by Woolf, Greg
Fig 7. Mithridates VI Eupator King of Pontus portrayed as Hercules
The Limitations of Mediterranean Hegemony
Roman hegemony created problems across the Mediterranean. A few historians have imagined a great conspiracy emerging between Mithridates, rebel slaves, and pirates. But the root cause was an imperialism that generated few structures of security to replace those it destroyed, and responded in an inconsistent way to challenges to its authority. This was not the only structural weakness of the Republican empire. Even if the Senate and people had been able to agree on how to exercise their power, had compelled generals on the ground to toe the line, and had conveyed a clear set of expectations to the cities, kings, and peoples under their indirect authority, Roman rule faced another fundamental weakness, this time geographical.
The defeats of Carthage, Macedon, and Syria had won Rome a Mediterranean empire. It was not just that the directly governed territories were easier to reach by sea than by land. This was in fact true; even provinces that were not actually islands were often separated from Italy by territory not under direct control. But a bigger difficulty was that Romans were most interested in controlling landscapes like those of Italy. Republican imperialism, taking direct rule and informal hegemony together, was exercised over a collection of coastal plains and islands. That is unsurprising. Most imperial nations begin by expanding within a single ecological zone. Chinese empires did not really expand into the tropical south until the Middle Ages.6 European empires fought in the eighteenth century mostly over temperate territories—the so-called Neo-Europes7 —before eventually trying to control sub-Saharan Africa and east Asia; the various central Asian empires— Persian, Macedonian, and Islamic—expanded east and west rather than north. Empire is rarely ecologically adventurous. Settlers prefer familiar landscapes where familiar crops may grow. Romans were slow to master mountains or forests, and treated these landscapes, and their inhabitants, with distrust.8
Unfortunately for Rome, however, the Mediterranean has never been a closed system. The Middle Sea is located at the junction of three continents, the interiors of which have always been closely linked to the coastal fringe.9 Ecotones between Mediterranean landscapes and continental hinterlands promoted exchanges of goods, technologies, and peoples since the beginning of the Holocene.10 In Africa and Asia Minor, in Gaul, Spain, and the Balkans, Rome tried to separate off the upland interiors from the parts they wished to control. That strategy was doomed to failure. Rome never had any chance of staying within her ecological comfort zone. It was not the first Mediterranean city-state to underestimate the economic and demographic resources of areas they regarded as barbarous. Greek history is littered with accounts of the terrifying power of groups from the interior, such as Scythians and Thracians and in the end Macedonians. The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun saw a great pattern in Middle Eastern history in which nomads from the margins repeatedly invaded the settled civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, and were then absorbed by them. Chinese history too has been written in terms of a constant struggle for control of its Inner Asian Frontier, the long boundary between the lands or rice-cultivating city dwellers and peoples of the Steppe.11 Both Jugurtha and Mithridates challenged Rome with resources drawn from outside the Mediterranean world. In Jugurtha’s case the Romans had only themselves to blame, since it was they who had tried to restrict him to the Wild West of Numidian territory. From the uplands of the Maghreb he created a powerful army, and based himself in a landscape that Roman armies found hard to deal with. Mithridates made similar use of Anatolia and the Pontic regions, areas that Rome had disdained to rule.
Roman generals were progressively drawn into other continental interiors. The occupation of what is now Andalusia and Mediterranean Spain brought Rome into contact with the much larger tribes of the Meseta, tribes like the Celtiberians with whom two generations of Romans fought between the 180s and the fall of Numantia in 133 BC. There were no easy frontiers before the Atlantic, and it took until the reign of Augustus to reach it. Possession of the Po Valley involved Romans in campaigns to control the Alpine valleys and Liguria. That, together with alliances left over from the war with Hannibal, brought Roman troops to the mouth of the Rhône and the territory of the Greek city of Marseilles. Minor campaigns escalated during the 120s into conflicts with the much larger tribal confederacies of the Allobroges, based in the middle Rhône Valley, and the Arverni of the Central Massif. Rome also exercised some sort of hegemony over the Greek cities and Illyrian tribes of the eastern Adriatic. But behind them, and to the north of the new province of Macedonia, were powerful nations like the Dacians and the Bastarnae and to their east the Thracians.
Rome had little experience to draw on in dealing with threats of this kind. The major tribal confederacies of temperate Europe could marshal armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands, were technologically on a par with Roman troops, and had impressive fortified sites, even if they did not possess an infrastructure of cities and roads.12 Greek and Roman sources presented northern barbarians as unpredictable savages. But these barbarians were also feared. Romans never forgot the Gallic sack of Rome in 390: traditions varied about whether all or part of the city had fallen, and who should take the credit for Rome’s survival, but treasure was piled up against further Gallic menaces until Julius Caesar’s day, and the constitutions of Italian cities long had a clause in them requiring them to provide troops in the event of a tumultus Gallicus. Greeks on the other hand remembered the events of 279 BC when a raiding party from the Balkans, identified as Kelts or Galatai, had got as far as the sanctuary of Delphi before being driven off, perhaps by the god Apollo himself. Not long after these events three Galatian tribes had crossed over into Asia Minor and set up tribal kingdoms on the plateau, from which Galatian raiding parties held coastal cities to ransom. The reputation of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum had been founded on their success in containing the Galatian threat. After the defeat of the Seleucids the Roman general Manlius Vulso marched up onto the plateau and defeated them once again, bringing back great quantities of booty to Rome. But Romans and Greeks alike were well aware that great populations of similar barbarians occupied Europe from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, and further migrations and invasions were possible in the future.
That fear was rekindled in 113 when another horde ran into a Roman army in Noricum in the eastern Alps. Over the next dozen years the horde passed through Switzerland and the Rhône Valley, through central France, down into Spain, and then back again into Italy. En route they defeated a second and a third Roman army in 110 and 105. It was only Marius, the victor of Jugurtha, who finally defeated the two parts of the migration, the Teutones in 102 at Aix-en-Provence, and the Cimbri in 101 at Vercellae in northern Italy. Romans did not feel like rulers of the world now. Eastern kings openly defied their requests for help, watching the growth of Mithridates’ power closer at hand. Marius, despite his origins outside the charmed circle of the nobles, and his links with the equestrians and populist politicians, was elected to an unprecedented six successive consulships to deal with the emergency.
Solutions and Failures
Romans were no fools, and the failures of their second-century hegemony were clear to them. Their analysis, however, was rather different from ours. We see inadequate infrastructure; an unsustainable preference for occasional booty over a tributary economy; and an unrealistic desire to control familiar landscapes, while ignoring the hinterlands with which they were joined. Knowing what came next we find it difficult to see why Rome did not move more quickly to institutionalize her power. Romans, however, saw a lack of the moral qualities advertised in the tomb of the Scipiones.13 Both the rise of Jugurtha and the ineffectiveness of the first armies sent to deal with him was laid, by Sallust, at the door of the inner circle of the aristocracy, the nobles. Their susceptibility to bribery and their failures of generalship were signs of moral weakness. It was Marius, a man with no senatorial ancestors yet possessed of traditional virtues, who had saved the day
first against Jugurtha, and then against the Germans.
One of Marius’ associates, Marcus Antonius, was appointed to a command in 102 against the pirates. By good fortune we have large parts of a law passed around this time designed to improve the government of Rome’s directly administered territories in the east.14 One revolutionary feature was that it required Roman governors and commanders to coordinate their efforts to suppress piracy. It is a sign of a new consciousness of the obligations of empire, and of the will of at least some of Rome’s leaders to try to design solutions that went beyond telling a general to raise an army and deal with this or that king, or people, or threat, in whatever manner he thought fit. The law was inscribed on stone and set up in a number of Greek cities. That fact too shows some awareness on the part of the drafters that Rome was no longer regarded as the liberating power. They were certainly right about this. A permanent law court had been set up in 123 BC to hear corruption cases brought by provincials against Romans in the provinces, one with more powerful provisions than its predecessor. It had received a good deal of use.
The decision of the assembly to accept the legacy of Attalus III, the passing of this great law, the commands of Marius and of Antonius, all emerged from a new style of politics that appeared in Rome in the late second century. It was created and led by a small group of senators who presented themselves as champions of the people, the populus Romanus. All Roman politics was cast in traditional terms, and they too claimed precedents and predecessors. But in reality both the problems they addressed and the solutions they proposed were new, as was in fact the politicized urban crowd to whom this politics was addressed.15 The most common term for the new leaders was populares.
The most prominent members were Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius, tribunes of the people in 133 and 123 respectively, and descendants of a family that had intermarried with the Cornelii Scipiones, and played a prominent part in the conquest of Spain. Other leading figures included some men from quite different backgrounds, like Marius, but also others from ancient families. Julius Caesar was later to be associated with this movement. They sought the support of the popular assemblies, as their views could not achieve consensus in the Senate, and their rhetoric spoke of the ancient rights and prerogatives of the people. Their legislation included proposals to distribute public land to poorer citizens, to found new colonies outside Italy, and to provide subsidized (and later free) grain to the population of the city of Rome. Many chose to stand as tribunes of the people, converting what had been a minor political office designed to protect the interests of plebeians, into a platform for wide-ranging reform. But they were hardly revolutionaries. Introducing the secret ballot into elections was the limit of their constitutional reform, and they seemed quite content with the structure of assemblies that gave more influence to the propertied classes, and with the senatorial monopoly of magistracies and priesthoods. Nor were their laws limited to matters of immediate concern to the people, let alone the poor of the city of Rome. No issue of Roman politics, from diplomacy and war to state revenues, the law courts, and Rome’s deteriorating relations with her Italian allies, was beyond their interests. What united their proposals was a willingness to form radical solutions to the crisis of the empire, and the oratorical skill to persuade the assemblies to back them when the Senate would not.16
The programme of the Gracchi and their successors was no more consistent than the policies of earlier generations of senators. The proposal to redistribute public land brought howls of protest from allied communities, many of whose members had quietly if irregularly rented it for generations. Yet they also proposed more rights for the Italians. Their improved corruption court put senators at the mercy of Rome’s equestrian order, ostensibly to improve the capacity of provincials to get redress against governors. But the organization of Asia handed the provincials over to those same equestrians by allocating them tax-farming contracts in a way that encouraged short-term exploitation from which governors were now afraid to restrain them. Opponents of these proposals found a common thread in the challenge posed to the leadership of the Senate. The law on piracy required magistrates to swear one by one to uphold it. Clauses like this appear in other legislation of the period. The implication was a grave insult to those who felt part of a class with a hereditary right to rule.
Mutual frustration and distrust led to ferocious condemnations and eventually violence. Both Gracchi brothers died in pitched battles in the streets of Rome, effectively between rival mobs of senators reinforced by their clients. Invoking the rights of the people and proposing radical legislation was not original in Rome. Cato too had made political capital out of his allegedly humble origins as a weapon against opponents of most ancient families. But political murder was something new. The deaths of the Gracchi were only the beginning. Marius was, for a while, an active supporter of another radical tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. Colonization, land distribution, and attacks on the nobles were once again on the agenda, the popular assemblies were again used to circumvent the Senate, and once again it ended in violence. Marius could have summoned his veteran soldiers to save Saturninus, but he refused to do so. This was the last time such restraint would be shown.
Roman orators and historians since Cicero spent a good deal of time wondering how things had come to this pass. Modern scholars have done the same. Ancient accounts stress the corrupting effects of wealth, and the arrogance brought by empire. Modern writers note the explosive potential of the city of Rome, doubling in size each generation, a good part of the population composed of migrants without secure employment or close links of clientage to the ancient houses. The measures proposed show a keen sense of the scale and range of Rome’s problems, and the solutions included genuinely innovative ideas, some borrowed from Greek history and philosophy. Most of all they show how dealing with the structural problems of the city of Rome, the Italian alliance, and the Mediterranean empire were no longer within the competence of the Senate alone. That these radical solutions were first proposed by political insiders perhaps tells us something of unrecorded collective failures of nerve and imagination by the ruling classes of Rome in the decades following the destruction of Corinth and Carthage.
Perhaps the most surprising failure was closest to home. By the late second century the role of Rome’s Italian allies had become increasingly problematic: they shared in the strains of continual warfare, but received only a fraction of the benefits. When warfare pressed hard on the Roman citizenry, it pressed hard on the allies too. But the allies did not have a chance to vote on declarations of war, and although they usually received a share of the booty it was not always an equal share. Their commanders took orders from Roman magistrates in the field. The Italians were partners in profiteering from empire, as well as in its acquisition. We find their names on inscriptions set up around the marketplaces of Delos, and in the politics of the great cities of Asia Minor. Overseas they all spoke Latin and were collectively known, and treated, as Romans. Often the same families can be traced making money overseas and spending it in the towns of central Italy. Italians were energetic members of the trade networks that linked the slaving grounds of the east and north, the breadbaskets of the south, the vineyards of Tuscany and Campania, and the metal sources of Spain and the Alps to Rome.
At the centre of these networks was Rome, and many Italians visited, but their interests were generally excluded from the new politics of the populares. At best this meant they were excluded from some of the rewards of empire: cheap grain, grand building schemes sponsored by the state, lavish festival games and triumphs, the lucrative opportunities offered by public contracts for which only Roman citizens were eligible, the growing protection offered by Roman courts. At worse they might be the collateral damage of Roman politics, as when the Gracchan land redistributions unintentionally dispossessed Italian tenants on state land. Roman rule over Italy also seems to have become more autocratic. Ancient testimony gathers anecdotes about arrogant acts on the part of i
ndividual magistrates. These were the grievances of which they were conscious, but there were certainly other causes of tension. The growth on the peninsula of a city of half a million must have had profound effects on other Italian towns, especially drawing manpower to Rome. Colonization initiatives had petered out with the final conquest of the lands north of the Apennines: that removed both a possible source of tension, and also opportunities for allies who had sometimes been allowed to share in the schemes. The enrichment of the Roman elite and their investment in slave-villas had effects that are difficult to map. But in every case the Italians suffered from a lack of representation, creating a need to depend on Roman aristocrats who were willing to patronize them. The domi nobiles (men who were aristocrats in their own communities) were forced to behave as clients.
The problem had begun to be noticed by the end of the second century, even by the populares. But schemes to offer the Italians various kinds of citizenship or legal redress came to nothing. Expectations were repeatedly raised only to be disappointed when the Senate and/or the people refused to back them. The flashpoint finally came in 91 BC. A tribune named Marcus Livius Drusus had proposed a comprehensive political programme designed to heal the political rifts opened by the proposals and murders of the Gracchi and of Saturninus. The plan was an ambitious one, including bringing 300 equestrians into the Senate to smooth over relations there, and a great colonization programme. Some of these elements would re-emerge in Sulla’s dictatorship. But it also included granting citizenship to the Italians. Hopes were raised again, and then dashed. The laws he had passed were abolished, and Drusus himself was murdered. This was the final straw. A great alliance appeared almost overnight, one in which the hill peoples of the Apennines, the Marsi, the Samnites, and others, took the lead. Historians disagree about their precise aims—did they want to destroy the Roman state, or become a full part of it? Perhaps the allies themselves were divided.17 Italian voices are now lost: the speeches made at the time were not recorded, and all historical accounts of the Social or Italian War are coloured by a desire for reconciliation and the teleology of the fall of the Republic. But their tactics were well worked out. Italian leaders knew each other well from service together on Roman campaigns and from participating in a social world that centred on the great houses of their Roman friends. A new capital was declared at Corfinium (renamed Italia), in the heart of the Abruzzi mountains. Coins were issued for a new Italian state. Some depicted an Italian bull trampling on a Roman wolf. Rome suddenly found herself struggling for control of the peninsula for the first time since Hannibal’s rout.