The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (40 page)

Carrots accompanied sticks. When soldiers distinguished themselves in battle, the commander would summon a general assembly of the troops and call forward those whom he considered to have shown exceptional courage. When a city was stormed, the first man to scale the wall was awarded a crown of gold. Anyone who had shielded or saved a comrade’s life was honored with gifts from the consul—a spear or a cup or horse trappings. A man whose life had been saved was obliged to treat his rescuer as if he were a parent, a
paterfamilias
, for the rest of his life.

Polybius was much impressed by this system of discipline and decorations: “
When we consider this people’s almost obsessive concern with military rewards and punishments, and the immense importance which they attach to both, it is not surprising that they emerge with brilliant success from every war in which they engage.”

The Greek historian has a point, but, as the Punic Wars showed, other factors also need to be taken into account if we are to give a complete explanation of Rome’s talent for making war. The way the state fused civilian politics and military activity meant that
many members of the ruling class could expect to command an army at some point in their careers. They received long and intensive military training and so were equipped, in principle at least, to get the best from the legions.

The fact that senior politicians usually held office only for a year led to a rapid throughput of distinctly variable talent. Disasters in the field occurred with surprising frequency. It took a generation before a general was identified who was capable of worsting Hannibal. However, this disadvantage was amply compensated by Rome’s access to abundant human capital.

Both Pyrrhus and Hannibal were astounded by the legions’ capacity for self-renewal. An army could be destroyed and within a very short space of time a brand-new fighting force took its place. Being a militarized society with long experience, Roman leaders developed a culture of invincibility, a powerful will to victory, and a bloody-minded refusal to accept defeat. They also had the self-confidence to innovate when their backs were to the wall; there is no more striking example of this than the Senate’s decision to build fleets during the First Punic War despite its almost complete inexperience of naval matters.

HANNIBAL WAS IN
early middle age. What was he to do with the rest of his life? He decided to stay on in Carthage and play an active part in the city’s recovery. He seems to have encouraged the further development of agriculture as compensation for the loss of the Punic trading empire and employed the army (what remained of it) to plant
a huge number of olive trees.

He also had a score to settle with the ruling oligarchy, for failing to back his Italian campaign. For the first time, he entered domestic politics and emerged as a radical reformer, as energetic in the council chamber as he had been on the battlefield. In 196 he was elected
sufet
, one of the city’s two chief magistrates, and set in motion a review of public finances.
He ordered a treasury official to appear before him, but the man refused, relying on the fact that he
was about to join the Hundred and Four—the “supreme court,” which had the right of scrutiny of public administrators, and in which membership was for life.

A furious Hannibal had the official arrested and hauled before the People’s Assembly, where he launched an attack on the committee for its arrogance and its overbearing use of power. He immediately proposed and carried a law whereby committee members could hold office for only one year and never for two years in a row. Having conducted his review, he returned to the Assembly and reported widespread embezzlement of public funds and tax evasion. If property and harbor duties were properly collected, the war indemnity could be paid off, he claimed, without the necessity of levying higher taxes.

The great and the good of Carthage were much put out. They wrote letter after letter to the Senate in Rome, alleging that Hannibal was in secret and seditious communication with Antiochus the Great, who was then engaged in a diplomatic confrontation with the Romans. There appears to have been no good evidence to back this up, and Hannibal’s generous onetime adversary, Scipio, advised his colleagues that it would be undignified to intervene in what was obviously an internal dispute. “
We should be satisfied with having defeated him in the field without then taking him to court!” he declared.

The Senate disagreed and sent delegates to Carthage to charge Hannibal with conspiracy before the Council of Elders. In order to avoid arousing his suspicions, they put it about that they were coming to arbitrate in a dispute between Carthage and Masinissa, the Numidian ruler. Hannibal was too wily to be taken in and quietly slipped abroad to avoid arrest. His first stop was Carthage’s mother city, Tyre, but he ended up at Antiochus’s court. Whether or not he had been in contact with the king previously is unknown, but the maladroit Senate had driven Hannibal into his arms, the precise opposite of what it wanted.

The two men did not get on very well. Hannibal thought little of Antiochus’s military abilities. From the king’s point of view, the advice his guest dispensed was always a variation on the same theme: war with Rome should be taken to Italy. It was as if Hannibal wanted to rerun his career. The king paid no attention and gave him only second-ranking jobs.

The ancient historians report that in 193 Scipio, now called Africanus in honor of Zama, was among an embassy the Romans sent to Antiochus. He and Hannibal met at Ephesus and had a conversation on the subject of generalship. Scipio asked the Carthaginian who in his opinion was the greatest commander of all time. Hannibal chose Alexander and placed Pyrrhus second. And the third? inquired Scipio, rather nettled but expecting that he would at least be given third place. Hannibal unhesitatingly chose himself:

Scipio laughed and asked, “Where would you place yourself, Hannibal, if you had not been defeated by me?” Hannibal, now perceiving his jealousy, replied, “In that case I should have put myself before Alexander.” In this way, Hannibal continued his self-praise, but delicately flattered Scipio by suggesting that he had conquered one who was the superior of Alexander.

It is a good story, but (probably) too good to be true.
Scipio seems to have been in Carthage at the time that he was supposed to be in Ephesus.

As we shall see in
Chapter 15
, Antiochus lost his contest with Rome, and Hannibal was obliged to set off on his travels again. He sought refuge in various corners of the Middle East, eventually ending up at the court of Prusias, king of Bithynia, on the Black Sea coast. Rome had a long memory. When a former consul came calling, he criticized Prusias for sheltering Rome’s great enemy. The king took the hint and made some necessary dispositions.

Hannibal knew that he would always be on the run, and had arranged
for his house by the sea in Bithynia to have seven underground exits; if necessary, he should be able to make a swift and secret getaway. The arrival of a Roman envoy meant that it was time to escape, but he had left matters too late. He found the king’s guards in all the passageways.
His only remaining option was suicide if he was not to fall into the hands of his lifelong foe. He wound his cloak around his neck and ordered a slave to plant his knee in the small of his back and simultaneously twist and tug at the cloak as if it were a rope. In this way, he choked to death. According to another account,
he took poison; but most poisons known at that time were slow-acting, and Hannibal would have needed something that killed quickly.

Plutarch gives the Carthaginian some famous last words: “The Romans have found it too tedious and difficult a business to wait for a hated old man’s death. Let us now at last put them out of their misery.” Whether or not this is what he actually said, it is surely what he would have liked to say. When the news of Hannibal’s suicide reached the Senate, many thought the former consul’s behavior had been odious and officious, for Hannibal was “
like a bird who is too old to fly and has lost his tail, and who is allowed to live on tamely and harmlessly.” Others took the view that the Carthaginian’s hatred of Rome was ingrained and that, if ever he were given the chance, he would be as dangerous as ever.

One thing was certain: the little boy had been true to the oath he swore in the temple at Carthage nearly half a century earlier, although it cost him a failed life and a lonely death.

14

Change and Decay

T
HE BOY WAS IN HIS LATE TEENS AND ENJOYING HIS
first serious love affair. Then a small cloud appeared on the horizon. One day in 186, he lightheartedly told his girlfriend that they would be unable to have sex for a week or so.

He was Publius Aebutius and she, somewhat older than he, was Hispala Faecenia, a high-class prostitute and former slave. An archetypal good-time girl with a heart of gold, she adored her young lover. He had not started the affair, for, uncharacteristically in a man’s world,
she
had picked
him
up. In fact, rather than make money from the relationship, as she would with an ordinary client, she subsidized him.

This was because Aebutius had trouble at home. He came from an affluent, upper-class family, but his father died when he was small and he was brought up by his mother and a stepfather. They embezzled his fortune and made as little provision for his daily needs as possible. He was able to get by only thanks to Hispala’s generosity.

After Aebutius had recovered from an illness, his mother told him that she wanted to initiate him into a secret cult devoted to Bacchus, the Latin name for Dionysus, the god of intoxication and ritual madness. She had vowed to do this on his behalf, she claimed,
once he had got better. He agreed to fall in with her wish, and she warned that he would have to be sexually continent for ten days before the ceremony.

This was the reason, Aebutius explained to Hispala, for staying away from her bed. Her reaction astonished him. “Heaven forbid!” she exclaimed. “Better for both of us to die than you should do that!” He protested that he was only following his mother’s request.

“This means that your stepfather—I suppose it would be offensive to mention your mother—is in a hurry to destroy your virtue, your good name, your prospects and your life.”

Swearing her lover to the strictest secrecy, Hispala said that she had been initiated while still a slave, and the cult was a cover for the grossest immorality and even murder. As Livy describes them, the rites were

a workshop of corruptions of every kind; and it was common knowledge that for the past two years no one had been initiated who was over the age of twenty. As each one was introduced, he became a kind of sacrificial victim for the priests. They led the initiate to a place that resounded with shrieks, with the chanting of a choir, the clashing of cymbals and the beating of drums, so that the victim’s cries for help, when violence was offered to his chastity, might not be heard.

Aebutius went home and announced that he would have nothing to do with the Bacchic cult. This enraged his mother and his stepfather, and they drove him out of the house. He took refuge with an aunt, who advised him to go and tell all to the consul Spurius Postumius Albinus. After checking that Aebutius was a reliable witness, Postumius made some discreet inquiries. He arranged for his mother-in-law to ask Hispala to pay her a visit. Mystified by the fact that this well-known and eminently respectable lady should want to see her, Hispala obeyed.

Puzzlement turned to terror when she saw the consul’s lictors and entourage in the hall, and then the consul himself. Eventually, she calmed down and told her story. Apparently, the rites had originally been all-female and had taken place only three times a year, but then a Campanian priestess had introduced reforms. Now men were allowed to take part, the ceremonies were held at night, and their frequency had risen to five times a month. According to Livy:

There were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim. To regard nothing as forbidden was among these people the summit of religious achievement. Men, apparently out of their wits, would shout prophecies with frenzied bodily convulsions: married women, dressed as Bacchantes, with their hair disheveled and carrying blazing torches, would run down to the Tiber, plunge their torches into the water and bring them out still alight—because they contained a mixture of live sulfur and calcium.

Anyone unwilling to take part was whisked away by, or in, some sort of mechanical device and done away with in hidden caves.

Postumius made a full report to a shocked Senate. Although the immoral goings-on were to be deprecated in themselves, what really worried members was that a secret society could recruit adherents from across the classes and plan heaven knows what clandestine mischief, political as well as sexual. Dionysus was associated with breaches of social control and the dissolution of gender, age, and class distinctions. It may be no accident that the orgies took place in a grove on the Aventine, the traditional center of popular agitation, and that Aebutius and Hispala both lived on the hill, too.