The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (25 page)

Nothing daunted, the Samnite commander-in-chief, Gellius Egnatius, assembled a remarkable pact. Its members had little in common, apart from fear and hatred of Rome and a sense that this would be their last chance to destroy the monster before it grew too great ever again to be suppressed. Egnatius’s bold plan was to join forces with the Etruscans, the Umbrians (a long-standing enemy), and the Celts in the north and launch a combined attack against the irrepressible Republic.

The existence of this alliance became a matter of common knowledge in 296 and caused a panic at Rome. One of the consuls, the democratic reformer Appius Claudius Caecus, was in command of an army commissioned to keep a watch on the Etruscans, and he warned the Senate to take the threat posed very seriously. Every category of men was called up, even former slaves, and special cohorts of older citizens were formed. The two consuls for the following year commanded an army of four legions, and a special force of two legions guarded Campania from Samnite incursions. If they were at full strength, that added up to 25,200 legionaries, as well
as a strong contingent of cavalry. Also, two legions were dispatched to ravage the Etruscan countryside, to discourage the Etruscans from marching to Egnatius. This wasn’t all. The citizen legions were accompanied by a
greater number of troops contributed by the allies and the Latins—further witness, if it were needed, of the success of the Latin settlement. In total, this was the largest force Rome had ever assembled.

The consuls hurried to prevent the Celts from joining up with the Samnites. But they arrived too late and their advance guard was badly mauled. However, the Etruscans and the Umbrians were absent and, when the two armies met for a full-scale battle at Sentinum (near the modern town of Sassoferrato, in the Marche), they were probably evenly matched.

The hour of reckoning had arrived and, to mark it, a portent occurred.
A female deer was chased by a wolf across the open space between the front lines. Then the animals veered off in opposite directions. The wolf ran toward the Romans, who opened a pathway for it to pass through. The deer rushed into the arms of the Celts, who struck it down. A Roman front ranker made the obvious connection. “On that side lies flight and slaughter,” he shouted. “The deer, the goddess Diana’s beast, is dead, but here on this side the wolf is the winner, whole and untouched. He reminds us of our descent from Mars, god of war, and of Romulus our founder.”

It does not matter much whether or not this incident is a historical event, for, one way or another, it is evidence that the Romans saw this day as a turning point in their history. The battle at Sentinum, like Waterloo, was the “
nearest run thing.” The Roman left, commanded by Publius Decius Mus, the son of the commander who had “devoted” himself during the Latin war, was hard-pressed by the Celts and their chariots. In a bid to redeem the situation, Mus
followed his father’s example. After saying the ritual prayers, he galloped on his horse into the Celtic lines, to his death. The army’s priest cried out that the Romans had won the day, now that they were freed by the consul’s fate. Meanwhile, the Roman right
wore down and eventually routed the Samnites. They then turned back and smashed the Celts from the rear.

Victory was complete, but it came at a cost. According to Livy, 25,000 of the enemy were killed and 8,000 taken prisoner, while the Romans lost 8,700 men. The decision of Sentinum was permanent: Egnatius’s grand alliance was broken for good, and its inventor lay dead on the field of battle.

The Samnites still would not give up. Even the ultra-patriotic Livy acknowledged their stamina. He wrote:

They could carry on no longer, either with their own resources or with outside support, yet they would not abstain from war—so far were they from tiring of freedom even though they had not succeeded in defending it, preferring to be defeated rather than not to try for victory.

Fighting continued for a few years, and finally Samnium was penetrated by Roman forces and ravaged from one end to the other. Resistance was no longer possible. To judge by the amount of loot seized and the number of captives enslaved, little mercy was shown: auctions of booty and prisoners raised more than three million pounds of bronze—a windfall that funded the Republic’s first ever issue of coinage. For the fourth time, the Samnites signed a treaty with their conqueror. They became “allies” of the Republic—in other words, a vassal nation liable to send its young men not to fight its conqueror but to help it win its future wars.

The struggle had lasted half a century. The Samnites were down, but even now they refused to be counted out. Sullen, resentful, and subjugated, they nursed their grievance against Rome and awaited an opportunity for revenge.

FOR AN INDIVIDUAL
Roman soldier, a battlefield was a narrow and constricted place, electric with fear and tension. As most fighting took place in the summer, the air would be filled with dust
raised by thousands of tramping feet, the ancient equivalent of
von Clausewitz’s fog of war. Rain brought no relief, for an army soon turned wet ground into a quagmire. Sharp and repulsive smells spread through the armies—caused by sweaty unwashed men, the panicked loosening of sphincters and bladders, and, in due course, the cutting open of guts. There was a tremendous noise of metal on metal, of war cries and screams, of regimental trumpet blasts. The soldier was surrounded by comrades but could not see anything that was going on beyond them, nor easily hear orders. He had no idea how the battle as a whole was going. At best, he might glimpse his general riding past, himself hardly able to descry events. In the middle of a crowd, our Roman was fearfully on his own.

In modern warfare, combatants are often more or less remote from their opponents, and so are insulated from the terrors of hand-to-hand fighting. For the Roman, a javelin could perhaps be thrown thirty meters, but once two armies collided he was in touching reach of his enemy. His duty was to try to kill or disable him with his trusty
gladius
, a short cut-and-thrust sword, and to avoid getting killed by use of his shield, or
scutum
, two and a half feet in width and four feet in height.

In the fourth century, military reforms improved the effectiveness of Roman arms but probably made the battlefield a more frightening place than it had previously been. Originally, a legion fought as a phalanx. A phalanx was a tight infantry formation, eight and, later, twelve or sixteen ranks deep. It was a Greek invention that the Romans copied. As if they were a single invincible organism, soldiers marched close together shield to shield. They carried long spears thirteen to eighteen feet in length that, like a lethal porcupine, presented an impenetrable thicket of shafts. The phalanx crashed into the enemy line and usually prevailed by virtue of its sheer momentum and perfect drill. Not for nothing is the word
phalanx
the Greek for “roller,” or heavy tree trunk.

However, the phalanx had weaknesses. It was vulnerable to attack
from the sides and men found it hard to stay in formation on rough ground. Once broken up, this monument of human solidarity disintegrated into a collection of individual soldiers, easily picked off and put to flight. Except in the Po Valley, Italy is not a land of flat plains, and during the fourth century Rome found that the phalanx was at a disadvantage when confronting the loose, open tactics of the Celts, with their terrifying chariots, or the guerrilla tricks of Samnite mountaineers.

So the Romans abandoned the phalanx for a more flexible arrangement. Rather than form a single deep rectangle, a legion’s heavy infantry was divided into three successive lines. The first consisted of
hastati
, young soldiers; the second,
principes
, men in their prime; and, finally, the
triarii
, mature veterans in reserve. The
hastati
and the
principes
carried two throwing javelins a man, six feet long and made from wood and iron, and the
triarii
one long thrusting pike. Each line was broken down into ten subunits, or maniples (from the Latin
manipulus
, or “handful”) of about 120 men. Maniples were separated from one another by intervals equal to their own frontage. The gaps in the front line were protected by the maniples of the second, and those in the second line by the third.

The formation resembled a checkerboard and allowed fighters in the first line to withdraw and be replaced by fresh troops. The task of the
triarii
was defensive. If both the
hastati
and the
principes
had been forced to retreat, they were the last obstacle before an ignominious defeat. They knelt down beneath their banners, held up their shields, and pointed their pikes into the air, a kind of human barbed-wire entanglement. The phrase “to have come to the
triarii
” was a common expression that things were going badly.

Severity was essential if men were to be serious about fighting. We have no eye-witness testimonials to the experience of battle in classical times, but research into modern warfare offers findings that doubtless have a general application. It seems that comparatively
few soldiers put their heart into fighting.
Battles often have a rhythm, with waves of men pushing forward, feinting, and then rushing back. Men are usually capable of facing the danger they are in, but
only a quarter of them actually attack with a will to kill. A paralysis of terror overtakes some soldiers; they are unable even to surrender, much less fight back, and are killed where they stand or lie.

Joy in combat and the taking of an almost sexual pleasure in killing occurs but is rare. In a modern survey,
about one-third of combatant soldiers show strong or mild fear, another third are “in the middle ground of tension and concentration,” and about one quarter are “calm and neutral”: these last may be presumed to be the effective combatants. A small number are stunned or incapacitated.

According to a recent sociological study of violence, “
in ancient and mediaeval warfare, there appears to have been a high degree of incompetence in the use of … weapons.” As is usually the case, most wounding and killing took place when the opposing forces were unequal—for example, during a rout or an ambush. “Forward panic” is a kind of fever that maddens advancing troops, who may then commit atrocities. Likewise, after victory in the field or the capture of a besieged city, soldiers allow themselves a temporary moral holiday. Individuals feel protected by the crowd and behave with great cruelty to the vanquished. When normal social controls have resumed, the same men may share their rations with surviving victims.

One way of reducing fear and tension has been to put troops into massed formations, such as the phalanx, where they must act in concert and there is little or no room for individual initiative. Rome’s new manipular formation offered more scope for individual initiative but also (it follows) for cowardice or, at least, ineffectiveness in the face of the enemy.

So it is no surprise that, to maximize fighting efficiency, discipline had to be fierce. Two centurions stood at either end of a
maniple’s front row, each commanding one half of the unit, while a third officer, an
optio
, kept watch in the rear. Great care was taken in appointing men to these crucial positions. According to Polybius:

The Romans look not so much for the daring or fire-eating type, but rather for men who are natural leaders and possess a stable and imperturbable temperament, not men who will open the battle and launch attacks, but those who will stand their ground even when worsted or hard-pressed, and will die in defense of their posts.

It was an understood right of war for the winner to take as booty anything of value that could be found. A Roman soldier, both citizen and ally, could count on a fair share of the spoils. But the most persuasive encouragement to valor was the fact that Rome established a habit of winning its wars. Yes, there could be terrible setbacks and high casualties, but the Roman Republic now controlled most of central Italy; its territory had grown to more than 6,000 square kilometers at the turn of the century and ballooned to more than 15,000 square kilometers by the 280s. There was an unparalleled increase both in public and private wealth.

The wars of the fourth century made Rome into a warrior state. Campaigns took place more or less every year. The regular annual levy rose from two to four legions during the Samnite Wars—that is, about eighteen thousand men—and during the Sentinum crisis six legions were under arms, perhaps
twenty-five percent of all adult male citizens. However nerve-racking the experience of battle, warfare paid, and there was now no other power in the peninsula that dared challenge Rome’s supremacy.

SO WHAT WAS
it like to be a Roman, as the Republic found itself on the threshold of history and greatness? And how did he or she see the world? It is hard to be certain in the light of an unreliable
written record that later imaginative historians tampered with and “improved,” but a recognizable personality begins to emerge into the light of day.

The vast majority of people were poor and scratched a hard living from the land. Although Latium was fertile, hostile marauders trashed crops and burned down huts and houses. Smallholders were often absent on service with the legions. Women and children presumably worked the fields when not forced to make their escape to nearby strongpoints. However, with the expansion of Rome’s territories, fighting increasingly took place on the territory of others.

The problem of indebtedness remained endemic, and it was many years before the humiliation of debt bondage, the
nexum
, was outlawed. Economic hardship was never totally dispelled, but foreign conquests relieved its worst symptoms. As the Republic became wealthier, rural austerity, exemplified by the experience of Cincinnatus, came to be regarded with a certain nostalgia.

With migrants moving about the peninsula and rising populations, war was a way of life in central Italy. The Romans learned to be extraordinarily aggressive. There were few periods in their early centuries when the Republic was not invading its neighbors or resisting invasion by them. Little wonder that a constitution was devised which intermingled the military with the political.