MICHAEL CRAWFORD
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
SECOND EDITION

Copyright

HarperPress An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London W6 8JB

First published by Fontana 1978

Copyright © Michael Crawford 1978, 1992

Michael Crawford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Sourice ISBN: 9780006862505

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN 9780007385263

Version: 2015-04-08

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Historical Introduction

I The Sources

II Italy and Rome

III The Roman Governing Classes

IV The Conquest of Italy

V From Italian Power to Mediterranean Power

VI The Conquest of the East

VII The Consequences of Empire – The Governing Classes

VIII The Imperial Power

IX The Consequences of Empire–The Governed

X Reform and Revolution

XI Rome and Italy

XII The End of Consensus

XIII The World Turned Upside Down

XIV The Embattled Oligarchy

XV The Military Dynasts

Epilogue

Appendices

1 The Roman Assemblies

2 The Roman Army

3 Equites

4 The Special Commands

Maps

1 Central Italy

2 Italy

3 The Eastern Mediterranean

4 The Western Mediterranean

Date Chart

Further Reading

Indices

1 Sources

2 Persons

3 Places

4 General Index and Glossary

About the Author

Fontana History of the Ancient World

About the Publisher

Preface

I HAVE TRIED, within prescribed limits, both to present a balanced picture of the Roman Republic and to write an interpretative essay. I have also tried to do justice to the immense diversity of the source material for the period, sometimes by citation rather than quotation. (In this context, I should explain that my translations of the written sources are often explanatory paraphrases rather than strict translations.) The plates and figures also offer visual evidence of an importance equal to that of the written material.

The maps show the location of the most important places mentioned in the text; for the others an atlas must be used.

Dates are BC, except for a few which are indicated as AD and a few which are quite obviously so. The date chart should compensate for the fact that the arrangement of the book is only loosely chronological.

The suggestions for further reading concentrate naturally on recent work in English.

All the indices are intended to function as tools of reference and therefore provide information, not easily incorporated in the text, on sources, persons, places and technical terms.

Tim Cornell, Oswyn Murray, John North, Helen Whitehouse and Peter Wiseman have all read the manuscript and have helped to eliminate a variety of aberrations. They of course bear no responsibility for the defects of the final version. The maps and figures are largely the work of Bill Thompson, of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge; I am gateful to British Archaeological Reports, the British School at Rome and Filippo Coarelli for illustrations. To him, Peter Brunt, Emilio Gabba, Keith Hopkins, Claude Nicolet and those already mentioned I owe thanks for many enjoyable discussions of Republican history. But my greatest debt, and with it the dedication of this book, is to my immediate colleagues in the period when it was taking shape, Jack Plumb, Simon Schama and Quentin Skinner.

In preparing a second edition, I have slightly expanded the text and altered it in places to accommodate changes of mind and some recent discoveries. I have learnt a great deal from the careful suggestions of Kai Brodersen, who oversaw the German translation of the first edition. There is now a much fuller Date Chart to provide a certain chronological framework for those who are unfamiliar with the Roman Republic. And the Further Reading is related to the Date Chart in a way which I hope will be helpful. I hope that in this as in other cases I have learnt from the kind comments of reviewers, though I have found myself unable to accept suggestions which involved wanton changes to the original texts which underly my translations. Nor do I have any regrets about the space devoted to social and economic, as well as political and institutional, factors. I continue to believe that the principal reason for the destruction of Republican government at Rome was the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes, just as I continue to believe that a socialist framework offers the only eventual hope for the survival of our own world. That the Roman Republic remains for me as live and fascinating a complex of problems as it has ever been owes much to the friendship and sparkle of my fellow Republican historians at University College London, Tim Cornell and John North; I should like to associate them in the dedication of this book.

Historical Introduction

Between the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC and the middle of the second century BC, a part-time army of Roman peasants, under the leadership of the ruling oligarchy, conquered first Italy and then the Mediterranean; the loyalty of the Roman population to its leaders was assured by a share in the rewards of victory. As the empire expanded, it became harder for the lower orders to gain access to these rewards, while at the same time competition within the oligarchy became more intense. The peasant armies of Rome were drawn into the conflicts born of this competition and the Republic dissolved in anarchy.

Some parts of this story may perhaps seem unduly dramatic; I can only say that a century like that between 133 BC and 31 BC, which killed perhaps 200,000 men in 91–82 and perhaps 100,000 men in 49–42, and which destroyed a system of government after 450 years was a cataclysm.

Three other themes also figure largely. In the first place, it seems to me important that the prevailing ideology of the Roman governing class was one which facilitated change, including in the end the abolition of Republican government itself; for it permitted and even encouraged the justification in traditional terms of actions which were in fact revolutionary.

The Roman state was one in which libertas, freedom, was early identified with civitas, citizenship, that is to say, political rights and duties; libertas was therefore universally accepted as desirable and trouble only arose when the question was raised of whose libertas was to be defended. At the same time, great services to the state brought a man dignitas, standing, and auctoritas, influence; and naturally both were sought after by all men of great ability or noble descent.

In the history of the Republic, appeal was made to the concepts of libertas and dignitas both by those who sought to introduce radical change, notably by appealing to popular opinion against aristocratic consensus and by attempting to increase the material privileges of the people, and by those who sought to preserve the status quo, both in terms of political power and in terms of the distribution of resources.

The struggles between politicians during the Republic were given free rein by the failure to develop communal institutions for the maintenance of order; thus even legal procedure often involved the use of an element of self-help, as in bringing a defendant to court. Such a state of affairs perhaps did not matter greatly in a small rural community, and the struggle of the Orders, between patricians and plebeians, was in the end resolved in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. But when men turned to force in the late Republic to resolve political differences, the result was catastrophic, with armies composed of many legions rapidly involved.

Secondly, I should like to stress the innovativeness of the governing class of the Republic in a wide variety of fields, cultural as well as political. If one looks at the two centuries between the Second Punic War and the age of Cicero, the impression is of an enthusiastic borrowing of Greek artistic and intellectual skills, slowly leading to the emergence of a developed Latin culture; the central period of Hellenization of the Roman oligarchy was precisely the period when it was locked in escalating internal competition which finally destroyed the system.

Finally, I have attempted to illustrate how the sources for a particular event often adopt, consciously or unconsciously, a polemical approach and how the development of this polemic is itself part of Republican history. The sources for the history of the Republic, indeed, leave much to be desired; the works of Roman and Greek historians contemporary with the events which they chronicled have largely perished; so too have most official records; even the works of later historians who reproduced and reshaped the material in earlier historians and in official records are rarely complete. But our inadequate knowledge of what happened is partly compensated for by the possibility of observing something of how the Romans saw their past and how that vision affected their conduct.

I The Sources

IT WAS NOT UNTIL the end of the third century BC that any interest in the writing of history manifested itself at Rome; this interest was the result of an awareness that Rome was or was becoming part of the civilized world, that is the Greek world, surrounded by states of great antiquity and with a long and glorious history. A similar pedigree was a vital necessity for Rome. Within a few years of each other, Q. Fabius Pictor, a member of the Roman nobility, set out to write in Greek a history of Rome; Cn. Naevius, a poet from Campania, composed in Latin an epic poem on the First Punic War which included a great deal of material on early Roman history; and the family of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died about 280 BC, inscribed on his sarcophagus an account of his career in nearly four lines instead of a simple line-and-a-bit giving his names and titles (See Pl.1).

From this point onwards there is a rich Roman historical tradition, albeit now very imperfectly preserved. Beside this tradition there is another, that of Greek historians observing Rome from the outside. The Roman tradition has certain unifying characteristics; Pictor removed history from the hands of the official priests who had been responsible for most of such records as had been kept, but since the official priests of Rome were drawn from its aristocracy and were more officials than priests he did not change its essential nature. History at Rome was almost always written at least unconsciously from an aristocratic viewpoint and was often consciously apologetic. It shows a strong tendency to simplify the dilemmas of the past; and particularly in the late Republic it tends to see the antecedents of the revolution in purely moral terms, with evil men subverting the efforts of the heroic defenders of the res publica.

The Greek tradition is perhaps more complex. With Rome’s confrontation with and defeat of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (Map 3) in 275 and the consequent abandonment of his attempt to create an empire in the west, the Greek world began to take notice, even if Rome remained unconscious of the significance of what she had achieved. The first serious Greek historian of Rome was Timaeus. Born in Tauromenium (Taormina) and exiled as a young man by King Agathocles of Syracuse (Map 2), he spent his working life in Athens, some fifty years in all; but his interest in the west remained and led him to write a history of Sicily and a history of Pyrrhus. The contemporary defeat of a Hellenistic king by a republic may have been a congenial theme to a man exiled by a tyrant and attested as an opponent of divine honours for kings. At all events, Timaeus was led to a serious investigation of the new power in the west; and it is not surprising that Polybius in his wish to establish himself a century later as the historian of Rome should have devoted so much energy to attacking the credentials of Timaeus.

We are told that Timaeus narrated the early history of Rome and the Pyrrhic War; but he went beyond merely accounting for the existence of the power which had defeated Pyrrhus. He questioned native informants about the Roman sacra at Lavinium (Map 1); he knew of the curious Roman customs relating to the sacrifice of the October horse; he wrote of the origins of the Roman monetary system and census classes; he synchronized the foundation of Rome with that of Carthage and thus knew, unlike all his fellow Greeks hitherto, that a long period intervened between the arrival of the Trojans in Italy and the foundation of Rome.

Timaeus lived to record only the first serious encounter of Rome with a Greek state; a century later Polybius of Megalopolis (Map 3) was stimulated to record the defeat by Rome not only of Carthage in the First and Second Punic Wars, but also of one Greek state after another and the consequent emergence of Rome as the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Unlike Timaeus, Polybius was an active politician, involved as a young man in the affairs of a Greek community, the Achaean League, which was allied with Rome in the early second century BC and whose leading city, Corinth, was eventually sacked by Rome in 146. Polybius, interned by Rome as a man whose allegiance was doubtful in 167, on balance approved of the Roman victory of 146. He had in any case already established a number of close friendships with members of the Roman aristocracy and his picture of Rome is hardly that of a complete outsider (see here).

The last great Greek historian of Rome is Posidonius; contemporary with and a friend of many of the great men of the late Republic, he wrote, apart from numerous works on philosophy, science and geography, a history of Rome carrying on from where Polybius ended, the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146. An admirer of traditional Roman values and contemptuous of Rome’s declared enemies in the Greek east, he nonetheless devoted much space to internal stress at Rome and commented on her often deplorable approach to provincial government.

Of all the historians of Rome writing before the death of Caesar no work is now preserved complete. The histories of Polybius have fared best, but of the other Greek historians and of all the Roman historians only miserable fragments have survived in quotation by later authors, often grammarians interested primarily in rare word forms. Their works, however, lie behind and are often directly used in the histories of two men writing under the principate of Augustus, the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Bodrum) and the Roman T. Livius of Patavium (Padua). The ‘Early history of Rome’ by Dionysius covered the period down to the beginning of the First Punic War and is preserved complete down to 444–3, thereafter in excerpts; the ‘History of Rome from its foundation’ by Livy covered the period down to the defeat of Varus in Germany in AD 9 and is preserved complete down to 293 (Books 1–x) and from 218 to 167 (Books XXI–XLV), otherwise in resumes made for the semi-literate reading public of the later Roman empire, in the works of later historians and compilers of collections of exempla, moral tales, and in occasional quotations in extenso.

A third ingredient in the works of Dionysius and Livy, apart from the writings of earlier Greek and Roman historians, consists of official Roman records. Although the Romans displayed no interest in the writing of history before the end of the third century BC, they had nonetheless kept from the beginning of the Republic records which were capable of serving as the bare bones of history and had also preserved certain documents important to the life of the community.

The records called the Annales Maximi appear to have been kept year by year by the Pontifex Maximus, the head of the most important of the Roman colleges of official priests, and displayed outside his house on a notice-board; there is little evidence for their content – no doubt the names of the annual officials and a jejune record of phenomena of religious import such as eclipses and of events such as major wars. The annual display of the Annales Maximi was abandoned by P. Mucius Scaevola, who became Pontifex Maximus in 130; the doubtless edited form in which they were kept after being displayed had clearly long been available for consultation at any rate by members of the aristocracy and at some point the whole corpus was worked up and published. But the annual display was presumably abandoned because by now there flourished at Rome a more literary type of history, and the publication of the Annales Maximi, whenever it occurred, fell on stony ground; the historians of the late Republic and after made almost no use of them.

More important for our purposes is the preservation of major documents. Some were already exploited by Polybius, notably the early treaties between Rome and Carthage; a wider variety can be found in Livy, ranging from the decree of the Senate on the suppression of the worship of Bacchus in the early second century BC to the records of booty brought in to the treasury by victorious Roman generals or the treasury records of building activity. The decree of the Senate on the worship of Bacchus survives also in a contemporary inscribed copy from which the substantial accuracy of the version preserved by Livy may be seen. Related to the Roman respect for tradition in religious matters is the careful recording of the foundations of temples; the historical framework implied by these records, for instance the picture of a Rome rediscovering the Greek world around 300 and borrowing Greek conceptions of the celebration of victory, is often strikingly confirmed by the archaeological record.

The historical tradition as preserved by Dionysius and Livy is marred, however, by serious deformations. This is the result of two main factors. In the first place, the early historians of Rome, whether Greek or Roman, were interested in and recorded only the relatively recent past and the very distant past; later historians, moved by a horror vacui, set out to fill this gap, building on the bare record of the Annales Maximi, in their unelaborated and unpublished form. What they offer may be anything from informed guesswork to patriotic fiction; it is not history.

Secondly and more seriously, however, few Roman historians were able to resist the temptation to improve the image of their own family in the history of the Republic. As we shall see, Rome was ruled by the members of an aristocracy, one of whose prime concerns was to achieve distinction in competition with their peers. This competitive ideology comes out already in the epitaph of L. Cornelius Scipio, son of the Scipio Barbatus mentioned earlier, inscribed in an archaic form of Latin around 230: ‘hone oino ploirume consentiont R[omane] duonoro optumo fuise viro’ – ‘this one man most Romans agree to have been the best of the good.’ The effects of this ideology on the writing of history are graphically described by Cicero:

And speeches in praise of the dead of past ages are indeed extant; for the families concerned kept them as a sort of mark of honour and a record, both in order to be able to use them if anyone else of the same family died and in order to preserve the memory of the achievements of the family and document its nobility. Of course, the history of Rome has been falsified by these speeches; for there is much in them which never happened – invented triumphs, additional consulates, false claims to patrician status, with lesser men smuggled into another family with the same nomen, as if, for instance, I claimed to be descended from Marcus Tullius, who was a patrician and consul with Servius Sulpicius ten years after the expulsion of the kings (Brutus 62).

The funerals at which such speeches were delivered are characterized by Polybius from his own experience:

Whenever any famous man dies at Rome, he is carried to his funeral into the forum with every kind of honour to the so-called Rostra, sometimes conspicuous in an upright posture and more rarely in a reclining position. Here with all the people standing round, a grown-up son, if he has left one who happens to be present, or if not some other relative mounts the Rostra and discourses on the virtues and successful achievements of the dead man … Next, after the burial and the performance of the usual ceremonies they put an image (imago) of the dead man in the most public part of the house, placing it in a little wooden shrine. The image is a mask, remarkably lifelike, both in its modelling and in its complexion (Pl.8). When any famous member of the family dies, his relatives take the masks to his funeral, putting them on men who seem most like the original in general appearance or bearing … (and) he who delivers the oration over the man about to be buried, when he has finished speaking of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the rest whose images are present, beginning from the most ancient (VI, 53–54, 1).

Even for a relatively recent period, Livy remarks that the recording of the death of M. Marcellus in 208 was complicated by the version in the funeral speech pronounced by his son; similarly, one of Livy’s sources omitted the consuls for 307 and 306, either by mistake or, as Livy suggests, supposing them to have been invented; and Livy comments in total despair on the impossibility of discovering the truth about a dictator of 322 as a result of the vitiation of the record by funeral speeches.

When one reflects that the historians contemporary with or close to the events they were describing and on whom Dionysius and Livy ultimately depended for much of their material were not above allowing family pride to influence their history, it is clear that any attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of the only more or less continuous sources surviving, the history even of the middle Republic from the fourth to the second centuries BC is a hazardous proceeding.

Despite this caution, the no doubt largely oral traditions of family history are not wholly to be decried. In a modern, literate society, oral traditions beyond the living generation have been found to reflect what has been read in books; but in early Rome, anchored to the imagines of the ancestors, traditions may have had a firmer basis. Funeral speeches may have been written down at a relatively early date and Cato (see here) is represented by Cicero (de senectute 21 and 61) as explicitly claiming that the sight of the tombs of men long dead served to keep fresh the memory of their deeds and as quoting the epitaph of a man who was consul in 258 and 254. And there is another point; the vision of the early Republic in Livy is no doubt fanciful, but it was a vision in its main outlines shared by his contemporaries and predecessors, a fact of the highest importance for the understanding of a society as prone as the Roman to identify itself by reference to the past.

A problem of a different kind arises in connection with the account in Livy of the Second Punic War and the early second century BC. For this period Livy used Polybius for affairs in the Greek world and for other matters earlier Roman historians, who themselves depended ultimately on official records and on contemporary authors. The result is a detailed chronological narrative of a particularly measured kind, which does not exist for any later period; the narrative breathes a confidence and a degree of normality which is necessarily lacking from the sources for the late Republic and it is desirable at least to ask how far the obvious contrast which exists between the middle and the late Republic results from the different nature of the source material.

Four lesser figures pose problems similar to those posed by Dionysius and Livy and require brief mention. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the late first century BC, is the author of a universal history from the earliest times down to his own day. His work survives only in excerpts for the period in which we are interested, but possesses one great merit: he was disinclined to do more than copy or paraphrase one source at a time and therefore preserves much good material. The other three historians who concern us all belong to the period of the renaissance of Greek literature in the second and early third centuries AD. Appian, a native of Alexandria in Egypt, wrote a series of monographs (for the most part surviving) on the wars which Rome fought during the Republic; like Diodorus, Appian faithfully reflects his source of the moment; his own comments are of a degree of naivety which sheds an interesting light on the nature of the Roman imperial administration, of which he was a member. By deciding, however, to write not only on Rome’s foreign wars, but also on her civil wars, Appian came in effect to write a continuous history of the last century of the Roman Republic, from 133 to 35; moreover the first book of the Civil Wars contains the only serious surviving account of the agrarian history of Italy.

Plutarch of Chaeronea in Boeotia was a member of the upper class of his community, a wide reader and a prolific writer; among his writings is a series of paired biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, covering with equal verve half-legendary figures like Romulus and historical figures like Julius Caesar; they are as reliable as their sources and Plutarch’s memory permit. Finally, there is Dio of Nicaea in Asia Minor, an easterner in the Roman senate at the turn of the second and third centuries AD ; an acute and original historian of his own times, his account of the middle Republic survives only in the version of a Byzantine abbreviator and in excerpts; it represents, however, in some cases a tradition not otherwise preserved. Dio’s account of the last generation of the Roman Republic, from 69 onwards, survives nearly intact and is of enormous value.

Fortunately there is other evidence outside the main historical tradition. In the first place, there is a great deal of evidence from contemporary sources of one kind or another which is in a sense free from contamination or distortion, the evidence of public and private inscriptions, of non-historical literature and of archaeology and coins. Outside early Roman history, archaeological evidence is particularly important in allowing us to know far more of non-Roman Italy than the literary sources reveal. At the same time, the development of Roman art under the patronage of the Roman aristocracy is one of the threads of Republican history. The production of the coinage of the Republic was entrusted to young men at the start of their political careers and the types which they chose often reflected the pretensions of their families and their own ambitions. Moreover, as time passed, the coinage of Rome circulated ever more widely, becoming eventually the coinage of a world state. That too is one of the threads of Republican history.

We also possess, for instance, twenty plays of Plautus, produced at the turn of the third and second centuries BC, which provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of Roman society and institutions. The poems of Lucilius, even in the fragmentary form in which they survive, present us with a succession of often savagely satirical vignettes of the aristocracy of the late second century BC.

Finally, Rome’s involvement with the Greek world on a massive scale from 200 onwards resulted in the promulgation there of numerous decrees of the Senate and letters of Roman officials, meticulously inscribed on stone by the communities to which they were addressed; laws of the people and decrees of officials along with treaties are preserved on stone or bronze in increasing quantities as we approach the end of the Republic.

The Romans were also in some respects a highly conservative people, often preserving as fossils, especially in a religious context, institutions which no longer fulfilled any useful function; much interest was shown in them in the first century BC and antiquarians such as Varro were responsible both for recording valuable evidence of this kind about early Roman history and for attempting to elucidate it. Antiquarian evidence of this kind plays a major part for instance in any attempt to reconstruct the development of the Roman assemblies. The evidence of language may also sometimes illuminate the earlier stages of Roman history.

For the last hundred years of the Republic, the amount and the nature of the information available change radically. The voluminous writings of Cicero not only document many aspects of the period of his maturity—roughly from the 80s onwards—but also contain much information on the two generations which precede his own. Sallust, a budding politician of the late Republic, writing in retirement after the death of Caesar, composed two monographs, which survive, on a past which was to him relatively recent and for which good information was still available; they are on the Catilinarian Conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. He also wrote a history of the period from Sulla to 70, which survives only in fragments. Finally, the first book of Appian’s Civil Wars draws on a late Republican source, sometimes identified with Augustus’ acquaintance C. Asinius Pollio; this source in any case paid a degree of attention, remarkable for antiquity, to social and economic factors.

A last word. The history of the middle Republic, as presented to us in the Roman tradition, is despite its diverse origins extraordinarily monolithic; the literary material only occasionally preserves variants, such as the assertion that Remus was not killed by Romulus, or that Rome surrendered to Lars Porsenna of Clusium, or that the Capitol was taken by the Gauls; on the other hand, the epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, inscribed in the late third century BC, preserves a record of campaigns which differs from that in the literary tradition; a tomb-painting from the Esquiline Hill of the same general period records an incident unattested in the literary tradition; coin-types sometimes display an item of family history which did not manage to enter the collective tradition.

In one case, literary and archaeological evidence combine, a version of early Roman history rediscovered by the emperor Claudius from Etruscan sources being confirmed by the paintings of the François tomb at Vulci; the account known to Claudius and the paintings both deal with the adventures of Mastarna, the Etruscan name for Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. This case serves to draw attention to what is perhaps the most serious loss for the historiography of the Roman Republic, the disappearance of the non-Roman tradition. Stray references enable us to perceive that apart from Etruscan, there were once Campanian, even Mamertine (see here) histories and numerous local traditions on which Cato (see here), when he wrote his history in the second century BC, was still able to draw. But that history has perished apart from fragments, and the view which our sources present us is almost wholly Romanocentric. It was not always so, and in writing the history of the Roman Republic one must remember that it is the history of Italy as well as of Rome.

II Italy and Rome

BY THE TIME HANNIBAL invaded Italy in 218, the whole of the peninsula was under Roman control with the exception of the Po valley, inhabited by Gauls and known to the Romans as Cisalpine Gaul. Much of the process was already complete by 280, when Pyrrhus invaded Italy from Epirus; many of the crucial steps were taken in the years immediately following 338, the end of the last war between Rome and her immediate neighbours, the other cities which were like Rome of Latin race and language.

Before turning, however, to consider the process of the unification of Italy and the nature of Roman institutions (Ch. 3), it is important to have some understanding of the diverse elements which comprise the mixture which we call Roman Italy; this not only because these various elements each influenced Rome in the period when Rome was still a small city state, but also because all of them directly affected the nature of the eventual mixture.

It is for these reasons as well as because of the distinctive nature of certain Roman institutions that if any other power had united Italy the result would have been different; though, it must be said, the view that if the Samnites, for instance, had united Italy the result would have been federation rather than domination is merely the transposition to the ancient world of modern wishful thinking.

The three main groups involved are the people of the central Italian highlands, culturally on a level with or inferior to the Romans, but ethnically related and using a variety of Italic languages related to Latin; the Greeks of the south Italian colonies; and the Etruscans. These two were both culturally more advanced than Rome, but in varying degrees alien in race and language. The Gauls of the Po valley, culturally no more advanced than the Romans and of alien race and language were in due course in effect exterminated and their culture destroyed.

There is a further reason for spending some time on the non-Roman peoples of Italy. The Etruscans, to a certain extent, and the Greeks of the south to a much greater extent, both of them in contact with other areas of the Mediterranean world, provided for the expanding Republic avenues leading to involvement with that world.

The peoples of the central Italian highlands survive in the literary record chiefly as bitter and often successful opponents of the extension of Roman control; the most prominent group, the Samnites, provided in the Romanocentric eyes of Florus (1, 11, 8) material for twenty-four Roman triumphs. The Samnites lived, as recent archaeological work shows, in settled farmsteads, cultivating cereals as well as olives and vines; for despite their height and relative inaccessibility the Appennines include numerous pockets of agricultural land; the Samnites had few cattle, but many pigs and large flocks of sheep and goats, which were no doubt moved over short distances between summer pastures and winter pastures close to the farmsteads (a technique known as transhumance); both sheep and goats provided milk for cheese, wool, and whey for pig-food, as well as meat when killed at a ripe old age. The symbiotic relationship between plain and hill which transhumance involved was clearly widespread in Appennine Italy and no doubt supported a basically similar economy throughout.

Spreading outwards from the hills, partly by way of raids, but eventually with more serious intent, the peoples of the central Italian highlands were attracted by the fertile plains of Campania, just as the Volscians farther north were attracted by the plains of Latium; the Etruscan city of Capua (see below) fell in 423, the Greek city of Cumae in 421, a Greek element in the population surviving in the case of the latter. Neapolis (Naples) remained the only Greek city in Campania, though even there infiltration took place; the Greek cities of the south came similarly under pressure from the tribes of the hinterland. In the end, the hills were conquered by the plains, but at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BC it was by no means an obvious outcome.

Of the three groups of people whom I wish to discuss, the Greeks are on the whole the most straightforward. A variety of Greek cities had planted a string of self-governing foundations along the coasts of Italy and Sicily, beginning with Pithecusae (Ischia) about 775; the earliest of these colonies, as they are rather inappropriately described, was almost certainly intended to act as an entrepot for trade with Etruria; but its own foundation on the mainland opposite, Cumae, was an agricultural community, as were the vast majority of Greek colonies both in the west and elsewhere.

Greek colonization, invariably the venture of an organized community, involved the transfer of a developed society and culture, of its political organization, religious organization, language, monetary system; the colonial experience and contact with indigenous populations might eventually lead of course to considerable transformations.

But Magna Graecia, the collective name for the Greek cities in Italy and Sicily, was very much part of the Greek world, despite alleged Athenian ignorance of Sicily prior to the mounting of the great expedition of 415; men from the west participated in the great Greek festivals and their successes were celebrated by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. In the fourth century Timoleon of Corinth set out to rescue Sicily from Carthage and, as we shall see, a succession of Greek condottieri attempted to help Tarentum (Taranto) in her wars with the tribes of the hinterland. The last of them Pyrrhus of Epirus, fought a full-scale war against Rome, by then the major threat.

The position of a Greek city overwhelmed by its barbarian neighbours is poignantly described in the case of Poseidonia (Paestum) by the near-contemporary Aristoxenus of Tarentum:

We act like the people of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It so happened that although they had originally been Greeks, they were completely barbarized, becoming Tuscans; they changed their speech and their other practices, but they still celebrate one festival that is Greek to this day, wherein they gather together and recall those ancient words and institutions, and after bewailing them and weeping over them in one another’s presence they depart home (quoted by Athenaeus, XIV, 632a).

For most of the cities of Italy the effective choice lay between the barbarian tribes and Rome; it is not surprising that many of them chose Rome, a civilized community and in the eyes of some contemporary Greeks a Greek city; the process began with the survivors of the original population at Capua in 343 (see here), followed by the Greeks of Neapolis (Naples) in 326.

The Etruscans are sui generis and were so regarded in classical antiquity; it was a unique characteristic of their religion that it was centred on sacred writings that had supposedly emanated from supernatural sources, and they also claimed a special ability to discover the will of the gods by a variety of processes of divination. Furthermore, Etruscan society was characterized, at any rate in its upper echelons, by the relatively high status of its female members and, as a whole, by a deep division between the governing class and a serf population.

Etruscan culture evolved from the Villanovan culture of central Italy and was from the eighth century BC onwards both extraordinarily receptive of foreign influences and extraordinarily adept at integrating them in a local framework. The Etruscans borrowed most perhaps from the Greeks, from whom they imported on an enormous scale fine pottery in exchange for metal; the origin of their language is mysterious.

By the end of the eighth century BC they occupied the area bounded by the River Arno, the Appennines, the Tiber and the sea; during the sixth and fifth centuries they established an empire in Campania, probably beginning at the coast and in due course occupying Capua, according to Cato in 470; during the fifth and fourth centuries they created another empire in the Po valley; as a by-product of this process of expansion, Rome was ruled for a time by kings who were in effect Etruscan condottieri. The process of expansion was not a single national effort, but reflected the disunity of Etruria and its division into independent city units.

The Etruscans provided Rome with early access to at any rate a form of Greek culture; they also probably provided Rome with some of her insignia of office:

The ambassadors, having received this answer, departed, and after a few days returned, not merely with words alone, but bringing the insignia of sovereignty with which they used to decorate their own kings. These were a crown of gold, an ivory throne, a sceptre with an eagle perched on its head, a purple tunic decorated with gold, and an embroidered purple robe like those the kings of Lydia and Persia used to wear, except that it was not rectangular in shape like theirs, but semicircular. This kind of robe is called toga by the Romans and tebenna by the Greeks; but I do not know where the Greeks learned the name, for it does not seem to me to be a Greek word. And according to some historians they also brought (back to Rome) the twelve axes, taking one from each city. For it seems to have been a Tyrrhenian custom for each king of the several cities to be preceded by a lictor bearing an axe together with the bundle of rods (the fasces), and, whenever the twelves cities undertook any joint military expedition, for the twelve axes to be handed over to the one man who held supreme command (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, III, 61, using the results of Roman antiquarian research;).

More fundamentally, the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva is of Etruscan origin; the Roman system of nomenclature, however, personal name (as Marcus), name of gens, or large family group (as Tullius) and cognomen, or family name (as Cicero), is Italic rather than Etruscan in origin.

The Etruscan empire in Campania was destroyed by the Samnites (see above), the empire in the Po valley by the Gauls. Etruria itself was progressively subjugated by Rome, much aided by the fragility of Etruscan social structures; the lower orders are described by Dionysius in connection with a campaign of 480 as penestai, the word used to describe the serf population of Thessaly in Greece. In return for support against the lower orders, the governing classes were only too happy to accept Roman overlordship, as at Arretium in 302 and Volsinii in 264. It was a technique that Rome never forgot.

III The Roman Governing Classes

DOWN TO 510, Rome was ruled by kings. The monarchy was in some sense elective, though the descent of a candidate from an earlier king was not an irrelevant consideration; the office of interrex, the man who presided over an interregnum and the emergence of a successor, survived the end of the monarchy with its name unchanged and its function essentially the same, to preside over a hiatus between duly elected officials of the community.

The essence of the transition from kings to pairs of officials (called by the Romans magistratus, magistrates) holding office for a year is encapsulated by Livy (11, 1, 7–8), following the common opinion of his day; the truth, if different, is irrecoverable:

One can regard the cause of freedom as lying rather in the fact that consular imperium was made annual than in any diminution in the regal power (inherited by the consuls); the first consuls retained all the rights and insignia (of the king); the only precaution taken was that they should not both hold the fasces simultaneously and thereby create a double impression of fearfulness. Brutus was the first to hold the fasces (for the first month), with the agreement of his colleague.

Two consuls instead of a king now stood each year at the head of the community; the assembly of adult males which elected them remaind the same,¹ as did the body of elders who advised them; this was the senate, composed in practice of former magistrates. Time and circumstance produced various modifications in the three elements whose interplay was the Roman political system, including notably the creation of a large number of lesser magistrates (see here and here); nothing altered the central fact of Republican government, that it was the collective rule of an aristocracy, in principle and to a varying extent in practice dependent on the will of a popular assembly. This aristocracy was in one sense self-perpetuating, but it was of course one from which many families disappeared over the centuries and to which new families were admitted, while an inner core of great families persisted (see Pl.8).

It was a form of government to which modern notions of being in or out of power are almost wholly inappropriate; a particular individual held office only at rare intervals and with one unimportant exception (for the dictatorship, see here and here) always as a member of a college of magistrates whose powers were equal. But increasing age, if coupled with a growing reputation for practical wisdom, brought with it increasing influence in the deliberations of the ruling elite. The voice of a few powerful men was often decisive.

At the same time, competition within this elite was fierce, for a consulship or other magistracy and for the recognition of primacy in practical wisdom; given the succession of wars in which Rome was involved, it is not surprising that success as a consul regularly involved victory in battle, rewarded with a triumph (see here); primacy in practical wisdom was rewarded with the title of princeps senatus, leader of the deliberative body of the Roman state.

Aristocratic attitudes to the political process emerge not only from the inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios (see here), but also from the record of the victory of C. Duilius over the Carthaginians in 260:

As consul he relieved the Segestans, allies of the Roman people, from the Carthaginian siege and nine days later drove the Carthaginian troops and their commanders from their camp in broad daylight and took the town of Macela by assault. And in the same magistracy as consul he for the first time had success with a fleet at sea and for the first time prepared and equipped naval forces and a fleet and with these ships defeated in battle on the high sea all the Punic fleet, including large Carthaginian forces in the presence of Hannibal their commander, and took by force with his allies 1 septireme and 30 quinqueremes and triremes. (A list of booty follows). At his naval triumph he presented the people with the booty and led many free Carthaginians (captives in the triumph) before his chariot … (ILLRP 319)

The history of Republican government is to a large extent the history of competition within a group of men formally peers, always within the framework of the overriding decisions of the group; the ideology of collective rule in the middle and late Republic was powerfully reinforced by stories, improving whether true or false, of the fate suffered by men who in the early Republic stepped out of line:

(Sp. Maelius had distributed corn from his own resources; emergency measures were taken to deal with the threat posed by his ambition; these measures involved the appointment of a dictator and a master of horse as his deputy, in office for six months with supreme power overriding that of the consuls.) C. Servilius Ahala as master of horse was sent by the dictator to Maelius and said ‘The dictator summons you.’ When Maelius fearfully asked what he wanted, and Servilius replied that he had to stand trial and disprove before the senate the charge laid by L. Minucius, Maelius began to retreat into his band of followers … Servilius followed him and cut him down; covered with the blood of the dead man and surrounded by a band of young patricians, he announced to the dictator that Maelius had been summoned to him, but had fought off the attendant (who had tried to arrest him) and had incited the mob, and had received his deserts. The dictator replied ‘Bravely done, C. Servilius, for freeing the res publica (from the threat of a tyrant)’ (Livy IV, 13–14).

Within the Roman community, a closed group of families, knows as patricians, had been defined already under the monarchy by a process which is now unknowable. The group succeeded after the overthrow of the monarchy in substantially monopolizing the tenure of magistracies and priesthoods alike; as a result patricians also largely filled the senate. Wealthy and ambitious families of plebeians mostly excluded from the processes of government were naturally anxious to be admitted; at the same time the poorer plebeians were anxious to reduce or eliminate the economic exploitation to which they were subjected. The two groups of dissidents combined to extort concessions, the breaking of the monopoly of office by the patricians and the alleviation of the harsh laws of debt (under these a peasant who could not pay off a loan, perhaps of seed corn from a wealthy neighbour, could be reduced to slavery). In the process, the plebs acquired its own assembly and legislative organ, the concilium plebis (Appendix 1), and its own officials, the tribunes, whose chief function was to protect citizens from arbitrary action by a magistrate. At some time they acquired the important right to veto any action by a magistrate or the senate. They were sacrosanct, protected by an oath of the plebs to kill anyone who killed a tribune.

By 342 the battle was essentially won, with the admission of plebeians to the consulate; the most important consequence was the creation of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility, defined by the tenure of the consulship – a man who held this ennobled his direct descendants in perpetuity – and less exclusive than the patriciate (it must be remembered that in the Roman tradition even the patriciate had once admitted a new family to its membership, the Claudii). This mixed nobility established its right to supremacy by its leadership in the conquest of Italy through the second half of the fourth century BC, the rewards of which, in the form of land, were in large measure distributed to the poorer plebeians, reconciling them to the political status quo. The problem of debt was in fact probably circumvented rather than solved.

Aristotle observed that an oligarchy which remained united could not be overthrown; the collective rule of the mature Republican aristocracy only eventually dissolved in the last century BC when it failed to attend to the increasingly serious grievances of the poor and when individual members of the aristocracy appealed to these lower orders for support in their competition with each other, a competition whose scale and nature had meanwhile already been changed out of all recognition by the spread of Roman rule over the Mediterranean basin.

The most important feature of Roman government is the structure created by the traditional obligation on anyone responsible for taking action to consult a group of advisers. It is apparent everywhere in Roman society; the decision in the last resort might be that of one man alone, but the obligation to take advice was absolute. A paterfamilias might summon a family consilium, a politician might summon his family and his friends (the hapless Brutus in 44 after the murder of Caesar consulted his mother, his half-sister, his wife and his friends Favonius, Cassius and Cicero), a magistrate in his province had to consider the opinions of his entourage; the senate was the consilium of the two highest magistrates, the consuls, by the late Republic the consilium for the whole world (Cicero, Philippica IV, 14).

Political groupings in the late Republic may indeed be regarded as consisting of those men whom a leading politician habitually summoned to his consilium; discussion there prepared for sessions of the senate and meetings of the assembly. Such groupings of course sometimes followed a leader out of habit, sometimes from conviction (see here).

Possessed of certain fairly limited actual powers, the senate by monopolizing the role of advising magistrates during their terms of office in Rome and Italy effectively controlled the Roman state. The senate’s formal powers (Polybius VI, 13) were the control of finance (total, despite Polybius’ qualification) and security, the administration of Italy and the running of relations with foreign powers (except for the actual decision for war or peace which was taken by the people). The control of finance for campaigning was one of the things which slipped from the senate’s grasp in the late Republic (see here), with disastrous consequences.

The most crucial part of the senate’s advisory role lay in the field of legislation; any intending legislator was expected to consult it. The corollary of course was that the senate was also in a position to advise on the invalidation of legislation, a position of which it took advantage in the turbulent years of the late Republic. The grounds for invalidation, technical and ideological, are expounded by Cicero, in a passage highly revealing of the unyielding mentality of part of the Roman governing class:

Marcus Cicero: For many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robbers had agreed to make them …

Quintus Cicero: I fully realize that, and indeed I think that there is nothing else (except a law as defined by Marcus) which can even be called a law, let alone be regarded as one.

Marcus Cicero: So you do not accept the laws of (Sex.) Titius or (L.) Appuleius (Saturninus)?

Quintus Cicero: I do not even accept those of (M.) Livius (Drusus).

Marcus Cicero: Quite right too, for they in particular were instantaneously invalidated by a single decree of the senate (de legibus II, 13–14, compare 31).

The domination of the Roman governing class found expression in the institution of clientela, clientship, an archaic form of personal dependence, which survived at Rome with undiminished relevance, in striking contrast to Athens and the Greek world in general. Cicero regarded the institution as created by Romulus (de re publico 11, 16); it placed the client in the position of being, in E. Badian’s words, an inferior entrusted, by custom or by himself, to the protection of a man more powerful than he, and rendering certain services and observances in return for this protection.

Among the services rendered was political support; a man might be helped to office by the votes of his clients and by those of his friends and associates; naturally they expected him in return to deliver the votes of his clients. The ingrained habits of dependence of clients in particular and the lower orders in general emerge with dramatic clarity from the reaction of one of the characters of Plautus to the notion of a marriage into a higher social class for his daughter:

Now if I married my daughter to you, it occurs to me that you would be like an ox and I should be like an ass; when I was linked to you and couldn’t pull my share of the load I, the donkey, should drop down in the mud, while you, the ox, would pay no more attention to me than if I wasn’t born; you would be above me and my own order would laugh at me, and I should have no fixed abode if we were separated. The asses would tear me with theirteeth, the oxen would run me through; it’s very dangerous to climb from the asses’ to the oxen’s set (Aulularia 228–35).

It is not surprising, given such subservient attitudes, that the Roman aristocracy was able to demand economic sacrifices from its clients:

Mucius Scaevola at any rate and Aelius Tubero and Rutilius Rufus … are three Romans who observed the Lex Fannia (limiting expenditure on food, see here) … Tubero for one bought game birds from those who worked on his own estates for a denarius each, while Rutilius bought fish from those of his slaves who were fisherman for half a denarius a mina … And Mucius fixed the value of things bought from those who were under an obligation to him in the same way (Athenaeus VI, 274 c – e; compare, e.g., Lucilius 159–60 W).

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, aristocrats depended on credit demanded from suppliers who belonged thereby to a kind of client economy; the resentment felt against the English aristocracy is well documented and it is likely that a similar resentment was eventually felt against the Roman aristocracy and for similar reasons. If this is right, force is added to the suggestion of P.A. Brunt that the Roman mob in the first century BC included like the mobs in France in the eighteenth century many people of the middling sort, and a further explanation of their readiness to turn to violence emerges.

One important consequence of the institution of clientship was that the struggle of the Orders, of the patricians and the plebeians, was in no sense whatever a class struggle; the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious and part of its support came not only from those in whose interest it was to support it, but from its clients at every economic level; the patricians were similarly supported by all their clients, the humble amongst them perhaps acting against the economic interests of their class, but nonetheless bound to their patrons by real ties of shared sentiment and mutual advantage.

It is also important to remember that the process of Roman government was not simply a matter of deploying clients and friends and relations in the pursuit of an aristocrat’s turn in office and the prestige and influence which that brought. Political power, then as now, was sought for a purpose; support was directed to one man rather than to another not only because of the traditional obligations of clientship and so on, but also on a calculation of the likelihood of his achieving a desired end; his conduct had to be validated by reference to the ideas of what was desirable and the aspirations of his supporters. The general expectation of anyone on whom the Roman people conferred office was that he was capable rem publicam bene gerere – of managing affairs of state well. The reasons for holding this view – noble birth counted for much – may sometimes strike a modern reader as curious; but they were none the less real.

Elections were in any case serious contests; from Ap. Claudius Caecus (see here) onwards, the lower orders sometimes successfully supported one member of the nobility against the wishes of the majority of the nobility and even brought unwanted outsiders to the consulship; at the turn of the third and second centuries, T. Quinctius Flamininus, the man who defeated Philip V of Macedon (see here), came to the consulship after holding only very junior magistracies, but offices which in some cases involved him in the distribution of land to the lower orders and won him popularity thereby. P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio failed in an election because he asked a farmer whether his hands were so hard because he walked on them.

Farmers indeed in the early and middle Republic formed the vast majority of the Roman electorate. The earliest codification of Roman law, the Twelve Tables of the middle of the fifth century BC, already takes for granted the distinction between the assiduus, the self-supporting freeholder, and the proletarius; Cato in the second century BC, and other writers after him, painted a no doubt idealized position of an early Rome composed of yeomen ever ready to defend their country, but the fact that service as a legionary was before 107 in principle a right and a duty of the assiduus alone makes it clear that early Rome was indeed a community of freeholders, for whom military service was as central an element of the citizenship as voting in the assembly. It is no accident that the variety of Roman assembly which elected the consuls was the people organized as an army (Appendix 1).

The general acceptance—barring extreme circumstances—of a hierarchical ordering of society and of the importance of traditional patterns no doubt led to a conceptualization of the political process in predominantly moral terms; but the consequent imperatives were deeply felt, despite perhaps growing cynicism. P. Cornelius Rufinus, consul in 290 and 277, was expelled from the senate in 275 for possessing ten pounds weight of silver vessels and by this luxury breaking the moral code of the governing class; his family was submerged for four or five generations.

If I am right in arguing, however, that at all times the conduct of the Roman governing class had to be justified in terms of the Roman system of values, a fortiori nobles who advocated particular policies were under an even greater compulsion to validate them in terms of an existing complex of ideas; the pattern is relevant to the progress of the Roman revolution.

1. See Appendix 1 for the different varieties of Roman assembly.

IV The Conquest of Italy

I HAVE SO FAR emphasized certain structural and permanent features of aristocratic society and government in the Roman Republic; but in many respects Rome of the early and middle Republic was astonishingly innovative.

An early stage of Roman history had probably seen the admission to political rights and duties of men who were domiciled in Rome, but were not full members of the community; the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians had seen the eventual admission of the latter to secular and religious office. One may hypothesize that these bendings of the rules were the result of the interest of the Roman governing class in the display of military virtus which made its members peculiarly amenable to pressure from those followers on whom they depended for success in battle.

In any case, just as non-exclusiveness was ultimately characteristic of privileged groups within Roman territory, so it was also of Rome in relation to Italy. It is also worth remarking that just as Rome throughout the early and middle Republic was anxious to add new members to her citizen body, so she was also open beneath a mask of religious conservatism to the import of foreign cults, as J. A. North has pointed out. The attitude was a general one.

And we shall see that after 200 the Roman aristocracy remained just as innovative, but devoted its energies increasingly to the enormous political problems posed by contact with the Greek world, to the acquisition of Greek culture and to the pursuit of the wealth available from the east.

Rome was originally simply one of a homogeneous group of Latin cities, sharing above all a number of common places of worship, although she possessed by reason of her position, controlling a route along and a route across the Tiber, certain peculiar strategic advantages. Unlike the other members of the Latin League, Rome also came under strong Etruscan influence and under her Etruscan kings expanded at the expense of her Latin neighbours.

Already by the fall of the monarchy, the four regional units of the city of Rome, tribus, tribes, instituted for census purposes and for the levying of men and taxation, had been joined by fifteen regional units in the countryside around Rome.¹

With the overthrow of the monarchy there was a Latin reaction against Roman power, defeated by Rome at the battle of Lake Regillus; Roman relations with the Latin cities were then regulated by an agreement known as the foedus Cassianum, the terms of which were apparently still extant in the time of Cicero. (There were also treaties with some individual Latin cities.)

The next century was characterized by battles between Rome, the Latins and the associated tribe of the Hernici on the one hand and the Etruscans to the north, the Volsci to the south (see Map 1). Largely successful wars on all fronts culminated with the Roman capture of Veii in 396. There followed almost immediately the first Gallic raid into Italy, with the Roman defeat at the battle of the Allia River, the sack of the city, the near capture of the Capitol and the departure of the Gauls only on receipt of a large indemnity.

It might seem that all lay in ruins and the impression is confirmed by the obvious patriotic fictions which the Roman tradition offers for the years after the Gallic sack. But there is impeccable evidence for the fundamental irrelevance of the Gallic sack to Roman expansion and for its negligible effect on Roman power. A mere twelve years after the sack, in 378, Livy records the building of a wall round the city of Rome:

After a short breathing-space had been granted to those in debt, when everything was quiet as far as Rome’s enemies were concerned, jurisdiction (in matters of debt) was resumed and hope was so far abandoned of relieving the burden of existing debts, that new debts were contracted by reason of the taxation levied for the wall in squared blocks put out to contract by the censors (VI, 32, 1).

3 map of roman showing area enclosed by walls of 378

The wall is the so-called ‘Servian’ wall of which extensive tracts still survive; this massive construction shows the structures of the Roman state intact and functioning and able to deploy substantial resources for a communal undertaking. The area enclosed (Fig 3) is already large, and, as if to symbolize the conviction that the Gallic sack changed nothing, the wall is built with tufa from the territory of conquered Veii.

The Roman sphere of interest was also extending steadily southwards. A Roman treaty with the Samnites in 354 was followed by the first war of Rome against the Samnites. In 348 Rome made a treaty with Carthage, renewing the one made after the fall of the monarchy:

There is to be friendship on these conditions between the Romans and their allies and the Carthaginians and Uticans and their allies … And if the Carthaginians take any city in Latium which is not subject to the Romans, they may keep the property and the captives, but must surrender the city. And if a Carthaginian captures anyone (in the course of piracy, presumably) who is a member of a community with a written agreement with Rome, but not subject, he may not bring him into any Roman harbour; if he does, a Roman may touch him and free him … (Polybius III, 24, 3)

Rome emerges as possessing a subject zone, which by implication the Carthaginians may not touch, as having an interest in the whole of Latium and as having a wider protective rôle. This nascent empire was joined by Capua in 343.

An attempt by the Latin cities to throw off the growing de facto hegemony of Rome failed with their defeat in 338; despite the fact that the Volsci and Aurunci and some Campanians fought with the Latins, Rome was able momentarily to secure Samnite help and thereby keep at least the Sidicini occupied and the rest of the hostile coalition preoccupied.

The settlement of 338 is crucial in the development of the forms in which Rome came to express her relationship to the rest of Italy (see here); in the present context it is one more step on the road to hegemony.

In 328 Rome founded a colony at Fregellae; she thereby embroiled herself irrevocably with the Samnites and in the following year became involved even more closely than hitherto with the affairs of Campania. Neapolis (Naples) appealed to Rome in 327 (see here) and a treaty was concluded in 326. An attempt to win a decisive victory over the Samnites in 321 led to the disastrous defeat of the Caudine Forks. The scale of the disaster is again indicated by the patriotic fictions reported for the subsequent years in the Roman tradition; again the check was momentary, with the Via Appia linking Rome and Campania being built in 312 (it eventually reached Brundisium (Brindisi) where the pillars marking its end may be seen a few yards from the modern steamer terminal). When peace was made with the Samnites in 304, that was for them effectively the end. Roman control of Samnium was followed in due course by the foundation of colonies at Beneventum (268) and Aesernia (263). At the same time, the establishment of Roman control over Italy opened the way for the long-distance transhumance agriculture of the second century (see here).

A last attempt was made to resist the rise of Rome by a coalition of Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans and Umbrians, destroyed when the Samnites and Gauls were defeated at Sentinum in 295 (an event noticed by the Greek historian Duris of Samos); thereafter it was simply a question of mopping-up. The only wars Rome fought on Italian soil south of the Po valley down to the great Italian rebellion of 91 were wars against the invaders Pyrrhus and Hannibal and very minor wars, in response to the appeal of the governing class of Volsinii in 264, and to suppress the isolated revolts of Falerii and Fregellae in 241 and 125.

The reasons for Rome’s success in conquering and holding Italy are manifold. Supposed factors such as the absence of an attack on Italy by Alexander the Great are a red herring, nor does Rome’s geographical position provide much help in explaining anything after the very early stages. Clearly in some cases, such as that of Neapolis, the fact that Rome was a tolerably civilized power helped and in other cases, such as that of Volsinii, the fact of her being aristocratically governed opened the way for her to intervene (see here). Rome’s eventual neutralization of the Gallic invaders was also important, but the crucial factor is to be found in the generosity and flexibility of the ways in which she gradually bound the rest of Italy to herself and the manpower upon which she could call as a result. Furthermore, the gradual incorporation of Italy by Rome helps to explain the nature and logic of Roman imperialism. It is thereafter the success with which Rome expanded and her willingness to share the fruits of expansion which underpin her strength; this was built upon the consensus, both of the Roman political system and of the Italian confederacy, from the late fourth to the early second century.

The group of communities with which Rome was most intimately involved was, as we have seen, that composed of the Latin cities; she and each of them were in principle equal, possessed of certain reciprocal rights, commercium, or the right to conclude valid contracts, conubium, or the right to contract marriages of which the offspring were legitimate, migratio, or the right to change domicile and acquire the citizenship of the new domicile, and (after 471, see here) the right to vote in one regional voting unit chosen by lot in a community of temporary domicile.² These rights were no doubt mostly traditional, regulated by the foedus Cassianum of 493 (see here).

Rome and the Latin cities divided up the booty and the land which they acquired as a result of joint military enterprises. Although there is no evidence for the Latin communities, we may presume that they like Rome assigned land so acquired individually, viritim, to members of their own citizen bodies. What also happened was that the Latin League as a body founded colonies which were additional Latin communities, self-governing and possessed of the same reciprocal rights as the old Latin cities.

With the end of the war against the Latins in 338, Rome incorporated many of the disaffected communities into her own citizen body; there remained separate, however, some of the original Latin cities and some colonies. In addition the status of civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, was conferred on the Campanians, and on the cities of Fundi and Formiae (Livy viii, 14, 10).

The Roman incorporation of some of the Latin communities into her own citizen body was an act which had precedents. Part of the process by which Rome achieved hegemony over Italy was the actual extension of Roman territory, ager Romanus, and some extension had already taken place before 338; there were two ways in which this happened and they help to explain the relative superiority of Rome over the Latins in 338.

Rome had fought the war against Veii largely on her own account, as she was later to fight her wars against the rest of Etruria and to become involved in Campania, although the Latins lay between; the consequent access of land, booty or mere influence accrued to Rome alone. Such land, distributed to Roman citizens, led to an increase in those possessed of enough land to equip themselves as heavily-armed soldiers (and to an increase in the number of regional voting units, tribus, tribes, into which the Roman people was divided).

Rome had also increased her territory already before 338 by the incorporation (in circumstances the details of which escape us) of other communities, perhaps Crustumeria during the monarchy (for extension of Roman territory during the monarchy, see here), Tusculum perhaps early in the fourth century.

Civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, on the other hand, is an innovation of the settlement of 338; those possessed of this status are the original municipes, those who bear the burdens (of Roman citizenship), military service, militia, and direct taxation, tributum; they are never Latin speakers and were no doubt for that reason debarred from voting. Originally independent, the communities concerned came in the end to identify themselves with Rome; the process no doubt helped to create the climate of opinion to which a dual patria, a local community and Rome, was normal and which was one of the characteristic strengths of the political structure of late Republican Italy.

The truly revolutionary sequel, however, of the settlement of 338 was that Rome, although the Latin League had disappeared, continued to found colonies with the status of Latin cities. The first of these new, self-governing communities to be founded was Cales in 334. Their prime purpose was of course strategic; and at the same time Rome began to found small colonies of Roman citizens to act as garrisons at vulnerable points on the coasts of Italy. These were too small to possess developed organs of self-government, though someone was no doubt charged with organizing the levy when the colony was attacked.³

The standard Roman view of the colonies is well expressed by Cicero:

Is every place of such a kind that it does not matter to the state whether a colony is founded there or not, or are there some places which demand a colony, some which clearly do not? In this as in other state matters it is worth remembering the care of our ancestors, who sited colonies in such suitable places to ward off danger that they seemed not just towns in Italy, but bastions of empire (de lege agraria 11, 73).

The last and by far the largest group in the Italy of the turn of the fourth and third centuries was that of the allies, bound to Rome after defeat by a treaty, the central obligation of which was to provide troops for Rome.

The global result was the military levy ex formula togatorum – ‘according to the list of those who wear the toga’; the relevant categorization of the population of Italy appears in the Agrarian Law of III in a formulation which is presupposed by a Greek inscription of the early second century and which is certainly archaic:

those who are Roman citizens or allies or members of the Latin group, from whom the Romans are accustomed to command troops to be levied in the land of Italy, according to the list of those who wear the toga (Roman Statutes, no. 2, lines 21 and 50).

The relationship of command is in no way dissimulated (see also Polybius VI, 21, 4–5) and after 209 Rome dealt out severe punishment to twelve Latin colonies which claimed that they could not supply any more troops (see here).

The levy that could be produced is described by Polybius in the context of the Gallic incursion of 225:

But I must make it clear from the facts themselves how great were the resources which Hannibal dared to attack and how great was the power which he boldly confronted; despite this, he came so close to his aim as to inflict major disasters on the Romans. Anyway, I must describe the levy and the size of the army available to them on that occasion. (Polybius goes on to claim that the total manpower available to Rome was 700,000 infantry and 70,000 cavalry.) (11, 24)

The link between the manpower thus available and Rome’s openness to outsiders was already obvious to Philip V of Macedon, a future rival of Rome, as appears from a letter written to Larisa in 217:

… and one can look at those others who adopt similar approaches to admission of citizens, among them the Romans, who when they free their slaves admit them to citizenship and enable them (actually their sons) to hold office; in this way they have not only increased the size of their own country, but have been able to send colonies to almost seventy places … (SIG 543 with Chr.Habicht, in Ancient Macedonia, 265, for date)

The admission of outsiders as a source of, presumably military, strength is also explicitly recognized by Cato in his Origines, talking of early Rome:

Those who had come together summoned several more thither from the countryside; as a result their strength grew (Gellius XVIII, 12, 7 = fr. 20 Peter).

The fourth century BC saw not only the emergence of what we call the Italian confederation, but probably also the progressive articulation of the Roman citizen body into the five census classes known in the late Republic; the original division of the citizen body had probably been into assidui and proletarii, members of a single class and those below it, those who served as legionaries and those who did not; assidui were probably simply those who could equip themselves with a full suit of armour. It may be that Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, then defined assidui in monetary terms, but the elaborate division of these assidui into five different classes, defined by different levels of capital wealth, is probably a development of the fourth century BC. Pay for the army had been instituted in 406, to be funded partly by indemnities from defeated enemies, partly from tributum, a levy on the capital wealth of the assidui; it was surely this and the growing complexity of the Roman fiscal system in general which called forth the so-called Servian system in its final form. The shift from a system which singled out those who could arm themselves to one which singled out those who were wealthy is clearly an important stage in the development of the Roman state.

Quite apart from providing the manpower which Rome controlled, the organization of Italy was also a considerable source of strength by reason of the loyalty which Rome was able to inspire by its means. In the first place, the range of statuses, with full citizens at one end and allies at the other and cives sine suffragio, citizens without the vote, and Latins in between prevented undue polarization. Secondly, the process of conquest of course involved deprivation, of booty or land or both, for the defeated; but once part of the Roman confederacy, they were entitled to a share in the spoils of the next stage and had indeed, as we shall see, an interest in ensuring that it took place. Finally, the way in which Italy was organized meant that there were open avenues of approach to full Roman citizenship. Civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, came to be regarded as a half-way house, whatever its original function; and it was possible for allies to join Latin colonies and thence, eventually no doubt, for their descendants to become Roman citizens.

It is also important to remember that apart from the levy, which was normally followed by a successful campaign, Roman rule lay light on the Italian communities; even in the case of incorporated communities, local government survived, and mostly the various elements of the Italian confederacy were left to themselves to perpetuate or evolve their own peculiar political structures. P. A. Brunt has indeed shown that the levy itself could not have been conducted without considerable local government institutions.

Given the power and preponderance of Rome, however, it is hardly surprising that the different cities of Italy should have increasingly assimilated themselves to Rome. Colonies obviously had a tendency at the outset to model themselves on different aspects of the city of Rome; thus Cosa, founded in 273, borrowed the notion of a curia, senate-house, linked with a circular comitium, place of assembly, directly from Rome. Building styles in general came increasingly to spread out from Rome to the periphery. And Cicero talks of the voluntary adoption of Roman institutions by Latin cities:

C. Furius once passed a law on wills, Q. Voconius on inheritance by women; there have been countless other measures on matters of civil law; the Latins have adopted those which they wished to adopt (pro Balbo 21).

The end product of the social and political process I have described is incisively delineated by Ennius, a native of Rudiae in Apulia, whose maturity belongs in the early second century (Annales, line 169 V): ‘The Campanians were then made Roman citizens.’

1. In 471 these regional units were chosen as the basis of a new organization of the Roman people for voting purposes, the comitia tributa, trial assembly (see Appendix 1).

2. Much later the rule was introduced whereby the magistrates of Latin communities acquired Roman citizenship.

3. A variety of ad hoc measures existed to provide jurisdiction for Roman citizens in colonies and scattered in individual assignations.

V From Italian Power to Mediterranean Power

THE REMOVAL OF the barriers against the participation of plebeians in the political and religious life of the Roman state was followed by the Roman assertion of her hegemony over Latium and then by the defeat of the Samnites and of the Gallic incursion of 295. The mixed patrician and plebeian nobility was tested and confirmed in power by the successes of those years; but it is also plausible to suppose that the opening up of avenues to power to groups previously excluded was likely to cause disturbances. The career of Appius Claudius Caecus, the earliest Roman to appear in our sources as a personality rather than the edifying stereotypes dear to the later Republic or the age of Augustus, provides evidence of such disturbances. Despite the deformation in a historical tradition often hostile to the gens to which he belonged, the essential outline is clear. His elogium, reinscribed at Arretium (Arezzo) in the age of Augustus, is startling enough, with its frequent repetition of magistracies:

Appius Claudius, son of Caius, Caecus (the blind), censor, consul twice, dictator, interrex three times, praetor twice, curule aedile twice, quaestor, tribune of the soldiers three times. He captured several towns from the Samnites, routed an army of Sabines and Etruscans. He prevented peace being made with King Pyrrhus. In his censorship he paved the Appian Way and built an aqueduct for Rome. He built the temple of Bellona (Inscr. It. XIII, 3, no. 79 – contrast the original funerary inscription of Scipio Barbatus, see here).

The most revolutionary period of Appius Claudius’ career was his censorship in 312:

Ap. Claudius had his fellow-magistrate L. Plautius under his thumb and disturbed many ancestral practices; for in currying favour with the people he paid no attention to the senate. First he built the aqueduct known as the Aqua Appia over a distance of nine miles to Rome and spent much public money on this project without senatorial approval; next he paved with stone blocks the greater part of the road named after him the Via Appia, which runs from Rome to Capua, the distance being well over 100 miles; and since he dug through high ground and filled in ravines and valleys even where substantial fill was needed, he spent all the available public money, but left an enduring monument to himself, deploying his ambition in public service.

And he changed the composition of the senate, not only enrolling the noble and eminent in rank, as was customary, but including many who were sons of freedmen; so that those who were proud of their nobility were angry. He also gave citizens the right to be enrolled in whichever regional tribe they wished and to be registered accordingly by the censors.

In general, seeing the cumulative hatred for him of the upper class, he avoided giving offence to any other citizen, contriving to gain the good-will of the masses to balance the hostility of the nobles. At the inspection of the cavalry (one of the functions of the censors), he deprived no man of the horse provided for him by the state (a way of disgracing someone), and in drawing up the list of senators, he ejected no member of the senate as unfit, unlike his predecessors. And the consuls, because of their hatred for him and their desire to curry favour with the upper class, summoned the senate not as constituted by Ap.Claudius, but as constituted by the preceding censors.

But the people, resisting these moves and sharing the ambition of Ap. Claudius and wishing to secure the advance of their class, elected as curule aedile (the election is effectively undated in Diodorus, but occurred for the year 304) Cn. Flavius, the son of a freedman, who was the first Roman whose father had been a slave to gain that (or presumably indeed any) office (Diodorus xx, 36, 1–6).

Apart from his other misdemeanours, Ap. Claudius refused to resign his censorship at the end of eighteen months according to the law and according to one tradition was still censor when a candidate for the consulship of 307. He was also remembered as the man who persuaded the family of the Potitii to make public the nature of the rites at the altar of Hercules, for which they had been responsible, and thereby invited their destruction by an angry divinity, and as the man who attacked the privileges of the sacred college of flautists (tibicines).

Much in all this may well be doubted, though hardly the uniqueness of Ap. Claudius among the politicians of his generation, but another act of Ap. Claudius, which may be accepted implicitly,¹ places him in the context of other innovatory activities of the turn of the fourth and third centuries. This is his building of the temple of Bellona, vowed during a battle in the course of his second consulship in 296 (the year before the battle of Sentinum, see here); the building of this temple forms part of a whole pattern of interest in the honouring of the gods of war and victory, which shows Rome newly aware of her enormous power and, what is more, aware of the ideology of victory of the Hellenistic world. It is also interesting that the lifetime of Ap. Claudius saw Rome adopt the Greek device of coinage (see also Pl.1).

It was no doubt his awareness of the enormous power of Rome which led Ap. Claudius, towards the end of his life and in perhaps its most celebrated incident, to reject the notion of peace with King Pyrrhus of Epirus (see here), addressing the Roman senate thus:

Whither have your minds in madness turned aside, which stood four-square on the path hitherto? (Ennius, Annates, lines 202—3 V)

We have seen that by the time of Pyrrhus’ invasion, Rome controlled virtually all Italy south of the Po valley and thus possessed the power with which to defeat Pyrrhus and other enemies after him. Furthermore, the nature of Rome’s control of Italy goes far to explain the nature of Roman imperialism, of interest to us, but something the existence of which Polybius took for granted. With the Pyrrhic War, Rome faced for the first time an enemy from the civilized core of the Mediterranean world and, with his defeat, that world began to take notice of Rome (see here). Rome’s wars of the third century and after are relatively well-attested and took her between 280 and 200 from a position on the fringe of the Mediterranean world to one from which she can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to dominate it. We must consider for a moment the nature of Roman imperialism and then look at the course of Rome’s wars down to the defeat of Hannibal.

Roman society can be seen as deeply militaristic from top to bottom, in a way and to an extent that is not true of any Greek state, not even Sparta. Whatever the Romans said and no doubt in part believed about their fighting only just wars, the value attached to successful wars of conquest found expression in a number of central institutions. It was an ancient custom, revived by Sulla, for those who had extended Roman territory in Italy to be allowed to extend the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city of Rome; the censors at the end of their term in office prayed that the Roman state might be granted greater wealth and extent, and haruspices, priests from Etruria, were consulted at least from the late third century to say whether a sacrifice made at the beginning of a war portended (as hoped) extension of the boundaries of the Roman people; Ennius (Annales, line 465 V) talked of ‘you who wish Rome and Latium to grow’. That Roman territory did grow in extent throughout the period when Rome was establishing her hegemony in Italy is in any case obvious; the land taken from conquered peoples and used for the foundation of colonies or for individual assignation became ager Romanus, Roman territory, unless used for Latin colonies; its progressive extension can be plotted down to 200, after which year the pattern remained unchanged until 91. It seems in fact that the Romans supposed that success in wars of conquest was the reward for their piety and the justice of their cause.

At the level of the individual, a general who brought a war to a successful conclusion was of course rewarded with prestige, booty and the avenue to popularity which its distribution could bring, and clients among the defeated; he was also likely to be permitted to hold a triumph, an astonishing and spectacular public and religious celebration of his victory. None of this was unwelcome to an ambitious member of a competitive oligarchy; the pretensions of such a man are graphically documented by the frequency with which they are satirized by Plautus, as at Amphitruo 657 (compare 192 and 196):

I routed them at the first attack by my divinely conferred authority and leadership.

or at Epidicus 381 (compare 343):

I am returning to camp with booty because of the bravery and authority of Epidicus.

Another factor operated both at the level of the community and at the level of the individual, the urge to intervene far afield; faced with an appeal from Saguntum in 220, Rome could not resist hearing it, although Saguntum lay in the area of Spain which Carthage reasonably held to be within her sphere of influence; it was yet another factor which fed Carthaginian enmity towards Rome. Similarly, individual members of the oligarchy involved themselves in the internal affairs of the kingdoms of Macedon, Syria and Pergamum in the course of the second century. Again, the involvement was related to competition within the oligarchy.

Furthermore, Rome had of course suffered defeats, some of them momentarily catastrophic; but that hardly explains why a desire for security, understandable in any community, amounted in Rome almost to a neurosis over her supposed vulnerability; in 149 Rome persuaded herself that Carthage was still a threat and duly annihilated her (see here).

Sheer greed also often played a part, overtly expressed by a character in Plautus:

Yes, you both go in, for I shall now summon a meeting of the senate in my mind, to deliberate on matters of finance, against whom war may best be declared, so that I can get some money thence (Epidicus 158–60).

But perhaps more important than any of these factors was the nature of the Roman confederation in Italy; Rome drew no tributum from any of her associates (other than from the cives sine suffragio) or allies, but demanded from them manpower. The origin of the institution is intelligible enough in a world in which Rome and Latium and the Hernici lived under permanent threat of invasion from marauding upland tribesmen; but the consequence of the institution was that the only way in which Rome could derive benefit from her confederation was by summoning troops. The only way in which she could symbolize her leadership, a factor of at least as great importance in an empire as its practical benefits, was by placing the troops of the confederacy under the command of the consuls. And then – what else but war and conquest?

The Roman involvement with Pyrrhus came about because of the difficulties of Tarentum. Under increasing pressure from the barbarian tribes of the interior in the latter half of the fourth century, Tarentum turned to the Greek homeland and to the help of a series of Greek condottieri, Archidamus of Sparta, Alexander of Epirus, Acrotatus of Sparta, Cleonymus of Sparta (in Italy from 304 to 299) and finally Pyrrhus of Epirus (in the west from 280 to 275); this last general was summoned to help not against the barbarian tribes who were neighbours to Tarentum but against the expanding power of Rome.

After a series of successes and an expedition to Sicily, Pyrrhus was finally defeated by the Romans at Beneventum and abandoned the Tarentines to their fate. The confrontation with Rome was in a sense marginal to the career of Pyrrhus; but it was a confrontation between Rome and a successor of Alexander the Great and marked the definitive emergence of Rome into the Greek world (see here).

Not long after the defeat of Pyrrhus, Rome found herself in 264 led to intervention outside Italy for the first time:

The Mamertini (Italian mercenaries settled in Messana and under threat of attack from Syracuse) wanted, some of them, to appeal to the Carthaginians (the other great power apart from Rome in the western Mediterranean and known to the Romans as Poeni, Phoenicians, whence Bellum Punicum, Punic War) and to hand over themselves and the acropolis to them, others to send an embassy to Rome, handing over the city to them and asking them to help them as being men of the same race. The Romans were in a quandary for a long time because the illogicality of such help seemed absolutely obvious; for shortly before they had inflicted the supreme penalty on some of their own citizens for illegally seizing Rhegium; now to seek to help the Mamertini, who had behaved in much the same way not only towards Messana, but also towards Rhegium, involved misconduct hard to condone. The Romans did not ignore any of these factors, but they realized that the Carthaginians had not only subjugated Africa, but also much of Spain (Polybius or his source here exaggerates), and controlled all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas; and the Romans were worried lest if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily they would be overpowering and dangerous neighbours for them, surrounding them and threatening all parts of Italy. It was clear that they would rapidly subjugate Sicily, unless the Mamertini received help; for if Messana were handed over to their control, they would rapidly conquer Syracuse, being already masters of almost all the rest of Sicily.

The Romans foresaw all this and thought that they must not abandon Messana and allow the Carthaginians as it were to acquire for themselves a stepping-stone over to Italy; they debated for a long time and eventually the senate did not pass the motion (to help Messana), for the reasons I have just outlined; for the illogicality of helping the Mamertini balanced the advantages to be derived from helping them.

But the assembly took a different line; the people had been worn out by recent wars and badly needed a change for the better in their circumstances; in addition to the arguments I have just outlined on the desirability of the war from the point of view of the state, the generals-to-be spoke of the clear and considerable advantage (in terms of booty) which each individual might expect; the people voted to help the Mamertini (Polybius 1, 10, 1–11, 2).

After some successes, including the acquisition of Hiero of Syracuse as an ally, Rome found that the war had reached a position of stalemate, with the Carthaginians masters of the sea, the Romans masters of Sicily apart from a few fortified places. As capable of innovation in the technical sphere as elsewhere, the Romans took to the sea:

When they saw that the war was dragging on for them, they set to for the first time to build ships, a hundred quinqueremes and twenty triremes. And since the shipwrights were totally inexperienced in building quinqueremes, none of the communities of Italy then using such ships, their project caused the Romans considerable difficulty. All this shows better than anything else how ambitious and daring the Romans are as policy-makers. (Using a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a model the Romans duly built a fleet and put to sea.) (Polybius 1, 20, 9–11)

The war was settled by Roman persistence, a characteristic which had already helped to defeat Pyrrhus and which was to help defeat Hannibal, the chief Carthaginian general in the Second Punic War; Rome built one more fleet than Carthage was capable of building and in the peace imposed in 241 made Carthage withdraw from Sicily and pay a large indemnity. By a piece of what even Polybius regarded as sharp practice, Rome acquired Sardinia and Corsica shortly after.

Not altogether surprisingly, there were those in Carthage who did not regard the verdict of the First Punic War as final; the creation of an empire in Spain and the acquisition thereby of substantial military and financial resources were followed by Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218 (the Roman tradition attempted to make the entirely justified attack on Saguntum by Hannibal into the casus belli, in order to salve its conscience over the failure to respond effectively to the appeal by Saguntum to Rome, see here). By a curious irony, the decisive confrontation between Rome and Carthage came at a moment when trading links between the two communities were greater than ever before – a large part of such fine pottery as Rome exported in the third quarter of the third century went to Carthage and her neighbourhood.²

Hannibal’s initial success was electrifying; invading Italy with 20,000 infantry and 6000 cavalry, he defeated the Romans in a succession of battles; at the River Ticinus and the River Trebia in the Po valley in 218, at Lake Trasimene in Etruria in 217 and at Cannae in south-east Italy in 216. Given his small forces, it was inevitable that he should seek to supplement them with such allies as became available and indeed ultimate success depended on detaching the majority of the members of the Roman confederacy. Given the secular enmity between the Romans and the Gauls settled in the Po valley and the Roman attempts immediately before 218 to plant colonies in the Po valley, it was inevitable that the Gauls should be anxious to join him, quite apart from the prospects of plunder. Their adhesion, however, was unlikely to endear Hannibal to the rest of Italy.

5 Map showing places to which Roman fine pottery was exported in the middle of the third century BC

Hannibal’s spectacular initial successes in fact only masked a deeper long-term failure. The battle of Cannae was followed by the revolt of a number of Italian communities and conspicuously of Capua, some eager to abandon Rome, others constrained to do so by military force; Hieronymus, the grandson of Rome’s ally of the First Punic War, Hiero of Syracuse (see here), was persuaded to join Carthage. But most of Rome’s allies remained loyal and the community of interest between them and Rome remained the most important factor in deciding the outcome of the war.

It was clear in the immediate aftermath of Cannae that Rome had no intention of ever surrendering; given that, her allies recalled her leadership in the series of battles against Gallic raids and the fact that the Gauls were now allied with Hannibal. They recalled the sense of identity which Rome had created for an Italy united under her leadership. Above all they recalled the shared rewards of success.

Syracuse was recaptured by M. Claudius Marcellus in 211, having held out so long only because of the ingenuity of the engines designed by Archimedes (who was killed in the sack). In 209 P. Cornelius Scipio captured the Carthaginian base in Spain, Nova Carthago. Meanwhile in Italy, Hannibal was forced to watch the superior manpower of an essentially unshaken Roman confederacy slowly subjugating the cities which he had won over and which he was unable to defend. In 207 he summoned Hasdrubal and the remaining Carthaginian forces from Spain, but they were destroyed in a battle beside the River Metaurus in north-east Italy. Hannibal’s departure from Italy and ultimate defeat in 202 at Zama by a Roman expeditionary force under P. Cornelius Scipio, as a result surnamed Africanus, were only a matter of time.

The measure of Rome’s control over her allies is her response to the plea in 209 of twelve of her Latin colonies that they could neither provide more men nor pay for them:

There were then thirty (Latin) colonies; twelve of these, when representatives of all were at Rome, informed the consuls that they no longer had the resources to provide men or money … Shocked to the core, the consuls hoped to frighten them out of such a disastrous state of mind and thought that they would get further by rebuke and reproof than by a gentle approach; so they claimed that the colonies had dared to tell the consuls what the consuls would not bring themselves to repeat in the senate; it was not a question of inability to bear the military burden, but open disloyalty to the Roman people … (The remaining colonies produced more than their quota; the delinquent colonies were temporarily ignored and later severely punished by the imposition of additional burdens.) (Livy XXVII, 9, 7)

Just as the rewards of success kept her confederacy loyal to Rome despite occasional rumblings, so they held the lower orders loyal to the rule of the oligarchy, again with occasional rumblings. The career of the novus homo, a man without ancestors who had held office, Manius Curius Dentatus, undoubtedly depended on popular support. Consul in 290, he defeated the Samnites and the Sabines, and celebrated two triumphs, and he then distributed land taken from the Sabines among the Roman needy. Not surprisingly he went on to hold command again, against a Gallic tribe, the Senones, in the 280s; he then held office yet again, to inflict defeat on Pyrrhus in 275. A final consulate in 274 was his reward.

But the most serious clash before the second century between the will of the oligarchy and a representative of the people was provoked by C. Flaminius, tribune in 232, who carried in that year against the opposition of the senate a law by which individual allotments were made to Roman citizens in the Ager Gallicus and Ager Picenus. The bitterness of the oligarchy against C. Flaminius was conveyed to Polybius in the middle of the next century by his aristocratic sources:

The Romans distributed the so-called Ager Picenus in Cisalpine Gaul (the Po valley), from which they had ejected the Gauls known as Senones when they defeated them; C. Flaminius was the originator of this demagogic policy, which one may describe, as it were, as the first step at Rome taken by the people away from the straight and narrow path (of subservience to the oligarchy) and which one may regard as the cause of the war which followed against the Gauls. For many of the Gauls, and particularly the Boii, took action because their territory now bordered on that of Rome, thinking that the Romans no longer made war on them over supremacy and control, but in order to destroy and eliminate them completely (Polybius II, 27, 7–9).

The reasons for senatorial opposition to the proposal of C. Flaminius are not hard to guess – not any theoretical concern with the effect of an extension of Roman territory on the functioning of the city-state, but simple apprehension of the rewards awaiting C. Flaminius in terms of prestige and clients.

Nor was the law of 232 the only thing which alienated C. Flaminius from the senate:

(He was) hated by the senators because of a recent law, which Q. Claudius as tribune had passed against the senate and indeed with the support of only one senator, C. Flaminius; its provisions were that no senator or son of a senator might own a sea-going ship, of more than 300 amphoras’ carrying capacity; that seemed enough for the transport of produce from a senator’s estate; all commercial activity seemed unsuitable for senators. The affair roused storms of controversy and generated hostility to C. Flaminius among the nobility because of his support for the law, but brought him popular backing and thence a second consulate (Livy XXI, 63, 3–4).

The law was without practical consequences, since a senator could engage in commercial activity through an intermediary, as the elder Cato, that upholder of traditional values, discovered; rather, the law accurately expressed a fundamental belief of the Roman governing class, that a gentleman should live off the land, or at any rate seem to do so. The chief importance of the law was that it involved public recognition of the senate as the governing council of the Roman community (and indeed of a senator and his son as belonging to a distinct Order in society); the law insisted that its members should be above worldly considerations.³ The law also provided evidence of the willingness of the people to legislate for the conduct of their leaders; that was its offence – an offence that came to be repeated more than once as the revolution of the late Republic unfolded.

The second consulship which his support for the Lex Claudia brought C. Flaminius was that of 217; defeat at Lake Trasimene cost him his life and provided further material with which the oligarchy could blacken his memory. But he was not the last leader whom during the Hannibalic War the people brought to office against the wishes of the oligarchy. C. Terentius Varro, one of the consuls for 216, came to office partly as a result of popular dissatisfaction with the oligarchy’s conduct of the war (Livy XXII, 34, 8, is also a plausible reconstruction of part of the ideology of his supporters); the policy associated with the name of Q. Fabius Maximus, of avoiding battles with Hannibal, was supposed to involve prolongation of a war which could easily by won outright. C. Terentius Varro took the Roman legions down to the greatest defeat of the war at Cannae.

Despite his failure, the rumblings continued. Not surprisingly, one reaction of the oligarchy to crisis during the Hannibalic War was to authorize a consul to name a dictator, in office for six months with supreme power. This emergency office was reduced to a nonsense in 217 when the people elevated M. Minucius Rufus to a dictatorship alongside Q. Fabius Maximus; ironically, the senate itself weakened the position of Maximus by quibbling over his access to finance for ransoming prisoners. The people again nominated a dictator in 210; and in that year tribunician interference with the activity of a dictator was allowed for the first time. The office fell into desuetude and its function was taken over when need arose by a very different institution (see here); the office itself was revived in a very different form by Sulla and Caesar.

But the most remarkable product of popular feeling during the Hannibalic War was the emergence of a charismatic leader who for the moment avoided any overt challenge to the collective rule of the oligarchy, but whose example had nonetheless the most sinister implications for the future, P. Cornelius Scipio. Carried by popular fervour to the command in Spain, he there found himself hailed as king by some native Spanish troops; he turned the embarrassing compliment by creating the title imperator for them to use. The title was initially monopolized by members of his family and then competed for in the escalating political struggles of the late Republic. The victory over Carthage at Zama then gave Scipio the title of Africanus and a degree of eminence over his peers never before achieved. He even claimed a special relationship with Jupiter. Also symptomatic of the degree of eminence which an individual could achieve in this period is the cult offered to Marcellus, the captor of Syracuse, by that city (we do not know whether in his lifetime or posthumously). For the moment, however, senatorial control was unchallenged; the astonishing thing is not that the assembly in 200 refused initially to vote for another war, with Philip V of Macedon, but that it was persuaded so readily to change its mind. Such was the grip of the oligarchy on the Roman state.

1. Records of temple foundations appear to have been preserved independently of the main historical tradition (see here).

2. It is also interesting that at some time the Romans acquired the word macellum, market, from a Phoenician source.

3. It is unreasonable to suppose with some scholars that the law was motivated by the desire of men of business to eliminate competition from senators.

VI The Conquest of the East

ROMAN POLITICAL involvement east of the Adriatic began with the First Illyrian War in 229, an event as crucial to our understanding of Roman expansion as to that of Polybius, with his Hellenocentric view of the ‘world’ conquered by the Romans. According to Polybius, the Illyrians (Map 3), long in the habit of molesting ships sailing from Italy, did so even more when in the course of the reign of Queen Teuta of Illyria they seized control of Phoenice; a Roman protest led to the murder of L. Coruncanius, one of the Roman ambassadors, on his way home and war was declared. Roman distaste for a queen who could not or would not control her subjects’ piracy is intelligible enough and one can compare the Roman punishment of their troops who seized Rhegium in 280; but the strategic threat posed by Illyria with its capital at Rhizon on the bay of Kotor should not be underestimated. ‘Whoever holds Kotor, I hold him to be master of the Adriatic and to have it within his power to make a descent on Italy and thereby surround it by land and sea’ remarked Saint-Gouard in 1572. Of the power of Illyria after the seizure of Phoenice Rome had tangible evidence in the shape of the pleas of those who suffered.

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