SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

As soon as Lucretia stabbed herself, Lucius Junius Brutus – who had accompanied her husband to the scene – took the dagger from her body and, while her family was too distressed to speak, vowed to rid Rome of kings for ever. This was, of course, partly a retrospective prophecy, for the Brutus who in 44 BCE led the coup against Julius Caesar for his kingly ambitions claimed descent from this Brutus.

The fall of the Tarquins – sometime, as the Romans had it, at the end of the sixth century BCE – amounted to a new start for Rome: the city began again, now as ‘the Republic’ (or in Latin res publica, meaning literally ‘public thing’ or ‘public affairs’)

As Tarquinius Superbus fled, the story goes, Brutus and, before his imminent exile, Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, straight away became the first consuls of Rome.

First, they were elected entirely by popular vote, not the half-and-half system of popular involvement that supposedly characterised the choice of king. Second, they held office for only a single year at a time, and one of their duties was to preside (as we saw Cicero doing in 63 BCE) over the election of their successors. Third, they held office together, as a pair.

the list of consuls on which the chronology of the Republic was based – going back in an unbroken series to Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus in 509 BCE – was in its earliest parts the product of a good deal of adjustment, imaginative inference, clever guesswork and most likely outright invention.

Barbatus’ Rome was very different from the Rome of the earliest Republic, two hundred years before, and it had ceased to be ordinary. Vast by the standards of the time, the city was home on a reasonable guess to something between 60,000 and 90,000 people. That put it roughly in the same bracket as a handful of the biggest urban centres in the Mediterranean world; Athens at this point had a population of considerably less than half that number, and never in its history had more than 40,000 in the city itself. What is more, Rome controlled directly a large swathe of land stretching from coast to coast, with a total population of well over half a million, and indirectly, by a series of agreements and alliances, much more – foreshadowing its later empire.

The first aqueduct to bring water into the growing conurbation was constructed in 312 BCE, a watercourse that ran mostly underground for some 10 miles from the nearby hills, not one of those extraordinary aerial constructions that we often now mean by ‘aqueduct’. This was the brainchild of a contemporary of Barbatus, the energetic Appius Claudius Caecus, who in the same year also launched the first major Roman road, the Via Appia (the Appian Way, named after him), leading straight south from Rome to Capua.

Two thousand years later, we can read Livy, who had read Pictor, who had talked to people who remembered the world as it was around 300 BCE – a fragile chain of connection deep into antiquity.

One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property – whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles).

But, just in case this all sounds a bit too familiar, it was also a world in which people worried about magic. What should you do if some enemy bewitched your crops or cast a spell on you? Sadly, the remedy for this is lost.

hostis (a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘enemy’; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both)

In 494 BCE, plagued by problems of debt, the plebeians staged the first of several mass walkouts from the city, a combination of a mutiny and a strike, to try to force reform on the patricians. It worked. For it launched a long series of concessions which gradually eroded all the significant differences between patricians and plebeians and effectively rewrote the political power structure of the city. Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.

In the middle of the fourth century BCE the base of the main platform for speakers in the Forum was decorated with the bronze rams of enemy warships captured from the city of Antium during the Latin War, as if to symbolise the military foundation of Roman political power. The Latin word for ‘rams’, rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word ‘rostrum’.

The ambivalence of the Latin word hostis nicely captures the blurring of the boundary between ‘the outsider’ and ‘the enemy’. So too does the standard Latin phrase for ‘at home and abroad’ – domi militiaeque – in which ‘abroad’ (militiae) is indistinguishable from ‘on military campaign

In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government.

For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory.

In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome.

And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography.

By 367 BCE, the Conflict of the Orders had done something far more significant and wide-ranging than simply end political discrimination against the plebeians. It had effectively replaced a governing class defined by birth with one defined by wealth and achievement.

Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a great-grandson of Barbatus, was the man who in 202 BCE secured the final defeat of Hannibal: he invaded the Carthaginian’s home territory in North Africa and at the Battle of Zama, near Carthage, routed his army, with some help from Hannibal’s elephants, who ran amok and trampled over their own side.

Africanus, Asiaticus and Hispallus (from his father’s service in Spain, Hispania) reflect the new horizons of Roman power. One reasonable way of translating ‘Scipio Africanus’ would be ‘Scipio hammer of Africa’.

Greece, who in 280 BCE sailed to Italy to support the town of Tarentum against the Romans. His self-deprecating joke – that his victories against Rome cost him so many men that he could not afford another – lies behind the modern phrase ‘Pyrrhic victory’, meaning one that takes such a heavy toll that it is tantamount to defeat.

From the invasion of Pyrrhus to 146 BCE – when Roman armies destroyed both Carthage, at the end of what was called the Third Punic War (from the Latin Punicus, or ‘Carthaginian’), and, almost simultaneously, the wealthy Greek city of Corinth – there was more or less continuous warfare involving Rome and its enemies in the Italian peninsula and overseas. One ancient scholar isolated the year ‘when Gaius Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls’ (235 BCE) as the only point in this period when hostilities were not taking place.

Throughout this period, somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year, a greater proportion than in any other pre-industrial state and, on the higher estimate, comparable to the call-up rate in World War I.

Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’). For some observers, this canny strategy largely won the day. Despite his close association with Africanus, Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy, and even the British left-wing Fabian Society adopted his name and example – the message being, ‘if you want the revolution to be successful, you must, like Fabius, bide your time’.

But there have always been those who have thought Fabius a slowcoach or a ditherer rather than a clever strategist, in contrast to the much more dashing Scipio Africanus, who eventually took over the command and persuaded the senate to allow him to move the war into Africa and finish Hannibal off there.

but Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.

‘Democracy’ (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to ‘mob rule’. There is little point in asking how ‘democratic’ the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

The poor could never rise to the top of Roman politics; the common people could never seize the political initiative; and it was axiomatic that the richer an individual citizen was, the more political weight he should have. But this form of disequilibrium is familiar in many modern so-called democracies: at Rome too the wealthy and privileged competed for political office and political power that could only be granted by popular election and by the favour of ordinary people who would never have the financial means to stand themselves.

First, the Romans were not the only agents in the process. They did not invade a world of peace-loving peoples, who were just minding their own business until these voracious thugs came along.

The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap.

It was a coercive empire in the sense that the Romans took the profits and tried to ensure that they got their own way when they wanted, with the threat of force always in the background. It was not an empire of annexation in the sense that later Romans would understand it. There was no detailed legal framework of control, rules or regulations – or, for that matter, visionary aspirations.

But it is a fair estimate that in the early second century BCE the numbers of new slaves arriving in the peninsula as a direct result of victories overseas averaged out at more than 8,000 per year, at a time when the total number of adult male Roman citizens, inside and outside the city, was in the order of 300,000. In due course, a significant proportion of these would have been freed and become new Roman citizens.

After the Second Punic War, there were regularly more than 30,000 Roman citizens in the army outside Italy, anywhere from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean.

Whatever motivations lay behind the violence of 146 BCE, the events of that year were soon seen as a turning point. In one way, they marked the acme of Roman military success. Rome had now annihilated its richest, oldest and most powerful rivals in the Mediterranean world.

King Attalus III of Pergamum had died in 133 BCE, and – combining a realistic assessment of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean with a shrewd defence against assassination by rivals at home – he had made ‘the Roman people’ the heir to his property and large kingdom in what is now Turkey.

Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed. This involved exporting surplus citizens en masse to ‘colonies’ not only in Italy but also, for the first time, overseas. Just a couple of decades after it had been razed and cursed, Carthage was earmarked as a new town to be resettled.

a favourite story of the successful transformation of Italians into Romans highlights the career of a man from the northern Italian region of Picenum: as a babe in arms he had been paraded among the prisoners in one of the triumphs celebrated at Rome for victories over the allies-turned-enemies; fifty years later, now a Roman general, he celebrated his own triumph for victory over the Parthians – the only man known to have been on both sides of a triumphal procession, a victim turned victor.

The allies seem to have gone some way towards establishing a rival state, under the name ‘Italia’, with a capital at a town renamed ‘Italica’ and even the word Itali (‘Italians’) stamped on their lead shots.

Whatever the causes of the Social War, the effects of the legislation of 90 and 89 BCE that extended full citizenship to most of the peninsula were dramatic. Italy was now the closest thing to a nation state that the classical world ever knew, and the principle we glimpsed centuries earlier that ‘Romans’ could have dual citizenship and two civic identities, that of Rome and that of their home town, became the norm.

There was never any system for registering votes outside Rome, so in practice only those Italians with the money and time to travel would have taken advantage of their new political clout. And the burden of formally enrolling that number of citizens seems to have almost defeated them, even though there was some attempt to devolve part of the work to local officials.

The point is that, whatever lay behind Sulla’s actions (and that is as irrecoverable now as it ever was), the violence was much more widespread than could possibly be put down to the influence of one man.

Once re-established in the city in 82 BCE, Sulla engineered his own election as ‘dictator for making laws and restoring order to the res publica’. The dictatorship was an old emergency office which gave sole power to an individual on a temporary basis to cope with a crisis, sometimes but not always military. The last person to hold the position had been appointed more than a century earlier, to conduct elections in 202 BCE, at the end of the Second Punic War, when both consuls were away from Rome. Sulla’s dictatorship was different in two ways: first, there was no time limit placed on it; second, it entailed vast, unchecked powers to make or repeal any laws, with guaranteed immunity from prosecution.

For three years that is exactly what he did, before resigning the office, retiring to his country house on the Bay of Naples and dying in his bed in 78 BCE.

Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is one of Rome’s most corrosive legacies.

Sulla introduced a programme of reform on an even bigger scale than Gaius Gracchus. He cancelled some of the recent popular measures, including the subsidised corn ration. And he introduced a series of legal procedures and rules and regulations for office holding, many of which reasserted the central position of the senate as a state institution. He drafted in hundreds of members to double its size from about 300 to about 600 (there was never an absolutely fixed number), and he astutely changed the method of recruitment for the future to ensure that the new size would be maintained.

In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round.

Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government.

‘Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer’, as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another. For Sallust, that incompetence was a consequence of their narrow elitism and their refusal to recognise talent outside their own small group. The exclusion of the plebeians from political office had long ago been broken down, but two hundred years later – so this argument went – the new mixed aristocracy of patricians and plebeians had become in practice almost as exclusive. The same families monopolised the highest offices and the most prestigious commands, for generation after generation, and were not keen to let competent ‘new men’ in. The senate was dominated by the ancient equivalent of the old boy network.

Marius’ career had an enormous impact on the rest of Republican history, in ways he can hardly have planned. First, when he returned to Africa to take command against Jugurtha, he enrolled in his army any citizen who was prepared to volunteer. Up to then, except in emergencies, Roman soldiers had officially been recruited only from families with some property. On that basis, recruitment problems had been evident for some time and may have lain behind Tiberius Gracchus’ anxieties about the landless poor; for, if they had no land, they could not serve in the legions.