SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

Roman storytelling gave extravagant coverage to the capture of the city, with various acts of heroism mitigating the widespread destruction.

The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate.

The one clear surviving mark of the ‘sack’ on the Roman landscape is the vast defensive city wall, of which some impressive sections are still visible, constructed after the departure of the Gauls and built with some particularly durable stone that was one of the products of Rome’s new territory around Veii.

But there were powerful reasons why this defeat was a useful episode for Roman historians to stress. It set the scene for Roman anxieties about invaders from over the Alps, of whom Hannibal was the most dangerous, but not the only one. It helped to explain why so little hard information survived for early Rome (it had gone up in flames), and so it marked the start, in ancient terms, of ‘modern history’. It answered the question of why in the later Republic the city of Rome, despite its world renown, was such an ill-planned rabbit warren: the Romans had had to rebuild hurriedly when the Gauls left. And it opened a new chapter in Rome’s relations with the outside world.

What followed was a revolution in the size, scale, location and consequence of Roman conflict. True, the basic pattern of more or less annual warfare continued.

The Battle of the Caudine Forks, in 321 BCE, at which the South Italian Samnites trounced the Romans, became almost as resonant as the Battle of the Allia or the sack of Rome seventy years earlier – even though it was not really a battle at all. The Romans were trapped in a narrow mountain gully, the Forks, with no water, and they simply surrendered.

Yet between the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE, the manpower involved in these conflicts increased dramatically. Campaigns were fought further and further from Rome. Whereas Veii was 10 miles up the road, Sentinum was some two hundred miles away, across the Apennines.

The military impact of Rome by the end of the fourth century BCE was so great that Livy felt it worthwhile to compare Roman prowess with that of the world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India. Livy wondered who would have won, the Romans or the Macedonians, if they had come head to head, a military conundrum that armchair generals still ponder.

First was the so-called Latin War,

Shortly after followed the ‘Samnite Wars’, the occasion of Barbatus’ victories. They were fought in phases between 343 and 290 BCE against a group of communities based in the mountainous parts of southern Italy: Samnites, who were much less rough and primitive than it suited the Romans to portray them but less urbanised than those in many other parts of the peninsula.

Both of these ‘wars’ are rather artificial constructions, isolating two enemies and giving their names to the much more widespread, endemic fighting of the period, from a decidedly Romano-centric point of view (no Samnite ever fought a ‘Sam...

According to the usual story, the first was prompted by a revolt of the Latins against the dominant positi...

Almost fifty years later, the decades of Samnite Wars ended, with more than half the peninsula under Rome’s thumb in various ways, from treaties of ‘friendship’ to direct control.

Roman writers presented these wars as if they were a struggle between two states for Italian supremacy. They were certainly not that, but the scale of the conflict was something new and set the stage for the future.

At the Battle of Sentinum, the Romans faced a large group of enemies (‘alliance’ may be too formal a word for it): the Samnites themselves, as well as Etruscans and Gauls from the far north of the peninsula. The sheer number of combatants seems to have attracted the attention of Duris of Samos, who recorded a vast but implausible total of 100,...

One thing is certain, however: this was a different military world from the low-level skirmishes of the fifth century BCE.

It is a world we can still glimpse in an extraordinary discovery made in the 1870s in excavations at what would have been the edge of the ancient city of Rome: a tantalisingly small fragment of painting, from a tomb, probably dating to the early third century BCE.

Originally much more extensive, covering a whole wall, it is arranged in a series of registers, one above the other, which are thought to feature scenes from th...

Seen in these simple, stylised images, the Romans may not look much of a match for Alexander the Great.

But whether or not they would have been is precisely the issue Livy raises in the long digression in his History just after the description of the impressive Roman recovery from the humiliation at the Caudine Forks.

It did not escape his notice that the Samnite Wars were taking place in Italy at the end of the fourth century BCE, which was more or less when the Macedonian king ...

By Livy’s day, Roman generals had long been keen to emulate Alexander. They had imitated his distinctive hairstyle, they had called themselves ‘the Great’ and both Julius Caesar and the first emperor, Augustus, had made a pilgrimage to Alexander’s tomb in Egypt, Augustus – so it...

Alexander, he concedes, was a great general, though not without his faults, drunkenness among others. But the Romans had the advantage of not depending on a single charismatic leader. They had depth in their command, supported by extraordinary military discipline.

In his roundabout way, Livy – who sometimes seems rather plodding in his analysis – offers a perceptive answer to the questions of what made the Roman armies at this period so good at winning and how it came about that Rome extended control so rapidly over so much of Italy.

Two things are clear and undermine a couple of misleading modern myths about Roman power and ‘character’. First, the Romans were not by nature more belligerent than their neighbours and contemporaries, any more than they were naturally better at building roads and bridges.

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...

This was a world where violence was endemic, skirmishes with neighbours were annual events, plunder was a significant revenue stream for everyone ...

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 doubt shared that blurring. To be off one’s home turf was always (potentially) to be at war.

Second, the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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 thei...

I have tended to write of the spread of Roman power through the peninsula of Italy, but no one knows how many – or, realistically, how few – Romans at this date thought of their homelan...

These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory.

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.

There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies.

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...

The results may well have been unintended, but they were ground-breaking. 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.

Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy.

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). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war. Or as one Roman poet put it in the 130s BCE, ‘The Roman people has often b...

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.

How this complicated mosaic of statuses had originated is again hard to know.

It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a ‘Latin’ colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity.

The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. 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. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance fo...

There is no more vivid symbol of Rome’s changed relationship to the outside world in the early fourth century BCE than the vast wall erected around the city in the years after the Gauls left, with a perimeter of 7 miles and in places as much as 4 metres thick.

But what caused the change in the first place is a tricky question. What happened in the early fourth century BCE to start this new phase of Roman military activity? No ancient writer hazards an answer, beyond the implausible idea that the seed of world domination had somehow been planted.

Maybe the invasion of the Gauls produced in the Romans a determination not to be caught out like that again, to take the offensive rather than being forced on to the defensive. Maybe it took only a couple of lucky victories in the endemic fighting of the region, followed by a couple of alliances and the extra manpower they brought, to ignite the process of expansion.

So far in exploring this period, I have largely kept the internal history of Rome separate from the story of its expansion.