The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

753 to 27 B.C.

	The Etruscans
	The Founding of Rome
	The Roman Monarchy, 753-509 B.C.
	The Roman Republic: The Early Years
	Rome Becomes the Capital of Italy
	The Samnite Wars
	Pyrrhus
	Carthage
	The First Punic War
	Hannibal and the Second Punic War
	Roman Intervention in the East
	The Third Punic War
	Growing Pains
	The Reforms of the Gracchi
	Marius vs. Sulla
	Pompey's Campaigns and the Catiline Conspiracy
	The Rise of Julius Caesar
	The Gallic Wars
	Caesar Rules Alone
	The Second Triumvirate
	Go to Page Navigator

Among all of these groups, the Greeks and the Etruscans were the most advanced. We last looked at the Etruscans when they were in their formative stage, the Villanovan culture. Now that they had a fully developed civilization, the Etruscans followed the same political path as the Greeks; each city-state kept its independence, but all of them recognized that they were one people. Because of similarities in their art to that of the Greeks, archaeologists and historians give the following phases of Etruscan history the same names that they gave to the Greeks:

• The Orientalizing Period (700-600 B.C.)
• The Archaic Period (600-480 B.C.)
• The Classical Period (480-300 B.C.)
• The Hellenistic Period (300-89 B.C.)

The leader of each city was called a Lauchum, and he appears to have been more like a priest than a king, while an oligarchy of nobles held political power. Indeed, the Lauchums didn't even reserve many luxuries for themselves, because their assistants dressed as elegantly as they did. The Roman historian Livy tells us how when Lars Porsenna, the Lauchum of Clusium, attacked Rome (more about that later), an assassin tried to kill him. The attacker found the leader and his secretary seated in the middle of the Etruscan camp, paying the soldiers; because the two men were dressed alike, he stabbed the secretary by mistake.

To defend against outsiders like the Celts and Greeks, the twelve city-states formed a league, which we sometimes call the Dodecapolis. It appears that Campania eventually became the location of a second Etruscan league, though we can't be sure who was in it besides Capua and Volturnum. At any rate, these leagues were loosely organized, with each Lauchum only having power over his own city. Every year at Volsinii, they held a festival to honor the god Voltumna, and elected a Lauchum to serve as head of the league for the next year. This appears to have been largely a ceremonial post; you could call that ruler the Etruscan pope.

The sixth century B.C. was the best of times for the Etruscans. Rome was under their control from 616 to 509, and they expanded north to the Po River valley, building new cities like Marzabotto, Felsina (modern Bologna), Fiesole (next to Florence), and Melpum (Milan). At the mouth of the Po they founded Spina, which became an important seaport, and the nearby settlement of Adria gave its name to the Adriatic Sea. Overseas they colonized Corsica, and an alliance with the Carthaginian Empire allowed them to have outposts in Spain, the Balearic Islands, and even the Canary Islands. In 535 the Carthaginians and Etruscans teamed up to attack Alalia, a Greek settlement on Corsica, and though the Greeks did better in the resulting naval battle, they lost so many ships and men that they had to abandon Corsica.

Italy, about 600 B.C.

There are two reasons why the Etruscans are so mysterious to us. The first reason is the continual habitation of Italy since their time, which has made their artifacts scarcer than those of the civilizations which followed. When the Romans took over they assimilated the Etruscans, and obliterated everything the Etruscans built above ground, leaving only their graves for us to study. The other reason is that the Etruscan language still has not been completely translated. Their alphabet was nearly the same as ours, so we can read Etruscan inscriptions, but we have never found an Etruscan "Rosetta Stone," matching one of their inscriptions with one from a known language. By working on it since the mid-eighteenth century, using the techniques of modern cryptography, scholars have managed to learn the meanings of approximately 300 Etruscan words. It also does not help that the existing inscriptions are so short; a typical tomb inscription was limited to the deceased's name, whatever titles he/she may have had, and a brief prayer.⁽²⁾ Apparently they did most of their writing on sheets of linen, a material not likely to last until our time. The longest Etruscan text ever found (1,200 words) survived because somebody sent it to Egypt, where it was cut into strips and used for mummy wrappings!

The Etruscans were great technicians whose architectural skill is evident in their roads, bridges, canals, and temples. In art they specialized in luxury items, and in painted and sculpted works intended for religious and funerary purposes. Tombs carved out of rock were made to look like the interiors of houses; like the Egyptians, the Etruscans formed a necropolis, or "city of the dead," on the outskirts of each city. Wealthy families or clans had many-chambered tombs to hold several generations.

The interiors of Etruscan tombs provide rare examples of large-scale ancient painting. Among the best preserved is the series from Tarquinia, dating from the late 7th to the 1st centuries BC. Human forms figure prominently in the lively and naturalistic scenes, which depict daily activities and funeral celebrations. Pictures of recreation--such as banquets, the playing of music, and sports like chariot races--are common, and dancing is the most common of all, suggesting a happy, carefree people.⁽³⁾ At funerals they might stage a fight to the death between two of the deceased's slaves, presumably to teach other slaves to take good care of their master while he's alive! From this the Romans later developed the sport of gladiatorial combat.

Where the Etruscans differed most from the other civilizations of their day was in their treatment of women. Greek and Roman women had few rights, lived at the will of their fathers or husbands, and were expected to stay out of sight, doing housework; by contrast, Etruscan society displayed a remarkable equality between the sexes. Women were just as likely to recieve fine tombs as men, and at parties, men and women mingled freely. The Greeks accused the Etruscans of having loose morals for this, because at Greek parties, prostitutes were the only women likely to attend.

Etruscan vase-painting imitated Greek models, while funerary portrait sculptures of men and women were produced not only in stone, but also in ceramics. They sculpted some funerary urns as a bust representing the deceased whose ashes they contained, while others were still shaped like miniature huts. Bronze sculpture was also an Etruscan speciality. Between 700 and 500 B.C., the potters of Caere used a ceramic style named bucchero, made from black clay and given a metallic sheen to imitate bronze.

We talked in previous chapters about how the Celts were governed by passion, and how the Greeks let reason determine their actions; the main motivator of the Etruscans was superstition. While the Greeks allowed a prominent place for people in their mythology, sometimes even having heroes challenge the gods, to the Etruscans the gods were the only performers on the stage. They felt they could not influence the gods, and all they could do was look for signs of what they were going to do next; thus, soothsayers were the most important kind of priests. The best places to look for signs was in lightning bolts, the way birds fly, and by studying the livers and entrails of sacrificed animals. Later on, the Romans classified Etruscan science (disciplina Etrusca) into the following categories, all having to do with divination:

1. Libri haruspicini, the study of animal guts.
2. Libri fulgurales, the interpretation of lightning.
3. Libri rituales, the proper rituals to use when founding a city.
4. Libri acherontici, the paths by which the dead followed to the afterlife.
5. Libri fatales, the Etruscan understanding of how destiny works.

Etruscan power went into a definite decline after they lost Rome. In 524 B.C. the Greeks defeated an Etruscan attack on Cumae; this gave the Greeks control of the Straits of Messina. In 474 B.C. the Sicilian Greeks won an even bigger victory, by defeating the Etruscan navy off the coast of Cumae. After that the strongest tribe in central Italy, the Samnites, took over the plain of Campania. The flourishing trade between Greece and north Italy dropped off, and in late Etruscan tombs we can see the resulting poverty because the dead received fewer grave goods. The tomb murals also show a grimmer mood; after 400 B.C., scenes from the afterlife became more common than joyous party scenes. Frightening demons like Charun (the Greek Charon), Vanth and Tuchulcha often appear, colored blue to symbolize decaying flesh. This reflects both the Etruscan attitude that their time was nearly up, and that life was getting tougher. The fourth century saw them withdraw to Etruria, where they came under attack, from the Gauls to the north and from the Romans to the south.

The late fourth and early third centuries B.C. saw the Etruscans become part of the Roman world. Their last bid for independence was a revolt at the town of Falerii, in 241 B.C. Rome received contributions from the still wealthy Etruscan cities during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), and in 89 B.C. the remaining Etruscans became Roman citizens, along with most other Italians. Afterwards Etruscan culture virtually disappeared, although the language remained in use for certain religious and magic formulas until the fall of the Roman Empire. Romans also preferred Etruscan soothsayers to the homegrown kind, and sometimes sent their sons to Etruria so they could learn divination from the experts. It was an Etruscan soothsayer, Spurinna, who warned Julius Caesar to beware the ides of March, on a fateful day in 44 B.C. Rome derived several features of its culture from the Etruscans, including the toga, the fasces (an axe in a bundle of rods, carried by ceremonial guards, from which we get the word fascism); the lituus (a curved staff that was a soothsayer's symbol of authority, which eventually became the crook carried by Christian bishops); a superstitious interest in omens and divination; words such as triumph, atrium, taberna (tavern), histrio (actor), and possibly even the name of Rome itself.

The Founding of Rome

They decided to build it right on the spot where the shepherd found them. However, so many years had gone by that nobody knew where that was. Romulus and Remus went to separate hills with their followers, and waited for a favorable omen. Remus thought he had one when he saw six vultures fly over him.⁽⁶⁾ Then twelve vultures flew over Romulus; thinking that was twice as good, he picked up a plow and started marking where he wanted the walls to be. Remus promptly jumped over the furrow made by the plow and declared that such walls would never protect a city. Romulus was so enraged that he shouted, "So perish all who cross these walls," and struck Remus dead. Afterwards, though, he regretted the murder, and when he became king, he put an empty throne next to his own with a scepter on it, letting everyone know that he felt he should have ruled with his dead brother.

There weren't any women among the first followers of Romulus, which is not good when you're trying to build a community that will last. To solve this problem Romulus staged a big picnic-like festival, in honor of the god Neptune, and invited the nearest community of the Sabine tribe, telling them to come with their families. In the middle of the celebration, Romulus gave a signal; every Roman grabbed a woman and took her home. The Sabine men tried to negotiate the return of their women; the Romans refused and the Sabines armed themselves. Their first attack on Rome failed, so they called in help from other Sabine villages. In the meantime the women learned to accept their new husbands, and had babies. With the second attack the Sabines broke into the city, but before they could finish off the Romans the women intervened. They ran between the two forces with their babies, and called for a halt to the bloodshed because it was a no-win situation for them; if the Sabines won they would become widows, while if the Romans won they would be orphans. The result was peace, and the Sabines went home, now aware that they were the grandfathers of Rome's second generation.

For a few years after that, Romulus shared rule with Titus Tatius, the king of the Sabines, until Titus Tatius was killed in a street riot. Because Romulus favored Mars, the god of war, he devoted the rest of his reign to a series of raids and battles with neighboring tribes. One day in 716 B.C., while reviewing the troops, a thunderstorm broke, and he disappeared in the middle of it; afterwards nobody could find him. The soldiers concluded that his god had come in the lightning to take him away.

Turning from fable to fact, modern scholars believe that at some point between 900 and 700 B.C., the inhabitants of several small Latin settlements in the Tiber valley united and established a common meeting place, the Forum, around which the city of Rome grew. Conveniently close to the river and protected from invaders by marshes and the famous seven hills, Rome was well-placed. By 600 B.C. the villages on the site had grown into a single city-state, full of traders and other workers as well as farmers, centered on the Forum and surrounded by an earthen wall. Even so, it took centuries to grow; as the popular saying goes, Rome was not built in a day.

The Roman Monarchy, 753-509 B.C.

From a start Roman society was sharply divided into two classes: the patricians, who came from the oldest noble families, and the plebians ("plebs"), who were everybody else. Only free men received citizenship; women and slaves were ignored completely. Sometimes a plebian could become rich by pursuing trade or some other lucrative profession, but he was excluded from any job with power; the king, senators and leading priests were always patricians.

Anyway, the Senate elected Numa Pompilius, a Sabine immigrant, to replace Romulus. Temperamentally the opposite of Romulus, Numa devoted himself to peaceful pursuits. To keep the people, now accustomed to fighting and pillage, from making war on others, he invented all kinds of laws, ceremonies and festivals. By the time he was done, Rome was the most pious city in Italy, and the citizens were too busy with their rituals to even think about bothering their neighbors.

The next two kings, Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Martius, were also elected. As one might expect from his name, Tullus brought back the warlike ways of Romulus, while Ancus, the grandson of Numa, brought another generation of peace. Then the Etruscans took over the city. According to Livy, this was a peaceful coup. It happened because an Etruscan couple, Lucumo and his wife Tanaquil, moved in; they were rich and ambitious, but the people of their home city (Tarquinii) would not let Lucumo rise to a position worthy of his skills because his father, Demaratus of Corinth, was a Greek merchant. Rome, however, was friendly to immigrants, and growing by leaps and bounds, so at Tanaquil's urging, they loaded their belongings in a wagon and went to seek their fortunes in Rome. On the way an eagle snatched the hat of Lucumo, flew away with it, then returned and dropped the hat back on his head. Tanaquil was a prophetess, and to her there could be no better omen than this: her husband had been crowned by an eagle! They continued to Rome, prospered there, and when the throne became vacant in 616 B.C., Lucumo campaigned for it, on the assumption that the Romans would choose anyone suitable for the job, native-born or not (remember Numa). Sure enough, he won, and changed his name to Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.⁽⁷⁾

Tarquinius ruled wisely, but in the middle of his long reign many people, including the king and queen, saw something very unusual. A servant boy in the palace named Servius Tullius was asleep, and his head glowed like it was on fire; then when he woke up, the glow disappeared. Tanaquil took her husband aside, and said this must be a sign from the gods that he was to be the next king. They were so convinced by this "halo" that instead of promising the throne to one of their biological sons, they gave their daughter to Servius, and made him the royal heir.

The sons of Tarquinius and Tanaquil probably didn't like being passed over in favor of an in-law like Servius, but they allowed him to enjoy a reign that lasted more than forty years. Servius, however, had a restless and headstrong daughter named Tullia, who became as much a kingmaker as her grandmother Tanaquil had been. She was married to a princely youth with a gentle disposition, but her sister married the prince's violent brother, a young man who was also named Lucius Tarquinius. Tullia saw that her husband didn't want to be king, whereas Tarquinius did, so she arranged for the murder of both her husband and her sister. Once those obstacles were out of the way, she married Tarquinius, declaring that "If you are he whom I thought I was marrying, I call you both man and king. If not, then I have so far changed for the worse, in that crime is added, in your case, to cowardice. Come, rouse yourself!"

Tarquinius acted by slandering the king, looking to find political support from those who also wanted a different ruler. Then he convened a session of the Senate to declare that he would make a more suitable king than the ex-slave who wore the crown. The aged Servius tried to interrupt the meeting, and Tarquinius killed him by throwing him down the steps outside the Senate building. According to Livy, Tullia rushed to the Senate to proclaim her husband king, and when she left, her carriage came to the body of her murdered father. Her terrified driver pulled up on the reins to stop, but Tullia, "crazed by the avenging spirits of her sister and former husband," ordered him to gallop right over the corpse, showering blood on them. Because of that gory scene, the Romans renamed that street the Street of Crime. Thus, Lucius Tarquinius became Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), Rome's worst and final king.

Tarquin constructed the Cloaca Maxima (Rome's great sewer system), and built a great temple to the gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the Capitoline Hill. But he was also paranoid; he surrounded himself with yes-men, and exiled, killed, or confiscated the property of anyone he thought might give him trouble. Soon the Romans decided they didn't want anything more to do with Etruscan kings.

If the legends can be trusted, the end of Etruscan rule came because of a friendly contest between some Roman and Etruscan army officers. One night they decided to test the virtue of their wives by making some unannounced visits. Going to the Etruscan ladies first, they found them "at a luxurious banquet, whiling away the time with their young friends." By contrast, when they called on the home of a Roman wife named Lucretia, she and her industrious maidens were staying up late to get their spinning work done. After the contest, one of the Etruscan officers, a son of Tarquin, vowed to rape Lucretia. He went back to her house with a sword; Lucretia would have preferred death to dishonor, but he overcame her defenses by threatening to kill her and her slave, and placing their naked bodies together as evidence of her unfaithfulness. Afterwards Lucretia denounced the violation to her male relatives, and stabbed herself in shame. A nephew of the king, Lucius Junius Brutus, was a friend of Lucretia's family, and he took both the knife and Lucretia's body to the Forum, where he used them to enrage the people into rebellion. Tarquin was out of town when this happened; he tried to return, only to find himself locked out, and the whole army turned against him. The only thing he could do was go into exile, so he departed for the Etruscan city of Clusium. On that note the Roman monarchy ended in 509 B.C., and in its place came the Roman Republic, with Brutus as one of its first consuls.

The Roman Republic: The Early Years

The new government's most powerful body was the Senate, which remained a good old boy's club for patricians only. The chief executive was not a king but two consuls, who were elected from the Senate. Each consul served for a single year, and then had to wait at least a year before he could run again. The two consuls provided an effective check to keep one man from becoming too strong; both had to agree for any law to pass, for example.

In times of emergency, like in a war, quick decision making was needed, rather than careful deliberation. For this the Republic installed a temporary dictator, who was given unlimited powers for six months or until the crisis ended, whichever came first. The best example of a dictator was Cincinnatus, who was called to stop an invasion from the Aequi, a neighboring people, in 458 B.C. According to the story, Cincinnatus was plowing his field when he heard the Senate had chosen him to be dictator; he put down his plow and went off to do his duty without hesitation. He won a quick victory, and came home to finish his spring plowing only sixteen days after they called him away.⁽⁸⁾

The Republic retained the Comitia Curiata from earlier days, and added a new body, the Comitia Centuriata, to organize and maintain the army. Every male citizen between the ages of seventeen and sixty was registered with this body, so they could call him to duty at a moment's notice. Membership in the Comitia Centuriata was determined not by family background, but by wealth, and it was divided into seven classes. Patricians and those plebians who could afford weapons, armor and horses were placed in the class on the top; poor plebians who could only bring slings and stones occupied the second class from the bottom; the class on the very bottom contained those who had no weapons at all, and served in noncombatant roles. Each class had to supply a certain number of centuries (100-man units) in wartime, and received votes according to how many centuries it could muster. The top two classes, which included all patricians and provided for 98 centuries, thus had a majority vote over the other five, which only had 95 centuries between them.

Plebians quickly came to resent the limitations put on them. As noted previously, wealthy plebs could not have the most important jobs, no matter how big their fortunes grew; even marriage between patricians and plebians was forbidden. For poor plebians, especially farmers, it was much worse. Falling into debt after a season or two of bad crops was commonplace, and while the plebians were off at war (which was often), their families borrowed money to make ends meet. Since these loans came from patricians, the patricians saw it as state business to make sure that those loans were repaid. There were laws against plebians selling their land to pay debts, so they had to offer their own persons as collateral; if they defaulted on payments, the creditor could sell them into slavery or even put them to death. This meant that if the typical soldier did not loot adequately, he risked losing his land, freedom, and maybe his life.

In 494 B.C., only fifteen years after the Republic's founding, the plebians figured out that maybe the patricians could run Rome by themselves, but they could not defend it alone. In that year, when they were called out to fight a campaign, the plebian soldiers staged a strike; they marched to a camp outside Rome, announced a list of demands, and set up a government of their own, run by a plebian officer named Sicinius.⁽⁹⁾ To protect Sicinius and his associates, the plebs swore an oath to kill anyone who even touched their officers with violent intentions.

The government respected this challenge, and allowed the plebian assembly to join it, alongside the Senate, the obsolete Curiata and the powerful Centuriata. The new body, called the Comitia Tributa (Assembly of the People by Tribes) viewed the protection of plebians' rights as its foremost concern. Two tribunes led it originally; later they increased them to ten. Like the consuls, the tribunes were elected annually, and they gained extraordinary powers. Not only was it illegal to lay hands on them, they could stop any action by a consul, senator, or the Centuriata, simply by calling out "Veto!," meaning "I forbid!"

Next the plebians reformed Roman law. The laws up to this point were not written down but committed to memory by the patricians, who of course only enforced those laws which suited their interests. Plebians wanted laws they could see, so they would know when they were treated fairly. After some more strikes, they succeeded. Around 450 B.C. the government agreed to write down the laws on twelve bronze tablets, and put them on display in the Forum. Law codes were hardly a new idea, but this one started the great tradition of Roman law. It inspired the recording of legal cases, so that lawyers and judges could follow precedent instead of plucking vague customs from memory. The Twelve Tables proved so enduring that Roman schoolboys still memorized them four centuries later.⁽¹⁰⁾

The struggle between patricians and plebians, sometimes called the Struggle of the Orders, continued for a long time to come. Only five years after the creation of the Twelve Tables, for example, the government agreed to do away with the law banning patrician-plebian marriages. Fortunately, neither side let their disputes imperil the common good of the state. Together they promoted a patriotism that increased civic pride and encouraged expansion by conquest. At the time of the Republic's founding, Rome controlled no more than 350 square miles of land, and from the start it found itself in a fight to keep from losing what it had to larger neighbors.

Their first dangerous enemies were the Etruscans. According to tradition, in 506 B.C. Tarquinius Superbus came with Lars Porsenna, the ruler of Clusium, in an unsuccessful attempt to regain Rome. The Etruscan army advanced to the Tiber River, where it was halted by the bravery of a single Roman, Horatius Cocles. Horatius fought alone on the west bank of the river, singlehandedly holding off the invaders while his comrades destroyed the bridge leading over the river to Rome. Once he knew he had saved the city, Horatius jumped into the river, becoming a martyr and the greatest Roman hero.⁽¹¹⁾

Once the Etruscans were gone, Rome faced trouble with the rest of Latium. The Latins had a common language and religion, and similar political institutions; now eight of the twelve Latin communities formed a new alliance, called the Latin League, because they thought Rome was becoming too overbearing. Rome fought a small war with the League and defeated it in the battle at Lake Regillus (493 B.C.), about fifteen miles southeast of Rome. Afterwards both sides signed a treaty and a defense pact, which called for perpetual peace between the Latins and Romans, mutual assistance in time of war, and an equal share of whatever booty might be gained; Rome also relinquished its claim to dominance over Latium. The alliance came in handy when two non-Latin tribes from the Apennines, the Aequi and the Volsci, invaded Latium a few years later. The final victory against these two, however, did not come from either the alliance or the aforementioned campaign of Cincinnatus. It came when Latium formed another alliance, this one bringing the Hernici, a people living between the Aequi and the Volsci, into the Roman-Latin League. This was an early application of what would become a favorite Roman policy--divide and conquer.

Late in the fifth century, the Romans felt ready to finish off the Etruscan city of Veii, which had long been an annoyance to them. Only a dozen miles north of Rome and on the opposite bank of the Tiber, Rome and Veii had quarreled since earliest times over who could mine the salt pans at the mouth of the river. The two cities had fought twice (483-474 and 438-426), with inconclusive results. This time the Roman army, now vastly improved after fighting other enemies, laid siege to Veii. According to the account the siege lasted for a full decade, and in it Rome's first professional army came into existence; soldiers accustomed to a single summer campaign were paid to stay on the front lines all year round. When Veii finally surrendered in 396 B.C., the Roman commander, Marcus Furius Camillus, annexed both the city and the land it ruled, doubling the size of Rome's territory in one stroke. Most of this land promptly went to the poor to keep the plebians happy. Veii had help from three other Etruscan city-states, so these were marked for punishment next. Two of them, the small towns of Sutrium and Nepi, fell in 387; Caere was taken in 384. Rome gave these lands to its allies, so they could have something to show for their efforts. Though it acted generous in victory, Rome had regained its status as the leading city of Latium.

Next came one of those military events which changed the course of history. Several tribes of Celtic warriors, called Gauls by the Romans, migrated over the Alps from Switzerland and southern Germany; their women, children, servants and livestock followed behind, with their belongings piled high on wagons. In the same year as the Roman conquest of Veii, the Gauls captured the northernmost Etruscan settlement, Melpum, and destroyed it completely; now the Po River valley became theirs. Then a horde of 30,000 screaming warriors, led by a chieftain named Brennus, surged down the peninsula. They attacked Clusium in 391, and some Roman ambassadors on the scene tried, without success, to persuade the Gauls to turn back. The following year a hastily enrolled Roman army met the Gauls on the Allia River (a tributary of the Tiber), and was utterly defeated. With nothing left between them and Rome, the Gauls poured into the city and sacked it, capturing everything except the citadel and the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.⁽¹²⁾ They remained for seven months, looting, burning and terrifying the inhabitants of the city. Finally the Celts ran low on food and an epidemic of dysentery set in, so they decided to return home. Before they left, they heaped another humiliation on the Romans, forcing them to pay 1,000 pounds of gold for their freedom. When Camillus protested that the weights used by the Celts to measure the gold were too heavy, and thus dishonest, Brennus threw his iron sword on the scale and said "Vae victis!" ("Woe to the vanquished!"), a phrase that has haunted the discussions of ransoms ever since.

Rome Becomes the Capital of Italy

Then two tribunes, Licinius and Sextus, passed a sweeping set of reforms that softened the pitiless old laws on debtors⁽¹³⁾, and opened all state offices to plebians, even the consulship; they now required that one of the two consuls be a plebian. In practice, though, what really happened was that the patricians made a deal with the well-to-do plebians. Once a pleb joined the elite, he became as conservative as a blue-blooded old patrician.

The ancients never wondered why Rome became the capital of the known world; according to legend Romulus predicted it would be a great city. Whenever Rome needed it, the Senate and people acted with a courage and discipline that both deserved and ensured the favor of the gods. But history is crowded with brave people who failed (the Celts, for instance), so now historians look for a less glorious answer in social and economic statistics.

The strength of united Italy is obvious from the number of legions fielded in the Punic Wars and the course after 300 B.C. makes sense. The part with the question mark is the fourth century B.C., when Rome became mistress over the whole Italian peninsula. The city had no natural resources, no manufacturing industry, no trade; in a nutshell, its population never should have grown beyond 10,000. Yet it grew anyway and this growth seems to have started before the conquests that allowed it to keep its size. Within a generation of its sacking by the Gauls, Rome was the largest city in both Latium and Etruria. Perhaps the Gauls, by displaying the vulnerability of small towns, taught the Romans that joining together would give them strength.

It may be that we won't fully understand why this happened until we understand the facet of human nature that prefers urban to rural poverty, why big cities attract people beyond their ability to employ them all, and why sponsored programs of emigration always fail to solve the problems of overcrowding and unemployment. In other words, the key to the mystery of Rome's rise to greatness may lie in the slums of South-Central Los Angeles.

The constant need for cheap grain was an important factor in Rome's overseas policy, just as today the need for cheap petroleum drives U.S. policy in the Middle East. In the fourth century B.C. the Romans got their grain by conquering the plain of Campania. This was followed by the conquest of Sicily & Sardinia, then the Carthaginian part of Africa, and finally Egypt; a bigger granary was needed in each century.⁽¹⁴⁾ One reason why expansion nearly stopped in the reign of Caesar Augustus (see the next chapter) may have been because there were no unconquered lands left in the known world, that produced as much grain as those places.

Another motivator for conquest was the desire for security. The Romans never put forth a plan for world conquest, but were always suspicious of whoever lived outside their growing domain. They seemed to have had the feeling that if they could just conquer the land beyond the next hill, Rome would be safe at last. Instead, each time they conquered a hostile neighbor, they found themselves with a new neighbor just a little bit farther away who also needed taming. As the territories filled with Roman citizens, they needed protection too, so Rome became occupied with defending its buffer zones as well. Ultimately this cycle went on until Rome no longer had the resources to expand any more.⁽¹⁵⁾

The growth of Rome made sure that the various Italian tribes would accept their new masters. Instead of continuing to revolt, the citizens of other towns migrated to the new capital and cultural center, thus confirming her status; whether they were Latins, Etruscans or something else, their ethnic identity disappeared as they became Romans. To paraphrase another famous saying, when in Rome they learned to do as the Romans do. Although the patricians opposed this influx and tried to reverse it by encouraging Romans to move out, they could not halt the growth--only slow it a bit. Again, there was an economic reason for this: the importation of cheap grain deprived the Italian farmer of his market and profit, so he abandoned his farm and moved to the city, where he completed the vicious circle by adding his voice to the demand for more cheap grain.

While Rome experienced her own rocketing expansion as a city, she did less than nothing for the urbanization of her provinces. True, we can scarcely call the settlements in Spain and Gaul cities, but in the already civilized areas the legions brought disaster. They wasted Carthage and Corinth, and the treatment Syracuse got insured that she would never be a first-rate city again. With Athens the Romans were sentimental--they made her a gift of Delos--but before 100 B.C. the most successful cities within the Roman sphere were the Campanian towns of Naples⁽¹⁶⁾, Puteoli and Capua. Their wine, oil, pottery and metalwork supplied the Italian market, the colonists in the provinces and, as they gradually acquired Roman tastes, the Republic's non-Roman subjects.

In theory the Etruscans still should have been the strongest people in Italy. In practice their fleet could no longer compete when the Carthaginians and the Greeks ganged up against it (this happened after they supported the disastrous campaign of Athens against Sicily in 413 B.C.). Their twelve-city league never worked very well, either; we saw how it had failed to stop the Romans from taking Veii, and how it couldn't keep the Gauls from wasting the whole country. In fact, between wars with outside enemies, the Etruscan city-states fought each other frequently. In 358 the city of Tarquinii started a war to recover the lands lost to the Latins, but it got nowhere and agreed to a truce seven years later.

The Samnite Wars

This caused great resentment among Rome's allies. Since the threat which brought them together (the Etruscans & Celts) no longer worried them, and their combined effort against the Samnites had resulted in a draw, the Latin cities decided it was time to let their league die a natural death. However, Rome had other ideas. Their arguing led to a two-year war (the Latin War, 340-338), which Rome won. Once the war was over, Rome turned around and dissolved the Latin League, because all its members were now part of the Roman state. Then in 329 the Romans annexed the Volsci, adding another line of defense in case they had to fight the Samnites again.

Sure enough, a second confrontation between Rome and Samnium came in 327, when the Samnites put the squeeze on Naples. A pro-Samnite faction gained control of that city, and the Romans laid siege to it until the Samnite garrison inside agreed to leave. Now that Naples passed to the Romans, activity shifted to the hills of the Samnite country. Here everything favored the locals; the Roman army was still primitive at this stage, meaning that other Italians could beat it, and Samnium controlled most of the land between Latium and Campania. The Romans, on the other hand, had great difficulty fighting their way into the Appenines, and precious little to show for it after that.⁽¹⁷⁾ In 321 B.C. the entire Roman army (which at this time consisted of 8,000 men, divided into two legions) was trapped in a valley, forced to surrender, and made to pass under a yoke mounted on poles--a great dishonor. The Samnites let the legions go in return for a favorable peace treaty and the Romans were so discouraged that they kept the treaty for four years.

A compromise in their favor was all the Samnites wanted and expected; this was the usual way to end a tribal war. However, the Romans wanted to conquer the Samnites, so they trained themselves in the tactics needed for mountain warfare. When they returned for a rematch in 316, they showed a determination that was new in Italian warfare. By this time the Romans had learned that their willingness to wage long conflicts was a characteristic they had and their opponents lacked; although they frequently lost their battles, they usually won their wars.

It was part of Rome's policy to protect spots of the frontier that looked vulnerable, by planting fortified colonies on them. On average they founded one colony every ten years for most of the fourth century B.C. Now (between 315 and 290) they averaged a new colony every two years. Not all new settlements were established with defense in mind; some were put in locations that made them advance bases for attacks into Samnite territory, but indefensible should the tide turn against the Romans. The most remarkable of these was Luceria, built to the east of Samnium in 314. To get to it the Romans formed an alliance with a local tribe, the Oscans.

The second half of the Second Samnite War lasted 12 years. The Roman army, now increased to four legions, slowly gained the upper hand. In 311 the Samnites persuaded the Etruscans to attack Rome from the north, but the Romans beat them at Lake Vadimo and imposed a separate peace treaty (308). Ringed in by the Roman colonies, the Samnites never managed an effective counterattack; gradually their resistance crumbled. In 305 Bovianum (modern Benevento, Beneventum in Latin), the Samnite capital, was taken by storm. The next Roman-Samnite truce was all in Rome's favor.

The third and last Samnite war began in 298, when the Samnites formed an alliance with the Gauls, Etruscans, Sabines, Umbrians, and Lucanians to stop Roman expansion. Only once did these allies get together, and when they did, at the battle of Sentinum (295, near modern Ancona) the Romans broke the northern half of the coalition and added Umbria to their territory. Then the Romans annexed Rusellae, Perusia and Volsinii, and forced the remaining Etruscan cities to sign a 40-year truce and pay a heavy indemnity. One by one the other members of the coalition dropped out, until only the Samnites were left. When the Samnites sued for peace in 290, they were treated mercifully, since the Romans considered them valiant opponents, but now they were absorbed into the Roman state.

So, to their surprise, were the Oscans and the Etruscans. The treaties of alliance which the Oscans had signed, and the peace treaty that the Etruscans accepted, were now declared to bind them to Roman service; what they thought was a friendly handshake turned into a permanent grip. There were revolts, but these were uncoordinated and put down easily. To discourage further resistance Rome imposed harsher treaties. Land was confiscated, and more Roman colonists and road-builders went forth, cementing Roman rule over all of central Italy.

Pyrrhus

The man who came to champion the cause of Hellenism against the Romans was Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus (see Chapter 2). He arrived at Tarentum in 281 with a large army (20,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, and twenty elephants) and even larger ambitions. In the first battle with the Romans, at Heraclea, the infantry of both sides clashed several times before Pyrrhus turned loose his elephants. The Romans had never seen elephants before, and fled in panic, but not before inflicting heavy casualties: Rome lost 7,000 men, while Pyrrhus lost 4,000. Pyrrhus won the next battle, at Ausculum, which was nearly as bloody: Rome lost 6,000, Pyrrhus lost 3,505. "Another such victory and I am lost," Pyrrhus reportedly said, leading to the term "Pyrrhic victory" to describe a struggle won at too great a cost. Then he marched on Rome, stopping only thirty miles from the city, but the Romans refused to talk peace.

At this point (278 B.C.) the Greeks of Sicily also called for help, since the Carthaginians were besieging Syracuse, so Pyrrhus withdrew from Italy; he preferred dramatic victories to the task of grinding down Rome's legions. His success on Sicily was rapid; by 277 he had captured all the Carthaginian bases except Lilybaeum, on the island's western tip, and imagined Sicily as his second kingdom. The Sicilian Greeks, however, were no more willing to submit to him than to Carthage; they revolted and Pyrrhus returned to Italy. At Maleventum in Campania, the Romans defeated his large and unruly army, so he abandoned his Italian allies to fight with Macedonia's King Antigonus II (275). Three years later he was killed in a street brawl in Argos, so the Romans didn't have to face him in any more rematches.

Rome and Carthage were allies at this stage, for Carthage could not afford to have a strong power established as close to her as Sicily. Rome seemed a lesser threat than a second Alexander the Great, so the Carthaginians sent a fleet, captained by an admiral named Mago, to defend the mouth of the Tiber. With the war's end, Rome and Carthage split the reward: Carthage got all of Sicily but Syracuse, and Rome annexed Magna Graecia, making herself master of all Italy from the Po to the toe. Now Rome looked across the Straits of Messina, and imagined Carthage as a new, more dangerous rival. When Pyrrhus left Italy he predicted war between the two allies, by declaring, "What a battlefield I am leaving for Carthage and Rome!" That prophecy came true only eleven years later, in the first of three Punic Wars.

Carthage

Carthage's early constitution provided for a king, aristocratic senate, and popular assembly. Perhaps originally hereditary, the kingship was generally elective but was held for life. In the 3rd century BC the king was replaced by two chief magistrates, called shophets⁽¹⁹⁾, elected annually from the aristocracy, and by elected generals who held long-term commands and were often highly professional and successful. Membership in the senate, which was several hundred strong and discussed all important business, was for life. The assembly voted only on great issues such as war and peace or on issues that the other branches of government failed to resolve. In the mid-5th or early 4th century BC, a body of 104 senatorial judges was created to oversee the king. They later oversaw the magistrates and generals, but a reform of Hannibal, as shophet (c.196 BC), mandated their annual election and forbade consecutive terms.

The Carthaginian government was less stable than that of the Romans. In fact, it was a plutocracy (government or rule by the richest), whose main policy always seems to have been "let those in charge get more money." Around 520 B.C., Carthage abandoned a citizen army and began to rely heavily on mercenaries. Modern historians often criticize this shift, but Carthage's small population base forced it. By contrast, the Romans had been brought up on the virtues of pietas, simplicitas, gravitas (dignity), and civic responsibility, so they saw the Carthaginian way of life as disgusting. It also didn't help that the Carthaginians worshiped Phoenician deities like Baal, Tanit, and Melkart, and often sacrificed their children to them. In 153 B.C., the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato visited Carthage, and was so horrified by their lack of morals that from then on he finished every speech with the words "Delenda est Carthago!" (Carthage must be destroyed).⁽²⁰⁾

The First Punic War

On Sicily the two forces clashed, beginning the First Punic War in 264 B.C..⁽²¹⁾ The Romans managed to get across the strait of Messina, despite a Carthaginian blockade, and they spared no expense; both consuls and four legions--the whole levy of troops for that year--took part in the crossing. Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, decided to ally himself with Carthage, but he was defeated in the first battle. Very lenient terms persuaded him to switch sides; all he had to do was pay a hundred talents to Rome, and provide supplies for the Roman army. Hiero supported the Romans for the rest of the war, and they used Syracuse as their port when shipping reinforcements.

The Romans were better fighters on land, no question about that, and they overran the interior of Sicily within a year. The only Sicilian city which put up significant resistance was Acragas, which fell after a five-month siege. Carthage, however, had ruled the sea for centuries, meaning their fleet could go anywhere at will and supply their coastal forts indefinitely. Although they were landlubbers, the Romans overcame this disadvantage with luck and a clever invention. One of the mainline Carthaginian fighting ships, a quinquereme, ran aground on an Italian beach. The Romans captured it, hired some Greek naval architects to show them how to build ships, and used the wreck as their model to build a hundred quinqueremes in two months. Then for good measure, they also built twenty of the smaller Greek-style warships (triremes). To offset their lack of sailing skills, the Romans made the hulls thicker to increase protection, and fitted a boarding apparatus on the mast of each quinquereme. This device, called a corvus ("crow"), was a drawbridge which they dropped on the enemy's deck when the ship got close enough (it had a beak-shaped spike on its underside to keep the two ships together). Once the bridge went down, Roman legionaries rushed across and did the rest; since there were few marines on the Carthaginian ships, the battle was as good as over when that happened. This simple way of turning a sea battle into a land battle made it possible for the Romans to destroy the Carthaginian navy.

The corvus had its biggest success the first time it was used, at the battle of Mylae (260); Rome sank fourteen ships and captured thirty-one. At the battle of Ecnomus (256) in which more than seven hundred ships participated, the Carthaginians out maneuvered the Romans, but showed they learned nothing from the first disaster; the Romans sank thirty ships and captured sixty-four.

Even with command of the sea the Romans found the struggle hard and long. The fleet that won the battle of Ecnomus continued to Africa, carrying an army led by a general named Regulus. Regulus succeeded in capturing Tunis, but the Carthaginians had a Spartan named Xanthippus working for them, and his mercenaries threw the invaders back into the sea. On the way home the fleet was caught in a storm, which wrecked 184 ships and drowned 100,000 men; this was the worst sea disaster in history. Rome replaced them by building 140 ships in three months, and used the new fleet to capture Palermo, which has the finest harbor in Sicily (251).⁽²²⁾ Then in 253 a second gale sank the Roman fleet; 150 ships were lost, and since each quinquereme typically had three hundred oarsmen and a hundred soldiers on board, this set the Romans back considerably, leaving them in as bad shape as the Carthaginians were in. Activity now shifted to the last Carthaginian fort, Lilybaeum. Carthage won a great naval battle in the vicinity (the battle of Drepanum, 249); Rome lost 93 ships and 28,000 men (8,000 killed, the rest captured). Before the year was up the Romans lost a third fleet of 120 warships and eight hundred transports, partly in battle and partly in a storm.

For seven more years the nearly exhausted combatants fought a war of raids and sieges, during which Carthage had a better time of it at sea. Then Rome exerted enough effort to build one more fleet, of two hundred vessels. These were sent to Lilybaeum, and at the battle of the Aegates Islands, they won the victory they needed, sinking 50 Carthaginian ships and capturing 70 (242). Carthage couldn't take any more, and sued for peace. Rome's first overseas venture had been a success, won by her usual method of grinding down the enemy. In the treaty ending the war (241), Carthage agreed to evacuate Sicily, and pay an indemnity of 3,200 talents (about $20 million in 1990s dollars); Syracuse became a Roman client while the rest of Sicily became a conquered province.

The next twenty-two years were a time without prosperity. Both sides suffered from the usual hardship and disorganization that comes after a big war. Carthage in particular suffered from violent disorder; the returning soldiers could not get their pay, mutinied and looted; much of the land went uncultivated. Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general, used horrible cruelties to suppress these uprisings, crucifying more than a thousand troublemakers by 237. Corsica and Sardinia revolted, and Rome used that as an excuse to annex them in 241 and 238 B.C., respectively. There was a bloody six-year war with the Gauls, in which Rome killed 40,000 Gauls and pushed its northern frontier from the Po to the Alps (226-220).⁽²³⁾ The Adriatic swarmed with Illyrian pirates, which caused so much trouble for Greece and Italy that Rome would be forced to annex Illyria before long (219).

Carthage no longer had control of the sea, but it saw new opportunities on land. By strengthening control over Algeria and Morocco, it established a base to conquer the interior of Spain. Spain's treasure hoard of metals allowed Carthage to pay off its debt to Rome on time (which is why Rome permitted the Carthaginians to invade Spain in the first place), and hardy men of Celtic and Iberian stock filled the ranks of the depleted army. To lead the troops and govern the new territory, Carthage sent Hamilcar in 237 B.C., and he brought his nine-year-old son, Hannibal. In 228 Hamilcar fell in battle, and his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, took his place. Hasdrubal built up the expeditionary force until it numbered 50,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 200 elephants, and founded a second city named Carthage--modern Cartagena--to serve as the capital of Spain (the Romans called it Carthago Nova, meaning New Carthage). Then Hasdrubal was murdered in 220, and command passed to young Hannibal.⁽²⁴⁾

Left to themselves, the Carthaginians probably would not have challenged Rome again. But the Romans were not prepared to leave any potential rival or enemy alone. When Rome seized Corsica and Sardinia, it fined Carthage an additional 1,200 talents to cover the cost of pacification. In 225 the Romans got concerned about the safety of Massilia and northwest Italy, and made Hasdrubal promise not to cross the Ebro River. In 221 Rome decided to extend protection to Saguntum (modern Valencia), a Spanish town that lay south of the Ebro and was pro-Roman in its sympathies.

The Carthaginians realized that it was now or never. Hannibal was given the go-ahead and he took Saguntum by siege (219). The Romans did not assist the defenders, perhaps because both of their consuls were busy in Illyria at the time, but still Carthage expected war in a mood of grim determination. According to one account, an embassy went to the Carthaginian senate to demand that Hannibal be turned over to Rome for punishment. When Carthage refused, an elderly Roman named Fabius Buteo grasped the part of his toga over his breast, and said that from its folds, he could shake out either peace or war. The Carthaginians left the choice to him, and Fabius let go of the folds, shouting, "We give you war!"

Hannibal and the Second Punic War

Of the 46,000 men Hannibal started with, only 26,000 survived to gaze on the Po River. The local Roman commander took one look at the survivors and declared: "They are the ghosts and shadows of men already half dead. All their strength has been crushed and beaten out of them by the Alpine crags." He was badly mistaken; this part of Italy had only recently been conquered by Rome and the Gauls who lived there eagerly joined Hannibal. The strength of his army grew until it was equal to that of the four legions the Romans now hurriedly concentrated against him (the two on their way to Africa were recalled when they got as far as Sicily). Scipio also returned, when he realized that Hannibal was headed for Italy, not Massilia. He assembled 20,000 men at the junction of the Po and Ticino Rivers, near modern Pavia, and got the worst of it when Hannibal attacked with his cavalry. Scipio was wounded in the battle of Ticinus, and had to withdraw downstream and wait until reinforcements arrived. When that happened, Hannibal provoked the reconstituted Roman army into crossing the Trebia River to attack him, and once it was too late for them to pull back, he counterattacked on their flanks. The Romans broke through to the Carthaginian center where Hannibal had placed his Gallic recruits, but Hannibal's veterans closed in from the sides and cut off about half the Roman army. Pushing it back against the river they massacred it.

After this the Romans took Hannibal more seriously. They rebuilt their northern army to its original strength of four legions and raised five new legions for the defense of Rome (2), Sicily (2) and Sardinia (1). They were not entirely on the defensive; at the mouth of the Ebro, Cnaeus Scipio (the brother of Publius) won a naval victory that was as good as Hannibal's victory at the Trebia. Even so, in Italy all they could think of was defense, so they split their northern army into two forces: one guarded Etruria, the other the Adriatic coast.

Hannibal slipped between the two and turned southeast. The two legions defending Etruria followed him, just a day behind. He marched along the road that leads past Lake Trasimene, stopped there, and waited for them to catch up. They found Hannibal's infantry standing fast in the foothills on the opposite side of the road from the lake; his two cavalry wings moved in to block the road in front of and behind the Roman column. This time there was no escape; both legions were annihilated.⁽²⁶⁾

From Lake Trasimene Hannibal continued moving east until he reached the Adriatic. Then he turned south for Apulia. The Romans built up their main army in Italy to four legions again, and by the summer of 216 they were ready for another battle. Once more they let Hannibal choose the place--at Cannae--though this time they made sure they had no water at their backs.

The Roman army was larger than Hannibal's by a factor of four to three, but it was almost entirely infantry; the Carthaginian cavalry was larger and better. So Hannibal picked a flat, treeless battlefield, ideal for cavalry fighting. He knew that the Romans would try a frontal charge to break the Carthaginian center, and that his infantry would have a hard time holding back an attack from four legions. So he decided to let the Romans have their way--up to a point. For bait he put the Gauls in the center and farthest forward, with the Spaniards on each side; behind them and on each flank were placed the Carthaginian heavy infantry; a cavalry wing on each end completed the formation. Because the Gallic and Spanish troops were new recruits, with lower morale than the veterans from Africa, Hannibal stationed himself in the center as well, using his presence to keep them from breaking when the Romans attacked.

The first part of the battle went as both sides expected. The Carthaginian cavalry swept the weak Roman cavalry from the field while in the center the Gauls were forced back by the weight of all four Roman legions. Or so it appeared. Hannibal had ordered the Gauls to fall back slowly and shorten their line so that as they retreated their formation strengthened. The flanking columns of Carthaginian and Spanish infantry spread out to keep the Romans from getting around the Gauls.

The pace of the Roman advance slowed as they started bumping into each other on the narrowing front. Then it stopped. The Romans became uneasily aware that they were in a box, surrounded by infantry on three sides. They also realized that the Carthaginian cavalry was behind them, but it had not rushed off to loot the unguarded Roman camp (something soldiers will do when they get the opportunity). That was when Hannibal closed the lid of the box.

Surrounding a force larger than your own is always a risky move, and in some places the Carthaginian line was only three ranks deep, meaning that the Romans could have broken out if they had charged at one of those spots. Instead they panicked, being a force of mostly green troops (after Ticinus, Trebia and Lake Trasimene, veteran soldiers were hard to come by). The rest of the battle was a massacre. Exaggerating their defeat, the Romans claimed to have lost 70,000 men, which was probably twice the real number. Nevertheless it was the worst defeat Rome ever suffered; those four legions were all but destroyed.⁽²⁷⁾

Cannae was the peak of Hannibal's career. The road to Rome was now wide open, but he could not clinch his victory by taking the city because his army lacked the food and equipment for a long siege. His brilliant Numidian cavalry commander, Marhabal, urged him to attack anyway, promising that, "Within five days, you will take your dinner, in triumph, on the Capitol!" Hannibal refused, and a disgusted Marhabal said, "You know, Hannibal, how to win a fight. You do not know how to use your victory."

Capua went over to Hannibal when he promised to make it the future capital of Italy. The southern tribes that Rome conquered a few decades earlier (the Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians) also defected, but the rest of the Roman state held together. We already saw how Rome had more willpower than her opponents to endure a long war; Cannae would have caused most nations to sue for peace immediately, but it made the Romans want to beat Hannibal even more. Throughout the whole war, as Livy put it, the Romans "breathed not a word of peace." (22.61)

Of course there was panic, at first; nobody in Rome expected four legions--fighting on their home ground, using superior weapons, massed in the largest formation seen in Italy so far--to be defeated, let alone obliterated. The Romans reacted with superstition, the way they had during the latest war against the Gauls, looking for a sign that the gods were angry with them. They learned that two of the Vestal Virgins, the famous priestesses who tended sacred fires in the temple of Vesta, had broken their vows of celibacy; one was entombed alive, while the other committed suicide. Then they consulted the Sibyline Books, a collection of three-hundred-year-old scrolls that supposedly contained instructions on how to deal with any crisis, and sent an embassy to Greece ask the Oracle of Delphi what to do. Finally the population called for a human sacrifice, so two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive.

After that the Romans pulled together, acting in unison for the common goal of defending their nation; the next few years were later remembered as Rome's darkest (and finest) hour. A temporary dictatorship was appointed for the purpose of replacing the four lost legions as fast as possible. To do it, the dictator, Marcus Junius, freed 6,000 convicted prisoners, bought and armed slaves, and accepted boys as young as sixteen. After that massive recruiting continued, until the Roman army had a total of 25 legions.

Nothing could persuade them to face Hannibal on the battlefield again, so for the next fourteen years the war in Italy was a cat-and-mouse game.⁽²⁸⁾ Hannibal could not be everywhere, and wherever he wasn't at any particular time the Romans were busy bringing part of the land back under their control. In 211 they recaptured Capua, in 209 Tarentum.

Hannibal's biggest problem was getting fresh recruits; the cities he had liberated were only willing to send a few volunteers. He formed an alliance with Philip V, the king of Macedonia, but Philip never got around to sending any Macedonian troops to Italy. A key factor at this stage was the Senate's decision to leave the Scipio brothers in Spain, even when Hannibal threatened the heart of Italy; this deprived Hannibal of reinforcements from Iberia and Africa. In Spain Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother, took command of the Carthaginian forces. He marched to the Ebro in 215 and tried the same formation that Hannibal used at Cannae; instead his center broke, causing a rout of the Carthaginian army. However, the Scipios commanded a small army, so after this they tried to win over the Spanish tribes by diplomacy rather than by force. They managed to capture Saguntum in 212, but that was the end of their winning streak. In 211 the Carthaginians managed to isolate and kill the Scipio brothers in two separate battles, and Rome lost everything it had gained south of the Ebro; only a quarrel among the three Carthaginian generals (Hasdrubal, his brother Mago and another Hasdrubal, the son of Gisgo), kept Carthage from advancing into Gaul at this point.

The Romans raised a new army for Spain in 210, and sent it under Publius Cornelius Scipio, the son of the first Scipio by that name. This Scipio was only twenty-five years old, too young by law to be placed in command (the minimum age was 35), but his leadership skills were widely known; he was a survivor of the battles of Ticinus and Cannae, and that gave him a unique understanding of Hannibal's skill with tactics, troops and terrain. In addition, he was very popular, so Rome let him go anyway. He arrived to find the three enemy generals in different parts of Spain, trying to consolidate Carthaginian power over the whole peninsula. A surprise move by him shifted the situation back in Rome's favor; he made a forced march down the coast and captured Carthago Nova, which only had a small garrison to guard it because it was hundreds of miles behind the front lines. This gave Scipio a secure base and control over half of Spain's silver. Both sides stayed put until 208, when Scipio advanced into the Baetis valley. Hasdrubal the brother of Hannibal tried to stop him, but disengaged when he saw he was about to be outflanked by the larger Roman force; by the time he got away he had lost a third of his 25,000 men. Then he decided that he could do more good helping Hannibal, so he began the long march to Italy; Scipio had to let him go, because chasing Hasdrubal would have meant ending a successful campaign in Spain.

Meanwhile in Italy, the war became a war of attrition, with both sides suffering badly. Roman census figures give us an idea of how bad things were for them: in 220 B.C. they could call up 270,000 able-bodied men to arms, but twelve years later scarcely 130,000 were available. This meant that their legions would have to fight under-strength, unless they recruited enough non-Roman auxiliaries to make up the difference. Then came the news that Hasdrubal was on the way from Spain with a second Carthaginian army to reinforce the first. Hasdrubal rounded the west end of the Pyrenees, wintered among a tribe in central Gaul called the Arverni⁽²⁹⁾, and marched over the Alps in the spring of 207. His Alp crossing was a lot easier than Hannibal's because he did it at the right time of year, and because he had the cooperation of the natives. He descended into Italy like a snowball, his army swollen by the allies he had gathered on the way from Spain. This was Rome's worst nightmare. If the two brothers met, they would have a force big enough to make the long-delayed march on Rome, and that would be the end of the Republic.

Fifteen legions rushed north to deal with this new threat. The importance of this campaign is shown in that both of the current consuls, Caius Claudius Nero and Marcus Livius, were there to lead it. They caught up with Hasdrubal on the Adriatic coast next to a small river called the Metaurus, about 200 miles north of Hannibal's current location. Hasdrubal heard they were coming and withdrew to more favorable ground the night before.⁽³⁰⁾ Both sides divided their forces into three parts; on the Carthaginian side Hasdrubal commanded the Spanish force on the right, while the center was made up of Ligurians and Gauls formed the left. At dawn Livius made a frontal attack on the Carthaginian right while Nero, instead of guarding the Roman right from the Gauls, sneaked behind the other Romans, outflanked the Carthaginian right and hit both Spaniards and Ligurians from the rear. The Carthaginians, completely demoralized by this surprise move, panicked. Hasdrubal's army was completely beaten, losing 10,000 men (including Hasdrubal); Roman losses were about 2,000 men. It was the miracle the Romans needed.

Rome finally felt confident enough to go on the offensive. While Hannibal was kept running circles in south Italy (and achieving less each year), Scipio won the decisive battle in Spain. In 206 he encountered a larger army, led by the other Hasdrubal, at Alcala del Rio, a few miles north of modern Seville. For several days the two sides maneuvered, each one drawing up formations that placed its elite force in the center; in addition, Hasdrubal kept the usual Carthaginian elephants in the front. Then one morning Scipio made his attack, moving so early that the Carthaginians did not even have time for breakfast. On this occasion he did the opposite of what he had done the other days, putting his Spanish troops in the center and the Romans on the wings, to encircle the Carthaginians. Hasdrubal found his cavalry neutralized by his elephants, which stampeded in the wrong direction to flee from the Roman cavalry. In the end Hasdrubal managed to get away with his best troops, the Africans, but otherwise the battle was another Cannae, this time with the Romans making the enveloping move.

Hasdrubal the son of Gisgo escaped by ship from Gades (modern Cadiz) to Africa. The remaining Carthaginian general, Hannibal's brother Mago, tried to take Carthago Nova, failed, and returned to find that the people of Gades had locked him out. Then Mago departed, and Scipio could claim that the conquest of Spain was complete. At the end of 206, Scipio sailed to Italy and got himself elected consul for the following year. Mago landed on the Ligurian coast of Italy with a new army in 205, but after the battle of the Metaurus, the Gauls no longer wanted to help, so his attempt to join Hannibal got nowhere; he died of a wound on the way back to Africa. After his term as consul ended, Scipio invaded Africa with 25,000 men (204). Within a year he captured Tunis, defeated the Numidian allies of Carthage, and broke the defending Carthaginian armies; only Hannibal's was left.

Carthage called Hannibal home in 202 and staked everything on one last battle in Tunisia. At Zama Hannibal had 80 elephants, but otherwise Scipio's force was superior in every way. Scipio (soon to be called Scipio Africanus) had a fine cavalry, recruited from the Numidians, two veteran legions and a cool head. When the pachyderms saw the Romans coming at them with spears they turned and trampled the infantry they were supposed to clear a path for. A step-by-step destruction of the last Carthaginian army followed. Carthage surrendered, gave up her empire and war fleet, and agreed to pay ten thousand talents (about $67.2 million). Most difficult of all, Carthage agreed not to go to war without Rome's permission, and to hand over Hannibal to the Romans.⁽³¹⁾ The greatest rivalry of classical times was over.

Before we go on, a few words would be appropriate about the side show that went on in Sicily while the main events took place in Italy. Hiero, the pro-Roman ruler of Syracuse during the First Punic War, died in 215, and his successor Hieronymus switched to Carthage. A Roman fleet came to attack the port, and it held out for three years, due to the genius of one man, the Greek scientist Archimedes. Long-range and short-range catapults were used effectively, and Archimedes put huge pincers on the city walls to crush or capsize the ships that got too close. According to one account, he even invented a type of laser; large parabolic mirrors were used to focus sunlight on distant ships, setting them on fire. After that all Archimedes had to do was show a log or rope on the wall, and the Romans would flee in panic, thinking it was some diabolical new device.

Finally Syracuse celebrated a holiday, and the Romans used the occasion to sneak in through an unguarded tower on the wall, thus capturing the city. Archimedes was drawing a geometry problem on the dirt floor of his house when a Roman soldier burst in and ordered him out. Without looking up, Archimedes said, "Do not disturb my circles," and the impatient Roman killed the old scientist. Since then this incident has been used by those who want to contrast Greek high-mindedness with Roman heavy-handedness.

Roman Intervention in the East

Rome had made its first move in this direction just before the outbreak of the Second Punic War, when they occupied the part of the Illyrian coast nearest the heel of Italy (an area almost identical to modern-day Albania). Greed or a lust for conquest did not sponsor this, but the need to suppress piracy in the Adriatic. Then they lost interest in the east while Hannibal was threatening them at home, until they were invited by Pergamun, a city-state in western Asia Minor. It was the Pergamenes who talked the war-weary Romans into sending their legions east to overthrow first Macedonia, and then the Seleucid kingdom.

Recently those two kingdoms had agreed to cooperate in dismantling the empire of the Ptolemies, the Greek kings who lorded over Egypt, Cyrenaica and most of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. In the same year as the battle of Zama, Macedonia's Philip V and Antiochus III of the Seleucid (Syrian) Greeks began the carving process. Pergamun saw that if Egypt fell, the little states of Greece and Asia Minor would soon be swallowed up by the victors. In 201 a Pergamene embassy went to Rome to ask the Senate for military assistance.

Persuading the senators to declare war on Philip wasn't very difficult. Philip was an open supporter of Hannibal and had made a sneak attack on Roman Illyria during the Second Punic War. The Romans never forgot this--nor did they forget that the Pergamenes had joined in the Roman naval counterattack that stopped Philip. Now the Romans sent Philip an ultimatum and when he rejected it, they dispatched two legions to Greece. At the battle of Cynoscephalae ("the dog's head") in 197 the Romans won a complete victory. The peace treaty they dictated was generous: Philip kept most of Macedonia while the rest of Greece was declared free. Grateful Greeks thanked the Romans with a eulogy that could apply to modern-day America:

"There was one people in the world which would fight for others' liberties at its own cost, to its own peril, and with its own toil, not limiting its guaranties of freedom to its neighbors, to men of the immediate vicinity, or to countries that lay close at hand, but ready to cross the sea that there might be no unjust empire anywhere and that everywhere justice, right, and law might prevail."⁽³²⁾

Antiochus III was impressed by the speed with which the Romans had disposed of his ally. But he had just chased Ptolemy V out of Israel and Lebanon, and was in no mood to let the Romans give him orders. Pergamun watched anxiously as the Romans offered to leave Antiochus alone if he kept out of Europe. Luckily for them he refused the offer. In 192 he advanced into Greece but was soon booted out again. Scipio Africanus led the Roman counterattack; at Magnesia in Ionia he destroyed the main army of Antiochus (190). Afterwards the peace terms were still not severe; Antiochus merely had to yield his holdings in western Asia Minor to Pergamun. Yet the blow to the Seleucid kingdom was mortal; it could never take on any state its own size after that. The Seleucids were checked again in 168 B.C., when a Roman ultimatum halted their invasion of Egypt. A year later Rome declared that it would support the Jews in their successful revolt against the Seleucids, by sending this message to the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes:

"Wherefore hast thou made thy yoke heavy upon our friends and confederates the Jews? If therefore they complain any more against thee, we will do them justice, and fight with thee by sea and by land."⁽³³⁾

At first Rome acquired no new territory in Macedonia or Greece, just protectorates. Roman idealism turned sour when anti-Roman sentiment arose in Greece, particularly among the radical masses who resented Rome's support of conservative governments and the status quo, as opposed to socialist revolutions like those recently attempted in Sparta. In 171 Perseus, the new king of Macedonia, started making alliances with the other Greek city-states to throw off the Roman yoke. This resulted in the Third Macedonian War; with some help from Pergamun, Rome annihilated the Macedonian army again, took Perseus to Rome as a captive, abolished the Macedonian monarchy and divided the kingdom into four states (168). A second Macedonian uprising occurred when a pretender appeared and reunited the country, causing Rome to turn Macedonia into a Roman province (148). Two years later the Greeks caused unrest, so Rome destroyed Corinth, a hotbed of anti-Romanism, as a lesson to the rest of Greece.⁽³⁴⁾ Then they turned Greece into the province of Achaia, with a rebuilt Corinth as its capital, and placed it under the watchful eye of the governor of Macedonia.

The Third Punic War

The Carthaginians sent the hostages Rome demanded, surrendered their arms and expected to surrender territory. In return Rome declared that Carthage must be abandoned, and its people must move to a spot no less than ten miles from the sea. This was too much for a people who lived on overseas trade, so the Carthaginians called back their exiles and grimly prepared to resist.

The dirty fight which followed is dignified by the name "Third Punic War." It lasted for three years (149-146) because the Roman army had gotten rusty in the half century since Hannibal. The first attacks on Carthage almost ended in disaster; the only officer who distinguished himself was Scipio Aemilianus, a grandson by adoption of Scipio Africanus. These defeats threw the Senate into a panic, and it now behaved as if Hannibal had risen from the dead to lead a new army into Italy. Scipio was too young to be a consul, but because of his name they made him one and sent him back to Africa to save his country.

Scipio applied a dreadful siege to Carthage for most of the war. The Carthaginians suffered horribly from famine, but held out until the town was stormed. Finally there were six days of street fighting, at the end of which only 50,000 inhabitants (one tenth of the city's original population) were still alive. The Romans enslaved the survivors, tore down and burned the city, sowed the ground with salt so that nothing would grow there, and turned Tunisia into the Roman province of Africa.⁽³⁵⁾

Growing Pains

In 133 the king of Pergamun died and in his will he left his state to Rome; Pergamun now became the Roman province of Asia. Curiously, similar testaments allowed the Romans to inherit Cyrenaica (96) and Bithynia (74). By this time Egypt and several states of Asia Minor (Paphlagonia, Galatia and Cappadocia) were all Roman protectorates. The western half of Cilicia was annexed in 102, as part of a campaign against the notorious Cilician pirates.

After the successful wars in Africa, Asia Minor and Greece, the Roman system stopped functioning well. The reason was that the Senate hadn't changed but conditions in Italy had. Rome's victories brought cheap grain and slaves from all the defeated nations.⁽³⁷⁾ The small farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic (and its legions) found themselves undercut by the imported food and labor. They left the land and joined the army of unemployed in the capital. Their discontent soon caused political trouble. The first casualty was the factor that had been the Republic's greatest strength: the sense of understanding between the handful of families who ran the Senate and the mass of poorer citizens who made up the state.

The government which worked so well when Rome was a city-state was ill-suited for running an empire. In those days there were no newspapers or other mass media, so most news traveled by word of mouth, not an effective means of communication in a state larger than a typical American or British county. The Greeks were aware that knowledge is power, so many of them, like Aristotle, argued that the city-state is the only place where true (participatory) democracy was possible. Nearly two thousand years later, the founding fathers of the United States allowed for the fact that their transportation/communication was only a little better than that of Roman times, and set up a representative democracy; people who cannot travel to the capital elect representatives to go in their place. This worked because the typical American voter is educated and is aware of the duties of citizenship. In Rome none of this happened; the Senate never became a true representative government, but continued to give a voice only to the wealthy in Rome. Education was a privilege, not a right; usually only a rich parent could give his children a proper education, and a Greek slave was more likely to do the teaching than the parent himself. There is no record of the state trying to instruct its citizens through any schooling program, and as early as the second century B.C. we hear reports of politicians deploring the ignorance of the common citizen. The gap between the educated and ignorant increased as the state grew, because the ordinary Roman not only did not understand his own history, but also the way other people lived; nor did he know about economic laws or social responsibility. That explains in part why there were only a few protests when the Republic collapsed, to be replaced by the permanent dictatorship we call the Roman Empire.

The Reforms of the Gracchi

Meanwhile, improved farming methods learned from the Greeks and Carthaginians encouraged rich aristocrats to buy more land. Abandoning the cultivation of grain, they introduced large-scale production of olive oil and wine, or of sheep and cattle. This change was especially profitable because plenty of cheap slaves from conquered areas were available to work on the estates. These large slave plantations, called latifundia, became common in many parts of Italy, and because of their emphasis on other crops, the need for imported grain steadily increased. Landowners got another opportunity from the government's practice of leasing part of the farmland in Italy to anyone willing to pay a percentage of the crops or animals raised on it. Only the rich could afford this deal, and in time they treated the land they rented as if it were their own property. Protests led to a law that limited the holdings of a single individual to 320 acres of public land, so that there would be enough for everyone, but it was never enforced.⁽³⁸⁾

Corruption in the government was another mark of the growing degeneracy of the Roman Republic. Theoretically any citizen could now hold public office; in practice, only the richest did. This was because the government did not pay salaries to its officials, so only the wealthy could afford to serve. Every step on the way up Rome's political ladder saw cutthroat competition, and enormous sums spent on bribes and entertainment like gladiatorial games and chariot races. Once in power, a politician could, and often did, line his pockets. The provincial governors, who were allowed to do what they pleased so long as they kept the peace and sent taxes to Rome, were especially notorious for graft. Romans caustically said that the typical governor made enough money in his first year to pay for the expenses that got him the appointment; during his second year he made enough to bribe the jury that would eventually try him when Rome found out about his crimes; during his third year he made enough to keep him in luxury for the rest of his life.

Roman businessmen became ingenious at finding new ways to make money, like bidding for the profitable state contracts to supply the armies, collect taxes and loan money in the provinces, and manage state-owned mines and forests. An early example of corrupt business practices occurred during the Second Punic War. According to Livy, "Two scoundrels, taking advantage of the assumption by the state of all risks from tempest in the case of goods carried by sea to armies in the field," fabricated false accounts of shipwrecks. "Their method was to load small and more or less worthless cargoes into old, rotten vessels, sink them at sea . . . and then, in reporting the loss, enormously to exaggerate the value of the cargoes." When the swindle was reported to the Senate, it took no action because it "did not wish at a time of such national danger to make enemies of the capitalists."⁽³⁹⁾

Because of the brutal treatment often given to the slaves, Cato wrote, "You have as many enemies as you have slaves." In 135 B.C. Rome got a bad reminder of this, as the slaves working the farms of Sicily rose in revolt. Because the uprising interrupted Rome's vital grain supply, it took years to put down, with heavy casualties on both sides. For many this was a wake-up call; if the common citizen no longer had work or land, and the capital depended on overseas slave plantations for its food, then how could the Republic survive? An awareness of these social and economic problems led to the reform program of an idealistic young aristocrat named Tiberius Gracchus. He sought to stop Rome's social decline by restoring the backbone of the old Roman society--the small landowner who was now a man without work or property. Supported by a few liberal senators, Tiberius was elected tribune for the year 133 B.C., at the age of twenty-nine.

Tiberius proposed to the Tribal Assembly that it was time to enforce the act limiting the holding of public land to 320 acres per person. Much of the public land would in the future go to the present occupants and their descendants as private property, but the surplus was to be confiscated and allotted to landless Roman citizens. In his address to the assembly Tiberius noted that:

"It is with lying lips that their commanders exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchers and shrines from the enemy; . . . they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own."⁽⁴⁰⁾

The senators, many of them large landowners, balked at Tiberius' proposal. When it became evident that the Tribal Assembly would adopt it, the Senate induced another tribune to veto the measure. On the ground that a tribune who opposed the will of the people forfeited his office, Tiberius took a fateful step, which the Senate claimed was unconstitutional, by having the assembly depose the tribune in question. The agrarian bill was then passed.

Before long Tiberius realized it would take more than a year to carry out his land reform, so he broke another law by running for reelection at the end of his term. Claiming that he sought to make himself king, the Senate staged a riot that killed 300 of his followers; Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death with pieces of a broken bench by two senators. The Republic's resort to bloodshed stands in striking contrast to its earlier history of peaceful reform, and its treatment of the "untouchable" tribune was a warning of the way the Republic would decide its internal disputes in the future.

Tiberius' work was taken up by his younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, who was elected tribune in 123 B.C. Besides the reallocation of public land, Gaius proposed Roman citizenship for non-Roman Italians, and to move citizens out of Rome to southern Italy and North Africa. To protect the poor against speculation in the grain market (especially in times of famine), Gaius committed the government to buy, store, and distribute wheat to the urban masses at half the former market price. Unfortunately, what Gaius intended as a relief measure later became a dole, by which free food was distributed--all too often for the advancement of astute politicians--to the entire proletariat.

Gaius's proposal to extend citizenship alienated the Roman proletariat, which did not wish to share the privileges of citizenship or endanger its control of the Tribal Assembly. Consequently, in 121 B.C. Gaius failed to be reelected to a third term. Now the Senate again resorted to force; it decreed martial law by authorizing the consuls to take any action deemed necessary "to protect the state and suppress the tyrants." They arrested and executed three thousand of Gaius' followers, a fate Gaius avoided by committing suicide.⁽⁴¹⁾

Marius vs. Sulla

There is a Latin proverb, "Pecunia non olet" (money does not stink), but the money of Jugurtha stank even in Rome. In the public outcry that followed, Gaius Marius, a member of the populares, was elected consul in 107 B.C.. A true populist, he had nothing but contempt for the nobles, saying, "They despise me for an upstart, I despise their worthlessness. They can taunt me with my social position, I them with their infamies. My own belief is that men are born equal and alike: nobility is achieved by bravery."

During the next seven years Marius was consul six times, and led the army on successful missions against the foreigners the Senate couldn't handle. His African campaign defeated Jugurtha and brought him to Rome, where the Numidian died in prison. Then Marius rushed home to deal with a new threat, an invasion of Italy by the Cimbri and the Teutones. These two Celtic tribes had left their Austrian homeland in 115, moved into north Italy and defeated a Roman army in 113, then withdrew across the Alps and wandered into Gaul. In Gaul they could beat every tribe except the Belgae, the strongest Gallic confederation, and when they easily pillaged the Roman part of Gaul, they decided Rome wasn't so strong and made a two-pronged attack on Italy. Marius annihilated half the horde on the Riviera in 102, but to do so he had to allow the other half an unopposed entry to the Po valley from Switzerland; fortunately he caught and destroyed this group a year later.⁽⁴²⁾

To conduct these operations, Marius changed the character of the army. Previously the legionary had to own land and have at least a middle-class income, because he paid for his arms and armor. Now, however, there was a shortage of available recruits from the landed peasantry, but a surplus of able-bodied urban poor who couldn't afford military equipment. Marius found a way to bring in these folks by issuing equipment against future pay. To make sure the new soldiers would stay in the army after their kits were paid off, he offered a bonus of land from conquered territories, as a reward for twenty years of service. Thus, the army went from a citizen's militia to a corps of professional soldiers, whose loyalty was not to the state but to their commanders. Aspiring generals could now use their troops to seize the government.

The senators were alarmed by these reforms. Not only did they make a profit from renting public land, which they would now lose to retired veterans, but they also didn't want to see the soldiers forming any kind of Marian political party (a very valid fear, as it soon turned out). Consequently, when Marius returned a hero from his campaigns, they decided not to use his services anymore. For nearly a decade his political fortunes went into eclipse, until another reform-minded tribune appeared. This was Marcus Livius Drusus, who proposed that Roman citizenship be granted to every free man in Italy. At this point only a fraction of the people under Roman rule enjoyed full rights, those who had Roman citizenship because they lived in Rome and came from families that had lived in Latium since the Republic's early days. Non-Roman Italians resented the privileges of the citizens, and the fact that they had to pay Rome's taxes and fight in her wars without receiving any of the benefits. However, the proposal of Drusus alienated Romans of both political factions, who did not want to share their power, so they assassinated Drusus. Because they could not get what they wanted in Rome's courts, the Italian cities launched a bloody two-year rebellion, called the Social War (90-88). The fighting did not stop until Rome agreed to give citizenship to its "allies."⁽⁴³⁾

The next problem came from Mithradates VI, the ambitious king of Pontus in Asia Minor. He was encouraged by the growing anti-Roman sentiment in the eastern provinces, caused by corrupt governors, tax collectors, and money lenders, so he declared war on Rome in 88 B.C. Rome's preoccupation with the Social War gave him the chance to invade both western Asia Minor and Greece; according to one (possibly exaggerated) report he massacred 80,000 Italian colonials in a single day. The Senate ordered Lucius Cornelius Sulla, an able general and a staunch supporter of conservatism, to march east. As a countermove, the Tribal Assembly chose Marius for the eastern command. In effect both the Senate and the Tribal Assembly were claiming to be the ultimate authority in the state. Sulla was in Naples preparing to leave for Asia when he heard of the selection of Marius for his job; instead of embarking, he led his army back to Rome. This was the first--and not the last--time that Roman marched against Roman. Marius fled to Africa, allowing Sulla to enter the city without resistance. He stayed long enough to strengthen the Senate's authority and condemn some enemies to death, before setting out for the east again.

Sulla successfully cut Mithradates down to size, but made a disgraceful peace with the Asian king so he could get back as soon as possible. This was because while Sulla was away, Marius returned to Rome, seized control from the Senate, canceled more than three-quarters of all outstanding debts, and made himself dictator. Sulla hurried home to find Marius dead of a stroke; his veterans took revenge on the other populares, who Sulla now regarded as enemies of the state. Once he ordered 6,000 of them put to death and their possessions confiscated. The executions took place within earshot of the horrified senators while Sulla gave a speech. Plutarch wrote that Sulla, "with a calm and unconcerned expression . . . bade the senators pay attention to his speech and not busy themselves with what was going on outside: some naughty people were being admonished at his orders."

In 82 B.C. Sulla's friends in the Senate appointed him to serve as dictator, not for the customary six months, but for as long as he liked. He strengthened the powers of the Senate, drastically curtailed the powers of the tribunes and Tribal Assembly, and packed both the Senate and the courts with his friends. Finally he made it a capital crime for a commander to start a war or lead his troops outside the province they were assigned to, without getting the Senate's permission first. Because he had massacred the opposition, Sulla was convinced that his work would be permanent, and in 79 B.C. he voluntarily resigned his dictatorship; he died one year later, probably from some disease produced by the debauched lifestyle he indulged in upon retirement. His counterrevolution, however, would not last, because the people's discontent was repressed, not resolved. Even more sinister, the fate of the Roman state had been decided not by the vote of its citizens but by the arms of its soldiers.

Pompey's Campaigns and the Catiline Conspiracy

In 73 B.C. a slave uprising terrified all Italy, led by a gladiator from Greece named Spartacus. He and seventy others escaped from a gladiatorial "farm" at Capua, and set up a base in the crater of then-dormant Mt. Vesuvius (this was 151 years before the famous eruption that destroyed Pompeii). They recruited other runaway slaves and gladiators, defeated two armies sent against them, and came to dominate much of southern Italy. Despite their love of "blood sports," the Romans did not appreciate seeing their whole country turned into an arena. When another army, led by Marcus Licinius Crassus⁽⁴⁴⁾, defeated and killed Spartacus in 71, Roman terror changed to cruelty. Six thousand crosses were set up along the Appian Way, with a follower of Spartacus nailed to each. Those rebels who escaped were hunted down and killed by Pompey's army, which had just returned from Spain.

Mithradates was a more dangerous opponent than Sertorius and Spartacus, but Lucullus got off to a brilliant start, running the king of Pontus out of his empire completely. However, Mithradates fled to Armenia, and the king of Armenia, Tigranes, now replaced Mithradates as the most powerful monarch in the Middle East. In recent years Tigranes had taken advantage of Parthian and Seleucid troubles by expanding south and east, so that now Syria and eastern Cilicia were under his rule, and so were the Parthian client states of Adiabene, Atropatene and Gordyene. Lucullus quickly broke up this Armenian Empire when he destroyed its new capital, Tigranocerta, in 69. Then he got stuck; his legions were tired of fighting and refused to go any farther, feeling that Lucullus had no plan beyond beating any enemies of Rome that appeared in the vicinity. They were right; while Lucullus was in Gordyene, Mithradates slipped back into Pontus and recovered his kingdom (67 B.C.). This meant that six years after the war had begun, the Romans were back to square one.

Although he had served under Sulla, like Lucullus and Crassus, Pompey undid much of Sulla's totalitarian handiwork. In 70 B.C. he asked for, and got, permission to run for consul, though he was underage (he was only thirty-six) and had not served in any previous political office. Once in power he removed the most objectionable of Sulla's laws and restored the former authority of the tribunes. He did not run for reelection when his term in office expired, but two years later he was granted a three-year imperium (dictatorship) to clear the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. These pirates had been a growing problem since the decline of the Greek navies; now they were attacking ships as far away as Sicily, threatening Rome's food supply. Pompey organized a huge fleet that swept the pirates back to their bases in Cilicia; then he took the bases by storm. The whole operation was finished in only three months.

To the Romans, Pompey was now the people's hero, the man who could solve any problem. Thus nobody was surprised in late 67 when the Senate voted to have him go east and replace Lucullus. By the summer of 66 he had forced Mithradates out of Pontus again. Then he took care of Tigranes by sacking Artataxa, the old Armenian capital. In 65 he subdued the tribes of Transcaucasia; in 64 he marched into Syria and deposed the last Seleucid king.

Pompey finished the job by reorganizing the region. Half of Pontus was added to the province of Bithynia, east Cilicia joined Roman-ruled west Cilicia, and Syria became a new province. All of the minor states to the east and south were told that they were now under Roman "protection." Among these was the Jewish kingdom of the Maccabees. When a faction in that kingdom tried to defy Pompey's orders, he marched to Jerusalem and took it by storm (63).

Pompey's eastern campaign was one of the most successful in Roman history. He had added a major province, made a dozen kingdoms and peoples satellites of the Republic, and had increased the revenue of the Roman state by two thirds. Afterwards Lucullus claimed that he had won the most important battles, and that he would have been able to achieve the ultimate victory if Pompey's legions had been entrusted to him. Though there is some truth to this, few people have felt sorry for Lucullus. During his governorship of the East he gained a huge fortune, and the villas he built in retirement were so amazing that Romans coined the adjective "Lucullan" to mean extreme luxury.

While Pompey was in the East, a monstrous conspiracy threatened the Republic. Lucius Sergius Catiline was one of many newly rich Romans who had squandered his wealth, to the point that he could only get out of debt by abolishing all debts or confiscating the wealth of others. To do either, he had to hold public office, so Catiline tried three times to get himself elected consul, as the candidate of the Populares. On the first try, he was disqualified because of charges of corruption during his term as governor of Africa. He tried again a year later (64), and the Optimates responded by nominating Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the greatest orators in Roman history. With endless energy, Cicero hammered away at the vices and crimes of Catiline's life, and won by a narrow margin.

Furious, Catiline prepared to run again in 63, and plotted to launch revolts if he did not win. Cicero heard a rumor of this and requested bodyguards for himself and the other consul, Caius Antonius. He did not have enough proof to convince anybody of the danger, so when election day, arrived, he brought some armed citizens to the polling place at the Forum. While voters were wondering what Cicero was up to, he let the toga slip from his right shoulder, revealing not a tunic, but a breastplate. The idea that a consul did not feel safe enough to appear in public without guards and armor caused much murmuring; enough voters changed their minds to defeat Catiline.

Not long after that, Crassus came to Cicero's house in the dead of night, awoke him, and presented him with a bunch of letters from Catiline warning of an upcoming massacre in Etruria, which would take place in just eight days. Crassus had been a supporter of Catiline, but the desperate actions of this violent young man made the plutocrat very nervous. When other followers of Catiline gave him the letters and told him to deliver them, Crassus saw this as a way to switch sides and keep his fortunes intact. Crassus had only opened the letters addressed to himself, so Cicero took the rest to the Senate and had them read aloud by the other recipients. It was the damning evidence he needed. They declared Catiline a public enemy, and he fled to join his Etruscan rebels.

Two months later, in a desperate (if not stupid) move, Catiline's followers remaining in Rome tried to get a Gallic tribe, the Albobrogians, to support the conspiracy. The wily Gauls said they would agree, but only if the conspirators put down the promises they made to them in writing. They did, and the Gauls, thinking that the conspirators had no chance of success, promptly turned the incriminating documents over to Cicero. In January of 62 the whole business ended when the consul Antonius caught up with Catiline and his force in northern Italy, killing them all in battle. Cicero was declared a hero for singlehandedly saving the Republic, and weeks of celebration in Rome followed.

The Rise of Julius Caesar

Despite the shortcomings, Caesar loomed high over everyone else. He had been educated in the great school of rhetoric in Rhodes, and was such a brilliant orator and conversationalist that even Cicero, one of his political rivals, was impressed. In 73 B.C., as a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer, he tried to prosecute the Roman governor of Greece for corruption. Romans couldn't believe that one of their own would force them to justify the exploitation of the conquered, and though Caesar lost the case, he won national exposure. After that he decided to try his hand at politics, and rose steadily from one office to the next; at every step of the way he borrowed extravagant sums of money from Crassus, and spent it on the gladiators his voters loved.⁽⁴⁵⁾ While still in his thirties, he became leader of the survivors from Marius' party.

Anyway, when Pompey returned from the Middle East, he was so popular that he could have taken over the government, and many expected him to do so. Instead, he followed tradition; he disbanded his army outside the gates of the Eternal City and waited for an official invitation. The Senate, alarmed at his success, did not welcome him with open arms, and decided it could do without this protector. Pompey got the customary triumphal parade but otherwise received a very cool reception. The senators even refused to give his soldiers the allotment of land that they were entitled to upon retirement.

Pompey was furious, and got together with Caesar and Crassus. All three men had grudges against the Senate; Caesar had been trying for some time to get a position worthy of his skills, like the consulship, while Crassus wanted to be a conquering general and get back the money he lent to Caesar. To make their pact more binding, Caesar gave his daughter Julia in marriage to Pompey. Then they formed a triumvirate, meaning a three-man team, in 60 B.C.

Together they got Caesar elected consul in 59. Caesar introduced a land bill for Pompey's veterans; the co-consul, Bibulus, and three tribunes opposed it. They met in the Forum to debate the issue, and somebody dumped a basket of "filth" (that is what the historian of the day politely called it) on Bibulus' head. Bibulus was so embarrassed that he did not show his face in public for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, the triumvirate passed the land bill and brought the Senate to heel. When Caesar's term ended, Pompey stayed in Rome to make sure the Senate cooperated, while Crassus became governor of Syria and Caesar took the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul.⁽⁴⁶⁾ In 56 B.C., despite some friction, the three agreed to extend their arrangement.

The Gallic Wars

The trouble originated in Germany, where the Germans, moving south from Denmark, had gradually squeezed out the Celts over the previous 200 years. Now the Germans were crossing the Rhine, still driving the Celts in front of them. The movement of the Suevi, the nearest German tribe, was a long-term threat to Roman territory (which began at Geneva, only 125 miles to the southwest as the crow flies); the immediate danger came from the Helvetii, the Celtic tribe the Suevi displaced.

The Helvetii had burned their homes and traveled to Switzerland in search of a safer land. Geneva lay in their path and it only had one legion defending it. Caesar had the legionaries dig in and they successfully defended the Roman bank of the Rhone. When the Helvetii veered away to the northwest he raced back to Cisalpine Gaul, picked up the three legions there, recruited two more and made a forced march back through the Alps. A month after he had left Geneva he was leading six legions across the Rhone. He overtook the Helvetii, beat them in two battles and forced them to turn back home. So they could withdraw, he then marched east and drove the Suevi back over the Rhine.

Caesar set up a winter camp for his army at Besancon. The news of this troubled the Belgae, and they talked about the need to halt Roman expansion, but they were a long way to the north and a long way from doing anything positive. Caesar, however, took the Belgian reports as a declaration of war. In the winter of 58/57 he raised two more legions; the following spring saw him march north and overawe the nearest Belgian tribe, the Remi. Then he led his legions on a zigzag path through the territory of the confederation, defeating the Belgian tribes one by one.

By the end of 57 resistance from the Belgae had been broken and Caesar suddenly realized that he had conquered all of Gaul. The Celtic tribes in the west were weak and soon surrendered to the single legion he sent against them. The Celtic tribes of the east were so scared of the Germans that they were positively eager to submit if it meant the Romans would do their fighting for them. After a certain amount of tidying up in 56 Caesar could declare Gaul pacified.

Caesar did not rest on his laurels. In early 55 he massacred two small German tribes that crossed the lower Rhine and followed this up by going over to the east bank of that river and making a show of force in German territory. Later in the same year he took two legions on an armed reconnaissance of Britain. He got as far as the mouth of the Thames when one of the co-kings of Britain, Nennius, launched a surprise attack. Nennius was forced away from Caesar by the Romans, but he did manage to capture the triumvir's sword, which he named Yellow Death. He died of his wounds fifteen days later, and was buried with Yellow Death at the northern entrance of London (modern Bishopsgate?). Meanwhile, Caesar escaped to the Continent, and came back in 54 with five legions. This time he defeated Cassivellanus, the other Celtic chief of Britain, surrounding him in his fort and starving him into submission.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Despite his success, Caesar did not try to occupy Britain; he left Cassivellaunus in charge on condition that he pay tribute. Cassivellaunus was succeeded by Tenvantius (38-18, called Tasciovanus in some histories), a son of the former British King Lud, who in turn was followed by a son named Cymbeline (18 B.C.-12 A.D., called Kynvelyn in Welsh and Cunobelinus in Latin). Cymbeline received a Roman upbringing in Caesar's household before he became king, and Shakespeare later wrote a play about him (Cymbeline).

Caesar made everything he did seem easy. In fact, he made it seem so easy that some Gauls felt they had been tricked. Late in 54 the Belgae rose in revolt, forcing Caesar to go back and put them down. Then, almost at the last minute, the Gauls found a chief who could lead them all, Vercingetorix of the Arverni. When Vercingetorix beat off a Roman siege of his hometown, Gergovia, the rest of Gaul rallied behind him. Caesar had to spend the next three years marching back and forth across Gaul, fighting all the time. His energy and his army (now ten legions strong) were equal to the task. In 52 he surrounded Vercingetorix and 90,000 of his followers at the hilltop town of Alesia (Alise-Sainte-Reine, near Dijon) with 60,000 men, and was in turn surrounded by a huge Gallic relief force of 200,000, which came to rescue Vercingetorix. Despite the attacks from both within and without, Caesar's legions held firm until Vercingetorix surrendered; that broke the Gallic resistance. After a little more mopping up he left in the summer of 51, able to claim that all Gaul was truly Roman territory. Caesar finished by writing down his account of the Gallic Wars, a classic still read by Latin students today.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar
(A thumbnail, click on the picture to see it full size in a separate window.).

Caesar Rules Alone

The death of Crassus turned the triumvirate into a two-man axis, and Caesar's mounting reputation cast a shadow over Pompey's accomplishments. This was exploited by the optimate faction of the Senate, which reminded Pompey that he was the heir of Sulla and it was his duty to protect the Republic from upstarts like Caesar. The two started working together; Pompey was confident that he could handle Caesar and the senators thought they could control Pompey. In 49 B.C. they told Caesar that his governorship of Gaul was over, and ordered him to disband his army and return to Rome, to answer questions concerning some old scandals they dug up.

Caesar knew that if he went to Rome without his troops, it would probably mean his death. He also knew that his troops loved him, and would follow him anywhere. Accordingly, he marched south with his army, in clear violation of the Senate's orders. He paused only for a moment at the Rubicon, a small stream marking the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. To go any farther was an act of treason. Caesar told his men, "We may still draw back, but once across that little bridge and the issue rests with the sword." The soldiers were still for him, so he shouted a gambling term, "The die is cast!" (Alea jacta est!) and boldly crossed the Rubicon. Ever since then the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" has meant making an irrevocable decision, going past a point of no return.

Legions sent from Rome to stop Caesar went over to him. Pompey fled to his nearest remaining army, in Greece. He planned to mount an invasion of Italy by sea, but Caesar was too fast for him. He quickly attacked and defeated Pompey's followers in Spain, then marched to Greece. Pompey was routed in the battle of Pharsalus (48), and he fled again, this time to Egypt. Here his luck ran out. Pompey was stabbed to death by an agent of Egypt's boy-king, Ptolemy XIII, who then pickled Pompey's head and gave it as a gift to a horrified Caesar.

Ptolemy's deed gained him nothing. He only had the throne of Egypt because he had driven his older and stronger-willed sister, Cleopatra VII, into exile in Syria. Cleopatra returned and made a dramatic introduction by having herself rolled up in a carpet (presumably to slip past Ptolemy's men), and carried into Caesar's camp by a rug merchant. Her intelligence, bravery and legendary charm persuaded Caesar to help get her throne back. Claiming to restore order, he used his legions to oust Ptolemy, who disappeared (possibly drowned) in the following battle. Then he and Cleopatra went on a grand cruise up the Nile, before Caesar departed to put down a revolt in Asia Minor, leaving Cleopatra pregnant with a boy named Caesarion.

Caesar made a clean sweep of Asia Minor, and headed west to deal with Pompey's supporters in Spain and Africa. In 46 he won the most critical battle, at Thapsus in North Africa. Here he faced ten legions, the king of Numidia's cavalry, and 120 war elephants. Just before the battle began, he felt the return of an older enemy than Pompey--epilepsy. He calmly encouraged his troops and instructed his captains before the seizure overcame him. When he regained consciousness, the enemy was no more. One year later he crushed the last Pompeian army, led by a son of Pompey, on the plains of Munda, in southern Spain.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The man who had gone into politics to pay his debts returned to Rome with the empire in his pockets and Cleopatra on his arm. He parked Cleopatra and Caesarion in a fine Roman villa, and went to take part in one of the grandest triumphs the city had known. The Senate honored him by making him dictator for life, and during the next six months he ruled the same way he had commanded, being both active and efficient. He pardoned and reinstated many old enemies, including Cicero, and initiated extensive reforms. He granted citizenship to Gauls and the children of slaves, and opened the doors of the Senate to citizens from the provinces, making it a more truly representative body. To help the poorer citizens, he reduced debts, reduced unemployment with a public works program, settled 80,000 colonists in Seville, Arles, Corinth and Carthage (which reduced the population crunch in Rome itself), and decreed that one third of the laborers on the slave-worked estates in Italy be persons of free birth. As a result, he could reduce from 320,000 to 150,000 the number of people in the city of Rome receiving free grain. (We estimate the population of Rome at this point to have been 500,000.)

His most enduring act was the reform of the calendar. The old Roman calendar was a lunar one, with months of 28-29 days each, and it was so inaccurate that summer began in September. With some tips from Egyptian astronomers, a solar calendar of 365 1/4 days replaced it. To get the months and seasons back in line, Caesar added eighty extra days to the end of the year when these changes went into effect; thus we sometimes call 46 B.C. "the year of confusion." This calendar, known as the Julian calendar, is still with us, with only a minor change to the order of leap year days. To make sure we remembered who got the credit, he renamed the fifth month July.⁽⁵¹⁾

Caesar realized that the Republic was, in fact, dead. In his own words, "The Republic is merely a name, without form or substance." He believed that only benevolent despotism could save Rome from continued civil war and collapse. This made many nervous, despite all his good works. Both friends and enemies viewed him as a tyrant who had destroyed the Republic, and expected him to make himself an outright king if they didn't act to stop him. On the Ides (the fifteenth) of March, 44 B.C., sixty conspirators stabbed Caesar in the Senate, inflicting twenty-three dagger wounds before he fell dead in front of a statue of Pompey.⁽⁵²⁾

The trappings of monarchy offended Caesar's assassins--his purple robe, the statues erected in his honor, the coins bearing his portrait--and they assumed that with his death they would restore the traditional Republic. However, the people of Rome were not moved when the conspirators marched through the streets of Rome with bloody weapons, crying, "Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!" Public opinion turned against the murderers, forcing them to flee when mobs attacked their houses. Most Romans were prepared to accept a Caesar-like character whose power and position stopped just short of a royal title. The real question was: Who would be Caesar's successor?

The Second Triumvirate

What Octavian really wanted was to be a consul; when the Senate refused to let him have the job, he allied himself with Caesar's last co-consul, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony to English readers), occupied the city with troops, and forced his election. Then they turned against both Caesar's assassins and the Senate. Unlike Caesar, who preferred to pardon his enemies, they executed all the leaders of the senatorial party and confiscated their property. Although he was not a conspirator, Cicero, the renowned orator and champion of the Senate, was put to death for his hostility to Antony; his head and hands were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum, with one nail driven through his eloquent tongue. Once Italy was secure, Octavian and Antony rushed to Macedonia to crush the army raised by two of the conspirators, Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The battle of Philippi (42) made an end of the Republicans; both Brutus and Cassius committed suicide after their defeat.

In 43 Antony and Octavian agreed to share leadership of the empire; they also brought in Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Caesar's chief lieutenant, to reassure conservatives. In 40 they partitioned the empire's land between them: Antony took the east, which included both Cleopatra and the Parthian problem, while Octavian took Gaul, Spain and Illyria. Lepidus got Sicily and Carthaginian Africa; Italy was ruled jointly by all three. The same year saw Antony marry Octavian's sister, Octavia, to strengthen their alliance. In 38 they agreed to renew the triumvirate for another five years, but the ambitions of each man proved too great for the alliance to endure.

Antony had to face a Parthian invasion from the east when he took charge. He drove it back, but when he made a counterattack into Iraq and Transcaucasia, casualties were heavy; furthermore, the reinforcements promised by Octavian never arrived. He had to settle for a truce that restored the prewar frontiers. Then a pirate named Pompey the Younger terrorized the central Mediterranean, threatening Rome's grain supply. Octavian went to Sicily in 36 to stop this menace, and one of the casualties was Lepidus. Convinced that he had gotten the least desirable Roman-ruled territory, Lepidus had himself elected Pontifex Maximus (chief priest of Rome), and tried to kidnap Octavian on Sicily. Instead Lepidus' soldiers switched sides, because of Octavian's relationship to Caesar. They put Lepidus under house arrest for the rest of his days.

Meanwhile, Antony became infatuated with Cleopatra. Together they had three children, and Antony divorced Octavia so he could marry Cleopatra instead. He even went so far as to make a will that promised the former Egyptian territories now ruled by Rome to Cleopatra and their children (this would have given her Libya, Cyprus and Syria, for starters). Since Antony also had Greece, The Greeks hailed Cleopatra as a real-life Aphrodite and raised a statue of her in the Acropolis.

Octavian took advantage of this high-handedness to arouse Rome and Italy against Antony and his queen. He contrasted Antony's hedonism with his own simple virtue, and persuaded the Senate to declare war on Antony. The decisive battle was fought in 31 B.C., when the fleets of East and West met at Actium, off the west coast of Greece. The sudden desertion of Cleopatra and her sixty ships decided it, though we do not know whether she was motivated by treachery, fear, or some personal whim. Antony followed, leaving his fleet to fight and die without a commander. Antony's nineteen legions on the Greek mainland surrendered without a fight, and Octavian pursued the two lovers to Alexandria. Octavian's fleet surrounded the Egyptian capital, and Antony, thinking Cleopatra had already killed herself, stabbed himself in the stomach. However, he did it ineffectively, and lasted long enough to be carried to Cleopatra before expiring in her presence.

Octavian had an interview with Cleopatra, and she presented herself as a scantily clad damsel in distress. It didn't work; Octavian didn't have the romantic inclinations of Caesar or Antony, and was only interested in keeping her alive so she could be paraded through the streets of Rome, in a triumph celebrating the conquest of Egypt. Since captives were usually executed after such triumphs, Cleopatra decided to call it quits. An asp was smuggled to her in a basket of figs, and Roman officers broke into her guarded quarters to find her dead from the cobra's bite (30 B.C.).⁽⁵³⁾

Octavian's victory marked the end of nearly a century of fighting over who should lead Rome. It also ended the Republic, though Octavian told everybody he had restored it. The truth was that the territory under Rome's rule had grown so vast that it could no longer be ruled by anything but a strong, central authority. Octavian would provide that authority.

1. It now appears that the oldest runic script, Futhark, was invented by some Teutons who copied the Etruscan alphabet for their own use. The main feature of ancient northern European alphabets is that all the runes (letters) use only straight lines, to make carving them on wood or stone easy.

2. Thanks to what we have translated, several Etruscan names are now available in the original language (as opposed to Latinized versions). Common male names were Larth, Vel, Arnza, and Aule; common females names were Thanchvil (Tanaquil?), Ramtha, Canatnei, and Larthi. They also were apparently the first culture to use family names after personal names, except that the women did not change their last names when they got married.

3. The June 1988 National Geographic suggested that the chaotic, "devil-may-care" attitude of today's Italians comes from the Etruscans, not the Romans.

4. Recently it was suggested that the she-wolf was really a prostitute, since the word for both is the same in Latin (lupa).

5. In the fourth century B.C., when trustworthy written records first appear, Italy had about four million inhabitants. Four million may not seem like a lot to us, but this was the densest population in Europe at the time. The Greeks, for example, probably numbered just three million people in the fourth century, and still they managed to make a lot of history.

6. Whenever the Romans did anything important, they consulted an augur, or fortuneteller. Like the Etruscans, they thought they could read the future from the behavior of birds. However, this didn't stop Roman chefs from inventing recipes for really exotic poultry, like peacock and flamingo. One could say that the birds were for the Romans, and vice-versa.
According to one story, a Roman naval commander took some chickens with him when he sailed off to a war. He expected to learn the will of the gods from which dishes the chickens ate out of. When they refused to eat at all, he threw them overboard and shouted, "Let them drink if they will not eat!"

7. Lucumo is the Latin form of Lauchum, one of the few Etruscan words we understand; we saw earlier that it means "priest-king." Therefore Lucumo was not the birth-name of Tarquinius, but rather his title. This suggests to me that Tarquinius didn't come to Rome as an entrepreneur, but as the leader of a conquering army. Livy should have known better.
Today some historians think that the reigns of Numa and Ancus reflect periods when the Sabines ruled Latium, and that Servius Tullius, the next king after Tarquinius, may have been a usurper. If this is true, than none of the Roman monarchs gained the throne peacefully.

8. Cincinnatus inspired several officers under George Washington to call themselves the Society of the Cincinnati, because they were equally willing to put down the plow when America needed them, and then return to the ways of peace afterwards; Cincinnati, Ohio is named after this group.

9. Barely remembered today, Sicinius is one of the few rebels in Roman history who mutinied and lived to tell about it.

10. By that time, though, many new laws had been tacked on to the originals. Gibbon tells us that in the beginning the authorities were so opposed to making laws that when a new one was proposed, they put a rope around the lawmaker's neck, and if the law was not passed they strung him up! Needless to say this custom went out of fashion, because in imperial days the law code got so big that it had to be overhauled several times. One might wish it was still practiced today, though, to put a limit on the "frivolous legislation" of our government.

11. As with our stories from the Roman monarchy, the truth may have been different. We're not even sure if Horatius died in the Tiber; one version of the story has him survive long enough to swim to the other side. A far less glorious version has the Etruscans take Rome anyway, as well as the surrounding countryside, until the Greeks sent soldiers from the south in 501 to throw them out again.

12. Legend claims that when the Gauls tried to sneak up the slopes of the Capitoline Hill, they startled some sacred geese, who raised such a squawk that it alerted the Roman guards on the hill in time to defend it. The garrison was starving at this point, but the geese were kept alive because they belonged to the goddess Juno. Today some Italians who remember that story keep geese to guard their property instead of watchdogs. One wonders how history might be different if the Romans gave in to their hunger and ate the geese!

13. In 326 B.C. the government abolished the practice of putting debtors into slavery. Now that Romans could not enslave other Romans, their slaves always came from elsewhere, usually from defeated enemies.

14. It is estimated that Sicily was able to export three million bushels a year, while North Africa exported ten million and Egypt twenty million.

15. H. G. Wells thought that Rome should have conquered Germany and Poland, to protect itself from the Germans that eventually brought it down. In response, I say that such a campaign would only delay the inevitable; had Imperial Rome pushed its frontier from the Rhine to the Baltic and Dnieper, some other enemy, like the Vikings, would have taken the place of the Germans.

16. A ship that sank near Massilia in the mid-second century B.C. illustrates the importance of Campania in Roman commerce. It carried six hundred Neapolitan pots and ten thousand gallons of wine; four fifths of the wine was Neapolitan, while the rest came from Rhodes and Sicily.
Incidentally, the main cargo container of classical times was the amphora, a large, graceful pot shaped like a vase. Amphorae were used to transport anything that would pour, and are a common find because they are so durable. We know some of them carried wine because they are occasionally found with their seals intact, preserving their 2,000-year-old contents. Divers who taste the wine from wrecks like the one mentioned above agree that aging can be carried too far!

17. The Second Samnite War showed the Romans that they needed to improve communications, so in 312 they began construction on the first of their famous roads, the Appian Way. Originally it ran south from Rome to Capua; later it was extended east to Brindisi, on the heel of the Italian "boot." The builder, Appius Claudius Caecus, generally followed a straight line from point A to point B, while later engineers did some surveying and earth moving, and followed the path of least resistance, making those roads easier on the feet of pedestrians.

18. The traditional foundation date of Carthage is 814 B.C., supposedly by a queen named Dido. Archaeology on the site of Carthage has not yet found anything made before c.750 B.C. The story of Carthage before the Punic Wars is featured in Chapter 3 of my African history series.

19. From the Hebrew shaphat, meaning judge; the Romans called them suffetes.

20. Despite Roman propaganda, the Romans did find some things they liked in Carthaginian culture. From Carthage they learned to execute criminals by the long and excruciating process of crucifixion, for starters. Then when they leveled Carthage, they found a Carthaginian slave-owner's manual, which they translated into Latin. This book went through many editions, and was read by both Europeans and Arabs who practiced the African slave trade. Since America's founding fathers knew Latin and had a classical education, many of them must have read it too, allowing one Carthaginian institution (slavery) to become established in the antebellum South.

21. "Punic" is a shortened form of Punicus, the Latin word for Phoenician.

22. 104 elephants were captured in that siege and sent home to amuse the Romans.

23. At one point, the Gauls got as close as ninety miles from Rome, and the Romans resorted to human sacrifice to get the gods on their side.

24. Hamilcar hated the Romans badly, because in the First Punic War they marooned him on a mountain for several years, making him look silly. Legend has it that just before they went to Spain, Hamilcar took Hannibal to the temple of Baal and made him swear never-ending hatred to Rome. Thus began the career of the most dreaded enemy the Roman Republic ever faced.

25. Hannibal surprised the Romans because both sides didn't think a supply line could be stretched from Spain to Italy, and the Romans didn't think he would try marching without one. Indeed, at a council meeting before they moved out, Hannibal Monomachus, one of Hannibal's officers, suggested that because the Carhaginian army would have to live off the land, they ought to teach the soldiers to eat human flesh, even if it comes from their fallen comrades, and to get used to it; that would be the only way to complete the march without starving. Of course nobody else wanted to go this far!
Today we mainly remember Hannibal for the opening phase of the war, the march through Switzerland with 37 war elephants leading the way. This is odd, because it wasn't his best moment. Elephants are very unsuitable for climbing mountains, far less sure of their footing than burros or goats and too sensitive to cold weather. Moreover, they made little difference in his battles. Hannibal lost quite a few elephants in the Alps, and the rest succumbed to the mild north Italian climate within a year. Consequently Hannibal won his greatest victories, at Lake Trasimene and Cannae, without any elephants at all. Actually, going over the Alps was an avoidable mistake; when he dodged the Roman army heading for Spain he went too far north and got badly lost.
In the early 1930s, Richard Halliburton, a famous American explorer and travel correspondent, re-enacted Hannibal's expedition by riding an elephant named Miss Elisabeth Dalyrimple through Switzerland. On the other side he blundered into the war games of the Italian army's mountain division. Exploding shells caused the elephant to panic, and she charged the soldiers, who likewise ran away. No doubt they must have thought that Hannibal was back!

26. The Roman commander at Lake Trasimene was Flaminius. His main claim to fame is that he built Rome's second major highway, the Via Flaminia. It ran northeast over the Apenines from Rome to Rimini.

27. By this time a legion's official strength was 5,000 men, but it was always accompanied by an equal number of auxiliaries (non-combatants plus troops supplied by Rome's allies), so at Cannae the army of four legions totaled 40,000 men.

28. A Roman dictator named Quintus Fabius Maximus won the nickname Cunctator, meaning the Delayer, because he never fought a battle with Hannibal, preferring instead to pick off isolated units and let time work in his favor. Since then the avoidance of pitched battles has been called the Fabian strategy.

29. Modern Auvergne; this would be the home of another famous enemy of Rome, Vercingetorix, 150 years later.

30. Hasdrubal brought ten elephants with him, but during the battle they behaved so badly that they had to be killed by their own side. So much for the idea that elephants can win battles!

31. Hannibal stayed in Carthage for a few years, trying to organize the city's finances so it could pay the new fines imposed on it. When Rome asked for him, he spared his country further humiliation by escaping to Syria. He stayed there until the Romans defeated his host, Antiochus III, and moved to the small state of Bithynia. Because the Bithynians were allies of Rome, he became an embarrassment to them. When he learned in 183 B.C. that they were planning to turn him in to the Romans, he took poison.

32. Livy, Roman History 33, trans. E. T. Sage, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), vol. 9, p. 367.

33. 1 Maccabees 9:31-32, King James Version.

34. One of the reasons why the Greeks disliked the Romans was the Roman fondness for blood sports; they deplored the amount of fame and money that went to successful gladiators. The Greek idea of a sporting event was track & field competition, featuring naked running men.

35. Today there is a suburb of Tunis named Carthage. In 1985 A.D. the mayors of Rome and Carthage signed a treaty declaring the Punic Wars over (It was a stunt to promote tourism to both cities.). Oh well, better late than never . . .

36. This region included the Greek colony of Massilia. It became a Roman protectorate during the Punic Wars, and was allowed to run its own affairs until 47, when it picked the wrong side in the Caesar-Pompey quarrel.

37. The Greek island of Delos, once a major commercial center for Athens, now became Rome's human clearing house, able to move as many as ten thousand slaves per day.

38. According to custom it was undignified for patricians to make money by any means except through real estate; in fact, it was illegal for senators to own merchant ships. Cato once said that there were three possible investments: good pasturelands, mediocre pasturelands, and poor pasturelands. The elite got around the restriction by freeing a clever slave to run a commercial enterprise for them, in return for part of the profits; even Cato did this.

39. Livy (trans. Aubrey de Selincourt), Livy: The War with Hannibal, Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1965, pg. 296.

40. Plutarch, Lives, "Tiberius Gracchus" (trans. Bernadotte Perrin), The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), vol. 10, pp. 165, 167.

41. According to Plutarch, the Senate offered a reward of its weight in gold for the head of Gaius Gracchus. The fellow who claimed the prize was a true entrepreneur; he filled the cranium with lead on his way to the scales!

42. Despite the similarity of names, the Teutones were not Teutons. To us the term "Teuton" means anyone of Germanic ancestry: Scandinavian, Dutch, Flemish, Swiss, Austrian, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as German. The Romans gave them similar names because to them a Teuton was anyone who lived in Germany (that is, east of the Rhine and north of the Danube), regardless of his ethnic background.

43. Later on, Rome gave citizenship as a reward to non-Romans who distinguished themselves in their service to the state, regardless of what province they lived in. Evidently this was still uncommon in the first century A.D., because the Apostle Paul used his citizenship to open doors wherever he went on his missionary journeys.

44. Crassus (115-53) was the richest man in Rome. He grew rich by buying up the property of Sulla's victims, and had his own farms, insurance company and fire brigade. Whenever a fire broke out in Rome, the firemen would rush to the scene and made the property owner sign one of Crassus' insurance policies. If they signed and later defaulted on payments, Crassus confiscated the building in question; if they didn't sign, he let it burn down!

45. By this time the typical Roman tended to vote for whoever gave him the most free food and entertainment; the author Juvenal sarcastically called it "bread and circuses."

46. Cisalpine Gaul was the name given to the Po River valley, because its population was still largely Celtic as late as the first century B.C. Cisalpine means "this side of the Alps," and reflects the point of view from Rome. Transalpine Gaul means "Gaul across the Alps."

47. The British tribes were still using chariots, a weapon the Celts on the Continent had abandoned generations before, and which no civilized nation had used since Alexander the Great had conquered the Persians. The British wore no armor, and frightened their enemies by charging recklessly with nothing on but blue paint! Fighting them must have been easy work for Caesar's legionaries.

48. He also claimed that all Britain was occupied but since no soldiers were left behind to keep the peace that wasn't really the case. More legions would have to go and repeat the task in the time of Claudius.

49. Crassus was killed at Carrhae, but the details are not clear. The most popular story is that he was captured alive, and the Parthians showed what they thought of his wealth by pouring molten gold down his throat! You can read the rest of the story of the Parthians in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 of my Middle Eastern history.

50. Caesar also planned campaigns against the Parthians, to avenge the death of Crassus, and against Dacia, a tribal kingdom in what is now Romania. His death stopped them before they started, but fortunately neither was necessary; Parthia was quiet and Dacia collapsed on its own a few years later.

51. The Roman year began in March, not January. That is why the 9th-12th months on our calendar have names which in Latin mean seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth (September-December).

52. Among the killers was a fellow named Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who founded the Republic. It is commonly thought that Caesar's last words were, "Eh tu, Brute?"("You too, Brutus?") This seems to have come from Shakespeare's play on the subject; in my own research I found that what Caesar really said was, "Kai su teknon?", which is Greek for "Even thou, my child?" This has led to some speculation that Brutus was Caesar's illegitimate son.

53. Since Octavian couldn't have Cleopatra in his parade, he substituted a statue of her, with a fake asp attached to one arm.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball