The Rise of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  When the Senate learned of these events, it began to raise troops without offering an explanation, except to say that it was “just in case of emergencies.” The Council of Elders was not deceived and immediately sent envoys to Rome. They explained that the war with Masinissa had not been approved by the government and that those responsible for it had been put to death. The Senate, aware that it now had its casus belli, refused to be appeased. Why, a senator inquired, had Carthage not condemned its officers at the first opportunity instead of waiting until they were beaten? It was an unanswerable question. The envoys asked what they could do to win a pardon. “You must make things right with the Roman People” was the alarmingly obscure response. A second embassy pleaded for specific instructions. The Senate dismissed it with the words “You know perfectly well what is necessary.”

  The Carthaginian authorities were at their wits’ end. Their only hope, they decided, lay in unconditional surrender. A third delegation made its way to Rome to announce this, only to find that war had already been declared. Neverthess, the Senate cynically accepted the surrender and demanded three hundred child hostages.

  There was no difficulty in attracting recruits to the legions, for it was clear to everyone that Carthage could not conceivably achieve victory and soldiers could expect rich pickings, treasure, and slaves. In 149, an unusually large army of eighty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry crossed the sea to Africa. The two consuls were in command and carried secret orders to destroy the city utterly when they captured it. Very helpfully, the important Phoenician port of Utica, a few miles from Carthage, which was “well adapted for landing an army,” came over to the Romans.

  The Punic leadership was appalled by news of the invasion and was willing to do almost anything to avoid fighting an unwinnable war. Yet more envoys were dispatched to plead for peace, this time to the Roman camp. When they arrived, the consuls, surrounded by their chief officers and military tribunes, were seated on a high dais. The entire army, with polished armor and weapons and erect standards, was drawn up to attention. A trumpet blew and, in dead silence, the Carthaginians were then obliged to walk the length of the camp before they reached the consuls. A rope cordon prevented them from drawing near.

  They asked why an expeditionary force was necessary to defeat an enemy that had no intention of fighting. Carthage would submit willingly to any penalty. In response, the consuls demanded the city’s complete disarmament. This was at once conceded, and soon a line of wagons brought to the camp armor and weapons for twenty thousand men and many artillery pieces.

  Only then did the consuls show their hand. They complimented the Carthaginians for their obedience so far, and asked them to accept bravely the Senate’s final commands: “Hand over Carthage to us, and resettle yourselves wherever you like inside your own borders at a distance of at least nine miles from the sea, for we have decided to raze your city to the ground.”

  This was unendurable. The people would wither away if banished from their traditional element, the sea. They rose up in rage and grief. They stoned to death the hapless envoys on their return and any pro-Roman politicians they could find. Roman traders who by ill chance happened to be in the city were set upon and killed. With magnificent, despairing defiance, Carthage made the decision to resist Rome.

  If the Carthaginians knew they could not vanquish their opponents, they were no walkover. They were greatly assisted by the poor quality of the Roman commanders. The city’s triple defenses, its high walls, and its fortified towers presented the besiegers with a very considerable challenge. Two years of hard but inconclusive fighting ensued. From the Roman perspective, the only bright spots were the valor and presence of mind of Scipio Aemilianus, who at this point in his career was a military tribune in his mid-thirties. Among other things, he arranged the defection of Carthage’s Numidian cavalry.

  The two very old men who were largely responsible for the war, Cato and Masinissa, died before its outcome was known. They shared a high opinion of young Scipio. Despite his dislike of the Scipio clan and his destruction of the grandfather Africanus’s career, Cato recognized talent when he saw it. He campaigned successfully for Scipio’s election as consul and army commander, despite the fact that he was officially too young to hold the post. Giving the lie to his pretended ignorance of all things Greek, Cato quoted the Odyssey:

  Only he has wits. The rest are fluttering shadows.

  The Numidian monarch, anxious to protect his hard-won kingdom, decided that it should be divided among three of his sons. Wiser than King Lear, he knew that he would need external guarantees. So in his will he charged Scipio with the disposal of his territories and powers.

  Now that Scipio had consular imperium, he tightened the discipline of his troops and in lieu of training launched some exploratory assaults on the walls. He completely blockaded the city by building vast fortifications on the isthmus that connected it to the mainland and a mole across the harbor entrance. Once that was done, the fall of Carthage was only a matter of time. Food grew short and the Punic commander-in-chief, Hasdrubal, seized autocratic powers.

  Before the final assault, Scipio conducted an evocatio, as Camillus had done before the sack of Veii, luring the Punic divinities to desert their temples and migrate to new homes in Rome. Carthage was now a godless community on which any kind of misery could be inflicted. Then the legions marched from the Roman mole along the twin harbors and up the narrow streets leading to the city’s high place, the Byrsa. Scipio fired and demolished houses to make space for the advancing infantry. The grim, methodical fighting went on day and night for nearly a week. Some men were detailed as street cleaners, sweeping away rubbish, corpses, and even the wounded. Suppliants walked out of the Byrsa and asked Scipio for the lives of the survivors. The consul agreed, and fifty thousand exhausted and famished men, women, and children emerged, their ultimate destinies to be determined at slave auctions.

  Only nine hundred or so Roman deserters remained, who could not expect forgiveness and had no choice but to make a last stand. They occupied the Temple of Aesculapius, the god of healing, which was built on a highly defensible rocky outcrop. They were joined by Hasdrubal and his family.

  Hasdrubal could see that his position was hopeless and slipped across the Roman lines. Scipio accepted his surrender, despite the fact that he had committed atrocities and had tortured to death some prisoners of war, and showed him to the deserters. When they saw him, they asked for silence and hurled insults at him. They then set the temple on fire. Hasdrubal’s wife was made of sterner stuff than her husband. After reproaching him, she killed her children, threw them onto the flames, and plunged in after them. The deserters, too, burned themselves to death.

  Now that resistance was over and the war won, Scipio surveyed the scene and, like Marcellus at Syracuse, burst into tears. The long, proud history of Carthage was at an end. He stayed wrapt in thought for a long time, reflecting on the mutability of fortune. He thought of the rise and fall of great cities and empires—Troy, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and, most recently, the dominions of Alexander. Did a similar fate in some future age await Rome?

  He turned to a friend who was with him, the historian Polybius, and, as educated Romans tended to do in moments of high emotion, quoted some lines from Homer. They appear in the Iliad and are spoken by Hector, Troy’s leading soldier, on the eve of his death:

  For in my heart and soul I also know this well:

  the day will come when sacred Troy must die,

  Priam must die and all his people with him,

  Priam who hurls the strong ash spear.

  This outburst of fine feeling did not deter the victorious general from razing the city to the ground and uttering a solemn curse that where Carthage once stood should forever be pasture for sheep.

  THE ROMANS HAD behaved very badly toward Carthage. They had, in truth, no real justification for the Third Punic War, and even less for the city’s annihilation. As we have seen, they liked speaki
ng sarcastically of Punica fides, but their own reputation for fair and honest dealing took many knocks in the second century. They must have felt uneasy about what they had done. So it is no accident that they began to rewrite the legendary past, in an attempt to retrieve their good name.

  The early histories of Rome were written in Greek. In the opening chapters of this book, I showed how the Romans linked themselves to the myths and legends of the Greeks. In this way, they acquired Hellenic credentials and proved that they were not barbarians beyond the pale of civilized life. Of course, in reality they had no connection that we know of with Trojans and (if it ever took place) the Trojan War.

  Cato was the first to write a history of Rome in Latin: this was Origines (Origins), a substantial prose work of seven books that have, unfortunately, been lost. From what is known of it and the fragments that survive, it was a massive exercise in collective self-justification. The man who willfully advocated the destruction of Carthage highlighted the typical Roman virtues of valor, obedience to law, honesty, and respect for the family, the state, and the gods.

  Two books were devoted to the beginnings of the peoples of Italy, perhaps to assert Rome’s national integrity and right to leadership. The early centuries were described in only one book, while the two wars with Carthage were allocated one book each, and finally two books covered the first half of the second century down to the fateful year 149. This emphasis on the recent past no doubt reflected reader interest, but it also gave the author an opportunity to explain, excuse, and celebrate Rome’s genocidal victory. He presented a dossier of seven alleged breaches by Carthage of its obligations to Rome. We may surmise that the Punic version of events received little notice.

  Rome’s first epic poets, Gnaeus Naevius and Quintus Ennius, from Calabria, also focused on the Punic Wars. Their poems have been lost, but we know that they interwove historical events with the legends of Greece and made much of Rome’s genetic link to Troy. In Naevius’s Bellum Punicum (Punic War), one or two fragments reveal Venus, Rome’s traditional protectress, begging her father, Jupiter, to calm a storm that threatens to destroy Aeneas’s fleet. We can just detect, offstage, the malign presence of Juno, for it appears that one hundred and fifty years later Virgil, in his masterpiece the Aeneid, which we have in full, lifted the entire episode from Naevius. Virgil blames the storm on the Queen of Heaven, and so, no doubt, did his predecessor. The earlier version probably also has Aeneas being blown off course onto Dido’s shore. Their tragic relationship sets the stage for the struggles between their descendants.

  Ennius, friend and admirer of Cato, saw himself as a second Homer. His masterpiece, Annales, or The Annals, took as its subject the whole of Roman history from the fall of Troy in 1184 (according to the calculations of Eratosthenes, a famous Greek mathematician and the inventor of the word and discipline of geography) to Cato’s censorship in 184. It was a remarkable compliment to close his thousand-year saga at this apex of the aged statesman’s career. Ennius’s theme was the unending growth of Roman rule and the eventual defeat of the Greek powers that had once destroyed Troy. Three books, or chapters, are devoted to the Carthaginians; in one fragment, they are “boys in frocks,” and in another “wicked haughty foes” who hamstring their opponents. The poet shows that during the Second Punic War Juno at last moderates her wrath and shows goodwill; and he has her all-powerful husband, Jupiter, swear the overthrow of Carthage.

  The underlying purpose of the poets and early historians is to maintain an artificial equivalence between the two nations; this is why Dido and Aeneas were wrongly made out to be contemporaries. The argument is that the quarrel between Rome and Carthage had nothing to do with the motives of greed, fear, or self-interest among mortals but was a foreordained encounter governed by the loves and hatreds in the Olympian pantheon.

  Fate follows a circular or repetitive course. Thus Hannibal is Dido’s avenger and Flamininus and his successors have paid back the Greeks with interest for their capture of Troy. No wonder Scipio Aemilianus feared for the future, for he knew the wheel of fortune would continue turning.

  BY A MACABRE coincidence, Rome destroyed another famous and outstandingly beautiful city in the same year that Carthage met its end. With the ruin of Corinth, the Greeks lost their freedom. By a savage irony, it was here that Flamininus had told the Greeks, exactly fifty years earlier, that Rome would guarantee it.

  In 167, after the Battle of Pydna, the Romans decided to teach the disputatious and unreliable Greek states a lesson. Their conduct during the Third Macedonian War had fallen below expectations. Of the two leagues, the Aetolians fared worse, for more than five hundred of their leading men were liquidated. As for the Achaeans, one thousand named individuals, whose loyalty was suspected, were deported to Italy (history is grateful, for the list included Polybius, who spent many years in Rome studying its politics and, as already noted, became a close friend of Scipio Aemilianus).

  A generation passed without incident. It was not until 150 that the surviving exiles, now well on in years, were allowed to return to their homes. The Senate discussed the topic at length, and Cato was moved to complain, “Just as if we had nothing else to do, we sit here all day debating whether some ghastly old Greeks should be buried in Rome or in Greece.” In fact, the men’s long absence had serious consequences, for it fanned the flames of anti-Roman feeling.

  In the following year, a pretender to the throne of Macedon turned up out of the blue. He quickly took control of the four miniature republics; these had been designed to be unable to harm Rome, but by the same token they were unable to protect themselves. The revolt was soon put down, but the Senate realized that the only way to ensure stability was to annex Macedon and turn it into a province. A great road, the Via Egnatia, was built from the western coast of Greece to the Bosphorus, linking Roman colonies and enabling rapid access to trouble spots in the Balkans and the Hellenic kingdoms of the East.

  In Greece, a quarrel with the embittered Achaeans led to an international incident. Some Roman ambassadors visited the capital, Corinth, and were beaten up. Rome’s patience snapped. In 146, a consular army defeated the Achaeans in battle and entered the undefended city. To set an example, all the inhabitants who had not already fled were sold into slavery and its buildings and temples were leveled. Its treasures and centuries’ old works of art were looted. A century later, the place was still deserted. Greece was added to the province of Macedon. It has been estimated that during the first half of the second century the region lost one quarter of its inhabitants.

  The fates of Macedon, Carthage, and Corinth taught the world that the Romans were changing. Wealth beyond imagination and the absence of any enemy that could seriously imperil their military dominance lured them to act without restraint. They were no longer willing to tolerate dissent. Diodorus Siculus, perhaps drawing on Rome’s affectionate but honest critic Polybius and writing from the vantage point of the first century B.C., remarked that the Republic used to be noted for “the kindest possible treatment of those whom it defeated.” He continues:

  In fact they were so far from acting out of cruelty or revenge that they appeared to deal with them not as enemies, but as if they were benefactors and friends.… Some they enrolled as fellow citizens, to some they granted rights of intermarriage, to others they restored their independence, and in no case did they nurse a resentment that was unduly severe. Because of their exceptional humanity, kings, cities, and whole nations went over to the Roman standard. But once they controlled virtually the entire inhabited world, they confirmed their power by terrorism and by the destruction of the most illustrious cities.

  This new brutality was accompanied by rising corruption in public life. Sooner or later, it would corrode the institutions of the Republic. The bacterium of self-destruction began to multiply beneath the glittering carapace of glory.

  Cato was a humbug and a hypocrite, but when he denounced the moral devaluation of his times he spoke of what he knew.

  16


  Blood Brothers

  CORNELIA WAS A VERY GRAND LADY INDEED. AS THE second daughter of Scipio Africanus, she belonged to one of Rome’s wealthiest and most aristocratic families. Well educated, she cultivated intellectual pursuits and, Plutarch writes, “always had Greeks and literary men about her.”

  Her lifestyle was one of some splendor, although, like many millionairesses of taste, she dressed with elegant simplicity (as the poet Horace famously put it, simplex munditiis, or “casually chic”). Once, she was entertaining a woman friend from Campania, where bling or deluxe display was de rigueur. Her guest drew particular attention to the fine jewelry she was wearing. Cornelia waited until her two sons came home from school, and then said, “These are my jewels.”

  Noblemen’s daughters seldom married for love, and the Scipiones were no exception. Cornelia’s husband, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, had been a political opponent of her father but had objected to the attempts of Cato and his friends to bring her uncle Lucius to trial for corruption. Cornelia was his reward. When they married, sometime after Africanus’s death in disappointed retirement, she was in her teens and Gracchus was in his forties.

  Despite the disparity in their ages, the union was a happy one and Cornelia gave birth to twelve children, although only three reached adulthood—a daughter and the boys, Tiberius and Gaius. Gracchus loved his wife, as a curious anecdote bears witness. One day he discovered two snakes on his bed. Being a typically superstitious Roman, he saw this as an alarming prodigy and consulted the appropriate religious authority. The advice he received could not have been more awkward if that had been the intention. He was neither to kill the snakes nor to let them go; rather, he should kill one or the other of them. An unhelpful caveat was added: if the male snake was killed, he would soon die, and if the female snake was killed, then Cornelia would die. Because Gracchus was so much older than his wife, he decided that it was fairer to sacrifice himself, so he killed the male and let the female slither away.