The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian

INTRODUCTION: THE PATH TO EMPIRE

Our story begins in the late summer of 264 BC, when a Roman army is poised to cross the straits of Messina from southern Italy into Sicily. It ends just outside of modern Tivoli, about twenty miles east of Rome, where the Roman emperor Hadrian died in AD 138. His palace, whose vast remains impress visitors to this day, was meant to evoke the world he ruled. His empire ran from northern England (the wall he built there marked one limit of the empire) through southern Germany to Turkey, around the eastern rim of the Mediterranean to Morocco in the west. The Roman Empire was then, and remains still, the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state in the history of Europe and the Mediterranean. But it would have surprised many of the people we will be meeting in this book to hear that everything was so rosy. For many of them, life was a struggle, and the ability to carry on in the face of adversity was a quality that the Roman people saw as being particularly their own. Rome’s greatest poet would celebrate this idea when he penned the line ‘so great was the labour to found Rome’. That was true both of the mythic tale he was writing about the city’s foundation, and the real story of the way the Roman Empire came into being.

This book ends with the death of Hadrian because he embodies the process of imperial integration that made Rome successful in his own right. He was born of an Italian family that had emigrated to Spain and lived there for centuries before returning to Italy. His reign was also the period during which Cornelius Tacitus, the greatest of Rome’s historians – who will also often act as our guide – was writing his history, so it is fitting that we should be able to see how his world shaped his views.

Romans of Hadrian’s time would look back at the crossing into Sicily as the first step in the acquisition of their empire. They would also look back on the state that sent the army to Sicily as being radically different from the one they lived in. In 264 BC there was no Roman emperor. One of the two central topics of this book will be the process of transformation which led to the creation of the office of emperor, and an entire imperial government. The other will be the way that the empire was acquired. These subjects are inseparable.

To tell the stories of Rome’s rise to empire, we will have to establish a baseline by looking at how Rome ran in 264 BC, and to do that, we will need to consider some Latin terms. Many are the roots of common English words, but the specific Latin meaning is not often very well understood through its English derivative. Taking time to understand the Romans in their own terms will allow us to move more easily between their world and ours.

The Roman state was formally known as the res publica populi Romani, or ‘public matter of the Roman people’. Although the English word ‘republic’ is derived from it, the Roman res publica was unlike any modern state, in that full membership – only men could be full members – carried with it the implication of physical ownership of state property. In 264 BC, this collective property included land spread throughout Italy. The members of the Roman community expressed their will through public assemblies in which they annually elected the magistrates who would be charged with overseeing their affairs. The same assemblies passed laws governing how those magistrates should act. In this way, while the people were sovereign, their elected officials constituted the government, and members of this government tended to be drawn from the highest aristocracy. Crucially, the offices occupied had powers defined by statute, and were both term-limited and revocable. The form of the Roman democracy, in which elected magistrates acted on behalf of a sovereign people that seemed to be politically inactive so long as it was satisfied with the way its officials behaved, has come, through the work of political theorists from Jean Bodin to Thomas Hobbes, to shape modern theories of representative democracy.

Roman magistrates usually had colleagues of the same rank and the Roman people conferred upon them administrative authority in the form of imperium and/or potestas, as well as religious authority or auspicium. Imperium, or ‘supreme military and administrative power’, is the root of the word ‘empire’, and was exercised in a provincia, familiar to us in the English word ‘province’. Potestas is the root of the word ‘power’, and a person who had potestas had the power to compel someone else to do something. While ‘auspicious’ in its modern use implies an anticipation of favourable outcomes, Roman auspicium was less purely positive. It meant the power to interpret divine signs – especially, but not limited to, those revealed by the actions of birds – and meteorological phenomena. No public business could be conducted unless the auspices were favourable.

In 264 BC, the word provincia did not yet mean a geographically defined administrative district, but rather ‘a task for which a magistrate should use his imperium’. These tasks, assigned by the Roman people, began one mile from the sacred boundary (pomerium) of the city of Rome. Within the city, magistrates would exercise their potestas according to regulations set by the popular assemblies. One of the important limitations on potestas of any sort was that a magistrate could not impose a capital sentence upon a Roman citizen unless that citizen had been condemned by vote of the citizen body or was subject to military discipline.

At the beginning of our story, the Roman res publica’s rise to dominance in the Italian peninsula had only recently been confirmed in a series of wars between 295 and 272 BC. Rome’s pre-eminence was now based on three factors: its system of alliances with individual Italian communities; its aggressive seizure of prime real estate; and its sophisticated military system drawing upon, by ancient standards, vast reserves of manpower and a relatively stable financial model.

The Roman alliance system rested upon the shared interests of Roman aristocrats and the leaders of allied Italian communities. In constructing their alliance system, the Romans depended on two basic instruments, the foedus (treaty) and deditio in fidem (handover [of self] into the faith [of the Roman people]). In the fourth century BC, it was quite common for a state that was having trouble with its neighbours to make a deditio in fidem to the Romans. If the Romans accepted the deditio, then they were under a firm obligation, before the gods, to protect the city. The Roman obsession with being seen as ‘the people who dealt in fides’ is evidenced by coins minted during the 270s BC at the city of Locris in southern Italy (a recently acquired ally), showing the goddess Pistis (Faith) crowning the goddess Roma (the personification of the Roman community).

The Romans’ determination to be seen to ‘do the right thing’ was built into the way that they declared war, and the way that they celebrated victory. Roman declarations of war were made according to rules laid down in a quasi legal/religious procedure connected with the ‘fetial’ priests (the term fetial indicated something done following a set procedure). According to this procedure, a representative of the Roman state (originally a fetial priest in person) would go to a place that had committed an offence against Rome and demand restitution. If none was forthcoming, the priest would return to announce that war would be declared as a result, and then, a few days later, that war was declared. The priest was a witness of the justice of Roman claims before the gods. With victory won, the commanding general might celebrate with a triumph, a procession through the city, ending at the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, Rome’s biggest temple for its most important god. The celebration was a symbolic statement of divine support. Quite often, by the end of the fourth century BC, the victorious general would erect a new temple with some of the plunder won from the victory to celebrate the divine personifications of qualities the Romans felt to be characteristic of themselves (courage, honour, etc.). By the time this book opens, the heart of Rome, surrounding the route the generals took to celebrate their triumphs, was well stocked with such self-congratulatory commemorative buildings.

1. Silver coin issued by Locris in 275 reflecting the city’s connection with Rome. The portrait is of the god Zeus (the Greek version of Roman Jupiter) while the scene on the reverse shows the goddess Good Faith crowning the goddess Roma, a graphic illustration of the importance of the concept of fides (good faith) in Roman diplomacy.

In addition to violence and diplomacy, another tool of Roman dominance were colonies, which came in a variety of sizes and shapes. Some were small, limited to Roman citizens, and looked much like military camps. These tended to be located in places where their population could provide early warning of developing hostility. Others, however, although also small, incorporated members of the local population. In parts of Italy where there were no urban centres (such as Samnium, in the south central Apennines), Romans would be given land as individual settlers organised around rural centres called conciliabula, or ‘gathering places’. Still others could be very large. Such colonies, which mingled Romans with non-Romans, came to be known as Latin colonies and could consist of 2–6,000 people. They were called ‘Latin’ because the members of the colony, even if they had once been Roman citizens, assumed a lower level of citizenship than the citizens of Rome, based upon the relationship between Rome and the other cities of Latium, the area of Italy in which Rome had been founded. Latin rights enabled men to do business in Rome, to marry Romans, and, if they were local officials, to acquire or reacquire full Roman citizenship. What Latins could not do, that Roman citizens could, was vote in Roman elections. So why would a Roman citizen want to become a Latin? The reason was economic – the promise of more property than he had. For non-Romans, inclusion in a colony on an equal footing with former citizens was usually a step up in status and gave the common people in communities allied to Rome a vested interest in Rome’s success.

The inclusivity of Latin colonies is connected to the single most important difference between Rome and most ancient states, as well as between Rome and modern imperialist states. This was the attitude towards citizenship. In Rome, citizens were the children of families endowed with citizenship, but people could also become citizens if they were the freed slaves of Roman citizens, if the Roman people voted to make them citizens, or if a Roman magistrate known as a censor enrolled them on the list of citizens. Many of the most important families of Rome had come from other communities, and this openness helped Rome absorb potential rivals.

The attitude towards citizenship was not the only unusual feature of the Roman system. Two others in the early third century BC were that Rome had only the most nebulous of coinage systems, and it did not collect tribute from subordinate states. Even when Rome had become the dominant state in Italy, coins which conveyed a very clear ‘Roman’ message by carrying images of the god Hercules on the front and the birth of Romulus and Remus (the mythical founders of Rome) on the back, were not minted in Rome. They were circulated in Campania, the area around the bay of Naples, which had a much more robust tradition of coinage stemming from the fact that many of the cities there (of which Naples is the most famous) had strong Greek roots. Roman coinage, minted in Rome, was simply not user friendly. It consisted of heavy bronze bars, weighing slightly less than five pounds, which seem to have been used for large-scale transactions; silver and bronze coins copied from coins circulating in southern Italy; and bronze discs, weighing nearly a pound.

2. Struck around 265 on a Greek standard this coin links Rome with Hercules (shown on the reverse) who was widely worshiped in Italy with the myth of Rome’s foundation by Romulus and Remus who were suckled by a she-wolf.

There are two more points that we need to explore before we move on to a brief survey of what would happen to Rome after 264 BC. The first is the way that its elections worked (we will be coming back to these voting practices quite often). The second is the structure of the government (another topic we will be coming back to quite often).

The way that Romans voted depended upon whether the election was for a magistracy that would have imperium. These were the two chief magistracies: the consulships (of which there were two) and the praetorship. In theory, the praetor (of which there was only one in 264 BC) would stay in Rome in years when both consuls went to war. The praetor and the consuls were elected by the comitia centuriata, the Roman voting assembly in which citizens voted through groups called centuries. In 264 BC the 193 centuries were divided into three groups. The first group, made up of eighteen centuries, were cavalry (known formally as the ‘cavalrymen with a public horse’); the second group of 170 centuries were infantry; the third consisted of four ‘unarmed’ centuries plus one century of proletarii – that is, people whose duty to the state was to ‘bear children’ as they did not have enough property to be classified as assidui, ‘the settled’ or ‘the landowning’, who made up the membership of the other centuries. The assidui, who were liable for military service as infantrymen and to pay tax (tributum) when they were not serving, were divided into five classes. Assignment to a class was based on the amount of property a person owned, with the first class being the wealthiest, and having the most centuries (eighty), the second, third and fourth classes having twenty centuries each, and the fifth class having thirty. To win an election, a person had to collect the votes of the majority of centuries, which meant that the wealthiest citizens – who were distributed through the eighteen cavalry centuries and the eighty centuries of the first class – could usually decide an election. In elections for the two annual consulships, the first person to reach a majority ninety-seven centuries was declared the winner of one consulship, then the second place votes were counted and the person with the most second place votes was declared the winner of each century until, again, the magic number of ninety-seven was reached. Even if there was some division of opinion among the wealthy, it is unlikely that voters in the lower census classes cast many meaningful votes in these elections.

There were also magistrates who only had potestas. These included the two aediles who were charged with managing the city, the ten tribunes and the quaestors, who administered the treasury and assisted officials with imperium. They were elected by the assembly of the thirty-three tribes of Rome. Voting in the tribal assembly worked on the same principle as voting in the centuries, so that whoever won a majority seventeen tribes would win the office he was seeking. On the other hand, as the tribal assembly took no account of census qualifications, the votes of the poor had potentially a great deal more weight.

It was a fundamental rule of the Roman constitution that only elected officials could sponsor laws, and that those laws were voted on in the assembly that had elected them. The result of this was that, at least in theory, very different sorts of laws could be passed. Those favouring the lower classes could pass through the tribal assembly where voting was not weighted in favour of the wealthy and those favouring the interests of the upper classes could move through the assembly of the centuries. In practice, either assembly was quite capable of passing laws of all sorts. The most striking thing about the way Romans voted on laws is that they very rarely voted anything down. The likeliest explanation for this is that the people who wanted to pass a law spent a good deal of time canvassing public opinion to make sure that their measure would pass before they even brought it to a vote.

There is also one exception to pretty much everything we have said so far about the way the Roman system worked. This was the position of dictator. A dictator had supreme political power while he was in office and he was not elected. He was appointed by the senior official in Rome when it was determined that a dictator was needed. Sometimes these needs were rather mundane, such as running elections for consulships. At other times he was appointed to solve a major emergency. When the dictator had accomplished his task, be it running an election or winning a war, he would step down.

This system of magistracies was the result of major reforms that had begun in the middle of the fourth century BC. Before these reforms, the only men who could obtain magistracies with imperium or the major priesthoods were those whose families were enrolled in the patrician order, which seems to have formed in the early fifth century BC and consisted of the major clans, or gentes, who defined Rome’s political order. By the mid-fourth century BC it was clear that this sort of restrictive arrangement was problematic, and the reforms of the 360s BC resulted in the opening-up of one of the two chief magistracies to plebeians (as non-patricians were called).

Gradually priesthoods, too, were made available to plebeians, but these constitutional changes were only part of the story. The relaxing of the old rules also made it possible to incorporate leaders of other Latin communities directly into the governing aristocracy of Rome. The great patrician families could use their influence with electoral assemblies to promote the families of important dependants to high office. The major families of this period were the Valerii, the Claudii, the Fabii (a clan that claimed roots in the area going back to well before the city’s foundation), the Aemilii, the Cornelii and the Manlii. The Fabii facilitated the rise of a series of Latin clans to high office, such as the Fulvii and Mamilii from Tusculum (near the modern town of Frascati), the Otacilii from Malventum (modern Benevento) and the Atilii from Nomentum (modern Mentana). The Aemilii seem to have sponsored the Genucii, a Roman family that were rich but certainly plebeian, the Licinii, also Roman and rich, as well as the Plautii from Praeneste (modern Palestrina).

3. This coin of 54 BC shows the legendary founder of the Roman Republic, Brutus, accompanied by his attendants (lictors, bearing axes bound by rods) and an assistant. The image conveys the idea of the consul’s imperium.

Magistrates were assisted by small staffs, and spent much of their time overseeing the activity of people with whom the state contracted for basic functions, ranging from repairing streets, roofing temples, supplying horses for state-sponsored chariot races to providing supplies for armies on campaign, transporting grain to market or collecting tributum. As the Roman state did not have a sophisticated monetary system, it is unlikely that these public contractors were especially influential or were able to become wealthy from the work they did for the government. Wealth at this period lay in land and major aristocratic clans were supported by large landholdings, though the limitation of these holdings to around 300 acres for each nuclear family was one feature of a major political reform that had taken place about a century before the Roman invasion of Sicily. The other major source of money for aristocrats was war booty, which, even though they were expected to share it with their men and with the state, would still have provided an important supplement to inherited wealth.

The Roman state we have been exploring so far was not very different from many other Italian states, which typically had aristocratic governing councils, sovereign assemblies and citizen armies, which they could supplement by hiring mercenaries (Rome was not immune to the use of mercenaries) and where magistrates worked with contractors to keep things running. This Roman state looks nothing like the Roman state that Hadrian would leave behind in AD 138. The process of change would really begin at the end of the third century BC. Before that, Rome muddled through a very long war with Carthage, a state in North Africa that had strong interests in Sicily and was strongly opposed to Rome having any presence on the island.

Rome continued to function largely as it had before 264 BC until it fell into a life and death struggle with a Carthaginian army commanded by a man named Hannibal, who invaded Italy from a family fiefdom in Spain in 218 BC. The struggle with Hannibal forced Rome to become more efficient (and even to acquire its own coherent coinage system). The war also embroiled Rome in the politics of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Roman victory over Hannibal and Carthage in 201 BC left Rome in control of Spain, and on the brink of war with the kingdom of Macedon in northern Greece. A rapid victory over Macedon (the war lasted from 200 to 197 BC) led to a war with another kingdom based in the eastern Mediterranean, that of the Seleucids. Another rapid, and total, victory over the Seleucid king Antiochus III (the war lasted from 192 to 188 BC) left Rome as the dominant power in the Mediterranean and opened sources of wealth, previously undreamed of, especially to its contractors. These contractors came to form a very powerful interest in Roman politics and it now becomes reasonable to think of them as forming a specific ‘contractor class’.

The vast and rapid increase in available wealth led to political dislocation. Romans would later trace the failure of the traditional Roman form of government to the actions of a series of individuals from the second half of the second century BC through the middle of the first century BC. While it is somewhat simplistic to associate large-scale political movements and social change with individuals, as the Romans did, it is none the less convenient, which is why in this book there are so many chapters that have an individual’s name in the title. The first of these people is Tiberius Gracchus, who challenged the dominance of the Senate, asserting the sovereign power of the Roman people in 133 BC. His brother Gaius Gracchus weaponised the contractor class against the office-holding classes in 122 BC by giving them control over a law court where cases could be brought against magistrates for corruption in office. Gaius Marius, a military hero who was himself the product of the politically active contractor class, would save the state from an external foe, but he had no interest in finding a solution to the complicated fractures that were running throughout Roman and Italian society as a result of the unequal divisions of the profits of empire.

A civil war broke out between Rome and its Italian allies in 91 BC, which was largely over by 88 BC, as Rome had granted the main request of the rebels (to become Roman citizens) in 90 BC. The most troubling aspect of this war, in some ways, was the appearance of large-scale military contracting, which would come to dominate Roman politics in the next half century.

The most vicious of the military contractors in this period was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who, after a bloody civil war in the late 80s BC, established himself as dictator, a position which he reinvented to give himself all power for as long as he wanted. Sulla’s failure to build a cohesive following led to the rapid breakdown of the political system he had tried to impose. In the next generation, one of his former officers, Gnaeus Pompey, achieved great prominence well before he held political office through both his ability as a general and his willingness to spend his own money to pay his own armies. Pompey’s prominence would be challenged in the 50s BC by Gaius Julius Caesar, who used the resources he obtained by conquering Gaul (modern France and Belgium) to build up what was essentially a privately controlled state. He used the resources of this state to invade Italy, defeat Pompey and set himself up as dictator in the 40s BC.

After Caesar’s assassination on 15 March 44 BC, Rome fell into a long period of civil war from which Caesar’s adopted son Augustus, who would become the first emperor, emerged victorious in 31 BC. It was Augustus who initiated the transition of Roman government from the fiscal–military contracting system that had grown in the second century BC into a bureaucratic state. The story of the century after his death in AD 14 is dominated by the continuing development of an effective government that could provide mechanisms for the integration of former subjects into the governing groups at Rome – and occasionally offer lessons in the ways that narcissistic, bullying chief executives with short attention spans and bad tempers could be managed (there were several rather colourful emperors in these years).

The great secret of Rome’s imperial success was that it allowed former subjects to become administrators and, ultimately, even emperors. No other imperial state has ever achieved the degree of integration between former administrators and former subjects that Rome did – but that, too, is not something that could have been imagined in 264 BC.

PART I

WAR (264–201 BC)

1

THE INVASION OF SICILY (264 BC)

Reggio Calabria, on the southernmost tip of Italy, is a beautiful place. In the early evening a quickening breeze chases away the afternoon heat that has flattened the sea, and reawakens the small whirlpools along the shore. To feel this breeze today is to share an experience with Appius Claudius, consul of Rome in 264 BC.

Because of what he did at the end of that summer, Appius Claudius would obtain an additional last name, or cognomen, by which he is now distinguished from the many other members of his powerful aristocratic clan. He is known as Appius Claudius Caudex, ‘the blockhead’. This is somewhat unfair. From what we know, he was scarcely either the most inept or the most obnoxious member of a family that would play an important role in Roman life for the better part of a millennium. In 264 BC he was confronted with a series of problems that other leaders have dealt with no better.

Appius Claudius was in Reggio Calabria because of a diplomatic crisis stemming from a Roman sense of obligation to a people known as the Mamertines, a group of Campanian mercenaries who had seized control of the city of Messana (now Messina) in Sicily, just across the straits from Reggio.

The Romans felt obligated to the Mamertines because the Mamertines had played an active role in the war that had confirmed Roman control over southern Italy between 280 and 275 BC. This war had begun as a conflict between the Romans and an alliance controlled by the southern Italian city of Tarentum. Realising that they were overmatched by the Romans, the Tarentines had imported a powerful army led by king Pyrrhus of Epirus in western Greece. Pyrrhus was an able general who had inflicted a couple of bloody defeats on the Romans in the first two years of the war (although these victories had cost him heavy casualties as well, hence our expression ‘Pyrrhic victory’). In the end, however, Pyrrhus had been unable to bring the Romans to the peace table, and by 277 BC the Tarentines had run short of money with which to pay him. He had then hired out his army to the Syracusans, based in south-east Sicily, for a war with the Carthaginians. When the Syracusans, too, ran out of money, that war ended. Pyrrhus returned to Italy and the Mamertines helped the Romans by attacking him on the way. Pyrrhus then fought a third battle against the Romans, was badly beaten and returned to Greece, where he died in battle a few years later. Tarentum’s surrender to Rome in 272 BC marked the completion of the Roman conquest of Italy south of the Po valley. Then the Mamertines got into trouble.

In 267 BC a general named Hieron of Syracuse crushed the Mamertine army, and now, after an interval during which he became king Hieron II, looked to finish them off. Faced with destruction, the Mamertines made a deditio in fidem to Rome – that is, a formal handing-over of themselves into the good faith of the Roman people, to whom they also claimed kinship as fellow worshippers of the god Mars, the father of Romulus, the founder of Rome. (We will see further instances of this sort of diplomacy anon.)

Unfortunately for pretty much everyone involved, the initial Mamertine response to the threat from Syracuse had been to ask Carthage rather than Rome for help. Such an appeal may have seemed initially attractive as the Carthaginians both had a long history of antipathy towards the Syracusans and, most recently, had been allied with the Mamertines against Pyrrhus. The problem with the Carthaginians, as the Mamertines were soon to discover, was that they wanted a good deal more control at Messana than the Mamertines were comfortable with. It was the arrival of a Carthaginian garrison that convinced the Mamertines to try their luck with Rome. Tricking the Carthaginian garrison commander into leaving, they dispatched their envoys to Rome asking that their protection be declared a provincia. This was done in July 264 BC.

The appeal caused confusion and ill will. The Carthaginians, who had always enjoyed good relations with Rome, thought that they had an understanding whereby Rome would stay out of areas that were important to them, such as Sicily. The Romans were uncertain how to respond: they recognised that they had a responsibility to the Mamertines, but they were already committed to a war that was not going well against a rebellious city in southern Etruria (roughly modern Tuscany) and were leery of fighting wars in two very different places at the same time.

There was considerable debate in the Senate as to whether to declare the relief of the Mamertines a provincia and, when the Senate could not reach a decision, Appius Claudius summoned a meeting of the comitia centuriata. The comitia duly voted him the provincia. What the comitia centuriata was not doing when it agreed to make ‘aid to the Mamertines’ a provincia was declaring war on either Carthage or Syracuse. Rome only ever went to war in self-defence. Self-defence could, of course, be more or less broadly defined, but in this case Rome would only declare war if the Carthaginians and/or the Syracusans attacked the Roman army once it had arrived in Sicily.

The dismissal of their garrison from Messana had so thoroughly irritated the Carthaginians that they had crucified its unfortunate commander. The prospect of a Roman intervention annoyed them even more, and before the Romans had even voted to send Appius south, the Carthaginians had already made a treaty with Hieron so as to keep them out.

We can reconstruct the events that followed Appius Claudius’ arrival only with difficulty. The reason for this difficulty is that some of our evidence comes from texts that have only been preserved in summary form, or through scattered quotations in other authors, known as ‘fragments’ (shown abbreviated to ‘Fr.’ after a quotation in the text). Other evidence comes from an author who was so overwhelmed by his own prejudices that he could only read the accounts that he had through the lens of later debates.

We have three sources that matter. One is the long Historical Library written by a man named Diodorus in the middle of the first century BC. The scope of the work extended from early Egypt and Mesopotamia to the lifetime of Diodorus’ contemporary Julius Caesar; in composing this massive work, Diodorus used material borrowed, not always carefully, from earlier writers. In this case, he used the work of an earlier Sicilian historian named Philinus, who detested the Romans. Sadly, we do not have Diodorus’ whole story because this part of his work is known to us only indirectly through quotations in later historians. Our second source is Cassius Dio, who wrote an 81-book history of Rome from its foundation to his own time in the early third century AD, which is also now known only from summaries. Our most detailed account, that of the second-century BC Greek historian Polybius, is marred by the fact that, against all available evidence, he presumed the Romans started the war for reasons of grand strategy.

In Polybius’ view the Romans were not inclined to help the Mamertines because they were terrible people, and because assisting them would be inconsistent with their earlier decision to punish another group of Campanian mercenaries. These men, who were in Roman employ, had seized Rhegium (the ancient name for Reggio Calabria) from its citizens during the war against Pyrrhus. What Polybius, who simply disliked mercenaries, did not perceive was that the Romans viewed the Campanians in Rhegium very differently from those in Messana. The Campanians in Rhegium had broken faith (fides) with Rome, whereas the ones in Messana had not – a point whose significance was obvious at the time, even if regarded as debatable. Confronting a Roman ambassador who had come to discuss the Mamertine situation, Hieron, in Diodorus’ account, opined that everyone would recognise how bogus were Roman claims to deal in fides if they were seen supporting creeps like the Mamertines.

For Polybius, the important thing in the Roman decision-making process was not fides but the perception that Carthaginian power was closing in on Italy and that, inevitably, Rome would have to fight Carthage. That being the case, it was better to do so sooner rather than later, as Carthage was growing stronger by the day. But Polybius’ view was based on a false appreciation of Carthaginian power – namely, that it had been stronger in 264 BC than it was in 218 BC, when the great Carthaginian general Hannibal launched the Second Punic War (be warned that Hannibal was a common Carthaginian name and we will encounter other Hannibals who have no relation to this one in the next few pages). Carthage, thanks largely to the activity of Hannibal’s family in Spain during the previous thirty years, was vastly stronger at that time than it had ever been. Later Romans – that is, Polybius’ contemporaries – were, however, interested in claiming that Carthage had been a perpetual and powerful menace long before Hannibal’s time. They wanted to believe this in order to justify their contention that they had to destroy Carthage (which they managed to do in Polybius’ lifetime and with his active participation). That is why Cassius Dio knew a Roman version of the story in which:

These [the Carthaginians] were in no way inferior to them [the Romans] in wealth or in the excellence of their land; they were trained in naval science to a high degree of efficiency, were equipped with cavalry forces, infantry, and elephants, ruled the Africans, and held possession of Sardinia as well as the greater part of Sicily; as a result, they had conceived hopes of subjugating Italy. Various factors contributed to increase their self-confidence, but they were especially proud because of their independence, since they elected their king under the title of a yearly office and not for permanent rule; and, feeling that their efforts were expended in their own behalf, they were full of enthusiasm.

(Dio, Roman History 11.8 (Loeb translation adapted))

Recent archaeological work has refuted the notion that Carthage at this time was a massive power, controlling the western rim of the Mediterranean. We now know that there was no vast Carthaginian empire, but rather there were numerous trade networks involving merchants of Phoenician descent, of which some, but not all, centred on Carthage. Carthage itself controlled a string of cities along the north coast of Africa, some cities in Sicily, and the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. In terms of military might it was usually hard-pressed to hold its own against Syracuse, which, as the events of late 264 BC were about to reveal, was itself no match for even a single Roman army, much less the two armies the Roman state ordinarily fielded every summer.

The Romans accepted the Mamertine deditio after the Carthaginian garrison had been withdrawn; the Carthaginians made their alliance with Syracuse sometime before August 264 BC, when the Roman army began to assemble at Rhegium. No one knew quite what would happen, but it appears that some Carthaginian ships sank some Roman ones. After the attack, Diodorus reports a Roman embassy to the Carthaginians complaining about the attack, pointing to the possibility that the result would be war, and lecturing them on Roman military history. Both sides seem to have been aware that an effective blockade of the strait of Messina would be impossible because the Carthaginian fleet, stationed twelve miles away at Cape Peloras, was too distant to mount effective patrols, and the Syracusans had no naval presence in the area worth mentioning. All the Romans needed to do was load up their ships one evening and head for Messana.

Although now allied against the Roman invaders, the Carthaginians and the Syracusans had a long history of mutual antipathy, meaning they were unable to coordinate their response to the enemy. Appius took advantage of this by attacking first the Syracusans and then, when they had withdrawn home in defeat, the Carthaginians. He scattered their land forces, and their naval power had no impact. Fighting on through the winter, causing his men great hardship – it is likely this is why he became known as ‘the blockhead’ – he reduced the Syracusans, whom the Carthaginians made no effort to help, to impotence. In March 263 BC, after the new consuls took office, they came south, crossing into Sicily without Carthaginian interference. More than sixty cities handed themselves over to Rome’s fides and Syracuse surrendered. It was only now that the Roman armies turned on the Carthaginians. Given the well-established Syracusan hostility towards Carthage, as well as what would later appear to be their enthusiastic support for the Roman war effort, it is quite likely that the Roman commanders now turned against Carthage with the encouragement of King Hieron, who had paid the Romans a large sum as a war indemnity.

2

WAR BY LAND AND SEA (263–241 BC)

With the transformation of Syracuse from enemy to ally, the war in Sicily entered a new phase. There is, however, little evidence that the Roman Senate understood exactly what the implications of that change were, and every sign is that it took the Roman state a long time to understand just how different this new war was from those that had gone before. Polybius speaks of the Romans becoming ‘thoroughly entangled in the affairs of Sicily’ (1.17.3), an image evocative of entrapment and captivity that is spot on.

One of the most important indicators of the Romans’ lack of comprehension of the difference between this war and previous wars is the way that they filled the consulship throughout the war. This is important because sources written after the event were composed with that same sense of historical inevitability that led them to characterise their presentation of the start of the war as being driven by considerations of grand strategy. When we see who was actually selected to do the fighting, we get quite a different sense to the way things seemed at the time.

The consuls of 263 BC were Manius Valerius Messalla and Manius Otacilius Crassus. Valerius Messalla was, like Appius, a patrician from a very ancient and powerful family, and it is one of the curious features of the Roman war effort that people like Valerius Messalla are rare among the consuls, whereas members of the recently arrived aristocracy are plentiful. Of the thirty-eight men who held consulships during the war years, only eleven – two of whom were brothers – had a consular father or grandfather, whereas six were the first members of their families to reach the office.

While Roman leadership included fewer of the old guard, it tended to involve people who were supported by a nexus of coeval relatives. One of the consuls of 261 BC was the brother of Otacilius Crassus, while his co-consul was a cousin of his brother’s co-consul. A consul of 262 BC was the brother of the consul of 265 BC; two brothers, Cornelii Scipiones, succeeded each other as consuls for 260 and 259 BC; in 258, 257, 256 and 254 BC one of the two consuls was a member of the clan Atilius. Their prominence at this point might be to do with the family’s close connection with Campania, whence, quite possibly, came a good deal of support for the war. In total, nearly half of the thirty-eight consuls elected during the war had a brother or cousin who was also a consul at that time.

Another oddity is that, unlike during the war with Pyrrhus and later the Second Punic War, when people who had proven themselves before the hostilities started to return to office, only two men who had been consul before 264 BC were elected once war broke out. Indeed, during the war years people were rarely re-elected. A conclusion that may be drawn from this is that the Romans did not feel seriously threatened by the Carthaginians.

Wars waged as family affairs by men of limited ability will not be waged efficiently – the swings in Roman conduct during the war against the Carthaginians betray the absence of any coherent design. They may also betray the influence of Sicilian politics. Sicilian cities, caught for generations between Syracuse and Carthage, looked to Roman power to break the long-standing cycle of conflict. One way the Greek states communicated with each other was by drawing on mythological traditions that could be reconstructed to suggest associations with the distant past. It was a style of diplomacy that could also work with Rome. Romans were used to listening to this sort of thing. Pyrrhus had given them a dose of it, pointing out that his ancestor, the Homeric hero Achilles, was greater than Aeneas, the Trojan prince who was remembered as one of the founders of Rome. Now that the Romans were in Sicily they found that the city of Segesta, in the south of the island, was summoning them via its connection with Rome through Aeneas.

It was perhaps easier for Rome to deal with the Greeks of Sicily because many of the troops the Romans sent there were either Greek or Campanian. That the cities of Campania minted heavily during these years is highly suggestive – in some cases, the only coins that can be attributed to a given city date from this time. There is not so obvious a trend in Apulia, Lucania or Bruttium, areas that had minted very heavily during the Pyrrhic war, and no activity at all among the cities north and west of Rome. Cities coined when they needed to, and there was generally a close correlation in the third century BC between a decision to mint more money and a war in the neighbourhood. Given the long history of Campanians going off to fight in Sicily, it comes as no surprise that the region should be especially interested in this conflict.

The war with Syracuse ended in the summer of 263 BC. The war with Carthage picked up steam as soon as the Segestans decided that their mythical connection with Aeneas was more important than their actual connection with Carthage. When they declared their interest in joining the Roman alliance, they massacred their Carthaginian garrison. The next year saw fierce fighting between the two powers, and both Roman consuls concentrated their efforts on capturing Agrigentum (modern Agrigento) on Sicily’s south coast. The victory at Agrigentum – facilitated by the Syracusans, who furnished the Roman army with supplies throughout the difficult campaign – led to a major change in Roman policy: they would carry the war to Africa, and for that they would need a fleet.

The decision to build a major war fleet can be associated with the sudden pre-eminence in Roman politics of the Cornelii Scipiones and the Atilii – there was at least one member of these clans in office between 260 and 257 BC – and some Syracusan encouragement. Big fleets were not a feature of Italian naval warfare, and Roman aristocrats had left the occasional mustering of fleets to their allies. Some of these allies had significant experience of naval raiding – in the eastern Mediterranean Italians were regarded as notorious pirates – but they did not have the sort of infrastructure needed to launch a major battle fleet from scratch. That would change, virtually overnight, as the Romans started to build a fleet.

The basic battleship of the fifth and early fourth centuries BC had been the trireme. The classic trireme, best known to us from accounts of warfare in the eastern Mediterranean, was around 120 feet long. It had twenty-five rows of three banks of oars on each side, carrying a crew of around 200 men. The basic tactic employed by these ships was to either disable an enemy vessel with the bronze ram that it carried on its prow or grapple and board the enemy’s ship. In the middle of the fourth century BC the Syracusans had begun tinkering with this design, developing ships on which there would be five rowers to each bank of oars (two each per oar on the upper two banks). These ships were called quinquiremes. The advantage of a quinquireme was that it could crash into another ship with greater velocity, could carry more marines for boarding, and was generally more stable than a