I. THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE AND THE FALL OF THE REPUBLIC
Dates for Military Actions in Second and First Centuries B.C.
200-197 Romans defeat Philip V of Macedon.
196 Flamininus proclaims "Freedom of Greece"
190-189 Romans defeat Antiochus III of Syria
183 Hannibal, Antiochus' military advisor, commits suicide rather than be extradited to Rome
171-168 Aemilius Paullus defeats Perseus of Macedon (battle of Pydna). Macedonia is divided into four republics
167 Rome plunders Epirus; Polybius among 1000 Achaeans deported to Rome.
149-148 Fourth Macedonian War. Macedonia becomes province under praetor.
149-146 Third Punic War. Scipio Aemilianus destroys Carthage.
146 War against Achaean League. Corinth is destroyed. Greece made a
province under administrative authority of governor of Macedonia.
143-133 Numantine war in Spain. End of organized Celtiberian resistance to Rome.
133 Tiberius Gracchus, as plebeian tribune, attempts land redistribution to the poor Roman citizenry (to increase number of citizens eligible for army) and is murdered
123-121 Gaius Gracchus, brother of TG, serves as plebeian tribune and sponsors land reform, state payment for soldiers' clothing and weapons. Supported by poor, some equites, and many Italians. Murdered.
112-104 War against King Jugurtha of Numidia. Marius and Sulla gain distinction.
107 Marius's first consulship.
105-100 War against Teutones and Cimbri. Marius's second through sixth consulships.
91-89 Social War. Rome's Italian clients, angered by Rome's refusal to grant them citizenship, go to war with Rome. Italians become Roman citizens.
88--85, 83, 75-66 Wars against Mithridates, king of Pontus. Expansion of Roman power and influence in Asia Minor.
88 Sulla, consul. Marches on Rome. Marius flees
87-86 Marius and populares in power. Marius's seventh consulate and death
83 Sulla, victorious against Mithridates, returns to Italy and defeats Marians with aid of Crassus and Pompey
82-79 Sulla dictator. Sullan terror in Rome. Optimates in power.
78 Death of Sulla in retirement
82-73 Sertorius, Marian proconsul in Spain, successfully leads native Lusitanians against a series of Sullan generals. Murdered by own men.
73-71 Spartacus slave revolt put down by Crassus and Pompey.
67 Pompey eradicates Mediterranean pirates
66-63 Pompey defeats Mithridates. Organizes eastern frontier into client states and provinces.
63-62 Catiline's conspiracy of disaffected noble debtors, dispossessed, etc.
60 First Triumvirate: political friendship formed by Pompey, Crassus, Caesar
59 Caesar's first consulship.
58-51 Caesar, as proconsul, conquers and pacifies Gaul. Expeditions across Rhine against Germans and to Britain.
53 Crassus defeated and killed by Parthians at Carrhae in east.
52 Vercingetorix leader of unsuccessful Gallic rebellion. Uses scorched earth strategy against Caesar. Caesar takes Alesia by siege; ends revolt.
53-50 Dissolution of friendship between Pompey and Caesar. Optimates support Pompey
49 Caesar, threatened with judicial prosecution, crosses Rubicon into Italy and marches on Rome. Pompey flees to Macedonia. Caesar wins victory Ilerda in Spain.
48 Caesar defeats Pompey at Pharsalus in Greece. Pompey murdered in Egypt. Caesar elected consul for second time, then appointed dictator by Senate.
47 Caesar supports Cleopatra in Egypt. Defeats son of Mithridates in Asia Minor ('I came, I saw, I conquered')
46-44 Caesar appointed dictator for 10 years; defeats Pompeians in Africa and Spain
44 Caesar appointed dictator for life; murdered in Senate on 15 March
43 Second triumvirate: Marcus Antoninus, Lepidus, and Octavian
43 Battle of Philippi; Mark Antony awarded the eastern provinces and Octavian the western provinces.
36 Antony's unsuccesful Parthian campaign; Octavian defeats Sextus Pompeius in naval engagement at Mylae
32-31 Octavian and Agrippa defeat Antony in naval Battle of Actium
27 Octavian given title 'Augustus'; "restores" Republic; beginning of the Roman Empire
ROMAN IMPERIALISM AND THE ARMY IN THE 3RD AND 2ND CENTURIES B.C.
In the second and first centuries B.C. Rome employed its military power to extend its authority and power throughout the Mediterranean World. In the process Rome was transformed from a hegemonic Italian city state into an imperial power. The growth of empire had profound social, economic, and military effects upon Rome. The old citizen army of the early and middle Republic, in which landowning citizen-farmers served under elected magistrates and former magistrates, was gradually transformed into a professional military led by ambitious military dynasts. This metamorphosis was assisted by a terrible irony: the Roman citizen-soldiers, the assidui (middling landowning taxpayers), were very nearly destroyed as a class by Rome's success. While the aristocrats who led the armies and served as their generals and officers profitted handsomely from the loot and plunder that attended victory, the ordinary rank and file of the army found itself serving extended tours of six or more consecutive years far from home in an unending series of foreign wars. Since military service was an obligation of citizenship, pay was minimal, and the cost of weapons and military clothing, which was borne by the soldier until 123 B.C., ate up much of that. Even more problematic, among the 'benefits' of victory were the importation of hundreds of thousands of slaves into Italy and the availability of cheap grain from Sicily, which exacerbated the economic problems faced by small farmers since the time of Hannibal's (and the Romans') ravaging of the Italian countryside during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). Soldiers on extended service often came home to find themselves impoverished, their lands taken over by wealthier neighbors willing to pay the taxes on it. The census class of the assidui was shrinking at a time when Rome's wars abroad and need for standing armies in its provinces made greater and greater demands on its citizenry. In short, by establishing Rome as the dominant power in the Mediterranean World, the Roman soldier enriched his generals and the Republic but impoverished himself.
3.Roman Imperialism in the Middle Republic
The manpower demands of the Second Punic War were extraordinary. P.A. Brunt estimated that during the war one out of every two eligible citizens served in the legions. Even those ineligible because of age or property requirements were often conscripted into the legions or organized into ad hoc legions to guard the city of Rome itself from possible attack by Hannibal. The ravages visited upon Italy in the course of the war were terrible. Italian casualties between 218 and 216 rivalled the worst horrors of Verdun or the Somme. Hannibal's destruction of the countryside coupled with the Romans' own scorched earth policy to deprive Hannibal of fodder and food strained the Italian economy and impoverished many small farmers.
It is therefore remarkable that the successful conclusion of the Second Punic War (201 B.C.) did not bring peace, as the Roman Senate found itself drawn into a series of 'defensive' wars against powerful Hellenistic kingdoms in the east and smaller scale conflicts in the newly obtained provinces of Spain. During the second century B.C. Roman wars spanned the Mediterranean world from Spain to Asia Minor. The result was the the Roman city-state gained an empire and was transformed politically, economically, and militarily in the process.
Why did the Roman senatorial elite choose the course of empire (assuming, of course, that they actually 'chose' a 'course,' which is not at all clear) and why were the small farmers who made up the legions willing to answer the summons to war? The nature of Roman 'imperialism' (or 'expansionism') in the middle and late Republic and the motivations of the Roman elite in engaging in wars of conquest have been subjects of great debate. Two rival explanations have gained adherents among historians. The first, now associated with E. Badian and his students, asserts that the Romans unintentionally and, at times, reluctantly acquired an empire as a result of a policy of self defense and defense of allies. Under this construction, Rome's wars were often protective reaction--or proactive--strikes against perceived potential enemies or the enemies of their friends. The Roman leaders were motivated largely by fear or, more properly, the obligation to preserve the security of Rome. The other view, promoted most strongly by W.V. Harris, is that the Roman elite, driven by lust for profit and glory, consciously sought to conquer and dominate, and economically exploit other peoples. Both schools agree that the bellicose ethos of the Roman aristocracy spurred the Romans to engage in war, and both also posit that the nature of Roman imperialism changed dramatically in the first century B.C., when individual generals such as Pompey, Lucullus, and Caesar conquered territories on their own initiative for personal gain. Neither, moreover, regard the acquisition of an empire as the result of long-term planning and a conscious imperial policy of expansion and annexation. Where Badian and Harris part company is on questions of motivation: the roles played by fear, security, national neurosis, greed, and glory in the Senate's decisions to wage war and annex territories in the second and early first century.
The haphazard manner in which the Roman Senate dealt with the conquered territories lends support to the 'empire by accident' theory. Failing to develop specific administrative institutions to govern their conquered territories, they designated them as 'provinces.' A provincia was any sphere of public authority assigned to a magistrate. Territorial 'provinces' were regions under the imperium (supreme military and judicial authority) of praetors and outgoing consuls who served, essentially, as military commanders of Roman armies. Unlike Rome's 'friends' and clients, provinces were charged with paying taxes, and the main responsiblity of a Roman governor was to keep order and make sure the designated tribute was paid. In matters of routine governance, economics, and law, the native elites continued to rule their localities without undue interference from Roman officials except when it came to paying taxes or on matters immediately affecting the interests of the Roman State. (Some provinces, such as Spain and Gaul, were conglomerations of small, largely independent cities and tribes united only by their common obligations to Rome.)
The authority of a governor in his province was extensive, and the opportunities available to predatory governors and their staffs to enrich themselves at the expense of their provincial subjects were myriad. (A favorite ploy was to threaten towns with the billeting of soldiers during the winter unless they bought an exemption.) Though the Romans created in 149 B.C. a permanent standing court to try charges of extortion and malfeasance against provincial administrators, such investigations--which were rarely successful--could only begin after the governor's term of office was up. No one until Augustus, apparently, supervised governors while they served.
Though Badian downplays it, his thesis is consistant with the manner in which contemporary historians of the late Republic and early Empire tended to portray Rome's rise to empire (though what Badian attributes to 'historical forces' the ancients ascribed to 'divine providence'). For Livy and other ancient writers Rome acquired its empire through a series of defensive 'just' wars fought either in self defense or in fulfillment of obligations to allies. The Romans thus obtained their empire justly as the result of divine providence and in consequence of their virtue and fides. Whether or not this interpretation is historically accurate, it clearly reflects the Romans' own imperial ideology. The Roman reluctance to admit aggression was so ingrained that it became fossilized in the very ritual by which the Romans declared war in the Republic, the so-called 'fetial' law. This ritual, which extends back into the early Republic, was a necessary prelude to the initiation of hostilities. It involved a formal accusation by Roman priests of wrongdoing on the part of the prospective enemy, and a castigation of that foe for their failure to remedy the injury they had committed against the Roman people.
One might be forgiven some skepticism regarding the fetial law and the protestations of Livy et al.. The Romans of the middle and late Republic were hardly Quakers; their ethos celebrated manliness and strength, not passivity and resignation. How then does one make sense of the Roman 'just war' doctrine? It is important here to recognize that the fetial law was a religious ceremony. Its audience was the gods, both of Rome and of Rome's enemies. The Romans were a conservative and cautious people. They were also intensely religious, and believed that the gods favored order, justice, and the welfare of the Roman state. The three were intimately connected in the minds of the Romans. To wage a patently aggressive war against an unoffending enemy was to offend against divine justice and to risk the loss of divine favor. Wars were to be undertaken prudently, and a just cause was an essential prerequisite for a prudential war. Whether or not the Roman elite of the late Republic really believed this, their traditions and conventions compelled them to present their wars as 'just' and defensive. Even C. Julius Caesar, who brutally and efficiently conquered the tribes of Gaul in a matter of a few years and undoubtedly regarded the 'fetial' law as a quaint nicety, wrote about his conquests as if they were the unintended result of his defense of Roman territory and friends, thus underscoring to his audience, the Roman elite, that he was a 'traditional' Roman, manly, pious, and duty-bound to Rome.
Caesar's explanation of his conquest of Gaul is almost certainly disingenuous. Even his contemporaries understood that the reality behind the traditional rhetoric was an aggressive campaign of conquest undertaken to swell the coffers and increase the 'dignity' of an ambitious general. For Badian Caesar represents the 'new imperialists,' the men of an age in which the traditional political and social restraints on imperial acquisition had disappeared. William Harris also admits that Caesar's imperialism was of a new sort, but not so much in its rapacity as in its individualism. As mentioned above, Harris and his adherents believe that the Romans consciously created an empire in the second century B.C. and did so in large measure out of the desire for economic gain. What makes this view so attractive is how well it accords with the notoriously bellicose, competitive, and aggressive character of the Roman aristocracy. The Roman elite culture glorified war and awarded prestige on the basis of military success; the latter made good sense since the higher magistrates of the Republic, the two consuls and the praetors, were also its generals. The idea of a Rome driven to war by fear contrasts starkly with the Roman aristocratic ethos of virtus, 'manly valor,' and gloria.
Nor were the Romans shy about profitting from their military ventures, as the flood of slaves and Hellenistic art into Italy in the second century B.C. well attests. War, for the Romans of the middle and late Republic, was a lucrative affair. From the fourth century B.C. to the first, Roman generals and their troops regarded warfare as an opportunity for personal profit as well as a duty to the state. If the Romans wished to be seen as reluctant warriors valiantly defending themselves and their friends against the depredations of others, modern students cannot help but be struck by how many vulnerable and wealthy enemies the Romans were 'forced' to face. Their 'restless desire for defensible borders' led them into a series of very profitable wars, and some of the aggressors whom they punished, notably the unfortunate Carthaginians of the Third Punic War, appear in hindsight to have been more victim than would-be victimizer. Harris regards Rome's pious justifications for going to war as masks for their true motivations, greed and glory. Regardless of historical merit, Harris' cynical, Machtpolitik interpretation of Roman expansion may strike students of modern European and American history as more 'reasonable'--certainly more familiar--than Badian's depiction of reluctant imperialists.
To debate the true motivations of long dead Romans is probably a futile endeavor. We cannot even determine whether the speeches in the Senate recorded by Livy, Appian, and other later historians actually captured the sentiments of the time or reflected the values of the authors' audiences. What one can say is that the very structures of Roman internal politics and the ethos of the elite classes helped propel the Romans to war and conquest. The Roman Republican aristocracy of the second and first centuries B.C. was a ferociously competitive society in which young males were judged on the basis of their demonstrated 'manliness' (virtus) as manifested through the glory they won through service to the state, especially in war. The connection between civil political office and military service was so close that, by tradition, a Roman noble could not stand for even the lowest magistracy, the quaestorship, before he had proved his worthiness for office by serving in ten military campaigns. Glory and a reputation for 'manliness' brought one prestige (dignitas), and prestige was essential political capital. The measure of a 'noble' was his resume: the offices to which he was elected and the deeds he accomplished while holding these magistracies. His competition, moreover, was not only with his contemporaries among the male Roman aristocracy--and because Roman offices were age specific, this competition among males of the same age continued throughout one's adult life--but with his own forbears, whose dignitas he inherited and hoped to surpass.
Roman consuls and praetors had only a single year to translate their office into glory and prestige. This meant that each consul had a stake in going to war. The desire of every Roman commander was to achieve a military victory of such recognized consequence that he would be awarded the honor of a 'triumph,' that elaborate Roman 'ticker-tape' parade that was the culmination of a military career. Whether or not the Roman 'state' entered its wars reluctantly, its military commanders (and probably the rank and file of its legions, who may well have been motivated by similar ideas of glory and dignity) did not.
Ironically, the very competitive character of the Roman aristocracy may have provided a check at times upon the consuls' aggressiveness. In the middle Republic, at any rate, the Senate rather than the two consuls determined whether Rome would go to war. (The popular assembly was charged with the legal right to declare war, but in practice in the second century B.C. the Senate would debate and decide the issue and then present its recommendations for the approval of the assembly. Rarely did the 'people' demur.) Given the personal rivalries among members of the senatorial class, the great men of the Senate had little incentive to award ambitious consuls opportunities to acquire greater prestige and wealth. Rome's decision to undertake a war may, generally, have had less to do with the personal ambitions of the commanders than with a consensus among the governing elite that war was either necessary, obligatory, or in the best interests of 'Rome' (i.e., the elite as a whole). The amount of support a consul could expect in the Senate also was based upon his personal prestige and friendships, and the sense that he had earned his 'turn at bat.'
The Roman institution of clientage, especially as it applied to diplomatic relations, also indirectly promoted wars. The social cement that bound together the various families of Rome was the patron/client relationship. The Roman Republic was a hierarchical society in which the weak were expected to submit to the strong. The strong, however, were also expected to protect and aid those who had so submitted, thus demonstating their true superiority. This was the essence of clientage. Roman aristocrats walked through the streets of the City surrounded by an entourage of clients, the visible manifestation of their dignitas. Their mutual obligations, their 'good faith' (fides), bound them to further each other's interests.
The institution of clientage underlies and explains much about early Roman imperialism. Rome's 'conquest' of Italy in the fourth century B.C. involved a great deal of territorial acquisition, but had much more to do with the establishment of a hegemony. Rome rarely conquered and annexed states. Rather, the Romans defeated, pillaged, punished, and then made 'friends' out of their former allies. Often individual Roman nobles or families became the 'patrons' of foreign cities or communities. This transformation of enemies into clients became the policy that Rome pursued in its wars with the cultured Hellenistic east. It was only when the Romans engaged those whom they considered 'barbarians' or when their more sophisticated clients proved to lack fides that they eschewed clientage in favor of more direct means of control and suppression.
Rome's patronage of its network of clients led to--or at least was the excuse for--many of the wars that Rome fought in the middle and late Republic. To attack a client or 'friend' of Rome was to dishonor--and threaten--Rome herself. Furthermore, since Rome did not impose tribute upon her allies and friends, her position of dominance could only be demonstrated during war, at which time all of her clients were obliged to support her with troops. War, in other words, manifested Rome's prestige. It also gave Rome and her clients common cause, which in itself reinforced the hegemony.
Finally, whether or not the Roman elite of the early and mid second century B.C. waged war and annexed territories for economic reasons, one cannot gainsay that war did prove profitable, not only to the generals and senatorial class but to the equestrian order, whose tax-farmers and financiers were among the primary beneficiaries of Rome's network of provinces and client states. By the first century B.C.-- and certainly after the dictatorship of Sulla--economic determinants played a major role in Roman wars of conquest. Caesar's conquest of Gaul and Pompey's wars in the east were motivated not only by a desire to benefit Rome and to win triumphs, but by the need to acquire the enormous sums of money necessary to compete successfully in Roman politics during the last years of the Republic. By this time, Roman imperialism may have had less to do with the corporate judgment of the senators than with the ambitions of individual military dynasts.
In the course of the second century B.C. Rome fought a series of wars against Macedonian kings and Greek leagues of city-states which resulted in the reduction of Macedonia in 148 B.C. to the status of "province" under the imperium of a Roman praetor. These wars are interesting for the light they shed both upon Roman military practice and upon the nature of Roman imperialism.
Philip V of Macedonia had entered into an alliance with Carthage in the wake of Hannibal's great victory at Cannae. result was the so-called First Macedonian War (215-205), remarkable mainly for its lack of miitary incidents. Philip was absorbed with extending and consolidating his authority over Greece, while the Romans were in a life and death struggle with Carthage. Neither side, as it turned out, was particularly interested in commencing hostilities. When Philip V seized the Adriatic port of Lissos, threatening trade routes and even a possible invasion of Italy, Rome merely responded by allying itself with the Aetolians (in southwest mainland Greece), agreeing in a written treaty to restrict itself to moveable plunder while allowing the Aetolians to retain any territorial acquisitions that might be made south of the island of Corcyra. The Aetolians proved brutal and unreliable, and against the terms of the treaty made a unilateral peace with Philip in 206. Rome was finally spurred into direct action. With the war in Italy won, the Romans in 205 landed an expedition of 35 ships and 11,000 men in western Greece. But rather than offer battle, the Roman generals used their show of force to negotiate a peace with Macedonia. Rome then turned back to the pressing problem of defeating Carthage, and Philip returned to his attempt to impose Macedonian rule throughout mainland Greece and the Aegean.
Five years later Roman again declared war on Macedonia. The reason why has occasioned considerable debate. The immediate cause of the war was Philip V's decision to attack Athens in the wake of the Macedonian king's unsuccessful war of aggression against the Hellenistic states of the Aegean and Asia Minor. Though Athens was not a formal ally of Rome, the Macedonian army had the bad timing of ravaging Attica at the very moment that the Athenians were entertaining a Roman embassy. The Senate, apparently regarding this as an insult to Roman dignity, issued an ultimatum to Philip against warring upon any Greek state. Philip ignored it and continued his war against Athens, provoking a second ultimatum in the summer of 200, expanded now to include restoring cities taken from Ptolemaic Egypt as well as payments of damages to Pergamum in Asia Minor and Rhodes, both friends of Rome and (alleged) victims of Philip's aggressions. When Philip responded with defiance, the Roman envoys broke off the embassy.
That this constituted sufficient provocation for beginning another major war was not at all clear to the Roman 'People,' who had not yet recovered from the devastation Hannibal had inflicted upon the Italian countryside. The Roman popular assembly, the comitia centuriata, had to be asked twice by the Senate before it would declare war. Why was the Senate so adamant? Badian suggests that the Senate acted out of fear and hatred--fear that Philip's expansion into Illyria portended an invasion of Italy or an attempt to dominate Adriatic trade routes, and a hatred arising from Philip's dealings with Hannibal when Rome was at its most vulnerable. (The Roman Senate's hatred and fear of Carthage and Hannibal had not ended with the Second Punic War. As my colleague Professor Culham has observed, 'There were some things to which the Romans responded completely irrationally, and Gauls and Hannibal lead the list.' ] Whether this 'fear' was reasonable--and Peter Green has argued strongly that it was not--, the Senate in all likelihood did regard Philip V as a potential threat to the stability to Roman interests in both the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean. His ambitions had been directed largely toward the East, but he had also seized an Adriatic port, which must have given the Roman policy-makers some pause. One also ought not discount the role played by Philip's obvious contempt for the opinion and good will of the Senate. The Senate, indeed, reacted to Philip as it would have to a client-king who had challenged its dignitas.
After establishing alliances with the major powers of Greece, the Achaean League and the Aetolians, the Romans dispatched an army to Greece in 198 under the command of a young consul, Titus Quinctius Flamininus. At a face to face meeting Flamininus laid out Rome's terms for peace: Philip was to withdraw his garrisons from Corinth, Euboea, and Thessaly. The 'Fetters of Greece,' the nickname given to these garrisons, were to be broken and the Greek city states were to be given their autonomy.
Philip V was enraged. Though his forces had dwindled to little more than 25,000 and the Romans had increased their strength by allying themselves with the Aetolian League, Philip decided to gamble on a decisive battle. On 197 B.C. the Romans engaged the Macedonians at Cynoscephalae (Greek for 'Dog's Head,' referring to the shape of the hillocks in the area) in Thessaly. Philip's army was largely composed of phalangites, some 16,000 of them, supported by about 7,000 light troops and only 2,000 cavalry. The Romans under Flamininus consisted of two Roman and two allied legions, about 14,000 strong, some 4,000 heavy and 2,000 light infantry from the Aetolian League, about 2,600 cavalry, and 20 war elephants.
To understand what occurred in this battle, one must recognize that Philip V's Macedonian army was radically different from Alexander's. In the 140 years that had elapsed, the phalanx had increased not only in weight but in tactical importance. Under Alexander, the proportion of infantry to cavalry was about 6 to 1; at Cynoscephalae it was about 12 to 1. More importantly, Alexander had used his cavalry as the 'hammer' and his infantry as the 'anvil': in his battles the phalanx's tactical role was to pin the enemy line down and create a gap in it that the cavalry could exploit. The Hellenistic army, on the other hand, was more like the old hoplite phalanx in its tactical reliance upon infantry. Cavalry reverted once more to its old tactical role of screening and protecting the infantry's vulnerable flanks. Protected by either bronze or linen cuirasses (the front lines were more heavily armed than the rear) and a 60 cm round shield slung around their left shoulder, phalangite carried with both hands a pike 6.3 meters long, weighing about 8 kg. According to Polybius, who ought to have known, the front hand was placed about 1.8 meters from the weighted butt end, with the right hand about 75 cm further down the shaft. This allowed about 4.5m to extend out. Given that each rank stood 3 feet (90 cm) apart, five rows of pikes points would project beyond the front line. Each cluster of five would be separated from the next by a little less than a meter, presenting to the enemy a nearly unbroken front of spear points. From the sixth rank to the last the phalangites would hold their pikes vertically for protection against missiles.
The strength of this formation was its weight and cohesion; on level, unbroken ground, it was virtually unstoppable. The phalanx, however, was also awkward to maneuver, had difficulty reforming right or left, and was vulnerable on broken ground. The Romans exploited these deficiencies at Cynoscephalae. The engagement grew out of an early morning chance skirmish when both sides sent out light infantry and cavalry reconnaissance forces to take control of a ridge separating the two enemy camps. Mists covered the hillside and neither contingent seems to have been aware of the other until they met on the summit. When the Macedonian advance troops began to push the Romans down the hill, Flamininus sent in an additional 2,000 infantry and 500 cavalry as reinforcements. The Romans now surged forward and the outnumbered Macedonians fell back. Philip responded by committing more troops, and the Macedonians regained the upper hand. Excited by the success of his light troops, Philip changed his mind about risking battle on the unfavorable terrain and led his peltasts and the right wing of the phalanx up the hillside as rapidly as he could, leaving orders that the left wing form up as quickly as possible and follow behind him. If Philip wanted a battle, Flamininus was more than willing to accommodate him. The Romans, who were encamped nearer the pass, deployed first. Flamininus, placing his 20 elephants in front of his right wing, ordered the right to stand firm, and advanced with his left to relieve the pressure on his skirmishers. At the advance of the two armies, the skirmishers broke off and retreated through their respective ranks. Flamininus's advance forced the issue for Philip. Unable to await the arrival of his left wing, which was still making its way up the hill, Philip ordered his left to double their length, close up to the right, and charge with pikes lowered. The Romans, in open order, let loose a volley of light pila when the Macedonians came within 35 yards and followed that with a volley of heavy pila at about 15-20 yards. They then closed with swords drawn. Though the phalangites were hindered by the uneven ground, their weight proved too much for the maniples, which were gradually forced back down the hill. Flamininus, facing the imminent destruction of his left wing, now took command of the right, which had not yet engaged, and ordered the elephants to be unleashed against the enemy's left wing, which was having difficulties forming up on the rough ground. Before the charge of the elephants and legionaries the cohesion of the Macedonian left disintegrated. The phalangites broke and ran, pursued by the advancing legionaries. As a result the Roman right drove the Macedonian down that far side of the hillock at the same time the Macedonian right was pushing the Roman left down the nearside. On his own initiative a tribune commanding twenty cohorts of triarii detached his troops from the victorious Roman right, marched them back up the hillock, and fell on Philip's rear. As Polybius observed, "the nature of the phalanx is such that men cannot turn around singly and defend themselves." The Romans began to hack away at the defenceless rear ranks of the Macedonian left, who threw down their pikes and shields and attempted to flee. Philip himself fled the battlefield. The remnants of the Macedonian phalanx attempted to signal surrender by raising their pikes. The Romans, however, were unfamiliar with this gesture and continued to slaughter their helpless enemy. When it was all over the Macedonians had suffered about 8,000 casualties. An additional 5,000 troops had been taken prisoner by the Romans. The Romans, in contrast, had lost only about 700 men.
Flamininus celebrated the Roman victory by dramatically announcing the 'Liberation of the Greeks' at the Isthmian festival at Corinth in July 196. The Isthmian festival was a major religious event, much like the Olympics, attended by representatives of all the major Greek poleis, an ideal spot for Flamininus's pronouncement. By decree of the Senate "all the Greeks of Asia and Europe" were "to be free and live by their own laws." The Greeks greeted the announcement with celebrations and praise for their Roman liberators. Macedonian garrisons were withdrawn from their strongholds in Greece. Though Roman troops briefly replaced them, occasioning much suspicion among Rome's Greek allies, neither Flamininus nor the Senate had any intention of occupying mainland Greece. By 194 all Roman troops had been withdrawn to Italy.
What Flamininus meant by "freedom," however, proved problematic. For the Greeks freedom entailed complete autonomy in domestic and foreign affairs. The Romans intended something quite different. In their view the Greek city-states had become Roman clients, free to regulate their own affairs as long as it was consistent with Roman interests. Like all good clients, they were expected to place the welfare of their patron before their own good. Whether from lack of understanding or willful recalcitrance, the Greeks proved to be unsatisfactory clients. From the Roman viewpoint, the Greeks were always looking for 'loopholes' and exceptions. In their sophistication and shiftiness they seemed the very antithesis of simplicitas, the Roman virtue of straightforwardness. By the late Republic 'Greek' had become a Roman synonym for trickery and slyness; the archtypical literary Greek was the trickster Ulysses, a far less admirable incarnation of Homer's heroic and resourceful Odysseus, or the sly Greek slave of Roman comedy. In 146 B.C., the Roman Senate, frustrated by a half century of failure to control the Greeks through a hegemony based upon auctoritas, would acknowledge its mistake and resign itself to more direct control of the 'childlike' Greeks.
But this was a last resort. In the early second century B.C. the Roman Senate had no desire to become permanently entangled in directing Greek affairs. As it had in Italy, Rome hoped to transform former enemies into reliable clients. Therefore, despite the decisive character of Cynoscephalae, Flamininus generously accepted Philip's capitulation along the terms that he had offered previously. This had less to do with clemency than with a plan to achieve stability through a balance of power. A restrained but still strong Macedonia checked the ambitions of Rome's untrustworthy Aetolian allies to the south as well as the incursion of barbarians to the north. (An analogue may be the U.S.'s reluctance to dismember Iraq after the Gulf War to preserve a balance of power in the region.) The most serious threat to Greek "freedom"--as well as to Rome's security and commercial interests in the Hellenistic East--was the growing power of Antiochus III of Syria, the heir to the much reduced Seleucid empire. Now that Philip had been humbled, Antiochus emerged as the dominant power in the Hellenistic world. Although Antiochus had been named a 'friend of Rome' by the Senate during the war with Philip V, his in Europe disturbed the Senate, as did his provocative decision to employ Hannibal as a military advisor. Rome offered Antiochus a cynical Realpolitik deal: evacuate Europe and Rome would drop its insistence on the 'freedom' of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor. The 'freedom of the Greeks' was negotiable; the security of Rome was not. While Antiochus considered the proposition, his Greek allies, the Aetolians, were urging him to war. Rome, in turn, was being pushed toward war by its good 'friend' King Eumenes II of Pergamum, who feared Antiochus' ambitions in Asia Minor and hoped to benefit territorially from a Roman victory. What followed was a battle for Greek public opinion, as both Flamininus and Antiochus pledged to do everything in their power to preserve the 'freedom' of the Greeks from the other.
When Antiochus crossed the Hellespont in fall 192 at the behest of the Aetolians to "liberate Greece" (from what is unclear, since the Romans had already withdrawn their troops), the Roman Senate responded by declaring war in support of its allies and friends. With the aid of the Rhodian fleet, allied with Rome out of fear of Antiochus' designs on their coastal possessions, the Romans defeated Antiochus's admiral, Hannibal, in a number of sea battled. The Romans followed that up with a crushing defeat of his land forces at Thermopylae (191), by outflanking the troops he deployed in the mountain pass, much as the Persians had done three centuries before to the Spartans, and followed him into Asia Minor, the first time Roman troops had ventured that far east. The Roman legions led by Lucius Cornelius Scipio, with his famous brother Scipio Africanus acting as his legate, engaged Antiochus's army at Magnesia near Ephesus and routed it (190). Though the Hellenistic king's forces greatly outnumbered the Roman legions, they were a motley assemblage that lacked cohesion. Antiochus had a brief taste of glory when he led a victorious cavalry charge on his right wing. But he made the tactical error of pursuing the fleeing Romans too long. He was nowhere in sight when the Romans destroyed his phalanx by stampeding the war elephants that he had placed in the gaps between infantry formations. The battle quickly degenerated into mere butchery, as the Syrian forces through down their weapons and attempted to flee. Though the Roman victory was total, the Romans contented themselves with imposing a massive war indemnity upon Antiochus, and rewarding their allies, King Eumenes of Pergamum and the Rhodians, with territories carved out of Antiochus's acquisitions in Asia Minor. Rome then withdrew all of its troops from Asia Minor.
By now it was clear that the Romans intended to be the arbiter of the Greek world. Their 'balance of power' policy was meant to preclude any state from establishing a hegemony in the East that might threaten the security of either Rome or her allies. Some of Rome's clients chafed under her interpretation of freedom. By 171 B.C. Rome found itself once again at war with a resurgent Macedonia, now ruled by Philip V's son Perseus. As in the Second Macedonian War, the outcome of the Third turned on a decisive battle. The battle of Pydna (168 B.C.) once more demonstrated the superiority of the flexible, disciplined Roman legions over the heavy Macedonian phalanx. Perseus, confident in the superiority of his numbers and satisfied with the relatively flat terrain of the battlefield, chose to fight at Pydna. When the Roman consul Aemilius Paullus brought up his forces, he found the Macedonian forces, some 40,000 phalangites and 4,000 horsemen, in battle array. Though his young officers urged an immediate attack, Paullus, aware of his soldiers' fatigue after a long march, ordered his troops to encamp. To screen his troops while they constructed the camp, he had several cohorts deploy as if for battle. When the camp's defences were complete, he had them stand down. The battle began about 1500 on the following day when Perseus' phalanx advanced in tight formation. On his order, the Macedonian phalangites lowered their pikes and charged. (Aemilius Paullus was later to say that the sight of the oncoming Macedonian hedgehog was the most terrifying thing he ever saw.) The Romans threw themselves against the phalanx, but could not break through against the superior weight of the phalanx. A contingent of Italian allied troops won glory by throwing their standard in front of the phalanx and then rushing in to rescue it. Their bravery resulted in their deaths, as the phalanx rolled over them. But, as had happened many times before, the Macedonian phalanx could not retain its cohesion: "Nevertheless, the unevenness of the ground would not permit a widely extended front to be so exactly drawn up as to have their shields everywhere joined; and Aemilius perceived that there were a great many interstices and breaches in the Macedonian phalanx, as it usually happens in all great armies, according to the different efforts of the combatants, who in one part press forward with eagerness, and in another are forced to fall back" (Plutarch, Life of Aemilius Paulus). Paullus cooly divided his troops into squadrons and ordered them to work their way into whatever gaps occurred. Roman legionaries darted in between the pike points with their short thrusting swords drawn, while other cohorts peeled off to hit the phalanx on its flanks. Needing both hands to hold their great pikes, the Macedonian phalangites were helpless against the swordsmen. The more men the Romans killed, the greater gaps became in the Macedonian lines. Finally, to defend themselves, the phalangites were forced to drop their pikes and fight hand to hand with the Romans. The Romans' superior armor, weaponry, and skill in such fighting took its toll; the greater part of the Macedonian army was destroyed in less than an hour of fighting.
This time the Romans were less forgiving. They abolished the Macedonian monarchy and divided the kingdom into four oligarchic republics. Though they imposed no new taxation upon Macedonia, they did divert half the taxes formerly levied by Perseus to the Roman state treasury. To prevent the economic recovery of Macedonia, the Senate ordered the closing of the rich gold and silver mines in the region of Mt. Pangaeum. (Some historians have suggested that the Romans did this to protect their own mining interests in Spain, though this seems unlikely in light of their diffident efforts to exploit those Spanish resources. What seems more probable was that the Senate did not wish to risk further disaffection from the natives and increased involvement in the region by leasing the mines to Roman contractors [publicani].)
One tangible result of the war was that Italy was flooded with art and slaves. "The Romans did not regard warfare as an occupation for gentlemen: they expected to turn a profit on any campaign, and were not fussy about how they did it" (Green 436). Paullus and his soldiers were as expert at plundering as they were at war. They celebrated their victory at Pydna by systematically looting the lands and temples of Macedonia's unfortunate ally, the Adriatic state of Epirus. One hundred and fifty thousand people from this region were enslaved and deported to Italy. Upon his return to Rome, Paullus celebrated an extraordinarily lavish triumph, marred only by the grumbling of soldiers who felt that too little of the fabulous wealth they had earned by their hard fighting had trickled down to them. Paullus deposited so much loot in the state treasury that the Romans were able to abolish the land-tax that had been imposed during the Second Punic War to pay for the military. It was not until Augustus redesigned the military into a professional, salaried, standing army that regular land taxes upon the Roman citizenry were again needed. How much unofficial loot stayed in the hands of Paullus and his officers is unknown.
If nothing else, Paullus's elaborate triumph reinforced the notion that, in addition to glory and security, wealth was to be won through war in the East. The lesson for Roman businessmen was that there were enormous profits to be had from financial and commercial dealings with Hellenistic clients of Rome. Though the Roman Senate of the second century was committed to a policy of non-expansion and reluctant interventionism, increasingly the senatorial policy makers found their intentions complicated by the lobbying and intrigues of equestrian businessmen and ambitious local officials. During the first half of the first century B.C., the schizophrenic quality of Roman foreign policy began to lift, as the military dynasts who waged Rome's war became more nakedly obvious about their own economic ambitions as well as those of their friends and clients. As Peter Green observed, "Far from trade following the flag (or in this case the fasces), Rome's military machine and administrative authority ... were invoked, again and again, to protect or enhance her own vested intersts. Trade went in first, and the flag followed" (Green 436).
After defeating Macedonia, the Romans immediately took action to pacify the southern Greek mainland. Based on the advice of Greek allies, they launched a preemptive strike against the locally powerful Achaean League. To prevent possible anti-Roman activities by the League, the Romans decided to remove the thousand leading Achaeans to Italy. Among the hostages was the Greek general and statesman Polybius, who was now to begin a new career as a 'friend' of the Scipiones, an apologist for Roman imperialism, and the most distinguished historian of the age. The hostages were kept in Italy for seventeen years. When they were finally permitted to return to Greece, many were old men. As Marcus Porcius Cato, that paragon of traditional Roman virtue, observed during the Senate debate: "Why are we wasting time discussing whether a few old Greeks should be buried by Greek or Italian undertakers?"
In the two decades following Pydna, the Greeks learned what the Roman concept of "freedom" really meant. The Greek city-states were to be loyal clients of Rome, amenable to the advice of the Senate and eager to defend Rome's interests if called upon to do so. What the Roman Senate did not expect was to the flood of petitions from Greek city-states and Leagues seeking Roman power to back them up in their interminable interstate squabbles. Two generations later the Roman Senate had come to expect to be consulted by its clients on all major foreign policy issues; in the mid second century B.C., though, the Senate's response was largely that of boredom and irritation. The Senate, presented with petitions, would either give its advice on the spot, or, in the case, of particularly tangled issues, send a senatorial commission of inquiry to arbitrate. The behavior of the commissioners underscored some basic cultural differences between patron and clients. The blunt style of the Roman arbitrators--what they conceived of as simplicitas--often came over as arrogance and lack of tact to Greeks accustomed to a more sophisticated style of diplomacy. Greek supplicants who lost their suits, often complained of what seemed to them to be arbitrary and capricious decisions. What must have been puzzling to the Greeks, moreover, was the indifference the Romans displayed when it came to enforcing many of these decisions. In matters involving the security of Rome or its allies, the Senate expected immediate submission to its will, and a client who hesitated did so at its own peril. When Antiochus IV of Syria tried to take advantage of Perseus' war against Rome to encroach upon Egyptian territory, the Roman envoys were adamant about his withdrawal from all his conquests. When he asked for time to consider their demand, the Roman envoy silently drew a circle in the dust around the Seleucid king and told him that he was to decide before he left the circle. Antiochus, realizing how serious the Romans were, accepted the humiliation. But when issues were of less gravity or of mere local interest, the Romans might well ignore lack of compliance. The unpredictability of the Roman response must have been maddening. The reason for Rome's apparent lacksadaisical responses was that the Senate had no wish to be drawn into foreign commitments unless it absolutely had to. But this does not mean that the Senate was indifferent to a client's contumacity. Tensions between the Romans and the Greeks were raised by different cultural assumptions about diplomacy. The Senate regarded its 'advice' as binding upon Rome's clients; to ignore it would be like a child disobeying his father. Compliance with a senatus consultum was thus a moral responsibility. The Hellenistic city-states and kingdoms were more accustomed to Real- or Machtpolitik based upon pragmatic issues of self-interest. As long as Rome was willing to enforce its decisions, they were willing to obey.
By 150 B.C. Greek disastisfaction with the Roman hegemony and Roman preoccupation with a new war in Africa against Carthage (the Third Punic War) led to two rebellions. In Macedonia a pretender to the throne named Andriscus, who claimed to be the son of Perseus by a Seleucid princess, established himself as king of Macedon with Thracian and popular support. (The Romans consistently supported oligarchies against democracies, regarding the masses as less reliable clients.) Andriscus' rise to power was made possible by Rome's indifference to him, despite pleas by local authorities in Greece and Asia. It was only after a distinguished Roman commissioner investigated the situation, that the Senate was willing to dispatch a praetor with a legion to deal with Andriscus. This proved too little force; the praetor was killed in battle and most of his army destroyed. In 148 B.C. the Romans sent another praetor, Marcus Caecilius Metellus, this time with two legions. Metellus--who was to assume the cognomen 'Macedonicus'--defeated Andriscus near Pydna, ending both the 'Fourth Macedonian War' and Rome's flirtation with Macedonian 'freedom.' The Senate now decided to make Macedonia and the adjacent region of Illyria into a province under the imperium of a praetor. The new status of the region was reflected by Rome's decision to build a major highway across the Balkans from the Adriatic coast to Thessalonica.
In southern Greece, problems arose from a most unlikely source, the Achaean League, which after the deportation of the 1,000 hostages in 167 had been a reliable and loyal client. This had largely been due to two men: Polybius, who had gained political clout in Rome through his close friendship with Scipio Aemilianus, and Callicrates, the leader of the Achaean League. The latter died, however, in 149 B.C. while on his way to Rome to present the Achaean side in a local dispute over the status of Sparta. After 30 years of forced membership in the League, the Spartans had decided to secede. When Rome decided not only that Sparta but Corinth as well should be independent (the irony is that Corinth had no wish to be separated), the new, young leaders of the Achaean League chose to ignore the Roman decision. The Achaean leader Critolaus went even further and despite conciliatory gestures by Roman envoys who reversed the earlier decision for Sparta chose to declare war on Sparta. Despite wars in Africa and Spain, the Roman Senate felt that it could not ignore this show of contempt from a client. Consequently, they sent in 146 the consul Lucius Mummius to Greece, who made short work of the Achaeans. Rome's frustration with their Greek clients was manifested in a new brutal policy. After the Achaean army had been destroyed, Mummius unleashed his troops against Corinth, which was given over to rape and pillage. When the soldiers had finished, they burnt the city--just as other Roman troops had done to Carthage that same year. Corinth was to lie a deserted ruin until Julius Caesar, a true connossieur of Greek culture, rebuilt the city in 40s. The intervention of Polybius saved other Achaean cities from the fate of Corinth, but even if he had wished Polybius could not have preserved the independence of the Greeks. A commission of ten senators were dispatched in 146 B.C. to settle the Greek problem. They disbanded all remaining Leagues of cities. The individual cities were to remain 'free,' though no longer immune to taxes unless granted such a privilege by the Senate. Administratively, the Greeks were not worth a separate praetor, and so the region was placed under the supervision of the governor of Macedonia. "What is clear from all this is that, nowhere in the Balkans could there now be the slightest pretence that any Greek community was independent, in any real sense of the word which had been known until then. 'Freedom' (libertas) now meant freedom to control internal affairs so long as this was done in a way that did not bother Rome ... the Senate too had learned from its experience, that clientela alone was an insufficient mechanism for controlling the Greeks, and that the detailed stipulations of what it required had to be spelled out to the legalistic Greeks in every sense. ... In Greece as a whole, the 'Achaean War' marks the point at which Rome finally and unambiguously decided to rule" (Errington 240-1).
5.Empire and the Crisis of Recruitment
Whether by conscious design or not, war and conquest in the second century brought individual and collective benefits to the Roman elite. Until about 170 B.C., when campaigns in Italy came to a halt, it also probably brought tangible benefits to the commoners who formed the core of the Roman legions. Not only did Roman legionaries acquire wealth through booty, a theme that carries through to the days of Caesar, but during the heyday of Roman expansion in Italy, the fourth and early third centuries, common citizens had the hope of receiving land from the extensive territories ceded to the Roman State by the vanquished. This had resulted in the establishment of numerous 'Latin' colonies of Roman citizens planted throughout the peninsular. For unexplained reasons, however, the second-century Senate showed itself very reluctant to sanction settlements of Roman citizens in provinces outside of Italy. It was not until the abortive attempt of Gaius Gracchus in 123 B.C. to plant a colony at Carthage and the land pensions granted to the veterans of Marius' and Sulla's armies in the early first century B.C. that Roman soldiers again were to receive land grants as rewards for their service.
During the course of the second century the nature of the Roman empire changed dramatically and with it the costs and benefits that accrued to those who fought its wars. The creation of provinces required large standing armies and foreign wars fought hundreds of miles from home meant extended tours of military service, often without the prospect of booty and loot. Before the Second Punic War the ordinary military establishment of Rome equalled four legions, about 17,000 troops with an additional 17,000 allied soldiers, each consul commanding two Roman and two allied legions. These troops tended to serve in seasonal campaigns in Italy, which meant that they would fight in the spring and summer and return in time for the harvest. Military service did not preclude caring for one's farm. All this changed with the Second Punic War. From Livy one can ascertain that the Roman fielded, on average, 8.75 legions each year between 200 and 168. To put it another way, during these three decades on average some 40,000 citizens served annually in Rome's armies, this from a population of fewer than 300,000 adult, male citizens. After 167 the military estabishment of Rome shrank somewhat, and the numbers of legions declined to an annual average of 6.5, but the pattern of service had changed dramatically, as most of these troops faced extended tours either on campaigns in the east or as garrison troops in the provinces of Spain and Macedonia. Wars and conquest had transformed the very nature of Roman military service.
The military career of one especially 'gung-ho' centurion, Spurius Ligustinus, underscores the ubiquity of Roman warfare between 200 and 171:
I became a soldier [Ligustinus is made to say] in the consulship of P. Sulpicius and C. Aurelius [200 B.C.]. In the army which was taken to Macedonia I served two years in the ranks against King Philip [V]; in the third year because of my bravery T. Quinctius Flaminius gave me a post as centurion in the tenth maniple of the hastati [the younger legionaries]. After Philip's defeat, when we had been brought back to Italy and released, I immediately set out for Spain as a volunteer with the consul M. Porcius [195]. He judged me worthy to be assigned as centurion of the first century of the hastati. For the third time I enlisted again as a volunteer in that army which was sent against the Aetolians [in Greece] and King Antiochus [III of Syria][191]. By M. Acilius I was made centurion of the first century of the principes [more experienced legionaries]. ... And twice after that I served in campaigns where the legions were in commission for a year. Then I campaigned twice in Spain [181, 180], first under Q. Fulvius Flaccus, and then under the praetor Ti. Sempronius Gracchus. I was brought back by Flaccus along with the others whom he brought with him from the province to take part in his triumph because of their bravery. I joined Tiberius Gracchus in the province at his request. Four times within a few years I held the rank of chief centurion; 34 times have I been rewarded for bravery by my commanders; I have received six civic crown [awarded for saving the life of a fellow citizen]. I have served twenty two years in the army and am more than fifty years old. ... As long as anyone who is enrolling troops judges me fit for serice, I will never plead excuses. What rank the military tribunes think that I deserve is for them to decide. I will see that no man in the army surpasses me in bravery. ... As for you, fellow soldiers, ... you should place yourself at the disposal of the consuls and the Senate, and consider any position in which you will be defending your country as an honorable one. (Livy, History of Rome 42.34]
Ligustinus' service reads almost like a road map of Roman warfare, taking us from Greece to Spain over a space of two decades. His career also hints at the profound impact that this warfare was having on those who waged it. Though Spurius Ligustinus prided himself on being a citizen and small landowner, practically his entire adult life was spent in one military camp or another. (One wonders where he manufactured the time to father six sons and two daughters!) In 171 B.C. he was more than fifty years old with twenty-two years of military service to his credit (the obligation was then sixteen years before the age of forty-six). And yet he still presented himself as a volunteer at the dilectus [the formal assembly to enlist troops]. He wanted to make certain, though, that the new consuls and tribunes appreciated what they were getting--and they did: he was appointed primus pilum, chief centurion. Ligustinus made it clear that he regarded the military as neither his profession nor his life, but rather as a civic duty. But rhetoric is one thing and reality another. The career of Spurius Ligustinus hints at the beginnings of a process of professionalization that was to alter the very character of military service in Rome.
Spurius Ligustinus' eagerness to serve in the legions may not have been typical of his class. His extraordinary 'patriotism' and ethos of self-sacrifice was, undoubtedly, the reason why Livy deemed this humble Roman centurion deserving of inclusion in his History, which was, after all, designed to be a compendium of moral lessons. Ligustinus's speech, significantly, ends with an appeal to his 'fellow soldiers' to emulate him by renouncing even earned exemptions and offering their service unstintingly to the consuls and tribunes. By 171 B.C. such an appeal might well have been necessary; a generation later it undoubtedly would have been met with hoots of derision. The enthusiasm of the assidui for war waned as the consequences of extended military service became clear. It was asking a great deal of farmers to leave their lands and families for long tours of duty overseas, especially when such absences often meant personal financial ruin. A changing Italian economy devastated the assidui as a class; farmers with a few acres and a few slaves found it difficult, in the best of circumstances, to compete under the new economic conditions created by the acquisition of an empire--an economy shaped by the importation of cheap foreign grain, the growth of massive estates given over to commercial farming and sheep and cattle raising, and importation of hundreds of thousands of slaves to labor upon the great estates of the wealthy. Those assidui compelled to serve six year tours abroad were at a further disadvantage. Often they returned to discover that their farms had been lost and that their families had been degraded to the ranks of the capite censi. A crisis of military recruitment was in the making. The assidui as a class was shrinking as the need for troops remained high. The Roman elite responded, first, by lowering property requirements for military service and, then, by dispensing with them entirely. The result was that the Roman military was gradually transformed in the course of the second century from a citizen militia of small landowners designed to fight seasonal campaigns revolving around the harvest into a professional standing army of conscripted and volunteer citizens.
To understand the process one must remember that the Roman legions of the early and middle Republic were conceived as citizen levies, not unlike the hoplite armies of Classical Greece. The fundamental principle in this 'timocratic system' (a political system in which privileges and responsibilities are allotted according to one's social prestige and status) was that the 'higher one's census qualifications the greater one's military obligations and the wider one's political rights' (Gabba 20). Throughout the Republic command of the military rested in the hands of the very richest citizens, the senatorial families (nobiles) and the 'knights' (equestrian order). The bulk of the citizenry deemed 'capable of bearing arms' (a phrase referring to the economic capacity to bear the expense of infantry service) were divided into five census classes based upon property. (A sixth group, the capite censi or proletarii, were considered too poor either to pay taxes or to serve in the army. They were enrolled by head count rather than name and their military obligation was acquitted through naval service, as in Classical Athens. ) Polybius, writing about the year 160 B.C., described fully how the dilectus, the levy of legionaries, was supposed to be conducted in the middle of the second century B.C. According to Polybius, once the two consuls had been elected, they jointly appointed 24 military tribunes, ten senior officers with at least ten years experience and fourteen junior officers with at least five years of military service. The tribunes were then appointed to the four consular legions. The newly elected consuls would announce to the popular assembly the day on which all citizens of military age (those between 17 and 46) were to muster on the Capitoline Hill in Rome for the dilectus. (Citizens living outside the city also mustered for regional recruitment, and messages were sent to the magistrates of allied cities and tribes stating the number of infantry and cavalry required from them for that year's service). On the appointed day, assidui of military age gathered in their respective 'tribes' (political units based on geography rather than common descent) and were then divvied up by the tribunes of the four legions on the basis of desirable physical qualities and experience. Groups of four were presented to the tribunes, who rotated the order of their picks in order to achieve equity among the legions, until each legion's infantry complement of 4200 was filled. (Cavalrymen were selected separately by the censors on the basis of property. Each legion was allotted 300 cavalrymen divided into ten units of thirty known as 'turmae'.) The result was similar to a giant playground pickup game.
The newly enrolled conscripts were then paraded by their officers, required to swear an oath, and formally enrolled in their legions. One man was selected by each tribune to give the oath in full, and the others then swore to do the same as the first man. The oath, which appears to have remained substantially the same throughout the Middle and Late Republic, was to obey one's officers and to carry out their orders to the best of one's ability. One might note that the oath was not to Rome or its 'constitution' (whatever that might have meant) but to their officers, which was eminently practical and concrete. As long as officers and troops saw themselves as fulfilling obligations of citizenship, moreover, an oath of this sort was not dangerous to the State. In the last generations of the Republic, however, the personal oath to the commander reinforced the sense that the Roman legions were gradually becoming the personal clientelas of their generals rather than the armed forces of the res publica.
After the oath was given the tribunes announced a day and place for the mustering of each legion. The recruits were then allowed to return to their homes. When they reassembled by legion on the appointed day, the conscripts were divided according to age, experience, and, to a lesser extent, wealth into four classes: the lightly-armed velites, who served as skirmishers; the hastati and principes, who, armed with oval shield, two javelins, short sword, and body armor formed the two main lines of the legion; and the veteran triarii, who carried thrusting spears and formed a defensive third line. The recruits were assigned to their individual maniples and swore to assemble again at a specified time and place with proper weapons and armor. They were then sent home once more. At the designated time and place, the two legions of a consul would muster along with their complement of allied troops. The new legionaries would begin their military training by learning how to set up a marching camp, one of the most basic activities of legionaries in the field.
In the second century B.C. a Roman citizen was required to serve for up to 16 years before he reached the age of 46. Ordinarily, he would be called upon for no more than six consecutive years of service (the normal tour of duty for the legions stationed in Spain). In the earliest Republic the cost of service was to borne entirely by the conscript. By the time of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), however, each legionary received a small stipend, 120 denarii (=480 asses) a year, to help defray the cost of his equipment, clothing, and food, and by the middle of the second century B.C. the State had begun to issue weapons and clothing to those legionaries who could not afford to supply them, deducting from their pay a modest sum of money that failed to cover the cost of the weapons but which symbolized, nonetheless, the expectation that Roman soldiers were expected to serve their fatherland at their own expense. The payment of the soldiers and the issuing of weapons reflect a gradual transformation of the Roman army from a citizen militia into a standing army with a professional ethos.
7.Manpower Demands and the Decay of the Assidui
The First and Second Punic Wars proved a turning point in Roman military history. Not only did Rome's victory make her the dominant power in the western Mediterranean and left her with her first 'provinces' (a provincia was a sphere of command entrusted to a Roman magistrate; by extension it was a territory under the control of a Roman commander), it also made unprecedented demands upon Rome's military manpower. During the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.) half of all adult male citizens served in the Roman army for an average of seven years. At the height of the conflict, between 214 and 203, the Romans fielded 20 legions (the normal forces had consisted of four legions), as well as raising ad hoc legions of the old and unfit to defend the city of Rome itself. Since there were only about 100,000 assidui of military age, the Senate needed to expand the pool of those eligible for military service. They did so by the emergency procedure of enrolling the proletarii and by permanently lowering the property requirements to belong to the assidui from 11,000 to 4,000 asses (1100 to 400 denarii), which entailed the possession of no more than a few acres of arable land. This swelled the number of assidui--the census of 130 B.C. recorded 319,000 registered citizens in all. The 'proletarianization' of the assidui had begun.
Rome's victory over Carthage did not bring her peace or alleviate her manpower needs. Wars in Cisalpine Gaul, Spain, Greece, and Asia Minor meant that thousands of Roman citizens spent years far from home fighting wars or defending the Roman provinces. In much of the first half of the second century B.C. the Roman military required the service of nearly 40,000 citizens each year. Troops assigned to the permanent garrisons in the Spanish provinces could expect six consecutive years of service before they were eligible for dismissal. Those called to serve in wars in Greece and the east would be enrolled for the duration of the campaign.
Though the wars in the east enriched many Roman legionaries, the prospect of long term absense from farms and families made military service less popular among the mass of assidui. What exacerbated this disaffection was the economic plight of the class. Plunder undoubtedly enriched some soldiers and their family. The Roman state acquired so much wealth from its wars in Greece that in 167 B.C. they were able to dispense with personal taxes, which also must have benefitted the assidui . On the other hand, conquest and empire also brought more dubious 'benefits.' One such was hundreds of thousands of slaves, who became the main labor force on the vast estates (latifundia) of the wealthy. By the middle of the first century B.C. the number of slaves in Italy may have numbered as many as 3,000,000 (as compared with 4,000,000 free men and women). Another was the acquisition of fertile provinces that could supply cheap grain, which encouraged the wealthy to abandon cereal cultivation in favor of vino- and oleoculture and, especially, sheep raising.
In such an economy small landowners found it difficult to compete economically. The proletarii were pressed even more directly by the competition offered by slave labor. The economic distress of the lower classes is especially ironic in light of the enormous wealth that flowed into Rome from booty and taxation. By 74 B.C. the Roman treasury collected 50 million denarii a year (enough to pay the wages of 400,000 troops). After Pompey's settlement of the east (62 B.C.) this sum swelled to 135 million. State revenues of this magnitude allowed the Roman elite to engage in massive programs of public works, which undoubtedly meant jobs for many. It also permitted Gaius Gracchus in 123 B.C. to introduce state subsidies for grain distribution and the establishment of colonies. And along with this 'bread' also came 'circuses,' as the wealth was translated by magistrates into public games and spectacles. Much of the riches, however, went into the pockets of generals and governors, who became fabulously wealthy. They used this wealth to purchase art, luxuries, land, and slaves, and to support armies of clients. The Roman elite of the first century B.C. had the means to live on a scale that would have appalled that early second century B.C. paragon of austerity Cato the Censor. This new found wealth, moreover, upped the ante in the game of politics. To win a consulship could mean the acquisition of a fortune, but to win an election now would also cost a fortune.
Little of this wealth seems to have trickled down to the assidui. Instead, the class that made up the rank and file of the Roman army saw its economic condition steadily decay. Soldiers returned after years of service abroad only to confront financial ruin. Many found their family farms had been bought by wealthy neighbors, adding even more acreage to their already extensive latifundia. The numbers of assidui apparently declined between 159 B.C. and 130 B.C.. When they began to rise again in 124 B.C. the change was probably due to the effects of the Gracchan land reform and, perhaps, to a new lowering of the property qualification. P.A. Brunt, citing St. Augustine's dictum that without justice kingdoms are but nothing more than robbery on a large scale, observed that the Romans practised theft on the largest scale yet known: "they robbed their subjects abroad, so that they could better rob their fellow-countrymen" (Brunt 40).
The more far-sighted among the Roman nobility recognized that the crisis of the assidui was also a crisis for the Republic. Rome's armies depended upon this class for its troops. How could Rome continue to field armies for war and to maintain garrisons in the provinces given the shrinking pool of those eligible for military service? Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus provided one solution, a solution the failure of which helped fragment the elite and push the Republic into social conflict and, eventually, civil war.
The backdrop for the tribunate of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, which arguably began the descent of the Roman Republic into a century of social unrest and civil war, is Rome's longstanding attempt to pacify the provinces of Farther and Hither Spain. In the second century B.C. the Roman elite pursued a dual foreign policy of seeking political hegemony in the 'civilized' Hellenistic east (in practical terms this meant creating client states and manipulating public opinion); in the 'barbarian' west, especially in Spain, the Romans showed their contempt for the natives by treating them with brutality and violence.
Part of the problem was that the Celtiberian tribesmen failed to understand Roman fides. The Roman practice of defeating an enemy and then making peace with them, transforming them from foe into client, failed miserably in Spain. The tribes that the Romans confronted apparently did not understand this process. They spoke a different 'cultural language,' which made them appear to the Romans treacherous and perfidious. Tribes would rise up, be defeated, agree to a treaty, and then break the treaty and rise up again. The result was nearly constant, fluctuating conflicts, which gave Roman praetors opportunities to win triumphs but which also frustrated Roman magistrates and made the lives of Roman troops unfortunate enough to be assigned to Spain wretched. One Roman praetor of Farther Spain, the notorious Servius Sulpicius Galba, in 150 B.C. shocked the sensibilities of his peers by ostentatiously violating Roman fides. Having devastated the lands of Lusitania, Galba received a embassy that sought peace on the basis of the former treaty that the Lusitanians had entered into with Galba's predecessor Atilius. They claimed that they had been forced to violate the treaty because of poverty. Galba, feigning sympathy, promised the Lusitanians good lands to settle upon if they surrendered. When they came to Galba, he divided them into three groups and moved each to a separate plain. Then, as a prelude to bringing them to their new homes,
he told them as friends to lay down their arms. When they had done so he surrounded them with a ditch and sent in soldiers with swords who slew them all, while they lamented and invoked the names of the gods and the pledges which they had received. In like manner he hastened to the second and third divisions and destroyed them while they were still ignorant of the fate of the first. Thus he avenged treachery with treachery, imitating barbarians in a way unworthy of a Roman. (Appian, Roman History, vi. x. 59-60, in Lewis and Reinhold 195)
Galba's barbarity appalled many senators, and he was even brought to trial because of this act, but he was never punished for it, either legally or socially.
Rome's military problems in Spain were due in part to the discontent of the two (later 4) legions stationed there throughout the second century B.C.. If fides was one casualty of war, the vaunted Roman military discipline so praised by Polybius was another. Separated from their homes for six year tours in a region in which low level conflict was frequent (and unpredictable) and booty scarce, the conscripted assidui became sullen and even mutinous. Resistance to the dilectus for Spain grew and was exacerbated by a series of military reversals suffered by Roman commanders in the early 130s. When the Senate dispatched the hero of the Third Punic War, the consul Scipio Aemilianus, to Spain in 134 B.C., Scipio chose to bring with him legions composed largely of volunteers, many of whom were his own clients, rather than more disgruntled conscripts.
The Spanish problem was to continue into the first century B.C., and Spain was to grant opportunities for military glory to both Pompey and Caesar. But the greatest impact that the low intensity wars in Spain had upon the Roman Republic was indirect. For it was his experiences in Spain that convinced Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus sometime between 137 and 133 B.C. that something had to be done to augment the numbers of assidui and to improve the conditions of this class.
9.The Gracchi: Land Reform as a Solution to the Recruitment Crisis
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (163-133 B.C.) and his brother Gaius (153-121 B.C.) were unlikely social revolutionaries. They were the maternal grandsons of the great Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal. Their father's family was also distinguished. In short, the Gracchi belonged to the highest stratum of the Roman elite. Tiberius's early career was in the military, and he served with distinction in Africa and as quaestor (paymaster) in Spain during the disastrous campaign against the Numantines in 137. Tiberius' father, the elder Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, had been one of the more successful Roman governors in Spain. His military victories in 179 and his reorganization of provincial taxation had pacified the region until the outbreak of hostilities with the Lusitanians in Farther Spain and the Numantines in Nearer Spain in 154. The younger Tiberius' tenure in Spain was less successful. He shared in the humiliation of his commander, Caius Hostilius Mancinus, who had been defeated so decisively by the Numantines that he had been compelled to surrender and agree to an unfavorable treaty subsequently renounced by the Senate as unworthy of a Roman. But whereas Mancinus bore the disgrace of his defeat--he was handed over to the Numantines by the Senate as part of their repudiation of his actions--Tiberius managed to escape with his reputation intact, in part because of his family connections.
Tiberius's experiences with the disaffected Roman troops in Spain and his observation on his journey to Spain that much of Etruria was given over to huge estates (latifundia) of the rich worked by teams of slaves impressed upon him the gravity of the crisis faced by the assidui. He became convinced that the welfare of Rome depended upon rehabilitating the assidui and reducing the numbers of slaves in Italy. (Tiberius was undoubtedly influenced in this by the bloody slave revolt in Sicily that was then raging for several years.) In effect, Tiberius had analyzed the crisis of Roman military recruitment and had concluded that the solution was to increase the number of assidui. He intended to do so by redistributing Rome's public lands in Italy, the legacy of her rise to hegemony in the fifth through third centuries, to poor citizens, thus raising them from capite censi to assidui.
To effect his plan Tiberius stood for election for the office of tribune of the plebeians in 133 B.C.. The ten tribunes of the plebeians possessed enormous authority and potential power. They not only presided over the popular assembly but served as the spokesmen of the plebeians, a group that included the vast majority of all Roman citizens. (By 133 B.C. there were only a handful of patrician families left.) The tribunes presented bills to the assembly and had the authority to veto the actions and punishments of Roman magistrates, including consuls. The check upon their power, however, was that any one of the ten tribunes could veto the actions of his colleagues. Their importance to the 'people' was such that the assembly took a vow to avenge any injuries done to them; their persons were to be sacrosanct.
The tribunate may have represented the 'people,' but those who held the offices were drawn from the highest nobility. The 'struggle of the Orders' had ended more than a century before with the victory of the plebeians; what this meant was that wealthy plebeian families could and did enter the senatorial class and become 'nobles.' The distinction between the few patrician noble families and the plebeian nobles had become less and less meaningful. In the hierarchical society of Republican Rome, it is not surprising that the men chosen to be the tribunes of the plebeians came from among the most distinguished families in Rome.
Tiberius saw the assembly with its legislative power as a vehicle for his reform. He proposed to introduce legislation in the assembly to distribute public land to the poor in allotments of 30 iugera (about 20 acres) stocked with cattle and seed. This entailed enforcing the old law against any individual holding more than 500 iugera (about 350 acres) of public land. The problem was that by 133 the vast majority of public land had long been in the hands of the nobles, who regarded the holdings as their own property. Many had even built villas, and some even family tombs, on the 'leased' land. Tiberius's proposal to limit such holdings to 500 iugera (plus an additional 250 iugera for each son) meant a massive confiscation. The outraged noble proprietors regarded it as legalized robbery.
The nobles had two aces in their hand, a compliant tribune named Octavius who was willing to veto the bill, and the custom of bringing all bills before the Senate for its approval. Tiberius trumped both. He had the assembly impeach Octavius, a maneuver of dubious legality, and then had his bill voted on without vetting it before the Senate, an outright affront to the 'Conscript Fathers.' The plebeian assembly established a land commission to survey holdings of public land to begin the redistribution. The only problem now remaining was to find the money to fund the reform. The plots would be worthless without stock, and stock required expenditures of cash. The Senate, however, controlled the state treasury. Tiberius overcame this through a stroke of luck and a bold disregard for political convention and custom. Attalus III of the wealthy kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor had recently died leaving Rome heir to his kingdom. Tiberius had the assembly pass a bill that allowed the commission to use the revenues from Pergamum, now organized into the new province of 'Asia,' to fund the land redistribution. This was an unprecedented attack on senatorial privilege and control over foreign policy and finances.
Tiberius's enemies accused him of aiming to establish a personal tyranny and made it clear that they would bring charges against him as soon as his term of office was up. He responded by standing for reelection, which itself was of doubtful constitutionality. The election was to be held in the Fall at the time of the harvest, which meant that Tiberius' most ardent supporters would be occupied in the fields and unable to vote. Tiberius turned to the urban proletariat for support, which made the landed rich even more nervous. Finally, the Chief Pontiff, Scipio Nasica, Tiberius's cousin, gathered together a mob of senators and their clients and attacked Tiberius and his supporters. Tiberius was clubbed to death and his mutilated body dumped into the Tiber River. The Senate subsequently legitimized the violence by declaring Tiberius ex post facto a revolutionary and traitor.
The Gracchan land commission survived the death of its inventor, but its attempt to identify public lands held illegally proceeded very slowly, due to the complexity of the problem. Nor did Tiberius' murder eradicate his following. Ten years after Tiberius's death his younger brother Gaius attempted to push forward the reforms begun by his brother. The problem of military recruitment probably also motivated Gaius, though, as with his brother, it is difficult to ascertain whether he used the issue to advance his personal ambitions or was truly concerned with Rome's welfare--or both. Gaius's reform program was more extensive than Tiberius's had been. As tribune of the plebeians in 123 and 122 he reached out to the urban masses as well as to the rural workers who formed the backbone of his brother's support. He also attempted to forge an alliance between the lower classes and the equestrian order, the census group deemed to possess sufficient property to serve in the Roman cavalry, the class from which Rome's bankers, traders, and publicans came. The result was a hodge-podge of proposals that included the creation of colonies of citizens in Italy and, for the first time, overseas (a colony actually was briefly established on the site of Carthage), public distribution of grain subsidized by the state treasury, a prohibition against deducting the cost of clothing and weapons from a legionary's pay (which did not long survive Gaius' death), a proposal to extend citizenship to Italian allies (the defeat of which led to the so-called 'Social War' in 91 B.C.), the placing of tax collection in the hands of publicans, members of the Equestrian Order who paid the state a flat sum of money in return for the right to collect--and pocket--provincial taxes, and the replacement of senators with equites on courts charged with trying cases of extortion and abuse of power by provincial governors. (The last two bills not only enriched the 'knights' but stripped provincials of some of the meager protection that they had previously enjoyed against the extortions of their Roman superiors.)
Gaius failed to be reelected tribune in 121 B.C., the result, according to Plutarch, of false returns and, perhaps, the disaffection of the City's proletariat with the proposal to extend citizenship to the Italians. The new tribunes acted in cooperation with the consul Opimius to negate a number of Gaius' bills, including the one to establish a colony at Carthage. Gaius and his followers resorted to a show of force, which led the Senate to issue a 'last decree' directing the consul Opimius to secure the safety of the state by any means possible. Gaius tried to flee, but was caught and killed, his head brought to Opimius on the tip of a spear. Three thousand of his supporters were also killed. The Gracchan reforms thus came to a violent end. The problem of military recruitment remained.
How successful were the land distributions of the Gracchi? Between 130 and 124 the number of registered citizens (adult, taxpaying males) in Rome increased from 319,000 to 395,000. This, however, may have had been the result of a change in the property qualification for the assidui. Sometime before 107 B.C. the property required for the status of assiduus was dropped once again, this time from 4000 asses to 1,500 asses (400 to 150 denarii), which was only slightly higher than the annual pay of a legionary. This was a very modest sum: in Cicero's day (ca. 60 B.C.) a skilled slave could earn three quarters of a denarii for a day's work. Those who qualified may well have possessed little more than a cottage and garden. The line of demarcation between the true proletarii (the word literally means those who offer nothing to the state except children) and the 'proletarianized' assidui of the late second and early first centuries B.C. was indistinct. The poverty of the rank and file is reflected in the abandonment of the notion that individual soldiers were obliged to equip themselves. By the end of the second century B.C. Roman legionaries were mainly equipped by the State at public expense.
The formal opening of the legions to volunteers from the proletariat was attributed in ancient times to Gaius Marius (157-86 B.C.). The historical context for Marius' reform of the levy was the Jugurthine War (111-105) in northern Africa. Jugurtha, the grandson of Rome's Numidian ally in the Second Punic War King Masinissa, had managed to outmaneuver his cousins and unite the kingdom in defiance of the wishes of the Roman Senate, which, spooked perhaps by visions of a new Carthage, much preferred a divided and more controllable Numidia. Jugurtha made the error of sanctioning the killing of some Italian traders in 112, which gave the Senate a casus belli. Jugurtha proved successful in the early years of the war. Sallust, a supporter of Julius Caesar whose anti-senatorial bias makes him less than trustworthy, claims that Rome's military efforts came to naught because of Jugurtha's ability to bribe Roman generals and key senators. In 109 B.C. Rome experienced the humiliation of having an entire army defeated and its troops forced to pass under the yoke, a shameful ritual of submission. The Senate responded by dispatching to Africa the consul Q. Caecilius Metellus, who systematically began to build fortifications and secure territory in eastern Numidia. Jugurtha, resorting to guerilla warfare, proved elusive, and Metellus' slow and cautious approach became unpopular in Rome. This gave Gaius Marius, one of Metellus' officers, who came from an equestrian rather than noble family, the opportunity to run for his first consulship (107 B.C.). Marius used his lack of 'nobility' to his advantage during the election campaign, presenting himself as a professional soldier in contrast to his effete opponents. He declared that, if elected, he would bring the war to a swift and victorious conclusion.
Marius' election displeased the Senate, who viewed him as a demagogue. When Marius asked permission to raise more troops, the Senate responded by authorizing a supplemental dilectus. Political considerations were undoubtedly involved, as Marius' senatorial opponents knew that a second round of conscriptions would alienate Marius's supporters among the small property owners. Marius, however, evaded the problem by calling for volunteers from all citizens, including the propertyless proletarii or capite censi.
Sallust and Plutarch, among other ancient historians, regarded this opening of the legions to landless citizens as a disastrous innovation that helped destroy the Republic. Marius, it is often argued, altered the nature of the army, transforming it from a citizen militia into a mercenary, professional force, willing to follow its generals even against the State. This, however, is an oversimplification of a complex process. Marius, indeed, did nothing new. In times of crisis, notably after the disaster at Cannae, the capite censi had long been allowed--or compelled--to serve. Volunteers, moreover, were always welcomed, especially given the growing unpopularity of conscription. By calling for volunteers among the proletarii, Marius was merely taking the next logical step in the proletarianization of the legions begun more than a century before with the first reduction in property qualification for military service. And given the failure of the Gracchi to restore the assidui, it was inevitable that all property qualifications would eventually have had to have been discarded.
Perhaps more significant than the presence of proletariat soldiers in Marius' army was Marius's securing grants of land in Africa for his veterans in 103. This was the action of a patron for his clients, and the notion that a Roman army could be the clientela of its general was ominous--at least in retrospect. But, again, there is some question whether Marius, or other 'populares,' was really responsible for this act of generosity. Certainly, later generals--Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar--would play the role of patron, and by the death of Caesar in 44 B.C. veteran soldiers had come to expect generous pensions and land grants upon the completion of their service.
Marius proved to be an outstanding general. As promised, he defeated Jugurtha, though it took him two years to do so. (Ironically, Marius was as systematic and cautious as his former superior Metellus. Caution and planning marked all of Marius's military campaigns.) Marius' victory in Africa made him the hero of the day, and when a large Roman army was annihilated on the Rhone at Arausio (Orange) in 105 by the Cimbri and Teutones, German tribes migrating in search of land, the Roman people turned again to Marius. In defiance of convention, which mandated a ten-year hiatus between consulships, Marius was elected consul for the second time in three years. He was to be reelected in each of the following four years, a testimony not only to Marius' prestige with the electorate but also to Roman fear of the German barbarians.
Marius assumed command of the legions after the initial crisis had passed. As he had done in the Jugurthine War, he again began to recruit among the landless and dispossessed, men who welcomed the steady pay and opportunities offered by a long campaign. Marius proved lucky as well as skillful. Faced with the difficulties of crossing the Alps, the Cimbri and Teutones chose not to enter Italy after their victory at Arausio and turned instead west toward Spain. This gave Marius two years of breathing space to drill and train his troops. It was during this period that Marius probably reformed the tactical organization of the legions. The basic tactical unit since before the Second Punic War had been the maniple, consisting of between 120-160 men. The legion had also been divided into battle lines of velites, hastati, principes, and triarii, distinguished on the basis of age, experience, armor, and tactical operations. Marius, it seems, replaced the maniple with the larger cohort, a unit of 480 men that added weight to the Roman battle line while still retaining tactical flexibility. Each cohort consisted of six centuries of eighty men, and each century of ten squads of eight (the complement for a tent in camp). Cohort and century was to be the basic organization of the Roman legions in the Empire as well as the late Republic.
Marius is credited with a number of other reforms, some of which may have occurred before his consulate. The legions described by Polybius in the mid second century B.C. had been divided into categories of soldiers by age, experience, and wealth. Marius seems to have dispensed with this; with the bulk of the rank and file now recruited from among the poor, the old categories of velites, hastati, principes, and triarii no longer reflected social reality and the old distinctions had long since lost their military value. Marius and his successors continued to deploy their legions in the traditional three battle lines, but each was now interchangeable and used accordingly. As a consequence of this, weapons and equipment were standardized; each legionary wore mail armor and carried two pila (throwing spears), scutum (oval shield),and gladius (short sword). Marius' attention to military detail is reflected in the alteration he made to the pilum. He had one of the two iron rivets connecting the iron shank to the wooden shaft replaced with a wooden peg. This meant that upon impact the shaft would break off, making it impossible for the enemy to return fire with the weapon. A more important innovation was the introduction of the silver eagle mounted on a staff as the legion's standard. If, as seems likely, this was an attempt to create unit cohesion and an esprit de corps in the newer long-serving legions, it worked. Within a generation of its introduction, the legionary eagles had become objects of quasi-religious devotion representing the genius of the legion. The loss of an eagle was a disgrace that demanded to be avenged.
Marius' professional attitude toward military discipline and service was most evident in his emphasis upon drill and his concern with logistics. Plutarch says that at the first news of the approach of the Germans, Marius ordered that supplies be gathered and stored at his camp on the Rhone "lest at any time he be forced to fight at a disadvantage for want of necessaries." The stockpiling of stores on this occasion was facilitated by a bit of military engineering. While training his army, Marius made use of their leisure by having them dig a large channel linking the town of Arles in the Rhone delta directly to the Mediterranean, thus bypassing the silted up mouth of the river and allowing the resupply of his forces by sea. He also insisted on drilling his army mercilessly, practicing forced marches over extended distances. This last, along with Marius's decision to reduce the number of camp followers, had important logistical benefits. An army can only travel as fast as its slowest element, and traditionally that had been the baggage train. The larger the baggage train, the slower the army--and the more food and fodder it needed for a campaign. Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander had revolutionized Greek warfare by having their troops carry much of their equipment and reducing the numbers of camp followers; Marius now did the same. Marius's legionaries were expected to carry between 80-100 pounds of equipment and weaponry bundled up at the end of a large fork. A typical legionary would carry two javelins (a heavy and light pilum), a shield, mail body armor, sword, dagger, sickle (for harvesting grain), wicker basket for moving earth, pick-axe for entrenching, pickets for the construction of the camp, a water bucket, bronze mess tin, a bed roll and cloak, and three days or more of rations. The heavy equipment, such as the leather tents, mill stones, siege equipment, was borne by mules in the baggage train, with each squad of eight men allotted a single mule. The result was a tough, disciplined soldier notable for his endurance. He could march twenty miles in a day and then build an elaborate marching camp. The sight of legionaries burdened down with their equipment gave rise to the affectionate nickname, Marius's Mules. As effective as the armies of the early and middle Republic had been, Marius' Mules were to prove even better soldiers. They possessed a professionalism that had not been seen before--and a loyalty to their commanders that was to prove fatal to the state.
Marius' army also depended more upon 'auxiliary' (foreign, i.e. non-Italian) troops than had previous incarnations of the Roman military. This was, however, not a Marian innovation but simply a continuation of a process that had begun in the middle of the second century. Despite its social prominence, cavalry had always been the weakest tactical arm of the Roman military. Its deficiencies had been revealed clearly during the Second Punic War when it was consistently routed by Numidian and Spanish horse. Though the title 'equestrian' continued to be accorded to the wealthier propertied classes, native Roman and Italian cavalry was increasingly supplemented by superior auxiliary alae (units of 500 hundred). The Spanish, in particular, achieved a reputation for having fine horse soldiers.
In 102 B.C., in the fourth consulship of Marius, the German tribes returned. While the Cimbri and the Celtic Tigurni made for Italy by way of the Alps, Marius' legions intercepted the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) en route to the Alpine passes. In doing so he showed coolness and resolve. Rather than meet the enemy immediately, he ordered his men to stay within their camp and observe the enemy, considering that the more familiar they grew with the Germans warcries the steadier they would be in battle. He refused to allow his troops to rush out even when the Teutones attacked his camp. Finally, the Teutones chose to bypass the Romans and make for the Alps. This is what Marius had been waiting for. Following carefully upon the enemy, making certain that his troops built strong fortified camps each night, Marius finally offered battle at Aquae Sextiae, a short distance from the entrance to one of the main Alpine passes. Before deploying for battle, he ordered one of his lieutenants, Claudius Marcellus, to post some three thousand troops in ambush in a heavily wooded valley behind the Teutones' camp, with orders to attack the enemy's rear upon the sounds of battle. Marius then set up his battle lines on a hill in front of his camp and waited. The Teutones were taunted into attacking by the Roman horse swooping down upon them. The rest of the Roman army was ordered to 'stand still and keep their ground; and when they came within reach, to throw their javelins, then use their swords, and joining their shields, force them back" (Plutarch, Life of Marius). The Teutones took the bait, and as Marius hoped, found themselves at a grave disadvantage fighting uphill. When the Romans began to push them down the slope, the Teutones, already breaking, were struck from the rear by Marcellus's forces. What had been a close fought battle turned into a complete rout.
Marius' consular colleague, a distinguished noble named Catulus Lutatius, enjoyed less success in northern Italy against the Cimbri. Marius, having gone to Rome to obtain his triumph, was dispatched by the Senate to go to the aid of Catulus. In August 101 B.C., a combined consular army met the Cimbri in battle at Vercellae near Milan. Again, Marius's well trained troops triumphed, and the Cimbri and their allies, who were suffering from the heat of the Italian summer, were completely crushed. The only dark note to the Roman victory was the squabbling that ensued over credit for the victory, as both Catulus and Marius claimed the right to a triumph. The Senate decided to grant them a joint triumph, which seems to have pleased no one. The Roman people, however, had no doubt that the true victor was Marius, and the assembly voted to honor his veterans with grants of land.
Marius and his Mules had proved their worth.
11.Transformation of the Army in the Late Republic
Throughout the centuries of the Roman Republic, the military reflected the organization and values of the society at large. The Republic was an intensely hierarchical society, and this was duly reflected in its armed forces. The officer corps was drawn from a small elite based on wealth and status, while the rank and file came from the lower classes of the citizenry. (The despised Navy was manned by the proletarii and foreigners.) An ordinary legionary, ca. 100 B.C., might aspire to achieve the rank of centurion after 15 to 20 years of service. As important as a centurion was--and in his role as a company commander he is closer to a Marine captain than to the NCOs with whom he is often compared--he did not participate in devising policy, strategy, or tactics--unless he was the primus pilus, chief centurion--or lead the legions. These roles were the province of the 'nobles' and equestrians, who were destined from youth to command. As odd as it may seem, in the armies of Scipio Africanus, Marius, and Caesar, centurions who could boast two or more decades of experience in war would technically be under the command of young 'noble' tribunes in their late teens or early twenties. In every legionary's kit there may have been a centurion's vinewood staff but certainly not a marshal's baton.
As society changed, so did the legions. As we have seen, by the beginning of the first century, the acquisition of empire had effected enormous changes in Roman society, enriching the 'nobles' and equestrian order beyond the imagination of their forebears, while impoverishing the small farmer and swelling the mass of urban and rural day laborers. The result had been the gradual 'proletarianization' and professionialization of the legions. In addition, the rank and file of the army increasingly in the second and first centuries came from rural small holders and laborers from the Italian countryside. Citizens of this sort had little opportunity to participate in the popular assemblies; their political rights were more theoretical than real. The ideal of the citizen soldier was becoming more and more divorced from reality. The political consequences that this process had for Rome in the first century B.C. were profound.
The growth of empire transformed not only the army but the nature of politics in Rome. The influx of enormous wealth and the creation of large, restless mobs of urban poor made the electoral process in the first century B.C. costlier and more susceptible to violence. Elections literally cost fortunes that could only be recouped by the profits of military commands or governorships. Loss of an election could mean staggering debt and ruin. The stakes of politics had been raised at a time when the legions had become more tied to their generals who recruited, led, and rewarded them than to the concept of the res public. As Ronald Syme observed, "The soldiers, now recruited from the poorest classes in Italy, were ceasing to feel allegiance to the State; military service was for livelihood, or from constraint, not a natural and normal part of a citizen's duty. ... The general had to be a politician, for his legionaries were a host of clients, looking to their leader for spoil in war and estates in Italy when their campaigns were over." Given the insanely competitive nature of the society and the premium placed by the elite on their 'dignity,' one might think that it was only a matter of time before some 'noble' general realized that the command of legions was political capital. Ironically, the first commander to do so was a highly conservative, even reactionary noble who claimed that he was only acting to preserve the Republic, L. Cornelius Sulla.
To understand the role that the military played in the 'Fall of the Republic,' we must first consider the formal constitution and its relationship to the actual workings of politics in Rome in the first century B.C. Polybius, a Greek noble hostage writing around 160 B.C., praised Rome to his Greek audience for its 'mixed' constitution. Influenced by Greek political philosophy, Polybius described a political system which combined elements of monarchy (the two annually elected consuls), oligarchy (the Senate), and democracy (the four popular assemblies). For Polybius, as for Cicero writing a century later, the Senate was the central institution of government in the Roman Republic. The preeminent dignity of the Senate was so thoroughly accepted that SPQR (senatus populusque Romanus, the 'Senate and the people of Rome') was the standard expression for the sovereign authority of the res publica. What is odd about all this is that the Senate possessed few formal, delineated powers. While the Roman consuls and praetors possessed imperium, which meant that they had the authority to lead armies and punish citizens, and the 'people' in their assemblies enacted law and elected magistrates, the Senate disbursed public monies for extraordinary expenditures, negotiated with foreign diplomats, and advised the consuls. Why then did Polybius and Cicero place it at the center of the Roman constitution? As strange as it may seem, the real power of the Senate derived from its role as an advisory body. Rarely would consuls undertake policies or the assembly enact a law without the advice and approval of the Senate.
To understand why we must consider the nature of Roman society and its value system in the Late Republic. Hierarchy and tradition were key elements in the Roman value system. In the Middle and Late Republic, the worth of a man and his place in the social hierarchy were established by a combination of birth and achievement. Together they gave a man his dignitas, his public prestige, and his auctoritas, his personal authority. The amount of 'dignity' that one could accumulate was defined in large measure by the class into which one was born. Wealth, dignity, and power were the birth-right of the 'nobles' and, to a lesser extent, the 'equestrians.' How much of each they achieved was based upon the competition among their age-cohort. For Roman nobles this competition was deadly serious. As Julius Caesar is said to have commented, his dignity was more precious to him than his very life. In this, as in much else, Caesar was expressing the traditional values of his class.
Men of dignity and authority were owed deference by those below them on the social ladder. This sense of hierarchy and subordination was greatly reinforced by the social institution of patronage that connected the highest strata of Roman society with the lowest in a network of patronage and service. The Senate represented the repository of the combined dignitas of the State. It comprised the three hundred (after 81 B.C., the six hundred) best Romans, the men whose names headed each census. The minimum qualifications for this life-long tenure were ten military campaigns, thirty years of age, and election to the office of quaestor (the lowest of the magistracies that made up the cursus honorum). As with society as a whole, the Senate was hierarchical in its workings. A new senator or one who had not advanced beyond the office of quaestor or aedile would only speak on the rarest of occasions, and then at the behest of a superior. The chief senators (principes), who led the debates, had achieved their 'authority' and dignity as consuls and praetors. These were men who had enjoyed imperium and who might, one day, possess it again. Conversely, the sitting consuls had come from the ranks of the Senate and were destined to return to that body after their term of office. Little wonder that they would be reluctant to flout the wishes of that body; a man was a consul for a year and a senator for life.
Given the hierarchical and tradition-bound nature of Roman society, it is not surprising that the Roman 'people' in their assemblies also usually deferred to the senators. When the Gracchi attempted to enhance the prestige of the plebeian assembly at the expense of the Senate, they paid for their presumption with their lives. The individual power of senators, moreover, was greatly enhanced by the institution of patronage. By the Late Republic great men such as Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, as well as their lesser known senatorial colleagues, the Caecilii Metelli, Domitii Ahenobarbi, Scipiones, and their ilk, boasted virtual armies of clients among their rural tenants and in the urban mob. And since patronage was a network of loyalty and service, in which one's own clients would have clients, the bonds of deference extended, at least indirectly, from the 'first men' (principes) down to the day laborers who made up the despised urban 'mob.' The influence of individual senators radiated out from Rome. The clientelas of many, especially those whose main estates lay distant from Rome, had a distinctly rural cast, filled with tenants and lesser landowning neighbors. The very greatest men were patrons not only to lesser Roman citizens but to whole cities, towns, and communities within the empire. Thus invisible bonds of subordination connected the entire society. The Senate, in short, spoke for Rome because its members had the 'dignity' and 'authority' to do so. Sovereignty may have belong to the SPQR, senatus populusque romanus, but the 'People' had to be guided by their Conscript Fathers. The power of the Senate reflected the truly oligarchical nature of Roman politics.
The Senate's true strength rested in the consensus of the Optimates ('the best'), the ruling fifty or so families who claimed the status of 'nobles' and who dominated elections for the consulship. This consensus, however, was beginning to breakdown in the last decades of the second century B.C.. The Gracchi had come from one of the most prestigious families in Rome and yet had turned upon their own class, stirring up the 'people' against their betters. 'Populares,' such as the Gracchi, may have challenged basic assumptions about the locus of sovereignty within the state, but the real threat to senatorial privilege and authority came from social, economic, and military changes that were transforming the practice of politics. The unity of the Roman elite all but disintegrated as the stakes and rewards of office became greater and greater. Along with 'dignitas' and 'auctoritas' the resources necessary to win power in Rome were cash, clients, and, increasingly, armed force. Marius's ascent to the consulship reflected the new clout of the equestrian order, enhanced by their economic exploitation of the resources of empire. Even the 'people' became political players. The 'great' found it necessary to court the masses, as demonstrations of public generosity (if not prodigality) in the forms of games and feasts became a regular element of electoral campaigning. Armies of street thugs and clients turned elections into bloodbaths. Roman armies now no longer menaced only the enemies of Rome but Rome itself (though this had less to do with the decisions of the rank and file than with those of their leaders). The Gracchi were only a hint of what was to come at the hands of men less honorable than they--and far more dangerous.
The election of the 'new man' Gaius Marius as consul in 107 B.C. and his consecutive consulships in 104 to 101 challenged the authority of the closeknit ruling aristocracy and hinted at a breakdown in the ordinary processes of politics. Though a great general and a wealthy landowner, Marius was still only an equestrian by birth. Marius was what the Romans called a 'new man,' the first of his family to achieve the distinction of a consulship. 'New men' were rare but not unheard of; Cato the Censor (234-149 B.C.), that very epitome of traditional Roman values, had been one, but he had risen to prominence the proper way, through the patronage of a great noble who recognized his personal merit. Marius had not. If anything, he had shown ingratitude to his social and military superior, Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, intriguing behind his back to rob him both of credit for achievements and command of his army. Marius, rather than showing proper deference, had played upon the growing popular suspicion of the pride and corruption of the nobility. In turn, the 'savior of Rome' was himself suspect to the older and more established element, who found his appeal to the popular assembly dangerous and destabilizing. Like the Gracchi, Marius was seen as a 'popularis,' one who regarded the authority of the Roman 'people' in their assemblies as superior to that of the Senate. This may be granting Marius too much credit for a political ideology. Whatever his opponents might have thought, Marius was not another Tiberius Gracchus. What motivated him was neither principle nor idea, but an apparently insatiable desire to enhance his personal prestige--in this, at any rate, Marius was 'traditional.' As consul, he made an excellent general--and little else.
Marius' six elections to the consulship in the course of a decade must have been profoundly disturbing to the elite. (Consider the Republican reaction to FDR's unprecedented four terms in the Presidency.) The constitutional guards that preserved the competition among peers and limited the possibility of an individual or a family becoming too dominant were breaking down. The discontent of men such as Sulla and their hostility toward Marius found its roots here.
Equally disturbing was Marius's route to office. He had been elected consul because of his military talent rather than his 'auctoritas.' In this he was the father of a new breed of consuls, who led their armies in the name of Rome but whose legions often became extensions of their own ambitions. One reason for the advent of these military dynasts was the ubiquity of war in the first century, much of which took place upon Italian soil. Between 90 and 80 B.C. some 250,000-300,000 Italians served as soldiers. After 78 B.C. the totals of men under arms averaged in excess of 90,000, reaching the neighborhood of perhaps 600,000 (more than half of whom were non-Italians) by the end of the Civil Wars that destroyed the Republic. The Italian agrarian economy was devastated by these wars. Not only were crops and goods plundered--the Spartacus slave rebellion (74-71), which took 10 legions to suppress, was particularly destructive--but the billeting of soldiers and forced requisition of supplies impoverished thousands of peasants unlucky enough to hold land in the path of an army's advance. Italian society became saturated with violence. Poverty bred crime. In the late Republic brigandage made travel through the countryside without an armed entourage risky, and by the 70s B.C. elections in Rome were constantly attended by street violence, as a new generation of politicians such as Publius Clodius and his rival Titus Annius Milo campaigned by raising armies of street thugs. (When Milo killed Clodius in 52 B.C. the former had with him a retinue of 300, some of whom were gladiators, while the former was attended by a mere few dozen.)
The oddly named 'Social War' (from the Latin socii, allies), which ravaged Italy between 91 B.C. and 89 B.C., introduced this new bellicose era. One of the most contentious legacies of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus was his plan to extend citizenship to Rome's Italian alllies. There were a number of good reasons for doing so, not the least being that the allies, upon whom the Romans depended militarily, clamored for political rights. After all, they fought in Rome's wars and followed its consuls without ever having a say in policy or a vote in elections. In 91 B.C., following the murder of a tribune, M. Livius Drusus, who had resurrected Gaius' proposal, the allies rose in revolt. For the next two years Rome fought its allies in a bitter and highly destructive conflict that at its height involved more than 250,000 combatants. As in the Second Punic War, Rome was forced to call upon the proletarii for their legions, and even turned to freedmen to garrison Rome. The devastation wrought by the conflict was enormous, perhaps even more ruinous to the Italian economy than Hannibal's campaigns had been. The economic after effects of the war lingered for a decade or more. The number of dead was also stunning. And after two years of fighting the Romans managed to win only by granting citizenship to all Italian cities and peoples who were willing to support her. Rome won the war but lost the issue. By 89 B.C. Roman citizenship had been extended to most Italians--though the senators attempted to save the situation by enrolling the new citizens in a few 'tribes' that could always be outvoted. The result for the military was the disappearance of allied legions, as the Italians were now conscripted into the regular legions. The specialized military roles once played by allies, especially the cavalry, were now assumed by 'auxiliary' troops raised from the provinces.
While the war in Italy was raging, Mithridates, the king of Pontus in Asia Minor, was provoked into a war by the Roman governors of the province of Asia (formerly the kingdom of Pergamum). Mithridates, who was to plague Rome for a generation, apparently conceived of himself as a Hellenistic liberator of the east from Roman domination. He consequently inaugurated his attack upon Roman Asia by inciting a widespread massacre of Roman and Italian businessmen throughout the east. According to the sources, in a single day some 80,000 Italian merchants, businessmen, and publicans--whose usurous loans and ruthless business practices made them distinctly unpopular with the locals--were killed. This was the sort of provocation that the Senate, regardless of its views about expansion, could not ignore.
Among Rome's heroes in the Social War was Marius's former quaestor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 B.C.). While the elderly Marius was finding little opportunity for glory leading armies in northern Italy, his former quaestor in the Jugurthine War was winning great victories in the south. Marius and Sulla despised each other, in part because of class resentments. Sulla was the scion of an old patrician family that had fallen upon hard times, both politically and economically; Marius, of course, was a 'new man' from a wealthy equestrian family from the Italian countryside. Their personalities also clashed; Marius the dour disciplinarian found little to admire in his lax, congenial subordinate. Their twenty years difference in age added an element of generational struggle to their rivalry. What the declasse noble and the 'new man' had in common was political ambition, a burning ambition for dignitas, and an almost pathologically vengeful nature. Marius, though he appreciated Sulla's military abilities, had done his best to deprive him of credit for his achievements in the African campaign, which included the actual capture of Jugurtha. (Sulla responded by having a signet ring made up depicting Jugurtha's surrender to him.) Over the next decade Marius in one way or another blocked Sulla's advance. The Social War had changed all that. Now Sulla had the limelight and the aged Marius resented it. In 88 B.C. Sulla was rewarded for his actions in the Social War by being elected to the consulship. It was a propitious time for the consulship. Rome needed to send an army against Mithridates and Sulla was their man. This was a truly plum opportunity for Sulla. Mithridates was fabulously wealthy, and the general who defeated him would gain incredible riches, a key consideration for Sulla, a man who grew up under modest circumstances and had learned to appreciate luxury. The war, moreover, was popular. The massacre of the Italians provided good propaganda; even more to the point, the legions raised to fight Mithridates knew that booty and loot lay in their future. Sulla's reputation of being a soldier's general, always desirous of the welfare of his men, also made it easy to recruit. During the 'Social War' he had won the affection of his troops by relaxing discipline when he could and by permitting them free rein in looting cities that they took. Consequently, Sulla had little difficulty raising six legions, which he assembled in camp at Capua. Then, incredibly, Marius, sixty nine years old and decidedly given to fat, came forward to claim the command. Supported by a tribune of the plebs, Marius appealed to the popular assembly, which stripped Sulla of command and replaced him with the old hero. The senators who protested the proceedings were violently driven out of the forum. When the news reached Sulla, he addressed his 35,000 soldiers, informing them about the events that had transpired in Rome and suggesting that Marius would raise his own troops for the campaign, thus depriving them of their chance for wealth. The soldiers began to cry out that Sulla should march on Rome; Sulla acceded to their demand.
Sulla's army took the City, se