each settlement. In a single day 150,000 men, women, and children were made slaves and Epirus became a wasteland, a condition from which it never fully recovered.

  There had always been slaves in Rome—serfs, bankrupt citizen peasants who sold themselves as labor, and, as the legions marched through Italy, captured enemies. They were a common feature of life—noticeable but not dominant. It was only when the Republic fought and won its overseas campaigns that the number of slaves rose to the point that it transformed the city’s way of life—that, in a word, Rome became a slave society.

  It has been estimated that the first Carthaginian war produced some seventy-five thousand slaves. In the struggle with Hannibal the capture of a single city, Tarentum, saw the sale of thirty thousand prisoners. Now, with the collapse of Macedon and the defeat of Syria, slaves and money flooded into Italy. People could also be purchased through organized piracy and trafficking.

  A slave had no rights: he or she was a res mancipi—the property of an owner who was entitled to do with it as he liked, including inflicting death. Varro said, with a Roman’s carelessly brutal frankness, that, along with a propertyless farmworker, a slave was “a kind of speaking tool.”

  A wealthy man would dispose of many, perhaps hundreds, of slaves, but even a lowly artisan owned one or two. The worst fate was to lead a short life working in the mines. Diodorus Siculus observed that many of these slaves preferred death to survival:

  Day and night they wear out their bodies digging underground, dying in large numbers because of the terrible conditions they have to endure. They are allowed no restbreaks or holidays and under their overseers’ whiplashes are forced to suffer the most dreadful hardships.

  Almost as bad as the mines was hard labor on the great landed estates that were replacing peasant smallholdings across the peninsula.

  To be a house servant was also bad, but better. Owner and slave could get close. Good-looking boys and girls fetched large sums at auction, and a master might well expect sexual favors. “I know of a slave who dreamed that his penis was stroked and aroused by his master’s hand,” wrote an expert on the interpretation of dreams, adding ominously that this meant he would be bound to a pillar and “receive many strokes.” In this way, the dream elided many slaves’ two recurring fears—of sexual and physical abuse.

  Slaves often managed to have a family life, even if it was the master who allocated partners. But, having produced children, they had to live with the permanent anxiety that their offspring might be sold off or, conversely, that the children might have to watch their old or sick parents auctioned or abandoned.

  Open resistance was dangerous, although unhappy slaves sometimes absconded. This was a dangerous thing to do, though, for the reach of the Roman state was long. Cicero, in the following century, was upset when his highly educated slave, Dionysius, ran off with some books from his library. The man was tracked down to the province of Illyricum, and his disgruntled owner asked two successive governors to help him retrieve the fugitive. History does not record the outcome, but the incident shows how hard it was for a man on the run to vanish without trace.

  Uniforms were forbidden on the grounds that this would show slaves how many of them there were and encourage solidarity and conspiracy. And indeed a slave revolt would occasionally terrify the authorities, but they all failed and were savagely put down. The most famous was that of Spartacus, a Thracian slave who led a revolt that began in 73 at the gladiatorial school at Capua. He routed three Roman armies before being cornered and destroyed in 71. Interestingly, rebels did not criticize the “peculiar institution” as such; they merely wanted to escape its grip.

  One of the most remarkable, and in part mitigating, features of the Roman slave system was the widespread practice of manumission. Slaves were often freed, although they were likely to remain in their former owner’s employ and were bound by the clientela system of mutual obligations. Affection may often have been the motive (although freedom was sometimes bought with h
ard-won savings), but liberation as a promised ultimate goal was a means of ensuring obedience and hard work.

  Former slaves automatically became Roman citizens and (in theory, at least) their male progeny could stand for public office, although in practice a man’s servile origin was remembered negatively for generations. The Romans had no concept of racial purity and, just as they had welcomed conquered states into partnership with them since the days of Romulus, so they invited individuals whom they had oppressed and degraded to join them as collaborators in their imperial project. Over time, Rome became the most culturally diverse of cities and its population mirrored the ethnic composition of its growing empire.

  AT SOME POINT in the 190s, when the memory of the war with Hannibal was still sharp, Plautus wrote a comedy called The Little Carthaginian (in Latin Poenulus). What is striking is that the juvenile leads are sympathetically drawn in spite of the fact that they are all Carthaginian. One of them is a young man who is sold into slavery and adopted by his wealthy purchaser, and the other two are kidnapped girls bought by a pimp for prostitution.

  A businessman named Hanno, the girls’ father, has long been looking for them and arrives from Carthage. He gives his opening speech in the Punic language before slipping into fluent Latin. He is a typical, shrewd, polyglot Carthaginian who astutely conceals his linguistic ability, but he is also an affectionate parent and a man of authority. The play leaves the impression that the Carthaginians were regarded as a clever race but had had bad luck. There is no residual enmity from the years of war, and we may suppose that this reflected the general opinion among Plautus’s audiences.

  It was not at all how the eighty-one-year-old Cato the Censor saw things. A member of a senatorial commission, he visited Carthage in 157, and was shocked by what he found. The city had recovered from its defeat and was enjoying an economic boom. It no longer had to bear the costs of running an empire and hiring mercenaries. In the old days, its wealth derived from trading in the Western Mediterranean, but Rome had annexed its possessions in Sicily, Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia and its prosperity now depended on the agriculture in its North African hinterland. It exported foodstuffs and developed a thriving trade with Italy. The envoys were disturbed by the evidence of revival. Appian writes:

  They carefully observed the country; they saw how diligently it was cultivated, and what great estates it possessed. They entered the city and saw how greatly it had increased in wealth and population since its overthrow by Scipio not long before.

  On their return to Rome, Cato and his colleagues reported what they had seen and argued that Carthage would once again become a threat to the security of the Republic. The aged censor would not let the matter drop. On one occasion, he spoke on the subject from the speakers’ platform in the Forum; he took a large and appetizing Punic fig from the folds of his toga. The country where it grew, he said, was only three days’ sail from Rome. At the end of every speech he made in the Senate, he added the sentence “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” (“In addition, it is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed”).

  This is very odd. Carthage had behaved toward Rome as a faithful and assiduous ally for half a century and had made no attempt to run an independent foreign policy. It supplied large amounts of grain as gifts during the Macedonian Wars and the war with Antiochus. It also helped stimulate the Republic’s economy by importing vast quantities of ceramics and kitchenware from Campania and elsewhere in central Italy. Although the city restored its great military and commercial harbors at about this time, it had adhered to the terms of the peace treaty. Hardly a single Carthaginian citizen had done any serious military service since Zama. What’s more, it was obvious that, without an army and with no fleet to speak of, Carthage no longer had the resources, let alone the will, to mount a serious challenge against Rome.

  There was one difficulty, which took the form of the irrepressible Numidian ruler Masinissa, now an old man in his late eighties. He had lost little of his energy over the passage of time; in his personal life he was philoprogenitive, having sired fifty-four children by numerous women, of whom the youngest was an infant. The king had a policy of settling and uniting the nomadic tribes over which he ruled; he admired Punic cultural values and wanted his subjects to adopt them. But he coveted Carthaginian land. According to the peace treaty of 201, he was entitled to claim back any territory that lay outside Carthage’s borders and had originally been a part of his domain. Unfortunately the terms were vaguely expressed and Masinissa constantly encroached on real estate that the Carthaginians knew was theirs. The Council of Elders regularly complained to the Senate, which sent out delegations to arbitrate, including the one on which Cato served. These invariably found for the king or suspended judgment, whatever the rights and wrongs of the particular case.

  However, despite this open wound Carthage continued to thrive and to do all it could to placate the Senate. Why, then, was Cato so monomanic on the subject? He had fought in the war against Hannibal and his memories were bitter. He may have seriously believed that the old enemy was making a comeback. His political opponents did not disagree with his analysis of Carthage’s growing strength, but they argued that without a strong potential enemy Rome would grow soft and decadent.

  A growing number of Romans supported Cato, but for more cynical reasons. They were aware that war was a highly profitable business. Carthage was a ripe fruit ready to fall from the tree into their grasping hands. Plutarch tells the story of a rich young Roman who held an extravagant dinner party. The centerpiece was a honey cake designed to look like a city. He said to his guests, “This is Carthage, please plunder it.” Rome was becoming both greedy and ruthless. As with Philip of Macedon the Senate secretly made up its mind for war and waited for an excuse to act.

  Two events precipitated the crisis. In 151, Carthage paid its last installment of reparations, so a useful source of income for the Republic now dried up. And then, with the self-confidence and independence of spirit of a house owner who has paid off a mortgage, the Council of Elders lost patience with Masinissa, who had made an encroachment too far.

  THE 150S WERE an uneasy time. The men who had defeated the Carthaginians were leaving the stage. They had had quick and easy successes in the Eastern Mediterranean and long, hard campaigns as they slowly Romanized Cisalpine Gaul in the north of the peninsula, but now their experience and skills gradually faded away. There was less fighting to be done, and in the absence of grand campaigns the Republic’s legions were demobilized. When an army was needed, the business of training had to start again from scratch. Younger commanders placed less emphasis on discipline, development, and high-quality logistics.

  Since acquiring Spain from the Carthaginians and establishing two provinces, the Romans had had trouble taming the Spaniards, who resented being plundered by venal governors. Cato campaigned successfully there in the year after his consulship and was awarded a triumph, but trouble continued. A great insurrection broke out in 154 and raged until 133. Roman generals combined incompetence with treachery. Even the Senate was shocked when a proconsul invaded Lusitania (roughly today’s Portugal) and agreed to a peace treaty with the rebels. On his promise of resettling them on good farming land, he persuaded them to gather on three separate plains, where he would assign them their new territories. He asked the Lusitanians to lay down their weapons, an order they unwisely obeyed, for, one after another, each group was massacred. Back in Rome, the proconsul was brought to trial and Cato spoke against him, but he deployed his ill-gotten gains to procure an acquittal.

  One of the few to escape the butchery was a shepherd and hunter, who carried on the struggle. A stickler for fair dealing and true to his word, Viriathus was a shining and shaming contrast to his Roman opponents. He was also a guerrilla fighter of genius, who deployed small bands that made sudden raids and then disappeared into the sierra. Eventually, in 140, a proconsul bribed three of Viriathus’s senior followers to kill him while he slept. This they did, but when they asked fo
r their money the general refused, saying, “It never pleases the Romans that a general should be killed by his own soldiers.” The remark was a fine example of that fusion of high-mindedness and fraud that was becoming a routine feature of Roman public life.

  The great hill fortress of Numantia (Cerro de la Muela, near Soria), which stood at the junction of two rivers running between steep banks through wooded valleys, repelled Roman attacks for ten years. Bungling legionary commanders behaved with their usual bad faith, but eventually, in 133, Numantia fell to the able Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus: he was the birth son of Aemilius Paullus and had been adopted by Scipio Africanus’s childless son (hence the “Aemilianus” at the end, to signal the original genetic connection). Noble families often helped out those facing extinction because of an absence of male heirs by allowing one of their boys to be adopted. Without consulting the Senate, Scipio razed the town to the ground, as a layer of burned material found on the site testifies to this day.

  At last, Rome had a firm hold on Spain.

  WITH APPALLINGLY BAD judgment, the Carthaginians laid a trap for themselves and then, eyes wide open, walked into it.

  They had agreed never to make war without the Senate’s permission. In 152, they raised an army to put an end to Masinissa’s depredations and went on the offensive. They did not inform Rome. Scipio Aemilianus happened to be in the country and tried unsuccessfully to mediate a cease-fire. The Numidian king then cornered and besieged the Punic forces, which were gradually weakened by disease and shortage of food and forced to capitulate. Harsh terms were agreed, and the Carthaginians were allowed to march away with nothing but a tunic each. As they were leaving, Numidian cavalry fell on the defenseless men and massacred most of them. Of an estimated twenty-five thousand men, only a handful returned to Carthage.