Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic Read online

  In their relations with their fellows, then, the citizens of the Republic were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. In their relations with other states, however, no such inhibitions cramped them. ‘More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.’2 The consequences for their neighbours of this hunger for honour were invariably devastating. The legions’ combination of efficiency and ruthlessness was something for which few opponents found themselves prepared. When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found. Rubble left behind by the legionaries could always be distinguished by the way in which severed dogs’ heads or the dismembered limbs of cattle would lie strewn among the human corpses.3 The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine. The courage they brought to service in the legions, steeled by pride in their city and faith in her destiny, was an emotion that every citizen was brought up to share. Something uniquely lethal – and, to the Romans, glorious – marked their way of war.

  Even so, it took time for the other states of Italy to wake up to the nature of the predator in their midst. For the first century of the Republic’s existence the Romans found it a struggle to establish their supremacy over cities barely ten miles from their own gates. Yet even the deadliest carnivore must have its infancy, and the Romans, as they raided cattle and skirmished with petty hill tribes, were developing the instincts required to dominate and kill. By the 360s BC they had established their city as the mistress of central Italy. In the following decades they marched north and south, crushing opposition wherever they met it. By the 260s, with startling speed, they had mastered the entire peninsula. Honour, of course, had demanded nothing less. To states that humbly acknowledged their superiority, the Romans would grant such favours as a patron condescends to grant his clients, but to those who defied them, only ceaseless combat. No Roman could tolerate the prospect of his city losing face. Rather than endure it, he would put up with any amount of suffering, go to any lengths.

  The time soon came when the Republic had to demonstrate this in a literal struggle to the death. The wars with Carthage were the most terrible it ever fought. A city of Semitic settlers on the North African coast, dominating the trade routes of the western Mediterranean, Carthage possessed resources at least as great as Rome’s. Although predominantly a maritime power, she had indulged herself for centuries with bouts of warfare against the Greek cities of Sicily. Now, poised beyond the Straits of Messina, the Romans represented an ominous but intriguing new factor in Sicily’s military equation. Predictably, the Greeks on the island could not resist embroiling the Republic in their perennial squabbles with Carthage. Equally predictably, once invited in, the Republic refused to play by the rules. In 264 Rome transformed what had been a minor dispute over treaty rights into a total war. Despite a lack of any naval tradition, and the loss of fleet after fleet to enemy action or storms, the Romans endured over two decades of appalling casualties to bring Carthage, at last, to defeat. By the terms of the peace treaty forced on them, the Carthaginians undertook a complete withdrawal from Sicily. Without ever having intended it, Rome found herself with the nucleus of an overseas empire. In 227 Sicily was constituted as the first Roman province.

  The theatre of the Republic’s campaigning was soon to grow even wider. Carthage had been defeated, but not smashed. With Sicily lost, she next turned her imperial attentions to Spain. Braving the murderous tribes who swarmed everywhere in the mountains, the Carthaginians began to prospect for precious metals. The flood of wealth from their mines soon enabled them to contemplate resuming hostilities. Carthage’s best generals were no longer under any illusions as to the nature of the enemy they faced in the Republic. Total war would have to be met in kind, and victory would be impossible unless Roman power were utterly destroyed.

  It was to achieve this that Hannibal, in 218, led a Carthaginian army from Spain, through southern Gaul and over the Alps. Displaying a mastery of strategy and tactics far beyond that of his opponents, he brought three Roman armies to sensational defeat. In the third of his victories, at Cannae, Hannibal wiped out eight legions, the worst military disaster in the Republic’s history. By every convention and expectation of contemporary warfare, Rome should have followed it by acknowledging Hannibal’s triumph, and attempting to sue for peace. But in the face of catastrophe, she showed only continued defiance. Naturally, at such a moment, the Romans turned for guidance to the prophecies of the Sibyl. These prescribed that two Gauls and two Greeks be buried alive in the city’s marketplace. The magistrates duly followed the Sibyl’s advice. With this shocking act of barbarism, the Roman people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not countenance to preserve their city’s freedom. The only alternative to liberty – as it had always been – was death.

  And grimly, year by year, the Republic hauled itself back from the brink. More armies were raised; Sicily was held; the legions conquered Carthage’s empire in Spain. A decade and a half after Cannae Hannibal faced another Roman army, but this time on African soil. He was defeated. Carthage no longer had the manpower to continue the struggle, and when her conqueror’s terms were delivered, Hannibal advised his compatriots to accept them. Unlike the Republic after Cannae, he preferred not to risk his city’s obliteration. Despite this, the Romans never forgot that in Hannibal, in the scale of his exertions, in the scope of his ambition, they had met the enemy who was most like themselves. Centuries later statues of him were still to be found standing in Rome. And even after they had reduced Carthage to an impotent rump, confiscating her provinces, her fleet, her celebrated war-elephants, the Romans continued to dread a Carthaginian recovery. Such hatred was the greatest compliment they could pay a foreign state. Carthage could not be trusted in her submission. The Romans looked into their own souls and attributed the implacability they found there to their greatest foe.

  Never again would they tolerate the existence of a power capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a pre-emptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity. Such opponents were easy – all too easy – to find. Already, even before the war with Hannibal, the Republic had fallen into the habit of dispatching the occasional expedition to the Balkans, where its magistrates could indulge themselves by bullying princelings and redrawing boundaries. As the Italians would have confirmed, the Romans had an inveterate fondness for this kind of weight-throwing, reflecting as it did the familiar determination of the Republic never to brook disrespect. For the treacherous and compulsively quarrelsome states of Greece, however, it was a lesson which took some grasping. Their confusion was understandable – in the early years of their encounters with Rome, the Republic did not behave at all in the manner of a conventional imperial power. Like lightning from a clear sky, the legions would strike with devastating impact, and then, just as abruptly, be gone. For all the fury of these irregular interventions, they would be punctuated by lengthy periods when Rome appeared to have lost interest in Greek affairs altogether. Even when she did intervene, her incursions across the Adriatic continued to be represented as peace-keeping ventures. These still had as their object not the annexation of territory but the clear establishment of the Republic’s prestige, and the slapping down of any overweening local power.

  In the early years of Roman engagement in the Balkans, this had effectively meant Macedon. A kingdom to the north of Greece, Macedon had dominated the peninsula for two hundred years. As heir to the throne of Alexander the Great, the country’s king had always taken it for granted that he could be quite as overweening as he pleased. Despite repeated punishing encounters with the armies of the Republic, such an assumption never entirely died, and in 168 BC Roman patience finally snapped. Abolishing the monarchy altogether, Rome first of all carved Macedon into four puppet republics, and then in 148, com
pleting the transformation from peace-keeper to occupying power, established direct rule. As in Italy, where roads criss-crossed the landscape like the filaments of a net, engineering prowess set the final seal on what military conquest had begun. The via Egnatia, a mighty gash of stone and gravel, was driven through the wilds of the Balkans. Running from the Adriatic to the Aegean Sea, this highway became the vital link in the coffle joining Greece to Rome. It also provided ready access to horizons even more exotic, those beyond the blue of the Aegean Sea, where cities glittering with gold and marble, rich with works of art and decadent cooking practices, seemed positively to invite the Republic’s stern attentions. Already, in 190, a Roman army had swept into Asia, pulverised the war-machine of the local despot and humiliated him before the gaze of the entire Near East. Both Syria and Egypt, the two local superpowers, hurriedly swallowed their pride, learned to tolerate the meddling of Roman ambassadors, and grovellingly acknowledged the Republic’s hegemony. Rome’s formal empire was still limited, being largely confined to Macedon, Sicily and parts of Spain, but her reach by the 140s BC extended to strange lands of which few back in Rome had even heard. The scale and speed of her rise to power was something so startling that no one, least of all the Romans themselves, could quite believe that it had happened.

  And if they thrilled to their country’s achievements, then so too did many citizens feel unease. Moralists, doing what Roman moralists had always done, and comparing the present unfavourably with the past, did not have to look far for evidence of the pernicious effects of empire. Ancient standards appeared corrupted by the influx of gold. With plunder came foreign practices and philosophies. The unloading of Eastern treasures into Rome’s public places or the babbling of strange tongues on her streets provoked alarm as well as pride. Never did the hardy peasant values that had won the Romans their empire seem more admirable than when they were being most flagrantly ignored. ‘The Republic is founded on its ancient customs and its manpower’4 – so it had been triumphantly asserted in the afterglow of the war against Hannibal. But what if these building blocks began to crumble? Surely the Republic would totter and fall? The dizzying transformation of their city, from backwater to superpower, disoriented the Romans and left them nervous of the jealousy of the gods. By an uncomfortable paradox, their engagement with the world came to seem the measure of both their success and their decline.

  For great as Rome had become, portents were not lacking of her possible doom. Monstrous abortions, ominous flights of birds: wonders such as these continued to unsettle the Roman people and require, if the prodigies appeared particularly menacing, consultation of the Sibyl’s prophetic books. As ever, prescriptions were duly discovered, remedies applied. The Romans’ time-sanctioned ways, the customs of their ancestors, were resurrected or reaffirmed. Catastrophe was staved off. The Republic was preserved.

  But still the world quickened and mutated, and the Republic with it. Some marks of crisis defied all powers of ancient ritual to heal them. Changes such as the Roman people had set in motion were not easily slowed down – not even by the recommendations of the Sibyl.

  It required no portents to illustrate this, only a walk through the world’s new capital.

  All was not well in the seething streets of Rome.

  The Capital of the World

  A city – a free city – was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas – citizenship – was to be civilised, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide. A citizen defined himself by the fellowship of others, in shared joys and sorrows, ambitions and fears, festivals, elections, and disciplines of war. Like a shrine alive with the presence of a god, the fabric of a city was rendered sacred by the communal life that it sheltered. A cityscape, to its citizens, was therefore a hallowed thing. It bore witness to the heritage that had made its people what they were. It enabled the spirit of a state to be known.

  Foreign powers, when they first came into contact with Rome, would often find themselves reassured by this thought. Compared to the beautiful cities of the Greek world, Rome appeared a backward and ramshackle place. Courtiers in Macedon would snigger in a superior manner every time they heard the city described.5 Much good it did them. Yet, even as the world learned to kowtow to the Republic, there remained a whiff of the provincial about Rome. Spasmodic attempts were made to spruce her up, but to little effect. Even some Romans themselves, as they grew familiar with the harmonious, well-planned cities of the Greeks, might occasionally feel a touch of embarrassment. ‘When the Capuans compare Rome, with her hills and deep valleys, her attics teetering over the streets, her hopeless roads, her cramped back-alleys, against their own city of Capua, neatly laid out on a suitable flat site, they will jeer at us and look down their noses,’6 they worried. Yet still, when all was said and done, Rome was a free city, and Capua was not.

  Naturally, no Roman ever really forgot this. He might sometimes moan about his city, but he never ceased to glory in her name. It appeared self-evident to him that Rome, mistress of the world, had been blessed by the gods, and preordained to rule. Scholars learnedly pointed out that the location of the city avoided extremes of heat, which sapped the spirit, and cold, which chilled the brain; it was therefore a simple fact of geography that ‘the best place of all to live, occupying as it does the happy medium, and perfectly placed in the centre of the world, is where the Roman people have their city’.7 Not that a temperate climate was the only advantage that the gods had thoughtfully provided the Roman people. There were hills that could be easily defended; a river to provide access to the sea; springs and fresh breezes to keep the valleys healthy. Reading Roman authors praise their city,8 one would never guess that to have built across seven hills was a contravention of the Romans’ own principles of town-planning, that the Tiber was prone to violent flooding, and that the valleys of Rome were rife with malaria.9 The love which Romans felt for their city was of the kind that can see only virtues in a beloved’s glaring faults.

  This idealised vision of Rome was the constant shadow of the squalid reality. It helped to generate a baffling compound of paradoxes and magnitudes, in which nothing was ever quite as it seemed. For all the ‘smoke and wealth and din’10 of their city, the Romans never ceased to fantasise about the primitive idyll that they liked to imagine had once existed on the banks of the Tiber. As Rome heaved and buckled with the strains of her expansion, the bare bones of an ancient city state, sometimes blurred, sometimes pronounced, might be glimpsed protruding through the cramped modern metropolis. In Rome memories were guarded closely. The present was engaged in a perpetual compromise with the past, restless motion with a reverence for tradition, hard-headedness with a devotion to myth. The more crowded and corrupted their city grew, the more the Romans longed for reassurance that Rome remained Rome still.

  So it was that smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when trees ‘of every kind’ had completely covered one of the hills, the Aventine.11 Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces and workshops. Long before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would forewarn the traveller that he was nearing the great city. Nor was smog the only sign. Nearby towns with celebrated names, rivals of the Republic back in the archaic past, now stood deserted, shrunk to a few scattered inns, emptied by Rome’s gravitational pull.

  As the traveller continued onwards, however, he would find the roadside lined with more recent settlements. Unable to accommodate a burgeoning population, Rome was starting to burst at the seams. Shanty-towns stretched along all the great trunk-roads. The dead were sheltered here as well, and the necropolises that stretched towards the coast and the south, along the great Appian Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-rate whores. All the s
ame, not every tomb had been left to crumble. As the traveller approached Rome’s gates he might occasionally find the stench from the city ameliorated by myrrh or cassia, the perfumes of death, borne to him on the breeze from a cypress-shaded tomb. Such a moment, the sense of a communion with the past, was a common one in Rome. Yet just as the stillness of a cemetery sheltered violence and prostitution, so not even the most hallowed and timeless of spots were immune to defacement. Admonitory notices were always being posted on tombs, prohibiting electioneering slogans, but still the graffiti would appear. In Rome, seat of the Republic, politics was a contagion. Only in conquered cities were elections an irrelevance. Rome, having neutered political life in other societies, was now supreme as the world’s theatre of ambitions and dreams.

  Not even the graffiti-ravaged tombs, however, could prepare a traveller for the bedlam beyond the city gates. The streets of Rome had never had any kind of planning imposed upon them. That would have taken a design-minded despot, and Roman magistrates rarely had more than a single year in office at a time. As a result, the city had grown chaotically, at the whim of unmanageable impulses and needs. Stray off one of Rome’s two grand thoroughfares, the via Sacra and the via Nova, and a visitor would soon be adding to the hopeless congestion. ‘A contractor hurries by, all hot and sweaty, with his mules and porters, stone and timber twists on the rope of a giant crane, funeral mourners compete for space with well-built carts, there scurries a mad dog, here a sow who’s been wallowing in mud.’12 Caught up on this swirl, a traveller was almost bound to end up lost.