Escape From Rome Read online

  Elite enrichment and the quest for prestige were thus critically predicated on the pursuit of military success, and were only gradually complemented by involvement in (at least at times) more peaceful provincial administration that opened up novel revenue streams. This shift occurred only once Rome had already eclipsed its most serious competitors: as a result, by the time martial norms and expectations began to be relaxed, the traditional war machine had already been in place long enough to achieve hegemony in western Eurasia.38

  It is less clear why the leaders of the allied Italian polities complied with Roman demands for military support as fully as they appear to have done. After all, they found themselves excluded from the lucrative state offices in Rome itself. We can only guess that martial prowess played an important role in the allies’ domestic affairs as well, providing impetus for active engagement. Moreover, the Roman state both directly and indirectly supported these local ruling classes. As already noted, constraints on taxation other than conscription inherently favored the well-off, making them more willing to follow Rome’s lead even as their fellow countrymen bled on the battlefield.39

  Yet in a system of aggressive popular mobilization, the masses also had to be kept motivated. Quasi-voluntary compliance was essential as the Roman authorities lacked autonomous means of coercing their own citizens into military service: despite formal compulsion, resistance to serve could not easily be overcome.40

  During the formative stages of Roman hegemony in peninsular Italy, the distribution of spoils went a long way in ensuring widespread popular support for war. Large tracts of land were seized from defeated enemies and assigned to Roman settlers. Tens of thousands of adult Roman men were resettled with their families. By 218 BCE, some 9,000 square kilometers of land had changed hands that way, and probably as much again had been turned into state-owned land (ager publicus) and leased out or sold—overall a considerable portion of a peninsula of 125,000 square kilometers, not more than half of which could have been used for agriculture.41

  In addition, colonization schemes in which both Romans and allies participated fostered cohesion by spreading benefits more widely. Between 338 and 264 BCE, twenty joint (or “Latin”) colonies were set up, mostly in central Italy. In total, these self-governing entities covered a further 7,000 square kilometers and 70,000 adult men with their families. Located on conquered land, they came to form bastions of Roman control.42

  But not all previous residents were routinely killed or enslaved: since the extent of ager publicus exceeded recorded assignments, we may assume that part of the original owners retained access to their land, albeit without title. It is hardly a coincidence that concerns about debt, which feature prominently in later sources for the period from the 380s to the 340s BCE, mostly faded once this colonization movement got under way. Some scholars have drawn attention to analogies between these Roman schemes and land distributions to loyal soldiers organized by the kingdom of Qin in the Warring States period: in both cases, large numbers of smallholders were successfully induced to bear an extraordinarily heavy military burden.43

  Alongside conquered land, allied soldiers also received a share of movable plunder and expected to be granted the share of campaign bonuses as Roman citizen troops. Beyond tangible economic rewards that were assigned to individuals, allied polities obtained valuable protection—not necessarily so much from credible outside enemies that soon disappeared from view but from neighboring communities. The Roman alliance system brought about lasting security at home, or at the very least suppressed old rivalries.44

  The Logic of Continuous War

  Reduced to essentials, the Roman-Italian cooperation system had not only been set up for the purpose of war-making but also required war to be successfully maintained and to yield benefits to different constituents. In this environment, in which conscription was the most important element of state revenue, forgoing war was tantamount to granting a tax rebate. Moreover, inasmuch as the Roman state depended on booty and war-related taxes as its main sources of nonlabor revenue, cessation of hostilities would have deprived it of vital resources.45

  And although a shift to routine taxation of economic output—the default mode of tributary states—might in theory have reduced this structural need for continuous warfare, it would not have been easy to implement change on this grand scale. The high degree of effective local autonomy of heavily armed subordinates and allies alone would have posed a massive obstacle to the introduction of generalized harvest or poll taxes. In fact, the more successful the Roman model turned out to be, the more the path of least resistance was to rely increasingly on external material resources by expanding beyond Italy proper, resources that in turn drove further expansion.

  From an institutional perspective, the Roman state was so poorly integrated beyond its urban center that in the absence of war, citizenship would not have meant much for most Romans. This was even truer of the allied polities, whose sole obligation lay in contributing military manpower to Roman campaigns. The entire system thus stood and fell with war: without ongoing war, key relationships would erode. Various seemingly undesirable consequences might have followed.

  In the short term, spoils and opportunities to gain glory would have dried up. Over the longer run, existing ties based on military cooperation might have atrophied or, worse, alienated allies and even rural Roman citizens who lacked a shared experience of military service under metropolitan Roman command. Not only would alliances by treaty have been robbed of their most powerful activating impulse, peripheral Roman citizenship might likewise have been hollowed out. It is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say, as John North once did, that “war-making was the life-blood of the Roman confederation in Italy.”46

  Roman-style expansionism evinces attributes of a pyramid scheme: “The Roman system has been compared to a criminal operation which compensates its victims by enrolling them in the gang and inviting them to share the proceeds of future robberies.” Success in turning former enemies into fellow citizens or allies depended in no small measure on Rome’s ability to access new resources to reward those who had just been robbed—a dynamic that made it rather difficult to abandon robbing altogether without incurring serious political costs.47

  This in turn makes it seem rather redundant to worry too much about the putative causes of individual conflicts: the underlying structural incentives were always present, skewing political decision-making in a predetermined direction. And as we will see below, this belligerent modus operandi survived for a while, even as it no longer produced any benefits other than reproducing established practices.48

  The Sustainability of Continuous War

  It was not enough for relentless warmongering to be structurally desirable—it also needed to be sustainable in the long run. Years of military service could readily be accommodated within the life cycle of farm households that were able to tolerate the absence of a son, at least in the aggregate if not in every single case. Later epigraphic evidence suggests that Roman men did not normally marry until their late twenties. To the extent that this was true across Republican Italy, Roman generals could avail themselves of a large pool of underemployed and unmarried young men. Only in extreme cases would older family men have to be drafted as well.49

  Taking the demographic argument one step further, it has been argued that steady casualties may have helped contain population pressure. The culling of young men and the concomitant inflow of resources won in war increased per capita income, whereas an end of war would have put an end to both. In the later stages of the Republican period, even as the novel opportunities offered by accelerating urbanization and the growth of the slave economy changed many Romans’ calculus of choice, military mass mobilization was successfully sustained for another century by relying on recruits from low-income backgrounds and by extending service duration through creeping professionalization.50

  Slave labor did not merely enrich the elite, it also supported basic output functions while free commoners were
tied up in military operations. This makes it easier to understand the extremely high mobilization rates shown above. In turn, militarism spurred on the expansion of slavery. Widespread popular military participation and large-scale migration to cities, colonies, and overseas militated against stable long-term employment (by self and others) in the civilian sector. In conjunction with rapid predatory capital accumulation among the elite and easy access to enslavable workers, these dynamics were highly conducive to investment in slave labor.51

  By the first century BCE, there were probably more than a million slaves in Italy, perhaps a fifth of the total population. Unlike other large slave societies in history such as ancient Greece or the colonial Americas, Roman slavery, much like that in the nineteenth-century Sokoto caliphate, was to a substantial degree based on violent capture by domestic military forces, or at least until the sheer size of the servile population turned natural reproduction into the leading source.52

  GROWTH AND TRIUMPH

  Takeoff

  What was the payoff of these expansion-bearing structures? Following the absorption of Veii and the shift to the incorporation of former enemies into the citizen body, wars against disunited opponents in central Italy pushed Roman power more deeply into Etruria. By 338 BCE, Rome had tightened its grip on its fellow Latins, most of whom were converted into Roman citizens.53

  The stakes rose when the Romans engaged with a rival alliance system that had been built up by the Samnites in the south-central Apennines. Akin to the Romans and their martial orientation, their confederation was made up of upland villages tied to hill forts: politically fragmented, they submitted to unified leadership in war. The Samnites disposed of fewer economic resources than the Romans and their allies: urbanism was relatively underdeveloped, and they were unable to tap into capital-rich coastal areas, most notably Campania south of Latium. That region, controlled by rival Oscan conquest groups, instead joined the Roman side.54

  This move in particular helped negate an initial advantage enjoyed by the Samnite federation, which had covered a much larger area with a larger population than the Romans and their allies. Even so, the incorporation of Campania and expansion elsewhere allowed the latter to catch up in terms of manpower (if not territory) by the time conflict commenced in earnest in the 320s BCE.

  Rome’s knack for successful co-optation reflects a major and arguably decisive difference between the two powers. Unlike the Romans, who aggressively invaded Samnite territory at great cost and gradually managed to encircle it with newfound allies and colonial settlements, the Samnitic league proved unable to project power, seize territory, or form lasting alliances beyond its home region. For all we can tell, its forces did not advance beyond raids and plunder even when they had the upper hand. By contrast, even though Rome struggled to operate in hostile upland terrain, it slowly added to its manpower both from within and without the Samnite domain until it eclipsed the latter by a wide margin.55

  Dragging on from the 340s to the 280s BCE, this prolonged conflict was accompanied by Roman campaigns in central and northern peninsular Italy, as growing manpower facilitated simultaneous fighting on multiple fronts. By 295 BCE, the Romans were reportedly able to field 40,000 men, comparable to the largest armies ever mustered by Syracuse (the most powerful Greek city in the south) or the Macedonian kingdom.56

  It is possible to track Rome’s steady territorial and demographic expansion over time (table 2.1). While the geographical area under its control is reasonably well known, the corresponding population figures can be no more than rough estimates, and are perhaps somewhat on the low side.

  Even allowing for substantial margins of error, this tabulation conveys a sense of the overall magnitude of change. Thus, Rome’s power system grew from some 30,000 people at the beginning of the fifth century BCE to more than ten times as many by the mid-fourth century, 1.3 million by the end of the fourth century, and more than 3 million by the 260s BCE, when the entire peninsula had fallen under its sway. This adds to up to a hundredfold increase over the course of some 230 years. Accounting for 30 percent of the peninsula’s population on a fifth of its land, by 264 BCE, the Roman citizenry formed a solid block across central Italy that separated the northern and southern allies, and thereby ensured Roman control from the inner line. Although some net population growth likely occurred during this period, most of this growth was caused by expansion. In demographic terms, this process was the equivalent of Iowa taking over the entire United States.

  Standing on Ancient Customs—and Men: Manpower

  And Rome did not stop there: the conquest of the Italian peninsula seamlessly merged into more wide-ranging campaigns. Encroachment on Greek cities in southern Italy prompted intervention by the kingdom of Epirus across the Strait of Otranto, which Rome thwarted by drawing on its huge reserves of recruits. The same pattern defined its wars against Carthage, the leading power of the south-central Mediterranean. By combining the resources of capital-rich naval societies—coastal Etruscans and Greeks—with sufficient manpower to staff large navies (and replace them when lost), Rome managed to prevail against an established naval power without having to introduce a much more sophisticated fiscal system that might have required a higher degree of state centralization. In the second war with Carthage, featuring Hannibal’s invasion of Italy that led to devastating defeats and tested the alliance to the breaking point, intensive mobilization of Rome’s demographic assets was once again decisive in mastering this serious and potentially fatal challenge.57

  The depth of Rome’s manpower is best documented by a breakdown of Roman and allied forces on the occasion of a muster in 225 BCE to repel a Gallic invasion. At that point, some 160,000 men were said to be under arms, out of a total of 700,000 infantry and 70,000 cavalry who were liable to military service. According to the latest scholarship, the overall total may have been closer to 900,000. Even though only part of these men could actually be called up, Roman commanders benefited from an extremely deep bench—and just how deep it was in practice (and not just on paper) became clear only a few years later when Hannibal entered Italy with the apparent objective of dismantling Rome’s Italian alliance system.58

  The ensuing conflict, known as the Second Punic War, demonstrated the strengths of the Roman war machine under maximum duress. Roman forces campaigned simultaneously in Italy as well as in Sicily, the Iberian peninsula, and across the Adriatic. Initial defeats were disastrous: from 218 to 213 BCE, fatalities net of natural causes amounted to 50,000 men or 15–20 percent of the entire adult male Roman citizenry, and to more than twice that number for Italy overall. Rome responded by raising mobilization levels to unprecedented heights. In a population of some 4 million people, approximately 225,000 to 240,000 men were called up between 214 and 212 BCE alone. The levies of the following decade were less extreme but still very substantial: 160,000 to 185,000 men served between 211 and 209 BCE, and 125,000 to 150,000 from 208 to 203 BCE. What is more, mass mobilization continued even once that war had been decisively won. From 200 to 168 BCE, annual enlistment averaged 120,000, ranging from 75,000 in years when only peripheral wars of choice were conducted to a peak of 180,000.59

  In later generations, domestic wars produced even bigger armies. Some 300,000 Italians are thought to have fought each other in the Social War of 91–89 BCE between Rome and some of its Italian allies, and more than a quarter of a million in the civil war of 83–81 BCE. Even in the somewhat less belligerent 70s–60s BCE, annual army strength averaged 140,000. Renewed civil war prompted a final all-out effort. In 42 BCE, very roughly a quarter of a million Italians were under arms, and two-thirds of them fought a huge battle in the northern Aegean, far away from home. Between 49 and 32 BCE, more than 400,000 Italian men were recruited into the military.60

  These numbers are best put in perspective by comparing them to later European levies. In the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, the Habsburgs and France never mustered more than 150,000 men each, a number the Roman Republic qu
ite easily surpassed on several occasions. French military strength reached 200,000 only in the 1670s, and 400,000 by the end of the seventeenth century when Louis XIV pulled out all the stops. All these efforts, however, were founded upon a much larger base population. While it was certainly extraordinary for 650,000 Frenchmen to sign up between 1701 and 1713, it had been even more extraordinary for 420,000 Italians to enter the Roman army between 49 and 32 BCE.

  France, after all, boasted 20 million people, whereas Italy was home to not more than 4 million citizens or, at best, about 2 million more. Moreover, French armies did not operate overseas the way Roman forces did in 42 BCE, more than 1,200 kilometers from their capital city by the most economical route. The Roman-on-Roman battle of Philippi that year and the battle of Actium eleven years later were the biggest engagements fought on European soil prior to Napoleon’s biggest battles near the end of his career—more than 1,800 years later, when Europe was maybe six times as populous as it had been in the first century BCE.61

  The exceptional scale of Roman war-making critically relied on very high military participation rates. We cannot really tell if Romans fought more fiercely than others, or whether high military participation rates generally increase ferocity. At the end of the day, it does not really matter: over the long run, sheer numbers were decisive. Rome’s superior manpower reserves compensated for the weakness of its oligarchic system that prized rotation of office-holding over pertinent expertise: a premise that not only strengthened the elite’s martial spirit but also welcomed amateurs to positions of command. Yet while this may have made warfare even costlier than it needed to be, in the end Rome’s massed infantry could always be counted on to hold the line: for centuries Rome lost many battles but never a war.62