SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Prowess, bravery and deadly violence in battle were repeatedly celebrated, from the successful general parading through the streets and the cheering crowds in his triumphal procession to the rank-and-file soldiers showing off their battle scars in the middle of political debates in the hope of adding weight to their arguments. 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’.

Yet it would be naïve to imagine that the other peoples in Italy were different. These were very disparate groups, much more varied – in language, culture and political organisation – than the shorthand ‘Italians’ implies. But to judge from the comparatively little we know about most of them, from the military equipment found in their graves or the occasional passing references in literature to their spoils, warfare and atrocities, they were just as committed to militarism as the Romans and probably just as greedy for profit. This was a world where violence was ende...

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’. Most of the peoples in the peninsula no doub...

For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps. What this implies for how they, or any other ‘precartographic’ people, conceived the world around them, or just over their horizons, is one of history’s great mysteries.

These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory. Of course, Rome’s growing power did dramatically transform the landscape of Italy. There was little that was more obviously transformative than a brand-new Roman road striking out across empty fields, or land being annexed and divided up among new settlers. It continues to be convenient to measure Roman power in Italy in terms of geographical area. Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion.

The results may well have been unintended, but they were groundbreaking. 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.

By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE).

There were, however, other far-reaching implications of the way the Romans defined their relations with other peoples in Italy. The ‘allies’, who were committed to no more than supplying manpower, were the most numerous, but they were only one of the categories concerned. To some communities over wide areas in central Italy, the Romans extended Roman citizenship. Sometimes this involved full citizen rights and privileges, including the right to vote or stand in Roman elections while also continuing to be a citizen of a local town. In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio. There were also people who lived on conquered territories in settlements known as colonies (coloniae). These had nothing to do with colonies in the modern sense of the word but were new (or expanded) towns usually made up of a mixture of locals and settlers from Rome. A few had full Roman citizenship status. Most had what was known as Latin rights. That was not citizenship as such but a package of rights believed to have been shared since time immemorial by the Latin towns, later formally defined as intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement and so on. It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis.

Twelve Tables into the relatively complex world of the year 300 BCE, the most influential factor would surely be the sheer size of Rome’s dominion and the organisational demands of fighting on a large scale. Simply the logistics of transport, supply and equipment entailed in mounting a campaign of 16,000 Romans (to use Livy’s estimate), plus allies, would have demanded an infrastructure unthinkable in the mid fifth century BCE. Although I have tried to avoid such modernising terms as ‘alliance’ and ‘treaty’ when referring to Roman activity in the fifth century BCE, the network of Roman connections throughout the peninsula and the different definitions of Rome’s relations with different communities by the end of the following century make those terms much less inappropriate. Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

The careers of these men point to a new world of Roman politics and expansion over the third and second centuries BCE. These are some of the key players, famous or infamous, in the series of military campaigns that gave the Roman Republic control over the whole Mediterranean and beyond. Their rather cumbersome names nicely sum up that new world. Barbatus presumably points to the bearer’s appearance, and Aemilianus is a reference to the man’s natural father, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, but 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’. These were military men. But there was more to the Scipios than that. As anyone would have realised who spotted the statue of the Roman poet Quintus Ennius proudly displayed, alongside those of Africanus and Asiaticus, on the elegant façade of the family tomb, they were also in the thick of the Roman literary revolution, sponsors and patrons of the first generation of Roman literature. This was no coincidence. For the origin of literature at Rome was closely connected with Roman overseas expansion: ‘The Muse imposed herself in warlike fashion on the fierce inhabitants of Rome,’ as one second-century BCE author described it.

As the statue on the outside of the tomb suggests, Scipio Africanus was one of the sponsors of Ennius, most famous for his multivolume Latin epic poem on the history of Rome from the Trojan War until his own day, at the beginning of the second century BCE, and another South Italian, fluent in Latin, Greek and his native Oscan (a reminder of the linguistic variety of the peninsula).

it: ‘Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?’ Who indeed?

And in 190 BCE, under the command of Scipio Asiaticus, they decisively defeated Antiochus ‘the Great’ of Syria. Not only was he busy modelling himself on Alexander the Great and extending his power base accordingly, but he had also given a home to Hannibal, now in exile from Carthage, who was reputed to be offering the king master classes in how to confront the Romans. Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life, and Roman writers organised the history of this period, as I have just done, around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day. When Sallust called his essay on Catiline’s plot The War against Catiline, or Bellum Catilinae, he was reflecting, and maybe slightly parodying, the Roman tradition of seeing war as the structuring principle of history. It was a tradition that went back a long way. There is a surviving snatch of Ennius’ epic poem on the history of Rome that refers explicitly to ‘the Second Punic War’, in which he had fought as a Roman ally; it was written even before the third had happened.

In practical terms the Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life. 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. Twice as many legions fought at Cannae as had fought at Sentinum some eighty years earlier – which is a convenient indication of the increasing size of these conflicts and the ever more complex and demanding logistics of equipment, supply and animal transport. An army of the size the Romans and their allies fielded at Cannae would, for example, have needed around 100 tonnes of wheat alone, every day. The deals with the local communities that this implies, the marshalling of the hundreds of pack animals, who added to the demand by necessarily consuming part of what they carried, and the collection and distribution networks would have been inconceivable at the beginning of the century.

There were also important consequences for Rome itself of military success overseas. The literary revolution was only one part of it. By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth. Bullion by the barrow load, taken (or stolen) from rich eastern cities and kingdoms, poured into the well-guarded basement of the Temple of Saturn in the Forum, which served as the state ‘treasury’. And there was enough left over to line the pockets of the soldiers, from the grandest general to the rawest recruit.

Yet these changes were destabilising too. It was not just that some curmudgeonly Roman moralists worried about the dangerous effects of all this wealth and ‘luxury’ (as they put it). The expansion of Roman power raised big debates and paradoxes about Rome’s place in the world, about what counted as ‘Roman’ when so much of the Mediterranean was under Roman control and about where the boundary between barbarism and civilisation now lay, and which side of that boundary Rome was on. When, for example, at the end of the third century BCE the Roman authorities welcomed the Great Mother goddess from the highlands of what is now Turkey and solemnly installed her in a temple on the Palatine, complete with her retinue of self-castrated, self-flagellating, long-haired priests – how Roman was that?

In 216 BCE the authorities in Rome performed what Livy calls ‘a very un-Roman ritual’. They buried alive in the city centre two pairs of human victims, Gauls and Greeks.

It was the closest to human sacrifice that the Romans ever came, and Livy’s embarrassment in telling the story is evident. Yet it was not the only time they did this: the same ritual had been carried out in 228 BCE in the face of a Gallic invasion from the north, and was again in 113 BCE, when another such invasion threatened. In 216 BCE the sacrifice was prompted by Hannibal’s victory earlier that year at Cannae, two hundred miles away to the southeast, which had left vast numbers of Romans dead after a single afternoon’s fighting (estimates vary from around 40,000 to 70,000 – in other words, something at the level of a hundred deaths a minute). There are all kinds of puzzles about this cruel ritual. Why this choice of nationalities? What relationship did it have to the similar burial alive of Vestal Virgins who were convicted of breaking their vow of chastity (which also happened in 216 BCE and 113 BCE)? It certainly points to the fear and panic that hit Rome after – to see it in his terms, for once – Hannibal’s stunning victory. The Battle of Cannae and the whole history of the Second Punic War have mesmerised generals, pundits and historians ever since. Probably no war has been refought so often in so many studies and lecture rooms or been scrutinised so intently by the military men of the modern world, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Field Marshal Montgomery and Norman Schwarzkopf.

The main issue has always been why on earth, after the stunning victory at Cannae, he did not go on to take the city of Rome while he had the chance but instead gave the Romans time to recover.

Livy imagines one of Hannibal’s officers, by the name of Maharbal, saying to him: ‘You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you don’t know how to exploit it.’ Montgomery is only one of the many later generals who have agreed with Maharbal. Hannibal was a brilliant soldier and dashing adventurer who had the final prize within his grasp, but for some unfathomable reason (loss of nerve or some flaw of character) he failed to take it. Hence his tragic glamour.

The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style, between on the one hand Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator – the last three names, ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism – and on the other Scipio Africanus. 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...

What is more, despite the almost mystical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae, which are still on the syllabus of military academies, they amounted to little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy. This was the one trick that ancient generals always tried if they could, for it offered the best chance of encircling the opposition and the only reliable way of killing or capturing them in large numbers. Indeed, it is hard to see how

That must also have been in Polybius’ mind when he chose to insert into his Histories a long digression on the strength of the Roman political system, as it was at the time of Cannae. His overall aim was to explain why the Romans had conquered the world, and part of that explanation lay in the strength and stability of Rome’s internal political structures. His account is the first more or less contemporary description of Roman political life to survive (Polybius was looking back fifty years or so but also mixing in observations of his own time); and at the same time it is the first attempt at a theoretical analysis of how Roman politics worked, one that sets the agenda even now.

The surviving hostages were released around 150 BCE. Only 300 were still alive, and one outspoken Roman is supposed to have complained about the senate wasting its time ‘debating whether some elderly Greeks should be buried by undertakers here or in Greece’. But Polybius was soon back with his Roman associates, travelling with the army to Carthage and acting as an intermediary in the negotiations that followed the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE. He was also still writing his Histories, which ended up spreading over forty books, mainly focusing on the years 220 to 167 BCE, with a brief flashback to the First Punic War and an epilogue to bring the story down to 146 BCE. Whoever was Polybius’ main intended readership, Greek or Roman, his work became an important reference point for later Romans trying to understand their city’s rise. It was certainly on Livy’s desk when he was writing his History.

Predictably, modern historians have found it hard to know quite where to fix the boundary between Polybius the Roman hostage and critic of Roman rule and Polybius the Roman collaborator. He certainly sometimes performed a deft balancing act between his different loyalties, giving behind-the-scenes advice at one point to a distinguished Syrian hostage on how to slip away from his detention, while carefully insisting in his Histories that on the day of the great escape he himself was at home, ‘ill in bed’. But whatever Polybius’ political stance, he had the advantage of knowing both sides of the Roman story, and he had the opportunity to quiz some of the leading Roman players. He dissected Rome’s internal organisation – which he insisted underpinned its success abroad – from a vantage point that combined a couple of decades of first-hand experience with all the sophistication of the Greek political theory in which he had been trained back home. His work is, in effect, one of the earliest surviving attempts at comparative political anthropology.

care. He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or ‘fear of the gods’, in controlling Roman behaviour, and he was impressed with the systematic efficiency of Roman organisation; hence his important – but now often skipped – discussion of military arrangements, with its teach-yourself rules on laying out an army camp, where the consul’s tent should be pitched, how to plan a legionary baggage train, and the savage system of discipline. He was also sharp enough to see beneath the surface of various Roman customs and favourite pastimes to their underlying social significance.

Another aspect of this – one that he makes into an extended, if slightly ghoulish, case study – was to be found in the funerals of ‘distinguished men’. Again, Polybius must have witnessed enough of these to draw out their deeper significance. The body, he explains, was carried into the Forum and placed on the rostra, normally propped up somehow in an upright position, so it was visible to a large audience. In the procession that followed, family members wore masks made in the likeness of the dead man’s ancestors and dressed in the costume appropriate to the offices each had held (purple-bordered togas and so on), as if they were all present ‘living and breathing’. The funeral address, delivered by a family member, started with the achievements of the corpse on the rostra but then went through the careers of all the other characters, who by this time were sitting on ivory, or at least ivory-veneered, chairs lined up next to the dead man.

‘I produced offspring. I sought to equal the deeds of my father. I won the praise of my ancestors so that they are glad that I was born to them. My career has ennobled my family line.’

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.

The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed. The consuls, for example, might have had full, monarchical command on campaign, but they had to be elected by the people in the first place, and they depended on the senate for funding – and it was the senate which decided whether the successful general should be awarded a triumph at the end of his campaign, and a vote of the people was required to ratify any treaty that might be made. And so on. It was, Polybius argued, such balances across the political system that produced the internal stability on which Roman external success was built.

This is a clever piece of analysis, sensitive to the tiny differences and subtle nuances which distinguish one political system from another. To be sure, in some respects Polybius tries to shoehorn the political life that he witnessed at Rome into a Greek analytical model that does not entirely fit. Saddling his discussion with terms like ‘democracy’ is, for example, deeply misleading. ‘Democracy’ (demokratia)

The other main assembly based on geographical ‘tribal’ divisions was more equitable in theory – but, as time went by, not necessarily so in practice. Of the thirty-five geographical divisions which were finally defined in 241 BCE (up to that point the number of tribes had increased as citizenship was extended through Italy), only four covered the city itself.

Quite how frequent or well attended they usually were, we do not know for sure. But there are several hints that they involved political passion, vociferous enthusiasm, and very loud noise. On one occasion, in the first century BCE, it was said that the shouting was so thunderous that a crow, which had the bad luck to be flying past, fell to the ground, stunned.

There are also all kinds of anecdotes about the importance and intensity of canvassing, and how the vote of the people could be won or lost.

Polybius tells a curious story about the Syrian king Antiochus IV (Epiphanes, ‘famous’ or even ‘manifest god’), the son of Antiochus the Great, who had been ‘crushed’ by Scipio Asiaticus. As a young man he had lived more than a decade as a hostage in Rome before being swapped for a...

On his return to the East, he took with him a variety of Roman habits that he had picked up during his stay. These mostly came down to displaying a popular touch: talking with anyone he met, giving presents to ordinary people and making the rounds of craftsmen’s shops. But most striking of all, he would dress up in a toga and go around the marketplace as if he were a candidate for election, shaking people by the hand and asking for their vote. This baffled the people in his showy capital city of Antioch, who were not used to this kind of thing from a monarch and nicknamed him Epimanes (‘bonkers’ or, to...

Equally revealing is an anecdote about another member of the Scipio family in the second century BCE, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica. He was out canvassing one day in a bid to be elected to the office of aedile and was busy shaking the hands of voters (standard procedure, then as now) when he came across one whose hands were hardened by work in the fields. ‘My goodness,’ the young aristocrat joked, ‘do you walk on them?’ He was overheard, and the common people concl...

Much like the extension of Roman control within Italy, this expansion overseas in the third and second centuries BCE was more complicated than the familiar myth of the Roman legions marching in, conquering and taking over foreign territory. 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. However cynical we might rightly be about Roman claims that they went to war only in response to requests for assistance from friends and allies (that has been the excuse for some of the most aggressive wars in history), part of the pressure for Rome to intervene did come from outside.

Rome in the hope of winning moral support or military intervention. That is a running theme in the historical accounts of the period: there are plenty of envoys reported, for example, in the run-up to Aemilius Paullus’ campaign against Perseus, trying to persuade the Romans to do something about the ambitions of Macedon. But the most vivid picture of how this ‘courting’ worked in practice comes from Teos, a town on the western coast of modern Turkey. It is a mid-second-century BCE inscription recording the attempts made to draw the Romans into a minor dispute, about which nothing else is known, over some land rights between the city of Abdera in northern Greece and a local king, Kotys. The text is a ‘thank-you letter’ carved on stone, addressed to the town of Teos by the people of Abdera. For the Teans had apparently agreed to send two men to Rome, almost lobbyists in a modern sense, to drum up Roman support for Abdera’s case against the king. The Abderans describe exactly how this pair operated, right down to their regular house calls on key members of the senate. The delegates apparently worked so hard that ‘they wore themselves out physically

In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for

Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.

that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.

Carthaginian Mago was rescued from the flames; back in Rome, the senate gave a committee of Roman linguists

Hasdrubal,

Mummius was a very different type from the Homer-loving Aemilianus, and he has gone down in history almost as a caricature of the uncultured Roman philistine.

The first was in 133 BCE, when Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a tribune of the people with radical plans to distribute land to the Roman poor, decided to seek a second year in office. To put a stop to this, an unofficial posse of senators and their hangers-on interrupted the elections, bludgeoned Gracchus and hundreds of his supporters to death and threw their bodies into the Tiber.

Just over a decade later, Tiberius Gracchus’ brother Gaius met the same fate. He had introduced an even more radical programme of reform, including a subsidised grain allowance for Roman citizens, and was successfully elected tribune for a second time.

But in 121 BCE, when he was trying to prevent his legislation from being dismantled, he became the victim of another, more official, posse of senators. On this occasion the bodies of thousands of his supporters clogged the river. And it happened again in 100 BCE, when other reformers were battered to death

Coriolanus

the Battle of Bovillae’, as it was grandly, and ironically, known).