Rome: An Empire's Story (20 page)

Perhaps the most surprising failure was closest to home. By the late second century the role of Rome’s Italian allies had become increasingly problematic: they shared in the strains of continual warfare, but received only a fraction of the benefits. When warfare pressed hard on the Roman citizenry, it pressed hard on the allies too. But the allies did not have a chance to vote on declarations of war, and although they usually received a share of the booty it was not always an equal share. Their commanders took orders from Roman magistrates in the field. The Italians were partners in profiteering from empire, as well as in its acquisition. We find their names on inscriptions set up around the marketplaces of Delos, and in the politics of the great cities of Asia Minor. Overseas they all spoke Latin and were collectively known, and treated, as Romans. Often the same families can be traced making money overseas and spending it in the towns of central Italy. Italians were energetic members of the trade networks that linked the slaving grounds of the east and north, the breadbaskets of the
south, the vineyards of Tuscany and Campania, and the metal sources of Spain and the Alps to Rome.

At the centre of these networks was Rome, and many Italians visited, but their interests were generally excluded from the new politics of the
populares.
At best this meant they were excluded from some of the rewards of empire: cheap grain, grand building schemes sponsored by the state, lavish festival games and triumphs, the lucrative opportunities offered by public contracts for which only Roman citizens were eligible, the growing protection offered by Roman courts. At worse they might be the collateral damage of Roman politics, as when the Gracchan land redistributions unintentionally dispossessed Italian tenants on state land. Roman rule over Italy also seems to have become more autocratic. Ancient testimony gathers anecdotes about arrogant acts on the part of individual magistrates. These were the grievances of which they were conscious, but there were certainly other causes of tension. The growth on the peninsula of a city of half a million must have had profound effects on other Italian towns, especially drawing manpower to Rome. Colonization initiatives had petered out with the final conquest of the lands north of the Apennines: that removed both a possible source of tension, and also opportunities for allies who had sometimes been allowed to share in the schemes. The enrichment of the Roman elite and their investment in slave-villas had effects that are difficult to map. But in every case the Italians suffered from a lack of representation, creating a need to depend on Roman aristocrats who were willing to patronize them. The
domi nobiles
(men who were aristocrats in their own communities) were forced to behave as clients.

The problem had begun to be noticed by the end of the second century, even by the
populares
. But schemes to offer the Italians various kinds of citizenship or legal redress came to nothing. Expectations were repeatedly raised only to be disappointed when the Senate and/or the people refused to back them. The flashpoint finally came in 91
BC
. A tribune named Marcus Livius Drusus had proposed a comprehensive political programme designed to heal the political rifts opened by the proposals and murders of the Gracchi and of Saturninus. The plan was an ambitious one, including bringing 300 equestrians into the Senate to smooth over relations there, and a great colonization programme. Some of these elements would re-emerge in Sulla’s dictatorship. But it also included granting citizenship to the Italians. Hopes were raised again, and then dashed. The laws he had passed were abolished, and Drusus himself was murdered. This was
the final straw. A great alliance appeared almost overnight, one in which the hill peoples of the Apennines, the Marsi, the Samnites, and others, took the lead. Historians disagree about their precise aims—did they want to destroy the Roman state, or become a full part of it? Perhaps the allies themselves were divided.
¹⁷
Italian voices are now lost: the speeches made at the time were not recorded, and all historical accounts of the Social or Italian War are coloured by a desire for reconciliation and the teleology of the fall of the Republic. But their tactics were well worked out. Italian leaders knew each other well from service together on Roman campaigns and from participating in a social world that centred on the great houses of their Roman friends. A new capital was declared at Corfinium (renamed Italia), in the heart of the Abruzzi mountains. Coins were issued for a new Italian state. Some depicted an Italian bull trampling on a Roman wolf. Rome suddenly found herself struggling for control of the peninsula for the first time since Hannibal’s rout.

Politicians of all sides rallied to Rome’s cause. Marius, no longer as popular as when he had routed the Cimbri and Teutones, fought alongside his rival Sulla. There were two frantic years of fighting, between 90 and 89, with a couple more years of mopping-up actions. Rome won the battles, but conceded all that had been demanded. By 87 most Italians were Roman citizens. The reasons were straightforward. Rome had been fighting wars she had not chosen for nearly two decades, she had only just escaped a repeat of the Gallic sack, and the domestic political system was imploding. Survival without the Italians was unthinkable. And just to encourage them to do the right thing, yet another threat emerged.

War in Italy offered Mithridates of Pontus an unmissable opportunity. His armies annexed the neighbouring kingdoms of Bithynia and Cappadocia in 89
BC
. The deposed kings bribed the Roman ambassador Manius Aquillius to compel Mithridates to restore them. But when Aquillius ordered Bithynia to invade Pontus in punishment, Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia, executed Aquillius by pouring molten gold down his throat to punish him for his greed, and instructed the Greek cities to demonstrate their loyalty by killing all their Roman residents. Estimates of the Roman and Italian dead range between 80,000 and 150,000. The Pontic armies swept across the Aegean to Athens; there the anti-Roman faction welcomed them with open arms. Victory was short-lived. Sulla marched east to sack Athens. The peace he made with Mithridates was not a permanent solution, but enough to allow him to return to Rome determined to purge the city of
popularis
politics, and of its main exponents. At home and abroad politics had entered a new, and bloodier, phase.

Further Reading

Robert Morstein-Marx’s
From Hegemony to Empire
(Berkeley, 1995) expertly tracks the evolution of Roman rule in the east between the fall of Carthage and the supremacy of Pompey. The opening chapters of the first volume of Stephen Mitchell’s
Anatolia
(Oxford, 1993) set this story in a rich geographic frame. Rome’s equally tentative search for stable limits of power in the western Mediterranean is the subject of Stephen Dyson’s
The Creation of the Roman Frontier
(Princeton, 1985); one of the many strengths of this work is the inspiration it draws from comparative studies. The implications of seeing the Mediterranean as a region in which continents meet, rather than a world enclosed in itself, are discussed in several contributions to William Harris’s
Rethinking the Mediterranean
(Oxford, 2005).

The best single account of the collapse of the Republican system is the title essay in Peter Brunt’s
The Fall of the Roman Republic
(Oxford, 1988). Mary Beard and Michael Crawford’s
Rome in the Late Republic
(London, 1999) is full of ideas. Anyone seeking a detailed account of the period is referred to volume ix of the
Cambridge Ancient History
, edited by Andrew Lintott, John Crook, and Elizabeth Rawson (Cambridge, 1994). Howard Scullard’s brilliant textbook
From the Gracchi to Nero
, 5th edn. (London, 1982) is still difficult to beat. Modern understandings of what the
populares
thought they were doing, at home and in the provinces, have been revolutionized by the publication of a marvellous edition of their epigraphic laws, in Michael Crawford’s
Roman Statutes
(London, 1996). Andrew Lintott’s
Judicial Reform and Land Reform in the Roman Republic
(Cambridge, 1992) contributes to the same debate. Important essays on the role of the people in this period are now helpfully gathered in the first volume of Fergus Millar’s collected papers,
Rome, the Greek East and the World
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).

VIII
AT HEAVEN’S COMMAND?

The most important respect in which Roman civil society surpasses that of other states seems to me to be how it treats the gods. I think too that the very thing that among other people is viewed unfavourably is, among the Romans, a source of cohesion: I mean their respect of the gods. For it is developed to such an extraordinary extent among them—both in their private affairs and in the common business of the community—that nothing is treated as more important than this. This fact seems astonishing to many people.

(Polybius,
Histories
6.56.6–8)

A Moral Empire

We are, in many ways, still Greeks when we contemplate the rise of Rome. It is not just that we rely heavily on Greek narrative accounts; nor even that we share with our Greek witnesses—Polybius and Diodorus, Dionysius and Plutarch among many others—a sense of ourselves as outsiders looking in on Rome. Even more fundamentally, the way we try to understand how societies work remains firmly based in a tradition of political science that can be traced directly back to classical Greece. When Polybius asked
why it was Rome that had conquered the Mediterranean, he found his answer in a unique balance of political and military institutions—a perfect blend of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements—along with the attitudes and habits they inculcated. Religious awe was just one component; he followed the passage quoted above with a good functionalist explanation of its role in stabilizing the social hierarchy. He looked, in other words, for Rome’s comparative advantage over its competitors. Another Greek, Aelius Aristides, in a speech of praise addressed to Rome nearly three centuries later, compared Roman success in government to the failure of earlier empires. One key variable he identified was inclusiveness; that Romans were unusually willing to incorporate those they had subjected into the citizen body.
¹
Whether or not we agree with these particular arguments, the analytical procedure is familiar.

Romans did not think like this, or not until the Greeks taught them to do so. Even after Rome had grown its own philosophers, they did not supply the most influential explanations of Roman success and failure. To access those we have to investigate the interlinked worlds of moral discourse and religious practice. For from the very earliest records we can access, Roman texts and monuments alike proclaim that Rome had grown great through the virtue of her men, and the favour of her gods.

During the Republic, it was common to attribute Roman successes to the virtue of its leaders, and Roman failures to their vices or occasionally to errors they had made in preparatory rituals. One result was a moralizing rhetoric that coloured all surviving speeches, histories, and biographies and many other kinds of literature.
²
Right back in the third century
BC
, the first of the
elogia
carved on the sarcophagi from the tomb of the Scipiones shows the close connection made between what we would call private moral qualities and public conduct. A rich tradition of invective preserves many more accusations of vice than memorials of virtue. The political reputation of Caesar was damaged by allegations that he had allowed King Nicomedes of Bithynia to have sex with him. Few of Cicero’s opponents in the trials in which he made his name escaped attacks of this kind. Virtue and vice were also manifested in the public sphere, where Romans performed as speakers and priests and magistrates and generals: so Caesar’s success in conquering Gaul was proof of his own dynamic virtues. The tradition persisted into the imperial period. Sallust, writing in the 40s
BC
, recalled an ancient habit of taking the examples of virtuous men as models for one’s own conduct.

For I have often heard that Quintus Maximus, Publius Scipio and the most famous citizens of our state were in the habit of saying that their hearts were set ablaze with the ardent desire for virtue when they looked on the images of our ancestors.
³

The remark forms part of a justification of history, but he goes on to say how the practice has fallen into decline, and people today only want to outdo their ancestors in wealth rather than virtues. Similar sentiments were expressed by Tacitus; writing nearly two centuries later he made similar comments at the beginning of his account of the exemplary life of Agricola.
⁴
Even the emperors would find themselves under this moral spotlight, as they did in Suetonius’
Lives of the Caesars
or Juvenal’s
Satires
, although condemnation was generally reserved for those who were safely dead. Roman writers in every age lament the decline of traditional morality, but in fact the moral tradition at Rome was extraordinarily long-lived.
⁵
Arguably the content of Roman virtue hardly changed until Christian bishops redefined it in the fourth century: even then new virtues did not displace old. Procopius’
Secret History
offers an unexpurgated account of the vices of Justinian’s court that would have delighted early imperial readers.

That mode of thought also offered an interpretation of the collective history of the Roman people. Roman prosperity derived from the proper management of relations with Roman gods and from ethical behaviour; periods of crisis might be understood as signs of a breakdown in those relations, and of moral decadence. Rome’s gods had issued no detailed code of personal ethics, but their support might be lost either by neglecting their cult or through acts of impiety: Polybius followed his account of Roman piety with the observation that Romans always abided by their oaths. Equally the gods gave support to the brave and virtuous, concepts the Romans barely distinguished. When disasters struck or when dreadful omens were reported, the Senate might ask a particular college of priests to consult the oracles known as the Sibylline Books, which generally prescribed a major public ritual or the invitation of a new god to Rome. Occasionally more sinister remedies were employed: some disasters might be caused by one of the Vestals breaking her vow of virginity. If she was found guilty she would be buried alive.