Middle Republic

We have two relatively complete accounts of the Punic Wars, Livy and Polybius, with the former relying at many points on the latter. Adding in the material in other sources, such as Appian and Plutarch, we have a fairly reliable account of the course of events.

A key passage upon which the idea of exceptional Roman brutality rests is Polybius' description of the aftermath of the capture of Carthago or New Carthage by the forces of Scipio Africanus. The siege occurred in 209 bce, during the Second Punic War, before Polybius was born, but he was a careful historian who had access to Roman records and eyewitnesses. Thus it is likely his graphic description is an accurate one.

[A]ccording to the Roman custom; their orders were to exterminate every form of life they encountered, sparing none, but not to start pillaging until the word was given to do so. This practice is adopted to inspire terror, and so when cities are taken by the Romans you may often see not only the corpse of human beings but dogs cut in half and the dismembered limbs of other 18

animals.

The slaughter of people in a captured city was not unusual in ancient warfare. It is the killing of dogs and other animals that strikes Polybius as extraordin­ary. Whether or not the Romans actually did this at New Carthage, or elsewhere, and whether it was normal practice for the Romans, and not others, to kill animals in such circumstances, hardly seems to prove that Roman military violence was more cruel than that of others.

The fifty years after the Carthaginian defeat at Zama in 202 bce saw the Romans defeat the two remaining powerful Hellenistic monarchies, the Antigonids and the Seleucids, thereby becoming the premier state in the Mediterranean world. To control areas outside of Italy, Rome adapted the provincial system already in use for centuries in the Near East. Rather than developing an imperial civil service, however, it used the existing elites to rule and relied on its armies to punish rebellion or recalcitrance. The Italian system of allies continued to be used, and in addition the Romans left some states independent as clients, or even allies in the true sense.

While the time of its introduction is debated, certainly by this time the Roman legionary was fighting with the gladius or shortsword. This weapon required a more close-up type of combat than spears, and also had an impact on the way non-combatants were killed. Another locus classicus for the argument of an especially violent ‘Roman way of warfare' comes from Livy's description of the Second Macedonian War (200-197 bce). After a skirmish with the Romans, King Philip V orders that the Macedonian dead be buried, thinking that this consideration will improve morale. Instead, Livy reports, it has the opposite effect, as his soldiers see mutilated corpses killed by gladius-wielding soldiers:

those who, being always accustomed to fight with Greeks and Illyrians, had only seen wounds made with javelins and arrows, seldom even by lances, came to behold bodies dismembered by the Spanish sword, some with their

18 Polyb.

arms lopped off, with the shoulder or the neck entirely cut through, heads severed from the trunk, and the bowels laid open, with other frightful exhibitions of wounds: they therefore perceived, with horror, against what weapons and what men they were to fight.^[479]

It is possible that Philip or someone else related this incident and it duly found its way into Livy's text. Alternatively, Livy or someone else may have invented it. Whether or not this represents Philip's attitudes, we need to keep in mind that indeed the shortsword resulted in more brutal wounds than the spear.

Killing and wounding enemy soldiers in battle is, of course, the purpose of armies. The question is whether the Romans were more brutal and vicious in battle than others. In ancient times violence was routine, and thus soldiers may not have seen military violence as a great contrast to their civilian life. Battle could occur in what is termed ‘open battle', that is, two armies facing each other, in the case of Rome usually literally on a field of battle. In a description of the nature of such combat, Brian Campbell writes that ‘Fighting in the Roman army was a personal experience, involving face-to- face combat, in which men used muscular force and cutting weapons to inflict highly visible, bloody wounds.'^[480] When reading accounts of battle, especially with an eye to understanding military violence, the reader should always keep in mind the rhetorical element of such descriptions. In addition, most of our sources, even those with military experience, are writing about wars they did not personally experience.

There is considerable debate about the tempo of Roman warfare, though generally the consensus is that it rose and fell in various periods. It was Harris who first made the case that the Roman Republic was almost constantly at war, a factor in his argument that it had an especially bellicose culture. It should be pointed out, however, that not all wars were created equal.

While Rome won a series of decisive victories in the east, the Republic showed an apparent reluctance to directly annex weak, but wealthy, regions such as Seleucid Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt. This led to vigorous debate over the nature of Roman imperialism. The school of thought following Harris explains the reluctance to annex by invoking the notion of indirect control, in which Romans exercised actual power while leaving states nominally inde­pendent. Those more convinced by Eckstein hold this hesitancy to annex feeble and rich territories as evidence for the revised defensive imperialism model.

In addition to the debate over the motives for Roman imperialism, there is the question of whether the Romans killed more enemies than other con­temporary states. For example, Pliny states that in 121 bce Fabius Maximus killed 130,000 Allobroges and Averni at the River Isara.^[481] Appian reports that after the Roman victory in the Third Punic War of 146 bce, of the 700,000 people in Carthage, only 50,000 survived.^[482] Aside from the question of the reliability of such figures, unless we have similar ones for other ancient states, which we rarely do for this period, they have little meaning. The question is not whether the Romans killed people, even large numbers of people, during war, but whether this killing was on a larger scale or of a more brutal kind than that of contemporaries.

In 150 bce Servius Sulpicius Galba, the praetor of Spain, invited the leaders of the Lusitanians to a negotiation and then slaughtered them.

Mass enslavement is also used as an example of Roman military violence towards non-combatants. According to both Livy and Plutarch, in 167 bce general Aemilius Paullus captured 150,000 people as slaves, who were suppo­sedly taken by the Romans from seventy cities after the conquest of Epirus, modern Albania.²⁴ The fact that there are two sources for this information does not give it any more credence, as both writers might well be drawing on a single exaggerated or invented source. As in the case of casualties, we are rarely informed about such large-scale enslavements by other contemporary states, but there is no way to choose between this being a function of surviving evidence or of an especially cruel Roman practice.

The practice of mass deportation was common in certain ancient states, such as ancient Assyria and Babylonia, but seems to have been rare for Rome. It did occur, however. After defeating them in 193 bce, the Romans drove the entire nation of the Celtic Boii out of their lands in Cisalpine Gaul, a clear case of ethnic cleansing. Shortly thereafter, in 180 bce they deported some 80,000 Ligurians from their home in north-western Italy to the south of the penin­sula. Such cases, though, are confined to this relatively brief period. They might represent an experiment of some sort or special circumstances of which we are unaware. Neither ethnic cleansing nor the deportation of populations became regular Roman practice, in contrast to other ancient (and modern) states.

An important attitudinal change was occurring in Rome over the course of the second century bce. Romans became less willing to serve in the legions, as reflected in popular demonstrations against the levy in 151 bce.^[483] Elite Romans became less likely to be personally engaged in warfare: cavalry units made entirely up of the wealthiest Romans disappeared, probably before 150 bce, and were replaced by non-Roman horsemen. The entire notion of virtus (literally ‘manliness') begins to change from meaning military skill and courage to more the philosophical idea of virtue.^[484] None of this disproves the idea of a continuously bellicose Roman culture, but it does raise questions about it.