The Roman Republic

Rome had also increased her territory already before 338 by the incorporation (in circumstances the details of which escape us) of other communities, perhaps Crustumeria during the monarchy (for extension of Roman territory during the monarchy, see here), Tusculum perhaps early in the fourth century.

Civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, on the other hand, is an innovation of the settlement of 338; those possessed of this status are the original municipes, those who bear the burdens (of Roman citizenship), military service, militia, and direct taxation, tributum; they are never Latin speakers and were no doubt for that reason debarred from voting. Originally independent, the communities concerned came in the end to identify themselves with Rome; the process no doubt helped to create the climate of opinion to which a dual patria, a local community and Rome, was normal and which was one of the characteristic strengths of the political structure of late Republican Italy.

The truly revolutionary sequel, however, of the settlement of 338 was that Rome, although the Latin League had disappeared, continued to found colonies with the status of Latin cities. The first of these new, self-governing communities to be founded was Cales in 334. Their prime purpose was of course strategic; and at the same time Rome began to found small colonies of Roman citizens to act as garrisons at vulnerable points on the coasts of Italy. These were too small to possess developed organs of self-government, though someone was no doubt charged with organizing the levy when the colony was attacked.3

The standard Roman view of the colonies is well expressed by Cicero:

Is every place of such a kind that it does not matter to the state whether a colony is founded there or not, or are there some places which demand a colony, some which clearly do not? In this as in other state matters it is worth remembering the care of our ancestors, who sited colonies in such suitable places to ward off danger that they seemed not just towns in Italy, but bastions of empire (de lege agraria 11, 73).

The last and by far the largest group in the Italy of the turn of the fourth and third centuries was that of the allies, bound to Rome after defeat by a treaty, the central obligation of which was to provide troops for Rome.

The global result was the military levy ex formula togatorum – ‘according to the list of those who wear the toga’; the relevant categorization of the population of Italy appears in the Agrarian Law of III in a formulation which is presupposed by a Greek inscription of the early second century and which is certainly archaic:

those who are Roman citizens or allies or members of the Latin group, from whom the Romans are accustomed to command troops to be levied in the land of Italy, according to the list of those who wear the toga (Roman Statutes, no. 2, lines 21 and 50).

The relationship of command is in no way dissimulated (see also Polybius VI, 21, 4–5) and after 209 Rome dealt out severe punishment to twelve Latin colonies which claimed that they could not supply any more troops (see here).

The levy that could be produced is described by Polybius in the context of the Gallic incursion of 225:

But I must make it clear from the facts themselves how great were the resources which Hannibal dared to attack and how great was the power which he boldly confronted; despite this, he came so close to his aim as to inflict major disasters on the Romans. Anyway, I must describe the levy and the size of the army available to them on that occasion. (Polybius goes on to claim that the total manpower available to Rome was 700,000 infantry and 70,000 cavalry.) (11, 24)

The link between the manpower thus available and Rome’s openness to outsiders was already obvious to Philip V of Macedon, a future rival of Rome, as appears from a letter written to Larisa in 217:

… and one can look at those others who adopt similar approaches to admission of citizens, among them the Romans, who when they free their slaves admit them to citizenship and enable them (actually their sons) to hold office; in this way they have not only increased the size of their own country, but have been able to send colonies to almost seventy places … (SIG 543 with Chr.Habicht, in Ancient Macedonia, 265, for date)

The admission of outsiders as a source of, presumably military, strength is also explicitly recognized by Cato in his Origines, talking of early Rome:

Those who had come together summoned several more thither from the countryside; as a result their strength grew (Gellius XVIII, 12, 7 = fr. 20 Peter).

The fourth century BC saw not only the emergence of what we call the Italian confederation, but probably also the progressive articulation of the Roman citizen body into the five census classes known in the late Republic; the original division of the citizen body had probably been into assidui and proletarii, members of a single class and those below it, those who served as legionaries and those who did not; assidui were probably simply those who could equip themselves with a full suit of armour. It may be that Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, then defined assidui in monetary terms, but the elaborate division of these assidui into five different classes, defined by different levels of capital wealth, is probably a development of the fourth century BC. Pay for the army had been instituted in 406, to be funded partly by indemnities from defeated enemies, partly from tributum, a levy on the capital wealth of the assidui; it was surely this and the growing complexity of the Roman fiscal system in general which called forth the so-called Servian system in its final form. The shift from a system which singled out those who could arm themselves to one which singled out those who were wealthy is clearly an important stage in the development of the Roman state.

Quite apart from providing the manpower which Rome controlled, the organization of Italy was also a considerable source of strength by reason of the loyalty which Rome was able to inspire by its means. In the first place, the range of statuses, with full citizens at one end and allies at the other and cives sine suffragio, citizens without the vote, and Latins in between prevented undue polarization. Secondly, the process of conquest of course involved deprivation, of booty or land or both, for the defeated; but once part of the Roman confederacy, they were entitled to a share in the spoils of the next stage and had indeed, as we shall see, an interest in ensuring that it took place. Finally, the way in which Italy was organized meant that there were open avenues of approach to full Roman citizenship. Civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, came to be regarded as a half-way house, whatever its original function; and it was possible for allies to join Latin colonies and thence, eventually no doubt, for their descendants to become Roman citizens.

It is also important to remember that apart from the levy, which was normally followed by a successful campaign, Roman rule lay light on the Italian communities; even in the case of incorporated communities, local government survived, and mostly the various elements of the Italian confederacy were left to themselves to perpetuate or evolve their own peculiar political structures. P. A. Brunt has indeed shown that the levy itself could not have been conducted without considerable local government institutions.

Given the power and preponderance of Rome, however, it is hardly surprising that the different cities of Italy should have increasingly assimilated themselves to Rome. Colonies obviously had a tendency at the outset to model themselves on different aspects of the city of Rome; thus Cosa, founded in 273, borrowed the notion of a curia, senate-house, linked with a circular comitium, place of assembly, directly from Rome. Building styles in general came increasingly to spread out from Rome to the periphery. And Cicero talks of the voluntary adoption of Roman institutions by Latin cities:

C. Furius once passed a law on wills, Q. Voconius on inheritance by women; there have been countless other measures on matters of civil law; the Latins have adopted those which they wished to adopt (pro Balbo 21).

The end product of the social and political process I have described is incisively delineated by Ennius, a native of Rudiae in Apulia, whose maturity belongs in the early second century (Annales, line 169 V): ‘The Campanians were then made Roman citizens.’

1. In 471 these regional units were chosen as the basis of a new organization of the Roman people for voting purposes, the comitia tributa, trial assembly (see Appendix 1).

2. Much later the rule was introduced whereby the magistrates of Latin communities acquired Roman citizenship.

3. A variety of ad hoc measures existed to provide jurisdiction for Roman citizens in colonies and scattered in individual assignations.

V From Italian Power to Mediterranean Power

THE REMOVAL OF the barriers against the participation of plebeians in the political and religious life of the Roman state was followed by the Roman assertion of her hegemony over Latium and then by the defeat of the Samnites and of the Gallic incursion of 295. The mixed patrician and plebeian nobility was tested and confirmed in power by the successes of those years; but it is also plausible to suppose that the opening up of avenues to power to groups previously excluded was likely to cause disturbances. The career of Appius Claudius Caecus, the earliest Roman to appear in our sources as a personality rather than the edifying stereotypes dear to the later Republic or the age of Augustus, provides evidence of such disturbances. Despite the deformation in a historical tradition often hostile to the gens to which he belonged, the essential outline is clear. His elogium, reinscribed at Arretium (Arezzo) in the age of Augustus, is startling enough, with its frequent repetition of magistracies:

Appius Claudius, son of Caius, Caecus (the blind), censor, consul twice, dictator, interrex three times, praetor twice, curule aedile twice, quaestor, tribune of the soldiers three times. He captured several towns from the Samnites, routed an army of Sabines and Etruscans. He prevented peace being made with King Pyrrhus. In his censorship he paved the Appian Way and built an aqueduct for Rome. He built the temple of Bellona (Inscr. It. XIII, 3, no. 79 – contrast the original funerary inscription of Scipio Barbatus, see here).

The most revolutionary period of Appius Claudius’ career was his censorship in 312:

Ap. Claudius had his fellow-magistrate L. Plautius under his thumb and disturbed many ancestral practices; for in currying favour with the people he paid no attention to the senate. First he built the aqueduct known as the Aqua Appia over a distance of nine miles to Rome and spent much public money on this project without senatorial approval; next he paved with stone blocks the greater part of the road named after him the Via Appia, which runs from Rome to Capua, the distance being well over 100 miles; and since he dug through high ground and filled in ravines and valleys even where substantial fill was needed, he spent all the available public money, but left an enduring monument to himself, deploying his ambition in public service.

And he changed the composition of the senate, not only enrolling the noble and eminent in rank, as was customary, but including many who were sons of freedmen; so that those who were proud of their nobility were angry. He also gave citizens the right to be enrolled in whichever regional tribe they wished and to be registered accordingly by the censors.

In general, seeing the cumulative hatred for him of the upper class, he avoided giving offence to any other citizen, contriving to gain the good-will of the masses to balance the hostility of the nobles. At the inspection of the cavalry (one of the functions of the censors), he deprived no man of the horse provided for him by the state (a way of disgracing someone), and in drawing up the list of senators, he ejected no member of the senate as unfit, unlike his predecessors. And the consuls, because of their hatred for him and their desire to curry favour with the upper class, summoned the senate not as constituted by Ap.Claudius, but as constituted by the preceding censors.

But the people, resisting these moves and sharing the ambition of Ap. Claudius and wishing to secure the advance of their class, elected as curule aedile (the election is effectively undated in Diodorus, but occurred for the year 304) Cn. Flavius, the son of a freedman, who was the first Roman whose father had been a slave to gain that (or presumably indeed any) office (Diodorus xx, 36, 1–6).

Apart from his other misdemeanours, Ap. Claudius refused to resign his censorship at the end of eighteen months according to the law and according to one tradition was still censor when a candidate for the consulship of 307. He was also remembered as the man who persuaded the family of the Potitii to make public the nature of the rites at the altar of Hercules, for which they had been responsible, and thereby invited their destruction by an angry divinity, and as the man who attacked the privileges of the sacred college of flautists (tibicines).

Much in all this may well be doubted, though hardly the uniqueness of Ap. Claudius among the politicians of his generation, but another act of Ap. Claudius, which may be accepted implicitly,1 places him in the context of other innovatory activities of the turn of the fourth and third centuries. This is his building of the temple of Bellona, vowed during a battle in the course of his second consulship in 296 (the year before the battle of Sentinum, see here); the building of this temple forms part of a whole pattern of interest in the honouring of the gods of war and victory, which shows Rome newly aware of her enormous power and, what is more, aware of the ideology of victory of the Hellenistic world. It is also interesting that the lifetime of Ap. Claudius saw Rome adopt the Greek device of coinage (see also Pl.1).

It was no doubt his awareness of the enormous power of Rome which led Ap. Claudius, towards the end of his life and in perhaps its most celebrated incident, to reject the notion of peace with King Pyrrhus of Epirus (see here), addressing the Roman senate thus:

Whither have your minds in madness turned aside, which stood four-square on the path hitherto? (Ennius, Annates, lines 202—3 V)

We have seen that by the time of Pyrrhus’ invasion, Rome controlled virtually all Italy south of the Po valley and thus possessed the power with which to defeat Pyrrhus and other enemies after him. Furthermore, the nature of Rome’s control of Italy goes far to explain the nature of Roman imperialism, of interest to us, but something the existence of which Polybius took for granted. With the Pyrrhic War, Rome faced for the first time an enemy from the civilized core of the Mediterranean world and, with his defeat, that world began to take notice of Rome (see here). Rome’s wars of the third century and after are relatively well-attested and took her between 280 and 200 from a position on the fringe of the Mediterranean world to one from which she can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to dominate it. We must consider for a moment the nature of Roman imperialism and then look at the course of Rome’s wars down to the defeat of Hannibal.

Roman society can be seen as deeply militaristic from top to bottom, in a way and to an extent that is not true of any Greek state, not even Sparta. Whatever the Romans said and no doubt in part believed about their fighting only just wars, the value attached to successful wars of conquest found expression in a number of central institutions. It was an ancient custom, revived by Sulla, for those who had extended Roman territory in Italy to be allowed to extend the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city of Rome; the censors at the end of their term in office prayed that the Roman state might be granted greater wealth and extent, and haruspices, priests from Etruria, were consulted at least from the late third century to say whether a sacrifice made at the beginning of a war portended (as hoped) extension of the boundaries of the Roman people; Ennius (Annales, line 465 V) talked of ‘you who wish Rome and Latium to grow’. That Roman territory did grow in extent throughout the period when Rome was establishing her hegemony in Italy is in any case obvious; the land taken from conquered peoples and used for the foundation of colonies or for individual assignation became ager Romanus, Roman territory, unless used for Latin colonies; its progressive extension can be plotted down to 200, after which year the pattern remained unchanged until 91. It seems in fact that the Romans supposed that success in wars of conquest was the reward for their piety and the justice of their cause.

At the level of the individual, a general who brought a war to a successful conclusion was of course rewarded with prestige, booty and the avenue to popularity which its distribution could bring, and clients among the defeated; he was also likely to be permitted to hold a triumph, an astonishing and spectacular public and religious celebration of his victory. None of this was unwelcome to an ambitious member of a competitive oligarchy; the pretensions of such a man are graphically documented by the frequency with which they are satirized by Plautus, as at Amphitruo 657 (compare 192 and 196):

I routed them at the first attack by my divinely conferred authority and leadership.

or at Epidicus 381 (compare 343):

I am returning to camp with booty because of the bravery and authority of Epidicus.

Another factor operated both at the level of the community and at the level of the individual, the urge to intervene far afield; faced with an appeal from Saguntum in 220, Rome could not resist hearing it, although Saguntum lay in the area of Spain which Carthage reasonably held to be within her sphere of influence; it was yet another factor which fed Carthaginian enmity towards Rome. Similarly, individual members of the oligarchy involved themselves in the internal affairs of the kingdoms of Macedon, Syria and Pergamum in the course of the second century. Again, the involvement was related to competition within the oligarchy.

Furthermore, Rome had of course suffered defeats, some of them momentarily catastrophic; but that hardly explains why a desire for security, understandable in any community, amounted in Rome almost to a neurosis over her supposed vulnerability; in 149 Rome persuaded herself that Carthage was still a threat and duly annihilated her (see here).

Sheer greed also often played a part, overtly expressed by a character in Plautus:

Yes, you both go in, for I shall now summon a meeting of the senate in my mind, to deliberate on matters of finance, against whom war may best be declared, so that I can get some money thence (Epidicus 158–60).

But perhaps more important than any of these factors was the nature of the Roman confederation in Italy; Rome drew no tributum from any of her associates (other than from the cives sine suffragio) or allies, but demanded from them manpower. The origin of the institution is intelligible enough in a world in which Rome and Latium and the Hernici lived under permanent threat of invasion from marauding upland tribesmen; but the consequence of the institution was that the only way in which Rome could derive benefit from her confederation was by summoning troops. The only way in which she could symbolize her leadership, a factor of at least as great importance in an empire as its practical benefits, was by placing the troops of the confederacy under the command of the consuls. And then – what else but war and conquest?

The Roman involvement with Pyrrhus came about because of the difficulties of Tarentum. Under increasing pressure from the barbarian tribes of the interior in the latter half of the fourth century, Tarentum turned to the Greek homeland and to the help of a series of Greek condottieri, Archidamus of Sparta, Alexander of Epirus, Acrotatus of Sparta, Cleonymus of Sparta (in Italy from 304 to 299) and finally Pyrrhus of Epirus (in the west from 280 to 275); this last general was summoned to help not against the barbarian tribes who were neighbours to Tarentum but against the expanding power of Rome.

After a series of successes and an expedition to Sicily, Pyrrhus was finally defeated by the Romans at Beneventum and abandoned the Tarentines to their fate. The confrontation with Rome was in a sense marginal to the career of Pyrrhus; but it was a confrontation between Rome and a successor of Alexander the Great and marked the definitive emergence of Rome into the Greek world (see here).

Not long after the defeat of Pyrrhus, Rome found herself in 264 led to intervention outside Italy for the first time:

The Mamertini (Italian mercenaries settled in Messana and under threat of attack from Syracuse) wanted, some of them, to appeal to the Carthaginians (the other great power apart from Rome in the western Mediterranean and known to the Romans as Poeni, Phoenicians, whence Bellum Punicum, Punic War) and to hand over themselves and the acropolis to them, others to send an embassy to Rome, handing over the city to them and asking them to help them as being men of the same race. The Romans were in a quandary for a long time because the illogicality of such help seemed absolutely obvious; for shortly before they had inflicted the supreme penalty on some of their own citizens for illegally seizing Rhegium; now to seek to help the Mamertini, who had behaved in much the same way not only towards Messana, but also towards Rhegium, involved misconduct hard to condone. The Romans did not ignore any of these factors, but they realized that the Carthaginians had not only subjugated Africa, but also much of Spain (Polybius or his source here exaggerates), and controlled all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas; and the Romans were worried lest if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily they would be overpowering and dangerous neighbours for them, surrounding them and threatening all parts of Italy. It was clear that they would rapidly subjugate Sicily, unless the Mamertini received help; for if Messana were handed over to their control, they would rapidly conquer Syracuse, being already masters of almost all the rest of Sicily.

The Romans foresaw all this and thought that they must not abandon Messana and allow the Carthaginians as it were to acquire for themselves a stepping-stone over to Italy; they debated for a long time and eventually the senate did not pass the motion (to help Messana), for the reasons I have just outlined; for the illogicality of helping the Mamertini balanced the advantages to be derived from helping them.

But the assembly took a different line; the people had been worn out by recent wars and badly needed a change for the better in their circumstances; in addition to the arguments I have just outlined on the desirability of the war from the point of view of the state, the generals-to-be spoke of the clear and considerable advantage (in terms of booty) which each individual might expect; the people voted to help the Mamertini (Polybius 1, 10, 1–11, 2).

After some successes, including the acquisition of Hiero of Syracuse as an ally, Rome found that the war had reached a position of stalemate, with the Carthaginians masters of the sea, the Romans masters of Sicily apart from a few fortified places. As capable of innovation in the technical sphere as elsewhere, the Romans took to the sea:

When they saw that the war was dragging on for them, they set to for the first time to build ships, a hundred quinqueremes and twenty triremes. And since the shipwrights were totally inexperienced in building quinqueremes, none of the communities of Italy then using such ships, their project caused the Romans considerable difficulty. All this shows better than anything else how ambitious and daring the Romans are as policy-makers. (Using a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a model the Romans duly built a fleet and put to sea.) (Polybius 1, 20, 9–11)