Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (16 page)

THE IDEA OF A NATION-IN-ARMS

Individual Greek city-states in the past had occasionally enrolled new citizens, but such grants were honorific and rare. Much of the commerce of the Hellenic polis remained in the hands of noncitizen resident aliens, the brilliant and industrious metics who might own more capital than any citizen but nevertheless lacked the ability to vote in Assembly. The Greeks were too jealous of their autonomy and freedom and too chauvinistic about their surrounding countryside to grant on any wide scale foreigners and immigrants—or even Greeks from different city-states—the same citizenship rights as hardy farmers who worked their ancestral plots.

Although a few Greek thinkers as diverse as Herodotus and Isocrates came to envision Greekness,
to Hellenikon,
as an ideal rather than a prerequisite of language or race—open to any foreigners who might share the culture and political premises of the polis—the rise of Macedonian monarchy cut short the evolution of the consensual and independent city-state. Military manpower was always the chief bane of classical Greek armies—a shortage of infantrymen brought about by the blinkered prerequisite that all soldiers should be citizens, but not all residents should be citizens. Even the poor who rowed for their freedom at Salamis were matched in number by slaves and foreigners who had—and would have— no say in the government of Athens. This narrow conception of citizenship would soon doom the independent Greek city-state.

In contrast, the culture that Hannibal fought in Italy was in the midst of a revolutionary transformation in the idea of what Rome was. The irony of the Second Punic War was that Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome, did much to make Rome’s social and military foundations even stronger by incorporating the once “outsider” into the Roman commonwealth. By his invasion, he helped accelerate a second evolution in the history of Western republican government that would go well beyond the parochial constitutions of the Greek city-states. The creation of a true nation-state would have military ramifications that would shake the entire Mediterranean world to its core—and help explain much of the frightening military dynamism of the West today. In the crisis after Cannae, the property qualification for infantry service—itself a borrowed idea from the Greeks’ concept of the hoplite census—was halved, and thereafter continually further lowered throughout the second century until ended altogether by Marius.

The population of Italy—Samnites, Etrurians, and the Greek-speakers of the south—was allied in varying degrees to Rome. Even the distrust of things Roman by Italian confederates was the result not so much of fear and hatred of foreign domination as of envy and resentment to the degree that they had not yet become Roman citizens with full rights to hold office and vote. The Other in the ancient world often migrated to Hellenic and Italian cities to find economic opportunity and greater freedom. Under the Greeks they found on occasion tolerance, indifference, or prosperity; among the Romans eventually citizenship. The Italian musters to oppose Hannibal’s presence were, in short, further catalysts in an ongoing evolution toward parity between Rome and Italy.

Already by the third century there were many visionaries in Rome calling for Italian-wide full citizenship—the matter would not be resolved until the Social Wars of the early first century B.C.—or recognition that whole communities akin in ideology and material circumstances to Rome should be in theory eventually incorporated into the Roman commonwealth. By the time of Hannibal’s invasion, Italian communities that were not Latin-speaking were nevertheless often comprised of Roman citizens, who were protected under Roman law even if they were not full voting members of the republic. The need to galvanize Italian support, man the legions, and prevent defections to Hannibal accelerated concessions from Rome to its allies. Under the late republic and empire to follow, freed slaves and non-Italian Mediterranean peoples would find themselves nearly as equal under the law as Roman blue bloods.

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for the growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. In the centuries of empire to follow, the legionaries of a frontier garrison in northern England or northern Africa would look and speak differently from the men who died at Cannae. They would on occasion experience cultural prejudice from native Italians; nevertheless, they would also be equipped and organized in the same fashion as traditional Roman soldiers, and as citizens they would see their military service as a contractual agreement rather than ad hoc impressment.

Even as early as the Punic Wars slaves in real numbers were on occasion freed and, depending on their military contributions, given Roman citizenship. The aftermath of Cannae would see their military participation and emancipation in the thousands. The Romans, in short, had taken the idea of a polis and turned it into the concept of
natio:
Romanness would soon not be defined concretely and forever by race, geography, or even free birth. Rather, citizenship in theory could be acquired someday by those who did not speak Latin, who were born even into servitude, and who lived outside Italy—if they could convince the relevant deliberative bodies that they were Roman in spirit and possessed a willingness to take on Roman military service and pay taxes in exchange for the protection of Roman law and security brought on by a free and mercantile economy.

Juvenal three centuries after Cannae would ridicule the “hungry Greeklings” that bustled about Rome, but such men ran the commercial life of Rome and would prove to be, along with thousands of other foreigners like them, as good citizen legionaries as any Italians. Rome, not classical Greece, created the modern expansive idea of Western citizenship and the notion of plutocratic values that thrive in a growing and free economy. Money, not necessarily birth, ancestry, or occupation, would soon bring a Roman status. The ex-slave Trimalchio and his nouveau riche freedmen dinner guests, lounging in splendor in Petronius’s firstcentury-A.D. novel, the
Satyricon,
were the logical fruition of the entire Roman evolution in civic inclusiveness—social, economic, and cultural— that went on even as political liberty at the national level was further extinguished under the empire. It is no accident that some of the most Roman and chauvinistic of Latin authors—Terence, Horace, Publius Syrus, Polybius, and Josephus—were themselves the children of freedmen, ex-slaves, Africans, Asians, Greeks, or Jews. By the second century A.D. it was not common to find a Roman emperor who had been born at Rome. What effect did this vast difference in the respective ideas of citizenship of the antagonists have on the fighting in August 216 B.C.? Quite a lot—very few trained mercenary replacements available to Hannibal in the exuberance of victory, a multitude of raw militiamen recruits for Rome in the dejection of defeat.

The earlier Greeks had invented the idea of civic militarism, the notion that those who vote must also fight to protect the commonwealth, which in the exchange had granted them rights. The result was that the classical city-states came to field infantries made up of almost half their male resident population. At the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.) perhaps 70,000 free Greek citizens annihilated a Persian army of 250,000 forced conscripts. This was a good start in mobilizing the manpower reserves of the tiny Hellenic landed republics well beyond the old aristocratic elite. Nevertheless, the potential of civic militarism was never fully appreciated by the classical Greeks due to their jealously guarded notion of citizenship that was not extended to all residents of the polis. The Greeks had kept Hellas free from Persian occupation in part through the revolutionary idea that all the citizens must serve in the battle, but by the same token lost their autonomy a century and a half later to the Macedonians through a shortage of just those citizen warriors.

The consequence of this blinkered vision of war making was the rise of the royal army of Philip and Alexander, who cared little which men fought, only whether they fought well and in service to their paymasters. The Macedonians and their Successors were not democrats. Yet their readiness to welcome all Macedonians and Greeks alike into their multicultural professional armies with a common wage—the desperate united by a shared desire for loot and glory, rather than divided by language, locale, and ethnic pride—was in some ways perversely egalitarian in a fashion undreamed of by the classical city-states. This rise of huge Greek-inspired mercenary armies in the Hellenistic period (323–31 B.C.) for a time solved the traditional problem of manpower, but it did so in a manner that often forfeited the past civic élan of the city-state. That dilemma earlier had bothered Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, who saw their ideal of large armies of citizen soldiers vanishing in their own lifetimes. Greeks could field either sizable armies or patriotic and dutiful ones, but no longer any that were both sufficiently large and spirited. Every Greek who died at the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) in a failed effort to preserve his liberty had voted to do so. Not a single one of Philip II’s Macedonians who killed them had a direct say in where, how, or why he fought. That the former—poorly led, less well equipped, and haphazardly organized—nearly beat back Philip’s immense royal army is a tribute to the spirit of civic government.

The solution to this classical paradox was to field spirited citizen armies that were nevertheless huge, combining the classical Greek discovery of civic militarism with the Hellenistic dynasts’ willingness to recruit infantrymen from all segments of society. The Roman nation and its radical idea of an expansive citizenship would eventually do both brilliantly—in the process ensuring that its armies were larger than those of the classical Greeks and yet far more patriotic than the mercenaries who enrolled in the thousands in service to the Hellenistic monarchs.

This idea of a vast nation-in-arms—by the outbreak of the war in 218 B.C. there were more than 325,000 adult male Roman citizens scattered throughout Italy, nearly a quarter million of them eligible for frontline military service—was incomprehensible to the Carthaginians, who restricted citizenship to a small group of Punic-speakers in and around Carthage. Worse still in a military sense, citizenship to Carthaginians never fully embraced the Hellenic tradition of civic levies—citizens who enjoy rights are required to fight for their maintenance. Carthage also had no concept of the Roman idea of nationhood transcending locale, race, and language. Local nearby African tribes, and even Carthage’s own mercenaries, were as likely to fight the Punic state as were the Romans. Aside from the veneer of a few elite representatives, upon examination there was little Western at all in Carthage’s approach to politics and war. Unlike the Greeks, Carthage failed to insist that its own citizens fight their own battles. Unlike the Romans, it lacked any mechanism of incorporating North African or western European allies, conquered peoples, or serfs into rough political equality with native-born Carthaginians—hence the constant and often barbarous wars with its own rebellious mercenary armies. Nor was there even the pretense that the Carthaginian Assembly voiced the wishes of a nonelite. Carthage seems to have been a society mostly of two, not three, classes—a commercial and aristocratic privileged few served by a disenfranchised body of serfs and laborers.

The Roman Senate was probably as aristocratic as the Carthaginian, but there were no corresponding Punic assemblies that could check aristocratic power, and little tradition of a popular reformer—a Licinius, Hortensius, or Gracchus—who sought to broaden the franchise, allow the middling classes and “new men” to obtain high office, and agitate for agrarian reform and a redistribution of land. In a military sense the result was chronic shortages of Punic soldiers and a complete reliance on mercenary recruitment. Both phenomena would mean that however brilliantly led Carthaginian armies were, and despite their battle experience acquired from nonstop warring, they would find it nearly impossible for long to field troops as numerous or as patriotic as the legions. Centuries after Cannae, Romans continued to create enormous armies even during the darkest hours of the Civil Wars; in the seventeen years of fighting after Caesar crossed the Rubicon (49–32 B.C.) 420,000 Italians alone were conscripted into the military.

In contrast, for Hannibal to succeed, he had to do far more than defeat the Romans at Cannae; he needed to win four or five such battles in succession that would eliminate a pool of well over a quarter million farmers throughout Italy, men between the ages of seventeen and sixty who fought for either the retention or the promise of Roman citizenship. Hannibal had to accomplish such slaughter with an army that probably did not contain a single voting Carthaginian citizen, but was made up of African mercenaries and European tribesmen. Both groups fought not for the expectation of Carthaginian citizenship, or for the freedom to govern their own affairs, but mostly either out of hatred for Rome or for the money and plunder that their strong leader might continue to provide— strong incentives both, but in the end no match for farmers who had voted to replace their fallen comrades at Cannae and press on to the bitter end to ensure the safety of the
populus Romanus,
the preservation of the res publica, and the honor of their ancestral culture,
mos maiorum.
Most Italian farmers rightly surmised that their children would have a better future under Roman republicanism than allied to an aristocratic, foreign, and mercantile state like Carthage.