Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (17 page)

“RULERS OF THE ENTIRE WORLD”— THE LEGACY OF CIVIC MILITARISM

The
Manpower
of
Rome

Non-Romans and Greeks of the ancient world could always mobilize enormous numbers of warriors—Gauls, Spaniards, Persians, Africans, and others—but in no sense did these tribal musterings and mercenary armies constitute a nation of arms. Not a single one of Rome’s formidable adversaries in the centuries to come would ever grasp this Western dual idea of free citizen/soldier. Jugurtha’s impressive Numidians (112–104 B.C.), the hundreds of thousands of Germans under Ariovistus (58 B.C.), the quarter million who joined the Gallic tribal leader Vercingetorix (52 B.C.), and the multitude of Goths who crossed the Danube to kill thousands of Romans at Adrianople (A.D. 378) were formidable fighters and they were often multitudinous. Many of such adversaries enjoyed a rich tribal history and crafted complicated methods of military organization. Nevertheless, they remained at heart armies of a season—migratory and ad hoc musters whose conditions of service depended solely on pay, plunder, and the magnetism and skill of a particular battle commander or regime. When such forces were satiated, they receded; when defeated, they disbanded; and when victorious, they were often effective for no more than another battlefield victory.

The advantages of the republican system were immediately apparent in the days after the disaster at Cannae. The government and culture of Rome were shaken to their foundations. Livy confessed in his description of Cannae’s aftermath that “never, except when Rome itself had once been captured, was there so much terror and confusion within the walls. I shall therefore confess that I am unequal to the task of narration, and will not attempt to provide a full description, which would only fall short of the truth” (22.54). Much of southern Italy began to defect or for a time stopped sending men and matériel to Rome. The rich city of Capua went over to Hannibal. Others in Campania and Apulia followed. A Roman army in Spain, under the leadership of Postumius, consul-elect for 215 B.C., was annihilated and the consul killed; Livy says that more than 20,000 legionaries died and that Postumius’s skull was hollowed out to be used as a Gallic drinking cup. The Carthaginian fleet was off the coast of Sicily, raiding at will. Half of the consuls elected between 218 and 215 had been killed in battle—Flaminius, Servilius, Paulus, and Postumius. The others were disgraced.

Rome’s reaction to these national catastrophes? After calm was restored in the streets and panic averted, the Senate met and systematically issued a series of decrees, reminiscent of the far-reaching decisions made by the Athenians after the catastrophe at Thermopylae, the Byzantines in the sixth century A.D. following the collapse of the Western Empire, the Venetians after the fall of Cyprus in 1571, and the Americans after Pearl Harbor. Marcellus was to be dispatched to Sicily to restore the situation. The bridges and roads to Rome were to be garrisoned. Every able-bodied man in the city was to be drafted into the home militia to defend the walls. Marcus Junius was appointed dictator, with formal directives to raise armies in any manner possible. He did so magnificently. More than 20,000 were recruited into four new legions. Some legionaries were not yet seventeen. Eight thousand slaves were purchased at public expense and given arms, with a proviso that courage in battle for Rome might lead to freedom. Junius himself freed 6,000 prisoners and took direct command of this novel legion of felons. Demands were made upon the Italian allies to muster an additional 80,000 troops within the year. For the duration of the war, the equivalent of nearly two legions was created each year to ensure a steady replacement for battle losses. Weapons were in short supply: Hannibal’s men now possessed most of the abandoned arms that had been fabricated in Italy during the previous decade. For new equipment to be manufactured, temples and public buildings were to be stripped of their ancestral military votives.

Within a year after the defeat, the Roman navy was on the offensive in Sicily, all the losses of Cannae had been replaced, and the thrice-defeated legions were twice the size of Hannibal’s victorious force lounging in winter quarters in southern Italy. The contrast with Hannibal’s army is striking: while Rome drafted emergency legislation to raise new legions, Hannibal’s veterans spent days scavenging the battlefield as their ingenious commander pleaded with his wary aristocratic overseers in Carthage to send more men.

The
Continuity
of
Citizen
Soldiers

In the next five centuries Roman armies would be confronted by an array of tactical geniuses, more Pyrrhuses and Hannibals, whose brilliance led to the annihilation of poorly led Roman armies: the one-eyed Sertorius and his tough Roman-Iberian renegades, the brave Spartacus and his enormous throng of seasoned gladiators, the canny Jugurtha of Numidia, the astute Mithridates of Pontus, Vercingetorix at the head of an enormous horde of Celts and Gauls, and the Parthians who exterminated the triumvir Crassus and most of his army. Together, these enemies of Rome slaughtered nearly a half million legionaries on the battlefield. In the end, all that glorious fighting was for naught. Nearly all of these would-be conquerors ended up dead or in chains, their armies butchered, enslaved, crucified, or in retreat. They were, after all, fighting a frightening system and an idea, not a mere army. The most stunning victories of these enemies of Rome meant yet another Roman army on the horizon, while their own armies melted away with a single defeat.

With the transition to empire and Rome’s subsequent collapse (31 B.C.–A.D. 476), republicanism for a time would all but disappear from Europe. Western armies would at times become every bit as mercenary as their adversaries and often in some areas as tribal. Nevertheless, the idea of a voting citizen as warrior and the tradition of an entire culture freely taking the field of battle under constitutional directive with elected generals were too entrenched to be entirely forgotten. In the dark days of the late empire and the chaos that followed, there remained the ideal that men who fought should be citizens, with legal—and sometimes extra-legal—rights and responsibilities to their community.

Even with the apparent end of civic militarism, the so-called professional soldiers of imperial Rome, like their republican counterparts of centuries past, still found in the army of the empire a continuance of five centuries of codified law. That meant to the average recruit freedom from arbitrary conscription, steady wages, contractual protections concerning service, and a fixed retirement—not press-gangs, ad hoc musters, and arbitrary punishments. If anything, the rights of the individual soldier expanded under the empire, to such a degree that his self-interested demands for greater pay and freedom tended to make provincial generals more receptive to his complaints than had been the elected republican leaders of the past. Just as the thriving empire and its Mediterranean economy benefited ex-slaves, the poor, and foreigners to a degree unimagined under the more democratic agrarian republic of central Italy, so, too, thousands of professional legionaries on the frontier found imperial bureaucrats more attuned to their needs even as their ability to vote for state officials was eroded and lost.

Civic militarism would be kept alive even when republicanism was on the wane, in a direct line of transmission from classical antiquity by elites in government and religion, as well as in popular folk traditions among the people. It was an entirely Western phenomenon. The warrior as citizen, and the army as assembly of warriors with legal rights and civic responsibilities, were ideas found in no other culture outside of Europe. Asia, Africa, and the Americas shared no intellectual or cultural heritage with Rome and Greece and thus possessed no source from which to adopt fully the peculiar Roman republican notion of voting assemblies and formal citizen soldiers.

Even during the so-called Dark Ages in “barbaric” Europe (A.D. 500–1000), civic armies like the Merovingians in western Europe, the Visigoths in Spain, and the Lombards in Italy would, like the Byzantines to the east, adopt Roman military nomenclature and organization to defend their
civitates
through the use of levies of citizen soldiers. Northern European skill at fortifications, road-building, and military science that kept Islam at bay was handed down directly from the old Roman imperial administration;
exercitus, legio, regnum, imperium,
and other Latin military and political terminology—or in the East their Greek counterparts— continued to be the language of war from the fifth century A.D. on into the medieval period. The stratagems of Frontinus and Valerius Maximus concerning the use of civic armies would be carefully studied in the late Middle Ages. The patristic writers of the late empire, Dark Ages, and medieval Christendom—from Ambrose and Augustine to Gratian in his
Decretum
(1140) and Thomas Aquinas in the
Summa Theologiae—
outlined the conditions under which the Christian commonwealth could wage a just and legal war
(ius in bello),
one that would be attuned to the values of a mobilized citizenry.

During the Renaissance the military precepts of thinkers as diverse as Xenophon and Vegetius—the most widely cited Latin author of the ancient world between the fifth and seventeenth centuries A.D.—would be adopted by Italians like Leonardo Brunni and Machiavelli. Pocket-sized manuscripts of Vegetius, translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, were published in book form to be used by medieval generals in the field. Even the conquistadors of Charles V’s autocratic reign were imbued with the notion that they were a tiny nation-in-arms as they marched on Tenochtitlán, each soldier enjoying particular rights and protections as a Spanish subject that were unknown among their Mexica adversaries.

Constitutional government itself would eventually reappear and expand among the pikemen of Switzerland during the Middle Ages, again in fifteenth-century Italy, and in a manner of sorts never forgotten even in monarchial Byzantine Greece, before becoming firmly entrenched with the rise of the modern nation-state in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. In all such instances the best exemplar for those like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Guibert who called for a return to “a nation-in-arms” was the classical state, and the authors of emulation Sallust, Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, with their stories of the great levies of the Roman Republic.

Citizens
as
Killers

Civic militarism itself would not always ensure numerical superiority for Western armies—the manpower pool of Europe and its colonies would often turn out to be inferior to that of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Nor would a nation-in-arms always be guaranteed victory through greater morale. At times Christianity would prove that the Sermon on the Mount is a less effective incentive for warriors than jihad. Moreover, Western armies that ventured abroad and across the sea would often be small, professional, and on occasion mercenary. Nevertheless, the ideal of a collective defense by its free citizenry—the musters of the Franks, the pikes of Switzerland, sailors of Venice, or yeomen of England and France—would help to ensure that for most of the time post-Roman Europe itself was safe from invasion, and its overseas expeditionary troops trained, organized, and led with a zeal that emanated from beyond a narrow aristocratic caste—and were thereby more than a match for the numbers and the skill of their non-Western adversaries.

Again, the latter were sometimes braver men. On occasion they fought for a better cause than the Westerners who invaded their country, ruthlessly enslaved their people, slaughtered women and children, and looted their treasure. The study of military dynamism is not necessarily an investigation into morality—armies of the caliber of Rome’s were often able to do what they should not have. Civic militarism ensured large and spirited armies, not necessarily forces that would respect the cultural and national aspirations of others and the sanctity of human life in general. In that narrow regard of military efficacy, no other people on a single occasion—not Persians, Chinese, Carthaginians, Indians, Turks, Arabs, Africans, or Native Americans—would ever march as free citizens with abstract conceptions of civic rights, and at the formal direction of an elected assembly, but were more commonly paid, frightened, or mesmerized into service to a chief, sultan, emperor, or god. In the end, that fact in and of itself often proved a disadvantage on the battlefield. Sadly, the Western method of creating public armies and legal terms of service was not necessarily a question of good or evil, fairness or injustice, right versus wrong, but one of military skill.

The significance of Cannae? The worst single-day defeat in the history of any Western military force altered not at all the final course of the war. Sheer stupidity in the form of incompetent generals and bad tactics had thrown away the intrinsic advantage of Western armies: superior discipline, excellence in and preference for shock engagement, technology, and the readiness to turn out en masse for decisive battle. Poor planning had also nullified the natural advantages that accrued to the embattled Romans: fighting at home, in greater numbers, and on the defensive. Bad luck (fighting a military genius in his prime) and inexperienced soldiers (fresh recruits pitted against a veteran mercenary army) had guaranteed the Romans untold problems. In the end, all that made little difference at all.

The real lessons of Cannae are not the arts of encirclement or Hannibal’s secret of tactical genius, and so they have for too long been ignored by military historians. Students of war must never be content to learn merely how men fight a battle, but must always ask why soldiers fight as they do, and what ultimately their battle is for. The tragic paradox of warfare is that so often courage, audacity, and heroism on the battlefield—what brave warriors can do, see, hear, and feel in the heat of killing—are overshadowed by elements far larger, abstract, and often insidious. Technology, capital, the nature of government, how men are mustered and paid, not merely muscular strength and the multitude of flesh, are the great levelers in conflicts between disparate cultures, and so far more often determine which side wins and which loses—and which men are to die and which to live on.