Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Although many of these Hellenic traditions of autonomy and freedom were eroded by the rise of the dynasts Philip and Alexander (359–323 B.C.) and their imperial Successors (323–31 B.C.) in the Hellenistic world, the ideals of the city-state were not entirely forgotten, but incorporated by states outside Greece itself. Italians, for example, learned more about constitutional rule from the old Greek colonies of southern Italy than from the contemporary Hellenistic kings across the Adriatic. So it was one of the great ironies of the Roman-Greek conflicts of the third and second centuries B.C. that the legions were more Hellenic than the Greek-speaking mercenaries they slaughtered at the battles at Cynoscephalae (197 B.C.) and Pydna (168 B.C.) inside Greece.

  Unfortunately for purposes of mustering quality military manpower, Carthage, unlike Rome, had not evolved beyond the first phase of Hellenic-inspired consensual rule. Its government remained in the hands of a select body of aristocrats and landed executives, themselves chosen from that same elite cadre. Carthage was a vast empire run by a small deliberative clique of noble merchants and traders. In contrast, Rome borrowed and improved upon the Greek ideal of civic government through its unique idea of nationhood (natio) and its attendant corollary of allowing autonomy for its Latin-speaking allies, with both full (optimo iure) and partial citizenship (sine suffragio) to residents of other Italian communities—and in the centuries to come full citizenship to those of any race and language that might accept Roman law and pay taxes. What at its inception had nominally been a government of Latin-speaking aristocrats in Rome proper would logically evolve into a pluralistic state, in which local assemblies would weigh in against the Senate, and popular leaders would veto oligarchic legislation. Even consuls like Flaminius and Varro— the former killed at Trasimene, the latter in large part responsible for the catastrophe at Cannae—were purportedly “men of the people” voicing the poor’s desire for precipitate military action in opposition to aristocrats like Fabius Maximus, who favored patience and delay. They had no popular counterparts at Carthage.

  LEGIONS OF ROME

  The Roman army, especially when deployed in strength on Italian soil, was not expected to lose, much less to be annihilated. Already by the late third century B.C. Roman legionaries had become the world’s most deadly infantry precisely because of their mobility, superb equipment, singular discipline, and ingenious organization. The Epirote king and general Pyrrhus (280–275 B.C.), the Carthaginian commanders of the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), and the northern tribes in Gaul (222 B.C.) could attest to the slaughter when their best troops tried to confront the Roman way of war. The Romans had developed a mobile and flexible method of fighting that could hunt down and smash through loosely organized tribal forces in Gaul and Spain, yet could also disrupt columns of highly disciplined phalangites from the East in pitched battles through encirclement or the manipulation of terrain. The history of the Roman third and second centuries is a story of bloody legion deployment throughout the Mediterranean, first to the west and south against the Iberians and Africans (270–200 B.C.), then against the Hellenistic kingdoms in Greece and to the east (202–146 B.C.).

  To indicate the scope of Roman campaigning and the wide-ranging experiences of the legionaries, Livy reports in his history of Rome the often quoted example of the Roman citizen soldier Spurius Ligustinus. In his thirty-two-year career in the army (200–168 B.C.) the fifty-year-old soldier, father of eight, fought against the phalanx of Philip V in Greece, battled in Spain, returned to Greece to fight Antiochus III and the Aetolians, then was back on duty in Italy, then off again to Spain. “Four times,” Spurius claimed in Livy’s highly rhetorical account, “within a few years I was chief centurion. Thirty-four times I was commended for bravery by my commanders; I received six civic crowns [for saving the life of a fellow soldier]” (42.34). Spurius might have added that he had collided against the pikes of Macedonian phalangites, faced the elephants of Hellenistic dynasts, and fought dirty wars against tribal skirmishers across the Pyrenees. Roman genius lay in finding a way to take an Italian farmer like Spurius and to make him fight more effectively than any mercenary soldier in the Mediterranean.

  Comprising anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 infantrymen, the legion was, by the end of the third century B.C., in reality a loose conglomeration of thirty companies called maniples (“fingers”), each composed of two smaller “centuries” of between sixty and one hundred soldiers, each led by a professional, battle-toughened centurion who mastered the Roman system of advance and assault in unison. When a Roman legion marched out to the battlefield, its sixty centuries did so in three vast lines, each wave itself able to coalesce into a mass or disperse into smaller contingents depending on the terrain and the nature of the enemy. The entire tactical design of the Roman army was intended precisely not to enter into clumsy, massed collisions with hostile columns, where it might either fall prey to encirclement or be broken apart by the greater depth of enemy formations.

  Unlike the Greek phalanx from which it had evolved, Roman legionaries advanced in a fluid formation, as neat lines of soldiers cast their javelins, or pila, and ran to meet the enemy head-on with their deadly short sword, the infamous double-edged gladius forged of Spanish steel— a far more lethal and versatile weapon than the Macedonian pike. Rectangular shields often themselves served as offensive weapons, as legionaries banged their metal bosses against the flesh of the enemy. In their combined use of javelin, massive shield, and double-bladed sword, the Romans had solved the age-old dilemma of choosing between missile and hand-to-hand attack, and fluidity versus shock, by combining the advantages of both. Legionaries hurling their javelins matched the offensive punch of Asiatic missile troops; yet with their large body shields and razor-sharp swords might also serve as a shock corps in the manner of Greek phalangites. Unlike the phalanx, however, the three lines of successive advance allowed both for reserves and for concentration of force upon particular weak spots in the enemy line.

  Against a Macedonian phalanx, Roman missile attacks might stun and wound pikemen, even as individual maniples rushed ahead for face-to-face battle at weak points in the enemy’s tattered columns. Similarly, when facing northern European tribesmen, the legions might advance wall-like to present a disciplined solid front of shield and sword that would plow through the poorly organized skirmishers of tribal armies who had little chance against disciplined shock troops. Against both such adversaries two lines of maniples to the rear (the principes and triari) watched the initial engagement of the front lines (the hastati), eager to exploit success or prevent collapse.

  What was it like to face the three lines of an oncoming Roman army? Most classical historians of Roman battle—Caesar, Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus especially—view the collision through Roman eyes. Their ethnocentric and lurid accounts portray shaggy six-foot Germans making queer sounds, deep resonating war cries (the barritus), and beating their equipment; screaming half-naked Gauls with their hair greased and piled high to increase their apparent height; or robed and painted Asians in vast droves, whose chatter and garishness give way to the disciplined advance of grim professionals—intelligence and civilization offsetting greater numbers, barbarism, and brute strength every time. War paint, tattoos, bare-breasted women, ululation, and an assortment of iron collars, chains, spiked hair, and occasional human heads and body parts hanging from the war belt are the usual requisites in any Western description, from Roman legions to the Spanish conquistadors, of fighting the Other.

  Yet it was not the “barbarian” advance but the Roman that was truly inhuman and chilling. The legions, as the Christians did at Lepanto and the British at Rorke’s Drift, fought in silence; they walked until the last thirty yards of no-man’s-land. At a predetermined distance the first line threw their seven-foot pila, for the first time yelling in cadence as they unleashed the volley. Immediately and without warning, hundreds of the enemy were impaled, or their shields rendered useless by the rain of projectiles. Now with the lethal short swords unsheathed, the fir
st rank crashed into the stunned enemy mass. The oblong shields had iron bosses in the centers, and the Romans used them as battering rams to shock the enemy, as the well-protected legionaries hacked off arms, legs, and heads during the confusion. Individual soldiers pushed in to exploit gaps where the dead and wounded had fallen. Almost immediately, an entire second army, the succeeding line of principi, surged in to widen the tears in the enemy line, hurling their pila over their friends’ heads in the melee, the entire process of charging, casting, and slicing now beginning anew— with yet a third wave ready at the rear.

  The terror of war does not lie in the entirely human reaction of tribal cultures to bloodletting—screaming and madness in giving and receiving death, fury of the hunt in pursuit of the defeated, near hysterical fear in flight—but rather in the studied coolness of the Roman advance, the predictability of the javelin cast, and the learned art of swordsmanship, the synchronization of maniple with maniple in carefully monitored assaults. The real horror is the entire business of unpredictable human passion and terror turned into a predictability of business, a cold science of killing as many humans as possible, given the limitations of muscular power and handheld steel. The Jewish historian Josephus later captured that professionalism in his chilling summation of legionary prowess: “One would not be wrong in saying that their training maneuvers are battles without bloodshed, and their battles maneuvers with bloodshed” (Jewish War 3.102–7).

  The utter hatred for this manner of such studied Roman fighting surely explains why, when Roman legions were on occasion caught vastly outnumbered, poorly led, and ill deployed in Parthia, the forests of Germany, or the hills of Gaul, their victors not only killed these professionals but continued their rage against their corpses—beheading, mutilating, and parading the remains of an enemy who so often in the past could kill without dying. The Aztecs also mutilated the Spanish—and often ate the captives and corpses; and while this was purportedly to satisfy the bloodlust of their hungry gods, much of the barbarity derived from their rage at the mailed conquistadors, with their Toledo blades, cannon, crossbows, and disciplined ranks, who had systematically and coolly butchered thousands of the defenders of Tenochtitlán. In the aftermath of the British defeat at Isandhlwana, the Zulus decapitated many of the British and arranged their heads in a semicircle, in part because so many of their own kinsmen had minutes earlier been blown apart by the steady firing of Martini-Henry rifles.

  The Roman republican army was not merely a machine. Its real strength lay in the natural élan of the tough yeoman infantry of Italy, the hard-nosed rustics who voted in the local assemblies of the towns and demes of Italy and were every bit as ferocious as the more threatening-looking and larger Europeans to the north. In the tradition of constitutional governance—the Greek Polybius marveled at the Roman Republic, whose separation of powers, he felt, had improved upon the more popular consensual rule of the Hellenic city-state—the Romans had marshaled a nation of free citizens-in-arms.

  Like most of the Greeks at Salamis, Roman yeomen in vast numbers had voluntarily imposed civic musters, voted through their local assemblies for war, and marched to Cannae under elected generals, determined to rid Carthaginian invaders from Italian soil. Like the phalangites of Alexander the Great, and influenced by the earlier Greek tradition of decisive warfare, the Romans put little faith in ruse or ambush, let alone archers, horsemen, or skirmishers. Would that they had listened to the warnings of Fabius Maximus and continued to wage a war of attrition, not annihilation, against a brilliant opponent like Hannibal.

  Better yet, would that Roman armies had developed, as Philip and Alexander had, a shock force of heavy cavalry that could have been integrated with the advance of the maniples and thus nullified the superb mobility and dash of Hannibal’s horsemen. The tactics of delay and scorched earth, along with the culture of the mounted grandee, went against the Roman tradition of frontal infantry shock assault. For a variety of cultural, military, and political reasons, the horseman was rarely the mainstay of classical armies—either in his incarnation as a mounted and gaudy seignior or as an impoverished nomadic raider. The use of cavalry by Philip and Alexander was exceptional rather than representative of Greek and Roman military practice, and Greco-Roman armies would pay in blood on numerous occasions for that critical shortcoming.

  Despite the simplicity of Roman advance and the occasional inexperience of the recruits, the discipline of the legions was unmatched, and the strength and courage of Italian infantry unquestioned. The Roman Senate, like the earlier Greek Assembly and the caucuses of the royal Macedonian elite, was nurtured in a tradition that sought to send its armies against the enemy head-on, and thus through the hammerblows of decisive infantry battle destroy him in a matter of hours. Few Roman commanders were ever prosecuted in the wake of defeat for their incompetence—only for cowardice in failing to engage the enemy in decisive battle. When Varro, the surviving consul at Cannae, returned to Rome after the debacle, he was greeted with enthusiasm: apparently his tactical blunders that resulted in thousands killed were overshadowed by his proven desire to lead inexperienced young Roman yeomen headlong to their deaths against Hannibal.

  The infantrymen who marched into the death trap at Cannae were probably better armed and equipped than their enemies: their shields, breastplates, helmets, and swords were the fruits of a scientific tradition that incorporated and improved upon the military practice found elsewhere. The West, unlike most other cultures, has always freely borrowed and incorporated from others, without worries over either national chauvinism or renunciation of native customs and traditions. When married with a rational tradition of scientific inquiry and research, this flexibility has guaranteed superior weapons in the hands of Europeans. Thus, most of Hannibal’s European and African mercenaries had reequipped themselves with superior Roman arms and armor plundered from the booty of the previous Italian disasters at Trebia and Trasimene. Nearly all of Rome’s enemies stripped its dead for weapons, whereas few legionaries sought to wear the equipment of dead Gauls or Africans.

  The Roman army at Cannae marked the zenith of the Western military tradition in the late third century B.C. Yet it was slaughtered by a Carthaginian army that enjoyed none of Rome’s cultural advantages. Hannibal’s men made use of inferior weapons and technology. They were a mercenary rather than a citizen militia. Much less did the Punic state recruit from a free citizenry of patriotic small farmers. Carthaginians lacked any abstract concept of individual political freedom or civic militarism. Aristotle tells us that they gave rewards to their warriors for individual kills—far different from classical armies that stressed staying in rank and keeping formation, avoidance of flight, and the protection of one’s comrade. Spurius Ligustinus was decorated with civic crowns for saving his comrades, not for piling up kills or collecting scalps. Cannae was an abject reversal of the usual military paradigm of the ancient world: a Western army that outnumbered its foe, fought at home, and relied on an unintelligently deployed but savage power was defeated by an enemy seeking victory for its outnumbered expeditionary forces through the coordination of its contingents and the organizational brilliance of its generals.

  THE IDEA OF A NATION-IN-ARMS

  Individual Greek city-states in the past had occasionally enrolled new citizens, but such grants were honorific and rare. Much of the commerce of the Hellenic polis remained in the hands of noncitizen resident aliens, the brilliant and industrious metics who might own more capital than any citizen but nevertheless lacked the ability to vote in Assembly. The Greeks were too jealous of their autonomy and freedom and too chauvinistic about their surrounding countryside to grant on any wide scale foreigners and immigrants—or even Greeks from different city-states—the same citizenship rights as hardy farmers who worked their ancestral plots.

  Although a few Greek thinkers as diverse as Herodotus and Isocrates came to envision Greekness, to Hellenikon, as an ideal rather than a prerequisite of language or race—open to any foreigners who might sha
re the culture and political premises of the polis—the rise of Macedonian monarchy cut short the evolution of the consensual and independent city-state. Military manpower was always the chief bane of classical Greek armies—a shortage of infantrymen brought about by the blinkered prerequisite that all soldiers should be citizens, but not all residents should be citizens. Even the poor who rowed for their freedom at Salamis were matched in number by slaves and foreigners who had—and would have— no say in the government of Athens. This narrow conception of citizenship would soon doom the independent Greek city-state.

  In contrast, the culture that Hannibal fought in Italy was in the midst of a revolutionary transformation in the idea of what Rome was. The irony of the Second Punic War was that Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome, did much to make Rome’s social and military foundations even stronger by incorporating the once “outsider” into the Roman commonwealth. By his invasion, he helped accelerate a second evolution in the history of Western republican government that would go well beyond the parochial constitutions of the Greek city-states. The creation of a true nation-state would have military ramifications that would shake the entire Mediterranean world to its core—and help explain much of the frightening military dynamism of the West today. In the crisis after Cannae, the property qualification for infantry service—itself a borrowed idea from the Greeks’ concept of the hoplite census—was halved, and thereafter continually further lowered throughout the second century until ended altogether by Marius.

  The population of Italy—Samnites, Etrurians, and the Greek-speakers of the south—was allied in varying degrees to Rome. Even the distrust of things Roman by Italian confederates was the result not so much of fear and hatred of foreign domination as of envy and resentment to the degree that they had not yet become Roman citizens with full rights to hold office and vote. The Other in the ancient world often migrated to Hellenic and Italian cities to find economic opportunity and greater freedom. Under the Greeks they found on occasion tolerance, indifference, or prosperity; among the Romans eventually citizenship. The Italian musters to oppose Hannibal’s presence were, in short, further catalysts in an ongoing evolution toward parity between Rome and Italy.