Warfare, Empire and Roman Militarism

One of our earliest surviving Latin inscriptions comes from the sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who was a consul (one of the two chief executive officers of the Roman Republic) in 298 bce.

he was the first consul to perform a feat on the sea with ships and the first to equip and train crews and fleets of ships. With those ships he beat in battle on the open sea all the Punic fleets and the great forces of the Carthaginians in the presence of their commander Hannibal, and he captured ships and their crews by force: one seven-bank ship, thirty five-bankers and three-bankers, and he sank thirteen.^[1073]

The inscription goes on to enumerate the loot - gold, silver and bronze coin - taken from the Carthaginians by Duilius.

On a broad perspective, warfare was endemic to the ancient Mediterranean world. The great civilisations of the east - Mesopotamia, Assyria, Egypt, Persia - had engaged in the conquest and suppression of neighbouring peoples for millennia before the Romans arrived. Warfare marred the inter-state relationships of the Greek cities and became the raison d’etre of their successor, the kingdom of Macedon. Philip II (382-336 bce) created a formidable fighting machine in the two decades after ascending to the throne in 359 bce, and his son Alexander III, dubbed ‘the Great' (356-323 bce), turned that war machine eastwards to carve vast realms out of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, whose existence he brought to an end. While the early history of Rome, from its traditional foundation in 753 bce to about 300 bce, has come down to us mostly in the form of fanciful and moralising tales, it emerges from this tradition that the Romans broadly followed the Mediterranean pattern, but were unusual in two respects. First, from very early on, when the Romans were just one small Italic community among many, they appear to have been particularly focused on establishing them­selves as dominant over their neighbours. Whereas the similarly small-scale Greek city-states struggled over disputed borderlands or claims to be the leading city (hegemon) among their peers, the Romans appear to have been concerned with the matter of mastery from the start. It was not enough that others recognised Rome's primacy - they had to be subject to it. As such, the Romans were almost constantly engaged in war and negotiation with the Latin communities around them and, once they had been subdued, with the peoples bordering the Latins, and then with further-flung peoples, and so on across the length and breadth of Italy until the whole peninsula was under their sway (by c.

The other main respect in which the Romans differed from their contem­poraries was in their open attitude as to what constituted the community. Whereas concepts of membership in other Mediterranean communities were highly exclusive, the Romans were uniquely relaxed about whom they admitted.^[1074] The attitude is expressed in the very earliest stories the Romans told about themselves: how Romulus, having founded his new city, opened it up to anyone who would present themselves at the Asylum, the saddle between the twin peaks of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. There flocked ‘a crowd from neighbouring states, without distinction between free or slave, eager for change' (Livy 1.8.6). It is nothing short of astounding that later Romans openly acknowledged an infusion of slave stock into the bloodline of the fledgling city. Whether it was true or not hardly matters. That they later thought it was true does, since it says much about how differently they defined what it meant to be Roman in contrast, say, to an Athenian or a Spartan, who would insist on pure freeborn, citizen ancestry as the most essential qualification for citizenship. The openness of the Roman concept of community had direct military consequences that pertains to the matter of violence. Armed with their distinctively inclusive sense of community, as they expanded their control over the Latins the Romans developed by degrees a system of benefit sharing with those they had subdued, until they had constructed a hierarchical nexus of bilateral agreements between them­selves and all the communities of Italy. While the details of each agreement determined where in the hierarchy a particular state stood, one demand was common to all: the provision of troops for the army.

The consequences of this situation for Rome were profound. Core aristo­cratic concepts came to be defined in large measure in military terms. Nobles competed to acquire gloria, which was earned first and foremost on the field of battle. They sought to outdo each other in virtus, which was essentially the excellence and fortitude displayed in war. They calibrated their worth against the prominence they enjoyed in public life, their dignitas, a large portion of which was derived from virtus displayed and gloria won. War was a central component in this conceptual ecology. Such was the perceived centrality of public, and especially military service to the aristocracy of Republican Rome that the writer Sallust (fl. c. 40 bc e) felt compelled to preface his first historical work with a lengthy justification of intellectual achievement as something not to be despised - and glorious both in war and peace:

For a long time mortals have discussed whether military success proceeds more from bodily strength or from intellectual excellence... [When men began] to consider lust for power a reason for making war and to think the most glory resided in the greatest empire, then finally it was discovered through risky endeavors that the greatest talent lies in war... It is a thing of beauty to serve one's country well; to speak well of it is hardly worthless. One can gain fame in peace as well as in war. Although by no means the same gloria accrues to the writer as to the doer of deeds, nevertheless the writing of history seems to me among the most difficult of tasks.^[1075]

The aristocratic assumptions Sallust is reacting against are revealed in his apologia: action is the primary route to gloria, and military achievement is the primary mode of action.

Under the Republic, Roman nobles competed for election to the higher offices that came with military commands.

But the reach of warfare stretched much further down the Roman social ladder from the elite.

They had seen wounds caused by spears, arrows, and, rarely, by lances, since they were accustomed to fighting with Greeks and Illyrians; but now they saw bodies dismembered with the ‘Spanish' sword, arms cut off with the shoulder attached, or heads severed from bodies, with the necks completely cut through, internal organs exposed, and other horrible wounds, and a general feeling of panic ensued when they discovered the kind of weapons and the kind of men they had to contend with.

About a metre in length, the gladius was well balanced, easily wielded and equally effective as a cutting or thrusting weapon. To be brought to bear, the legionary was obliged to get very close to his victim. For the Roman soldier, battle was a matter of engaging in butchery at close quarters. When using the gladius, he would be sprayed and caked in blood and gore, he would feel the reverberation as his blade struck bone or the kick as he thrust into living flesh. That is, for the majority of their adult lives, Roman males and their Italian allies were required to engage in levels of interpersonal violence scarcely conceivable to the modern imagination, and they did so more or less every year.^[1078] And remember, this was how Roman virtus was calibrated.

In later centuries, when the age of the emperors had dawned (31 bce - 476 ce), Roman armies became professionalised and the direct experience of battlefield violence was less widely disseminated across the male population. But by then warfare was firmly entrenched at the heart of what it meant to be Roman. Emperors were, first and foremost, military autocrats and became more overtly so as the Imperial Age wore on. They inherited the attitudes of the Republican aristocracy - and amplified them. The first emperor, Augustus (31 bce-14 ce), was among Rome's most ambitious conquerors and extended the empire's borders to its familiar frontiers along the Rhine- Danube frontier in the north and the Euphrates in the east. Trajan (98-117 c e) launched campaigns of conquest into Dacia (modern Romania) and across the Euphrates, and Septimius Severus (193-211 ce) waged war against the Parthians in the east and the Caledonians north of Hadrian's Wall in Britain. Even the more civic-minded emperors felt compelled to engage in military activity, such as the cloistered Claudius (41-54 ce), who invaded Britain, or the philosophically inclined Marcus Aurelius (161-80 ce), who embarked on genocidal expeditions across the Danube in 170-80 ce. In fact Marcus, very much an intellectual by nature, died on campaign in an army camp. Most emperors strove to outdo each other in adorning the city of Rome with buildings, arches, statues, reliefs and others forms of art that loudly pro­claimed their military virtues. Trajan built his Forum ex manubiis taken from Dacia and erected in it his famous column, carved with a helical frieze depicting his Dacian campaigns. Marcus Aurelius erected a similar column commemorating his northern campaigns. The reliefs are unsparing in their depiction of the grim business the Roman army was engaged in across the Danube: we see villages burned, wailing women and children enslaved, menfolk massacred.^[1079] This, it seems, was not something to be ashamed of, but rather something to be celebrated as barbarians getting their just deserts. The military was also present in the city of Rome itself in a manner that went beyond mere representation: the 9,000 soldiers of the Praetorian Guard and 3,000 men of the Urban Cohorts were stationed in a camp at the edge of the city and would have been a standard fixture in the city's urban landscape.¹⁰

In sum, the violence of warfare, conquest and empire was enthusias­tically celebrated in Roman culture in every era. According to Vergil, it was Rome's divine mandate ‘to rule over nations with your empire (for this is your skill), to impose the habit of peace, to spare the conquered and lay low the arrogant'. ‘On these people,' declares Jupiter elsewhere in the Aeneid, ‘I set no boundaries or duration on their possessions; I give them empire without limit. Harsh Juno... along with me will favour the Romans, masters of all, the togate nation.'11 War and dominion over others was the particular province of the Roman people, a gift of the gods, their divinely ordained mission. In what ways and to what extent did this cultural trait manifest itself in the Roman daily experience?

Spectacular Violence

An obvious expression of the Roman comfort with violence is their devotion to violent spectacle, one of the characteristic features of their culture that has sunk deeply into the contemporary popular consciousness. The gladiator, for instance, is almost de rigeur in modern reimaginings of ancient Rome, exert­ing his appeal on contemporary audiences no less than on ancient ones. The Colosseum, that quintessential symbol of Roman civilisation, was an amphitheatre, a type of structure specifically developed to house gladiatorial shows. These events offered displays of spectacular violence on a sometimes vast scale. Huge resources were expended staging them. The inaugural games of the Colosseum in 80 ce saw 100 straight days of spectacles featuring over 5,000 animals (9,000 in some sources) and massed battles staged on and around prepared sets, while Trajan's great celebration of his conquest of Dacia in 107 ce spanned 123 days and involved 10,000 gladiators and 11,000

M. Beckmann, The Column ofMarcus Aurelius (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2011). On warfare in Roman art see S. Dillon and K. E. Welch (eds.), Representations of War in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

10 J. C. Coulston, ‘Armed and Belted Men: The Soldiery in Imperial Rome', in

J. C. Coulston and H. Dodge (eds.), Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 76-118.

11 Verg. Aen. 6.851-3 and 1.278-82 (excerpted).

animals.^[1080] Spectacles along these lines, although on a more modest scale, were exported all around Rome's vast realm in the course of the first three centuries ce, so that amphitheatres are known from dozens of cities. Even in towns not equipped with the specialist building itself, other venues could be utilised: wooden arenas were erected in the open spaces of a town's forum, or theatres, circuses or stadia were adapted to accommodate the games. Spectacles of violence therefore found ready audiences wherever they were put on, from Britain to North Africa and Spain to Syria.1^[1081]

While the origins of gladiatorial combats remain debated - though the best evidence points to roots in the funerary games celebrated in fourth-century bce southern Italy - by the age of Augustus they had combined with two other forms of spectacle into a single, conglomerate show (munus gladia­torum). In the morning came the animal hunts, at lunchtime prisoners were executed in spectacular ways, in the afternoon the gladiators made an appearance. For the most part, the latter were professionals competing in stand-alone pairs announced in advance, though mass combats were not unheard of. All three elements of the show had an independent prehistory, but the developed Roman arena event melded them into a single perfor­mance, the mother lode of violent spectacle.

The popularity of the shows is not in doubt, and is demonstrated by a simple observation: many provincial amphitheatres are far too big for the towns that house them, and so they must have served the population of the surrounding region rather than just the community where they were located.^[1082] Nevertheless, attendance at the shows was circumscribed in two important ways. First, there is the matter of their frequency. It remains unclear how often such costly events would be staged, particularly since they were put on at the expense of a single sponsor (the editor or munerarius). In venues outside Rome, which was home to the emperor and the uppermost echelons of the Roman socio-economic elite, sponsors of more limited means would be common. Much about the staging of these shows would therefore depend on the purely practical considerations of how many sponsors were available in any given region, and how often they could afford to bankroll a show. Second, much of the seating at arenas was assigned by social rank, and this was enforced by an empire-wide law introduced by Augustus (the lex Julia theatralis). Even for the unreserved seats it seems likely that the system of patronage, which functioned on the basis of personal connections between the more and the less powerful, would have determined who got tickets. This meant that members of the common ‘mob' may not have been able to attend many gladiatorial shows, even if they wanted to, unless they had connections to those who could provide them with tickets.^{[1083] [1084]} Access to arena spectacles, then, appears to have been more restricted than we imagine, and the events themselves not terribly frequent - certainly so in the less developed parts of the empire.

As facets of Roman culture, modern scholars have interpreted arena games in various ways. Some have seen in them the most direct expression of the martial and imperial virtues the Romans held so dear. ‘Rome was a warrior state' is the opening line of one classic study. 16 On the sands of the arena, lowly slaves and volunteer fighters displayed the military qualities of endur­ance, skill-at-arms and contempt for pain and death to achieve victory over their opponents - all of which echoed the core values of the imperialist Roman community. As Tacitus (Ann. 12.56.5) writes of a naval spectacle staged by Claudius in 52 ce: ‘The battle, though one of criminals, was fought with the spirit of brave men, and after much bloodshed the survivors were spared extermination.' The shows validated Roman concepts of fortitude, so that even convicts could display admirable courage and be spared for doing so. The animals hunts were often staffed with varieties of wild beasts - ostriches, giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, lions, leopards and so on - whose exotic appearance spoke to the extent and reach of the empire. Their collection and destruction in the controlled space of the arena, surrounded by the Roman order arrayed in its social hierarchy, reproduced the Roman sense of dominance over threatening forces. The executions did the same for human deviants and criminals, since only convicts of lower social rank suffered humiliating execution before large crowds - the common murderers and rapists, the runaway slaves, the rebels and bandits, and prisoners of war. While the Romans were by no means alone in finding spectacles of death and destruction enthralling - and certainly basic psychological processes were at play in drawing the crowds to their seats - the arena games can profitably be read as cultural performances that reflected back to, and reinforced for the Roman audience, the essential values of dominance, conquest, war and control that are always central to an imperial state.^{[1085] [1086]} The matter of access discussed above warns against over­stating the role of arena spectacles in broadcasting these messages widely in Roman society. As shows, they were cultural performances, but there were other contexts in which Romanness was reaffirmed and reinforced, as we surveyed above: at triumphs, in communal religious festivals, in the ideology of the empire and the person of the emperor, and in the art and architecture of the city. Arena games were only one among many such media of communication.

More popular than gladiatorial spectacles, and markedly less violent (at least officially), were chariot races (ludi circenses). Whereas the seating capa­city of the Colosseum was about 50,000 to 60,000, that of the Circus Maximus, Rome's premier chariot-racing venue, stood at about 150,000 or more.1⁸ This alone says much about the relative popularity of each spectacle. Chariot races were staged as part of communal religious festivals, usually over the course of several days and largely paid for by the state, though the presiding magistrate (and, in time, the emperor) could subsidise the show with money from his own purse. The races were intense and dangerous, with chaos and death lurking just beneath the surface.

The standard format was for twelve four-horse chariots - three from each of the so-called circus factions, which were identifiable by their colour (red, green, white and blue) - to run seven laps to complete the course. The chariots ran around a central ‘spine' (the euripus), taking a hairpin turn at each end. That is, twelve vehicles with their drivers controlling forty-eight horses would careen around this course, making fourteen hairpin turns at high speed. The track was about 85 metres wide on each side, but the vehicles naturally bunched up close to the spine as they jockeyed to find the shortest route around the course. Images of chariot races in Roman art show the vehicles to be small and light, their fronts barely reaching hips of their drivers, who would tie the reins around their waists to help guide their teams. It is not difficult to imagine the chaos that would ensue when one of these chariots crashed, especially in the middle of the pack. The vehicle would quickly disintegrate, the driver dragged behind his team, the chariots behind trying to avoid the wreckage. Reliefs and mosaics of races usually include scenes of crashes, or ‘shipwrecks' (naufragia) in the fans' parlance, complete with drivers being run over by the vehicles behind. Drivers (agitatores) were kitted out in a fashion not unlike modern bikers, with helmets, leg protection and leather strips bound around their torsos. They were equipped with whips for their horses and carried curved knives, which they could use to cut them­selves free of the reins and other tackle in the event of a crash. Chariot racing was therefore a highly dangerous and violent spectacle, though not as overtly brutal as arena events. As with the gladiatorial spectacles, it offered an engrossing contest between skill (ars) and luck (fortuna), since even the most adroit gladiator or charioteer could be brought low and killed by a chance occurrence. Charioteers, like gladiators, exhibited talent and deter­mination to overcome their opponents and the odds to achieve victory. Like winning gladiators, successful chariot drivers were treated as sports heroes by their fans.^[1087]

The third main type of entertainment spectacle staged in ancient Rome were theatre shows (ludi scaenici), which were not overly violent in terms of their performance. It is worth noting that in the case of chariot races and theatrical shows the spectators displayed a tendency to become unruly and riotous - something audiences at gladiatorial spectacles were not known to do. Organised gangs of supporters are usually held to account for these disturbances: in the case of theatres, the fans of particular actors, and especially pantomimes, and the supporters of the four racing factions at the circus.^[1088] The record of circus riots is, for the most part, confined to the eastern part of the empire in the Early Byzantine era (c. 450-610 ce) but theatre riots are on record for the Early Empire (c. 14-96 c e). One explanation for theatre and circus riots is the sort of tribalism that stands behind the soccer hooliganism of recent memory, though some scholars have accounted for the chronological disparity between the two by plausibly suggesting changes in the late imperial socio-economic and political landscape that stood behind the large-scale circus rampages on record, such as the infamous week-long Nika riot in Constantinople in 532 bce that almost toppled the regime of the emperor Justinian and saw the centre of the city burned to the ground and thirty thousand people killed.^[1089] That is to say, Roman spectators at the theatre and circus could express their rivalrous passions in the form of violent outbursts, though this was by no means inevitable.

Aside from the gladiatorial shows and chariot races, public executions were also forms of violent public spectacle, but consideration of them requires examining the wider context of Roman communal violence.