SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

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.

That is partly the point of Barbatus’ epitaph: patrician though the Scipio family was, what counts here are the offices he held, the personal qualities he displayed and the battles he won. No achievement was more demonstrable or more celebrated than victory in battle, and the desire for victory among the new elite was almost certainly an important factor in intensifying military activity and encouraging warfare.

Equally, it was power over increasingly far-flung peoples and the demands of a conquering army that drove many of the innovations tha...

More generally, if we were to ask what transformed the relatively simple world of the 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.

Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

SCIPIO BARBATUS BUILT his tomb on a grand scale, and over the next 150 years around thirty of his descendants joined him there.

The Scipio family included some of the most famous names of Roman history, as well as its fair share of also-rans and ne’er-do-wells. Eight of their epitaphs survive more or less complete, and several of those commemorate the kind of Romans usually hidden from history: the ones who did not quite make the grade or who died young, and the women. ‘He who has been buried here was never surpassed in virtus. Just twenty years of age, he was entrusted to the tomb – in case you ask why no political office was entrusted to him,’ the text on one sarcophagus of the middle of the second century BCE explains slightly defensively.

Other members of the family would have had even greater boasts. 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’ grave lay on his estate in South Italy and became something of a pilgrimage site for later Romans. But it is almost certain that among the memorials in the family tomb were once those of his brother Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, the man ‘who crushed King Antiochus’ of Syria in 190 BCE; his cousin Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus, a consul in 176 BCE; and his grandson Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus.

An adopted member of the family, Aemilianus invaded North Africa and finished Africanus’ work: in 146 BCE he reduced the ancient city of Carthage to rubble and sold m...

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 Ro...

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.

For centuries, Romans had used writing for various purposes: public notices, rules and regulations, claims of ownership scrawled on a pot. But it was increasing contact with the traditions of the Greek world, from the mid third century BCE, that was the catalyst to the production and preservation of literature as such.

Livius Andronicus

The background and output of Livius Andronicus are typical of the cultural mix of this early writing and of its writers. He produced Latin versions not only of Greek tragedies but also of Homer’s Odyssey; he had been enslaved as a prisoner of war, probably from the Greek city of Tarentum in South Italy, and later freed.

Fabius Pictor, the Roman senator

The earliest literature actually to survive in any bulk, written around the turn of the third and second centuries BCE – the twenty-six comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus and Publius Terentius Afer (‘Plautus’ and ‘Terence’ from now on) – are carefully Romanised versions of Greek predecessors, featuring hapless love stories and farcical tales of mistaken identity often set in Athens but also sprinkled with gags about togas, public baths and triumphal parades.

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).

That eyewitness was the closest of Aemilianus’ literary friends and connections, a Greek historian, resident in Rome, by the name of Polybius. A shrewd observer of Roman politics at home and abroad, with a unique perspective on Rome from the inside and the outside, he hovers over much of the rest of this chapter – as the first writer to pose some of the big questions that we shall try to answer.

Why and how did the Romans come to dominate so much of the Mediterranean in such a short time? What was distinctive about the Roman political system? Or as Polybius sternly put 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?

Polybius’ ‘fifty-three years’ covered the end of the third and the beginning of the second century BCE, but it was some sixty years earlier that the Romans first encountered an enemy from overseas.

That was Pyrrhus, the ruler of a kingdom in northern 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.

The phrase is rather kind to the Romans’ side of the story, for Pyrrhus was a serious match for them. Hannibal is supposed to have rated him the greatest military leader after Alexander the Great, and – according to a number of aff...

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.

The most celebrated, and devastating, conflicts were the first two Punic Wars, against Carthage. The earlier lasted for more than twenty years (from 264 to 241 BCE), largely fought in Sicily and on the seas round about, except for one disastrous Roman excursion to the Carthaginian homeland, in North Africa.

On a very different geographical scale was the Second Punic War, which was fought between 218 and 201 BCE. It is now best remembered for the heroic failure of Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with his elephants (more of a propaganda coup than a practical military asset) and inflicted vast casualties on the Romans in Italy, most notoriously in 216 BCE at the Battle of Cannae in the south.

What is more, the Romans were also engaged in major conflicts with the Gauls in the far north of Italy in the 220s BCE.

They made periodic interventions across the Adriatic too, partly to deal with so-called pirates (a catch-all term for ‘enemies in ships’) who were supported by the tribes and kingdoms on the opposite coast – or so it was said.

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.

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 demandi...

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 collectio...

It is harder to put a figure on the casualties: there was no systematic tally of deaths on an ancient battlefield; and all numbers in ancient texts have to be treated with suspicion, victims of exaggeration, misunderstanding a...

It is necessary, however, to see beyond this carnage, terrible as it was, to look harder at the reality and organisation of the fighting and to investigate the domestic politics that underpinned Roman expansion, as well as the Roman ambitions and wider geopolitics of the ancient Mediterranean that may have encouraged it.

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.