War: What is it good for? (8 page)

Rulers steal from their people too, Olson recognized, but the big difference between Leviathan and the rape-and-pillage kind of bandit is that rulers are
stationary
bandits. Instead of stealing everything and hightailing it, they stick around. Not only is it in their interest to avoid the mistake of squeezing every last drop from the community; it is also in their interest to do whatever they can to promote their subjects' prosperity so there will be more for the rulers to take later.

It is normally worth a ruler's while to spend some money to keep other potential bandits out, since anything a roving bandit steals is something the ruler cannot tax. It makes sense too to suppress violence within the community—murdered subjects cannot serve in the army or pay taxes, and fields laid waste in feuds between villages produce no crops. Even spending royal or aristocratic revenues on roads, harbors, and welfare can start to seem sensible, if the investments yield even bigger payoffs within a tolerable length of time.

Leviathan is a racket, but it may still be the best game in town. Rulers in effect use force to keep the peace and then charge their subjects for the service. The more efficiently the rulers do this, the more profits they reap. Over the generations, competitive pressures nudged the business of Roman
government toward more efficient solutions. Allowing tax collectors to steal so much that their victims could not pay the next year's taxes was bad for business, so Rome stamped it out; letting potentially productive city dwellers starve was even worse, so Rome built harbors and even gave out food for free. Self-interest had the welcome side effect of making the empire's subjects safer and richer. The paradox of war was hard at work. Men who mastered violence carved out kingdoms, but to run them, they had to turn into managers.

As so often, Julius Caesar was the classic case. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he famously wrote; “I came, I saw, I conquered.” But he might have done better to say, “Veni, vidi, vici, administravi”; after coming, seeing, and conquering, he administered, and did it magnificently. Among his many reforms was the invention of the Julian calendar, still in use two thousand years later. July is named after him.

Ancient emperors were not Keynesian economists, sitting around calculating whether a sestertius spent now on keeping the peace would yield two sesterces in taxes down the road. Many of them, though, were hard and clever men who not only grasped the principles of the deal between Leviathan and its subjects but also saw the value of letting everyone know that they understood. One of the oldest surviving political texts in the world, dating back to the 2360s
B.C.
, makes just this point. In it, King Uru'inimgina (also known as Urukagina; reigned ca. 2380–2360
B.C.
) of Lagash, in the south of what is now Iraq, proclaimed that he had “freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, and seizure. He established freedom. The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful: it was for them that Uru'inimgina made his covenant with [the god] Ningirsu.” Augustus could not have put it better.

Uru'inimgina is a shadowy figure, almost lost in the mists of time, but he clearly understood the value of investing in this message. In another parallel with doing business, a nontrivial portion of the art of government is really about confidence. People who suspect that their rulers are mad, corrupt, and/or idiots are likely to resist their demands, while if the management seems skilled, fair, and perhaps even loved by the gods, the attractions of plotting against it decline.

That said, the law of averages meant that the ancient world necessarily got its share of mad, corrupt, and/or incompetent rulers. The real heroes of the story—the men who actually made Leviathan work—were the bureaucrats, lawyers, and hangers-on. Pen pushers and bean counters often
made it difficult for Augustus to get much done, but, more to the point, they also made it difficult for Caligula to get much done.

The surviving sources are full of stories of emperors' rages against obstructionist senators and the highly educated slaves who managed much of the court's business. On the whole, these episodes ended badly for the underlings. But in the background of these colorful accounts we can also make out thousands of men who lived less glamorous lives. On tombstones set up everywhere from Britain to Syria, men recounted with pride the offices they had held and honors they had won as they served on committees, collected taxes, and worked their way up the lower rungs of the bureaucratic ladder. “I, even I,” boasted one North African who had started out working in the fields, “was enrolled among the city senators, and chosen by them to sit in the house of that body … I have passed through years distinguished by the merits of my career—years that an evil tongue has never hurt with accusation … Thus have I deserved to die as I lived, honestly.”

There is no shortage of evidence that the empire's middle managers could be just as self-interested as their rulers, lining their pockets and promoting their relatives whenever the opportunity arose. But neither are we short of signs that plenty more really were earnest, industrious, and diligent. They made sure that aqueducts got built, roads were maintained, and the mail was delivered. They kept the Pax Romana going.

Catastrophic blunders could happen, and Rome went through phases of lurching from crisis to crisis. But in the long run, the pressures at work were inexorable. Warriors conquered small states, which forced them to turn into managers. Good management made states more efficient, safer, and richer, and the resulting efficient, safe, and rich states gave managers the tools they needed to compete with rival states. This, though, forced the managers to turn back into warriors who could put their rivals out of business—violently.

Can We All Get Along?

In April 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, just outside Los Angeles, reached a surprising decision. They had watched a videotape showing police landing fifty-six baton blows and six kicks on Rodney King during his arrest after a high-speed car chase. They had heard from doctors that King had suffered a facial fracture and broken ankle. They had listened while nurses reported that the police officers who brought King to the hospital had joked
about his beating. And then they acquitted three of the defendants and failed to reach a verdict on the fourth.

That evening, riots broke out in Los Angeles and in the next few days spread across the United States. Fifty-three people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, and a billion dollars' worth of property was destroyed. On the third day of violence, King went on television and asked one of the most famous questions of the decade: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible?”

It is a good question, which people must have asked in ancient times too. Instead of working their way toward peace through the violent, wasteland-making process of war, could they not have just sat down together, agreed to create larger organizations, drawn up rules, handed over taxes to fund enforcement, and got along?

Apparently not. “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” Winston Churchill once said, but in all the archives of ancient history it is hard to find a single convincing case of people agreeing to come together in a larger society without being compelled to do so by violence, actual or feared.

Take the case of Philip of Pergamum, whose account of how war, piracy, and banditry had ruined the Greek world in the first century
B.C.
I mentioned a few pages ago. “With my pious hand I delivered this [history] to the Greeks,” he explained, “so that … by observing the sufferings of others, they may live their lives in the right way.” The Greeks, however, were unimpressed and went on killing each other. When they did stop, it was not because of Philip's jaw-jaw; it was because of Roman war-war.

In 67
B.C.
, the Roman senate sent Gnaeus Pompey (known, with some cause, as “the Great”) to crush the pirates who infested Greek waters. As usual, they did this not out of benevolence but out of self-interest. The raids had gotten so bad that in 77
B.C.
one band had kidnapped the young Julius Caesar (who joked with his captors that when he was ransomed, he would come back and crucify them, which, of course, he did). By the early 60s
B.C.
, other bands were even raiding Italy's harbors.

The Greek cities had completely failed to suppress the violence, but Pompey brought Roman organization and a surprisingly modern approach to bear. In 2006, bloodied by reverses in Iraq, the U.S. Army adopted a new counterinsurgency doctrine known as “clear, hold, and build.” Instead of focusing on killing or capturing troublemakers, soldiers switched to sweeping them out of an area, securing it, and reconstructing it, before moving methodically on to the next area. By 2009, violent deaths had fallen more
than 80 percent. Pompey figured out the same strategy two thousand years earlier. He divided the Mediterranean into thirteen sectors and in a single summer worked through them one by one, clearing, holding, and building (
Figure 1.5
). Instead of crucifying the twenty thousand ex-freebooters he rounded up, Pompey imposed peace on them. “Wild animals,” his biographer wrote, “often lose their fierceness and savagery when subjected to a gentler existence; so Pompey decided to move the pirates from the sea to the land and give them a taste of civilized life by making them used to living in cities and farming the soil.”

The sea secured, Pompey turned to the land. In five spectacular campaigns he led Roman armies through the cities of Syria to the mountain fastnesses of the Caucasus and the borders of Egypt, crushing foreign kings, rebellious generals, and riotous Jews as he went. Again, he cleared, held, and built, drawing up law codes, installing Roman garrisons, and overhauling finances. Cracking down on corruption and extortion, he simultaneously lowered taxes and raised Roman revenues. Peace reigned; several Greek cities, Athens among them, announced that Pompey was a god in human form.

Pompey resorted to violence not because Romans lacked the skills for jaw-jaw—the city was bursting with orators like Cicero—but because he, like a lot of other Romans, saw that jaw-jaw worked best when it followed war-war. Tacitus, for instance, tells us that after spending his first summer in Britain (
A.D.
77) terrorizing the natives—“people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight,” Tacitus called them—Agricola devoted the winter to “getting them used to a life of peace and quiet by providing amenities. He gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares, and good houses.”

The Britons liked it. “The result,” says Tacitus, “was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favor and the toga was everywhere to be seen.” The political scientist Joseph Nye has called such an approach “soft power,” by which he means using “intangible factors such as institutions, ideas, values, culture, and the perceived legitimacy of policies” to win people over, as opposed to the coercive “hard power” of war and economics.

Tacitus understood the lure of the soft side. “The population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets,” he observed. “The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization,' when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.” But he also knew that softness only worked in the wake of hard power—or, as Americans would put it in Vietnam nineteen centuries later, “Grab 'em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” The Romans in Britain accomplished this much better than the Americans in Vietnam, winning hearts and minds because they had already robbed the Britons of their freedom to fight back. When Agricola came up against Britons who still had this freedom, like Calgacus, there was no talk of togas.

Archaeology largely confirms this. Roman goods, especially wine (transported in highly distinctive containers), were wildly popular far beyond the empire's frontiers. According to hearsay, Gallic chiefs would willingly sell a man into slavery in exchange for a large jar of wine, and Roman writers unanimously agreed that barbarians near the frontiers, who had gotten used to soft Roman ways, fought less fiercely than far-off barbarians, who remained as savage as ever.

The most seductive softness of all was intellectual, and in the first few centuries
A.D.
the Romans perfected a string of compelling systems of thought. The most successful were Stoicism and Christianity. Neither started
out as a form of imperial soft power; in each case, in fact, the founding fathers of the faith were critics of the status quo, penniless Greek philosophers and a Jewish carpenter speaking truth to power from the social and geographical margins. But as the generations passed, the hard, clever men who ran the empire did what such men always do. They subverted the counterculture. Instead of fighting it, they brought its best and brightest young men into the establishment. They picked and chose among its ideas, rewarding former radicals who said things the ruling class liked while ignoring those who didn't. Little by little, they turned the critiques of empire into justifications for it. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,” Jesus urged good Christians, “for,” Saint Paul added, “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”