The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (21 page)

At the eleventh hour, Camillus turned up at the head of his army. He ordered the gold to be removed and the Celts to leave. As he was dictator, the military tribunes had lost their
imperium
and their
entente with Brennus was null and void. A confused engagement followed, and the surprised Celts withdrew from Rome. A more regular battle was fought eight miles or so east of Rome, on the road to the town of Praeneste. The Celts had had time to reorganize themselves, but for all that the omnicompetent Camillus was again victorious. The Gallic camp was captured and the army annihilated. The greatest danger in which the Republic had ever found itself had passed.

THIS EXCITING NARRATIVE
is a blend of fact and fiction. The basic theme, the sack of Rome by the Celts, is indisputable. The humiliation was never forgotten, and Brennus’s proud taunt,
vae victis
, was an indelible affront. Worse, the
barbarians may have gone, but not forever.

For many generations, they remained just beyond the range of peripheral vision, their possible return an abiding nightmare. And, as we shall see, from time to time throughout the history of the Republic the Celts
did
march down again into the peaceful Italian peninsula. During the prolonged death throes of the Roman Empire many hundreds of years later, successive waves of barbarians followed one after another, and in the fifth century
A.D
. the much feared calamity occurred. Rome was sacked for a second time, at the hands of a new Brennus—king of the Visigoths, the fearsome Alaric. It would not be long thereafter before the Western Empire itself collapsed.

Elements of the story are not to be trusted, though. The exile of Camillus was probably an invention, to give him an alibi during the sack. His final victory over the Celts and the saving of the gold sound very much like false excuses. We may guess that in fact the invaders left at their leisure, with the classical equivalent of Danegeld in their pockets. Polybius says that “
at that moment an invasion of their own territory by the Veneti [a tribe in the area where today’s Venice is located] diverted their attention, and so
they made a treaty with the Romans, handed back the city and returned home.”

It took a surprisingly short time for Rome to recover. Having your city looted and burned is obviously a cataclysm. It is reported that some traditional enemies—the Etruscans, the Aequi, and the Volsci—tried their luck and attacked Rome when it was down, but to little effect. Some members of the Latin League suspended or abandoned their alliance with Rome, which dominated the federation. The fact that the city still had most of its army intact, and that Veii and its territory remained in the Republic’s hands, was of far greater importance. New grants of citizenship were awarded to people in the Veii region and in two neighboring towns. Land was distributed to Roman citizens, and in 387 four new tribes were created in the newly conquered territory. None of these measures sound like the actions of a state in crisis.

As for the Celts, they had not disappeared, but it was thirty years before they returned. By that time Rome had fully reestablished its power. The city was quickly, although haphazardly, rebuilt. According to Livy:

All work was hurried and nobody bothered to see that the streets were straight. Individual property rights were ignored and buildings went up wherever there was room for them. This explains why the ancient sewers, which originally followed the line of the streets, now run in many places under private houses, and the general layout of Rome is more like a squatter’s settlement than a properly planned city.

Greater efficiency marked the building of a wall around the city’s perimeter to insure against another invasion. Its circuit ran for about seven miles, longer than the earlier earthworks. In later times, as we have seen, it was attributed to King Servius Tullius, but in fact
work began in 378. Up to twenty-four feet high and
twelve feet wide, the wall consisted of large rectangular blocks of tufa from the annexed quarries of Veii. On a plateau running southward behind three of the city’s hills—the Quirinal, the Viminal, and the Esquiline—the wall gave way to a vast earthen rampart, revetted with stone, which stood behind a ditch 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep. This ambitious and costly enterprise was funded by an unpopular tax, which bore down heavily on the poor, but once complete Rome was as good as impregnable.

These great Servian fortifications survive in part to this day, but they long ago lost their defensive importance. By the first century, suburbs extended far beyond them, “
giving the beholder the impression of a city stretching out indefinitely.” The walls themselves, smothered by buildings, became almost invisible.

9

Under the Yoke

H
ALF A CENTURY AFTER THE CELTIC INVASION CAME
another disaster, as humiliating and apparently as complete as the first. An entire Roman army surrendered, en masse, to the enemy, Samnite hill-tribesmen from the central Apennines. This was a more serious threat to Rome’s existence than the fact that the city had been without walls when the barbarians came.

In 321, both consuls led their legions, one each probably, southward along the route of what in a few years’ time would be Rome’s first great road, the Appian Way. The Samnites had recently suffered a heavy defeat and disconsolately sued for peace. The Senate had refused to negotiate, and the Samnites were so furious that they recovered their morale. They laid a trap for the approaching Romans at a place called
the Caudine Forks (
furculae Caudinae
).

According to Livy, this was a small, grassy, and well-watered plain surrounded by steep wooded hills. Two narrow defiles at its western and eastern ends were the only means of entry. The very able Samnite leader, Gaius Pontius, advanced his army in the greatest possible secrecy and set up camp nearby. He sent out ten soldiers disguised as shepherds, with orders to scatter and graze their flocks not far from Roman outposts. Whenever they came across enemy raiding parties, they were all to tell the same story—that the Samnite army was campaigning miles away to the south, in
Apulia. A rumor had already been spread to this effect, and the shepherds’ reports would be convincing confirmation.

The ruse worked, and the consuls decided to make their way to the Samnite legions by the shortest route, even though it meant marching, via the Caudine Forks, straight across the middle of enemy territory. They entered the first, western gorge and were shocked to find the second obstructed by a barricade of felled trees and huge boulders. Samnite troops were seen at the head of the pass.

The Romans turned back, only to realize that the road by which they had arrived at the Forks was now blocked with its own barricade and armed men. They were trapped. The consuls ordered their legionaries to set up a full Roman camp, with trenches, ramparts, and palisades, although this seemed a pointless exercise.

Meanwhile, the Samnites could not believe their luck, and were unsure what to do next. Pontius sent a letter to his father, Herennius Pontius, elderly and astute, asking for guidance. Herennius replied, “My advice is that you should let all the Romans go away free.” His opinion was brusquely rejected and he was asked to think again. In that case, he said, “they should all be put to death, down to the last man.”

Pontius feared that his father’s once acute mind was softening, but he gave way to a general wish that the old man be brought to the camp for a consultation in person. He declined to change his opinion, but gave his reasons. Livy writes:

“My first advice,” he said, “which I thought the best, would establish lasting peace with a very powerful people by conferring on them an immense benefit. The second would postpone war for many generations during which the Romans would not easily recover their strength.… There was no third option.”

But what if the Samnites took a middle course, letting the Romans go unhurt but imposing terms on them as defeated men according
to the laws of war? Herennius would have none of it. “Your idea will neither win friends nor remove enemies,” he said. “The Roman People does not know how to lie down under defeat.” His advice was rejected for a third and final time, and he went home.

The Romans made a number of unsuccessful attempts to break out. Food stocks began to run very low, and the consuls sent a delegation to Pontius to seek terms. If they failed to win a peace, they would challenge the enemy to fight. “You Romans never admit catastrophe even when conquered and taken captive,” the Samnite leader responded. “So I will send you under the yoke unarmed, with a single item of clothing each.” (By “yoke,” he meant the arch made of three spears beneath which defeated and captured soldiers were obliged to walk in return for their freedom.) He added that the Romans should immediately evacuate Samnite territory and withdraw its two forward colonies at Cales and Fregellae.

It was self-evidently a disgraceful settlement, but, thought the consuls, better than the alternative—the complete destruction of their army. However, Livy assures us, they were only in a position to offer a personal guarantee that Rome accepted the terms (a
sponsio
). A final treaty (or
foedus
) would have to await approval by the Assembly at Rome. The trusting Pontius took the point and allowed the legions to depart in return for a
sponsio
, to which the consuls and senior officers subscribed. However, he demanded six hundred Roman cavalry as hostages. A dramatic scene ensued:

The Consuls, pretty much half-naked, were the first to be sent under the yoke, then their officers were humiliated, each in order of rank; then the legions, one by one in turn. The enemy stood round, taunting and jeering at them; many were threatened with swords, and some were wounded or killed if the expressions on their faces showed too much resentment at their intolerable position.

Once the troops were back in Rome, the public mood darkened. Many people went into mourning, feasts and marriages were canceled,
shops closed, and official business in the Forum suspended. New consuls were elected, and the Senate held a debate on whether or not to endorse the
sponsio
. One of the defeated commanders advised his colleagues, self-sacrificially, to reject it on the bare-faced excuse that he and his fellow consul had not acted of their own free will but from necessity, thanks to the enemy’s treacherous ambush. But as a matter of honor, he went on, he and all the other army officers involved should be handed over to the Samnites.

This was agreed, but, on their arrival at the Samnite camp, Pontius refused to accept their surrender. He argued that if the treaty was refused everything should revert to the status quo ante. In other words, the legions should go back to the Caudine Forks. “
You are never without a reason for not keeping your word in defeat?” he asked. “You agreed with us on a peace, so that we should return you the legions we had captured. Now you have nullified that peace. And you always give your fraud some semblance of legality.”

It is hard to disagree with this judgment, which is remarkable in that it is Livy, the most patriotic of authors, who put these words into the mouth of the Samnite commander. The Romans placed a very high value on fair dealing. On this occasion, they claimed to be keeping to the letter of the law, but one has the impression that they sensed, guiltily, that they were not keeping to its spirit. According to one report, the Romans,
far from being grateful to the Samnites for letting their soldiers go, “actually behaved as if they had been the victims of some outrage.”

In any event, war resumed and the Romans allegedly won a resounding victory, after which they compelled Pontius and his fellow captives to submit to the yoke themselves, a remarkable example of instant and mirror-imaged retribution that probably never took place.

In fact, we have good grounds for supposing that the official version of the affair does not square with what actually occurred. Some ancient writers asserted that the agreement between the warring parties was in fact a
foedus
, not a
sponsio
, and that Roman apologists
tried to hide the fact. Cicero, for example, an intelligent and thoughtful voice, twice
speaks of a
foedus
.

What happened to the six hundred hostages? These are the dogs not barking in the night. Were they killed, or released? A suspicious silence hangs over their fate. They are needed to back up a
sponsio
, but once a
foedus
was in place they would become superfluous and be handed back. But if the
sponsio
was rejected, the presumed consequence would be their execution. From the fact that nothing is said about them, we may infer that a treaty
was
approved by the Roman Assembly. It looks very much as if the aborted
sponsio
was a later invention designed to excuse Roman bad faith.

A further problem muddies the narrative. The description of the Caudine Forks is only very roughly right. We are not absolutely certain where they are, but the only plausible candidate is a pass in Campania between the two modern Italian towns of Arienzo and Arpaia, which was helpfully known in ancient times as Furculae or Furcae—namely, “forks.” Here there were two entrances leading into an area surrounded by mountains and steep hills, as Livy says. However, while the eastern gorge was narrow enough to be easily blocked, the western defile was two miles wide—far too long for the Samnites to have erected barricades capable of bottling in a Roman army. There must have been a battle of some sort that led to a surrender. Why the inaccuracy? Perhaps because it was less shameful to capitulate to deceit and trickery than to do so after a straightforward defeat in the field.