The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (18 page)

The purpose of this reform is hidden in fog. Some sources say it was a compromise by the patricians, who refused to accept that a consul could be a plebeian but would not object in the case of a governing committee; unfortunately for this theory, plebeians were seldom elected to the new posts, at least at the outset. Others claim that Rome needed more than two army commanders; so why, as sometimes happened, were tribunes elected in years when there was no campaigning to be done? And why did the Republic switch unexpectedly from year to year between tribunes and consuls? The second explanation is perhaps the more convincing, if we add a probable increase in official domestic duties. We should also remember that the decision whether or not tribunes were to be elected, and if so how many, had to be taken in the year preceding the period of office. So guesswork, well-informed, doubtless, but sometimes off the mark, would have been the order of the day.

The struggle between the rich and the poor, the nobility and the People, the patricians and the plebs, called the Conflict of the Orders, had a century and more yet to run. But despite setbacks for the popular cause, most Romans could see that the pendulum of power was swinging irreversibly toward the plebs.

8

The Fall of Rome

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE FIFTEENTH OF JULY
in the year 496 two tall, preternaturally handsome young men, just growing their first beards, were spotted in the Forum at Rome. They were washing their sweaty horses in
the spring that rose just by the Temple of Vesta and formed a small but deep pool. They were dressed in armor, and it looked very much as if they had just come from a battlefield. People gathered around them and asked if there was any news, for Rome had dispatched an army against the city’s Latin neighbors.

The youths replied that, yes, there had been a great battle on this day at Lake Regillus and that Rome had been the winner. Then they left the Forum and, although a great search was made for them, they were never seen again.

On the following day, letters arrived from the army reporting on the victory. Old Tarquin Superbus had been present, fighting alongside the Latins, and was wounded in the side. The enemy camp was taken. Apparently, two young men on horseback had suddenly appeared at the head of the Roman cavalry, spearing down every Latin soldier they encountered and driving the enemy into headlong retreat. Clearly they were gods, and the same ones who had appeared a little later in the Forum. Everyone agreed that they
must have been the Heavenly Twins,
Castor and Pollux, also known as the Dioscuri, or “sons of Zeus.” Helen of Troy was their sister, and they were among Jason’s Argonauts in the search for the Golden Fleece. They acted as helpers of mankind, typically intervening at times of crisis. They had an important shrine near Lake Regillus, so the battle had been fought on their doorstep.

The Roman commander vowed to found a temple in thanksgiving to the brothers and, although the story of their apparition is of course mythical, archaeologists have confirmed that it was built around this time in the Forum, near where they had been seen with their horses. The Romans revered the Heavenly Twins and the temple was twice rebuilt, each time more grandly. The massive ruins of the final version, commissioned by the emperor Tiberius in the first century
A.D
., can still be seen in the Forum today. The building stood on a high podium; the Senate frequently met inside it and its front steps were topped by a platform, much used for rabble-rousing open-air speeches during the riotous politics of the late Republic.

Every year on the date of the battle, a splendid ritual was conducted in honor of Castor and Pollux. Rome’s official cavalry processed into the city as if coming fresh from a battle and marched past the temple. They were crowned with olive branches and dressed in purple robes with scarlet stripes, along with their military decorations. “It made a fine sight,” wrote a witness of the ceremony in the first century, “and worthy of Roman power.”

TWO HUNDRED YEARS
of class struggle at home did not deter the Romans from fighting an almost continuous series of military campaigns abroad. Described in the ancient histories as if they were the wars of a great nation, these campaigns were in fact for the most part raids and counter-raids, state-sponsored brigandage. This was why, to
Livy’s “great astonishment,” seemingly decisive victories apparently had no effect, and the Aequi and the Volsci returned fresh to the fray with every new campaigning season. However, in
the long run the fighting was destructive and exhausting, for year after year harvests were trashed and buildings burned.

Under the kings, Rome had dominated Latium, but the arrival of the Republic coincided with a debilitating economic crisis. With their victory over Lars Porsenna, the Latins had removed Etruscan influence in the region and they were determined to cut the inexperienced regime at Rome down to size, too. However, the Republic’s new rulers gave notice that they intended to maintain Superbus’s expansionist foreign policy.

The first consuls negotiated a treaty with Carthage. It was a considerable achievement to obtain the recognition of such a great Mediterranean power. The text of the treaty sets out Carthage’s sphere of influence, including Sicily, while also revealing Rome’s (much more modest) pretensions in Latium:

The Carthaginians shall do no injury to the peoples of Ardea, Antium, the Laurentes and the peoples of Circeii, Tarracina or any other city of those Latins who are subject to the Romans. As for those Latin peoples who are not subject to the Romans, the Carthaginians shall not interfere with any of these cities, and if they take any one of them, they shall deliver it up undamaged. They shall build no fort in Latin territory. If they enter the region carrying arms, they shall not spend a night there.

The Romans were exaggerating the extent of their influence. Antium, Circeii, and Tarracina were outside the
boundaries of Latium at this epoch and fell squarely inside Volscian territory. But the treaty illustrated Rome’s aggressive intentions, and by implication its desire to regain the ascendancy lost during the upheavals attendant on the fall of the monarchy. Adventures abroad would be a welcome diversion from poverty and indebtedness at home.

The Latins shared a mutual solidarity. Every spring they held a “national” festival, the Feriae Latinae, at which they celebrated
their kinship. The central feature was a banquet. Each community brought to the party lambs, cheese, milk, or something similar; a white bull was sacrificed, and its meat was shared among all those attending. The Latin states formed a league from which Rome was excluded, and war soon broke out between them.

Hostilities were not long-lasting. For all the efforts of the Heavenly Twins, the Battle of Lake Regillus was not necessarily the success the Romans claimed it to be. And the opposing forces came to realize that they shared an important interest. They both faced a ring of hostile tribes and communities. Clockwise from the north, there were the Etruscans, especially the rich and powerful city of Veii. Then came the Sabines, the Aequi, the Hernici, and the irrepressible Volsci. Swaths of territory were being lost. Latium was in grave danger of being overrun unless Rome and the Latins reconciled their differences.

In 493, that is what they did. The consul Spurius Cassius (who, as we have seen, was later to be executed for aiming at
regnum
) negotiated a peace treaty, the Foedus Cassianum, named after him. Its terms were inscribed on a bronze pillar in the Forum, which was
still there in Cicero’s time. At its heart lay a commitment to mutual help:

Let there be peace between the Romans and all the Latin cities as long as the heavens and the earth stay where they are. Let them neither make war upon one another themselves, nor bring in foreign enemies, nor give safe passage to those who shall make war upon either of them. Let them assist one another, when warred upon, with all their forces.

A few years later, the Hernici were brought into the entente. They and the Latins fought in separate contingents under a unified, Roman command. At last, sufficient military force had been assembled to meet the omnipresent threats of invasion from every quarter of the compass.

The background of these small-scale quarrels was a vast movement of peoples from the beginning of the fifth century into Italy and down the peninsula’s Apennine spine. Facing overpopulation and, possibly, pressure from Celts who were beginning to cross the Alps into the Po Valley, Sabellians, mountain dwellers who spoke a language called Oscan, began to migrate southward from their habitat in the central Apennines in search of living space.

The migrations were governed, we are told, by a religious ritual called
ver sacrum
, the Sacred Spring. A year’s generation of animals and humans was dedicated, or made
sacrati
, to the god Mars. The animals were sacrificed and the young people, when they had reached the age of twenty or twenty-one, were sent away from their community to look for somewhere else to live. Under a leader they followed an animal, such as a bull, a wolf, or a woodpecker. Where it stopped to rest, there they founded a new settlement or colony.

These bands of young shepherd fighters set off a chain reaction, knocking onto the toe of Italy and threatening the Hellenic cities of Magna Graecia. Oscan-speaking Samnites (a group of Sabellian tribes) flooded down from the hills and invaded fertile Campania. They took over the main cities and set themselves up as a new nation, giving up stock-keeping for farming. The
Etruscan ruling class of Capua unwisely let the newcomers in and made them members of the community, only to be butchered en masse after a drunken festival one black night in 423.

For many years Rome only just held its own, much assisted by the Latins, against the Aequi and the Volsci, but in the second half of the fifth century the tide slowly began to turn. A decisive battle against the Aequi was fought on 19 June 431: the fact that the precise date stuck in the Republic’s collective memory suggests how precious the victory was. Lost Latin cities were recovered, and Roman forces at last moved onto the offensive.

IT WAS DURING
one of these scrappy campaigns, half skirmish, half full-dress battle, that the story of the staunchly anti-plebeian
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is set. This elderly and distinguished patrician and politician had fallen on hard times and farmed a smallholding of four acres. One day, a delegation arrived from the city and found him at work on his land, perhaps digging a ditch or plowing a field. “Is everything all right?” he asked. No, it was not, but the formalities had to be observed. After a prayer for the gods’ blessing on him and his country, he was invited to go and put on his toga, the uniform of the freeborn Roman.

It was no wonder that he was not wearing it, for it was among the most inconvenient garments ever devised by the mind of a tailor. A vast semicircle of heavy cloth, about ten by twenty feet in extent, it was draped over the body and worn without a fastening. Considerable skill was required to stop it from falling off, and it was drafty in winter and stifling in summer.

Cincinnatus returned duly garbed. Only then was he informed of a grave military crisis. A consular legion was besieged in its camp by an Aequian army. Cincinnatus was to serve as dictator and had been commissioned to march to its relief. He quickly accomplished the task. He made a lenient peace with the Aequi, but only after forcing a ritual humiliation on them; a yoke was set up, consisting of three spears under which the entire defeated enemy was obliged to pass, bowing down and so admitting defeat. Mission accomplished, Cincinnatus resigned the dictatorship a fortnight later and returned to his plow.

Although he is not a fully historical figure, Cincinnatus represented a combination of qualities that the Romans greatly admired, even if they were seldom honored in the observance. These were a simple life, commitment to country values, unquestioning patriotism, even-handedness, and disdain for riches. As usual, this admiration found a topographical expression: the old man’s farm, which lay west of the Tiber and opposite the shipyards at the foot of the Palatine Hill, was preserved, at least in name, as the Quinctian Meadows.

As late as the eighteenth century
A.D
., Cincinnatus was still regarded as a moral model. The American city Cincinnati was so called as a compliment to George Washington, who was considered a latter-day Cincinnatus for his indifference to power. The example has been followed as frequently in recent times as it was in ancient Rome.

SOME TEN OR
so miles north of Rome, at the confluence of two small rivers, a large grassy plateau stands on a tall rocky outcrop. Nearly five hundred acres in extent, it has been farming and grazing land for the past two millennia. Closer inspection points to a hidden, long-lost history. In the summertime, aerial or satellite photographs have revealed discolored markings on the fields, the ghostly patterns of lost edifices, and, here and there, ruined walls and the domes of tombs have broken through the earth.