ROMAN CONQUEST
THE ROMAN ARMY
=Military Service.=--To be admitted to service in the Roman army one
must be a Roman citizen. It is necessary to have enough wealth to
equip one's self at one's own expense, for the state furnishes no arms
to its soldiers; down to 402 B.C. it did not even pay them. And so
only those citizens are enrolled who are provided with at least a
small fortune. The poor (called the proletariat) are exempt from
service, or rather, they have no right to serve. Every citizen who is
rich enough to be admitted to the army owes the state twenty
campaigns; until these are completed the man remains at the
disposition of the consul and this from the age of seventeen to
forty-six. In Rome, as in the Greek cities, every man is at once
citizen and soldier. The Romans are a people of small proprietors
disciplined in war.
=The Levy.=--When there was need of soldiers, the consul ordered all
the citizens qualified for service to assemble at the Capitol. There
the officers elected by the people chose as many men as were necessary
to form the army. This was the enrolment (the Romans called it the
Choice); then came the military oath. The officers first took the
oath, and then the rank and file; they swore to obey their general,
to follow him wherever he led them and to remain under the standards
until he released them from their oath. One man pronounced the formula
and each in turn advanced and said, "I also." From this time the army
was bound to the general by the bonds of religion.
=Legions and Allies.=--The Roman army was at first called the Legion
(levy). When the people increased in number, instead of one legion,
several were formed.
The legion was a body of 4,200 to 5,000 men, all Roman citizens. The
smallest army had always at least one legion, every army commanded by
a consul had at least two. But the legions constituted hardly a half
of the Roman army. All the subject peoples in Italy were required to
send troops, and these soldiers, who were called allies, were placed
under the orders of Roman officers. In a Roman army the allies were
always a little more numerous than the citizens of the legions.
Ordinarily with four legions (16,800 men) there were enrolled 20,000
archers and 40,000 horse from the allies. In the Second Punic War, in
218 B.C., 26,000 citizens and 45,000 allies were drawn for service.
Thus the Roman people, in making war, made use of its subjects as well
as of its citizens.
=Military Exercises.=--Rome had no gymnasium; the future soldiers
exercised themselves on the parade-ground, the Campus Martius, on the
other side of the Tiber. There the young man marched, ran, leaped
under the weight of his arms, fenced with his sword, hurled the
javelin, wielded the mattock, and then, covered with dust and with
perspiration, swam across the Tiber. Often the older men, sometimes
even the generals, mingled with the young men, for the Roman never
ceased to exercise. Even in the campaign the rule was not to allow the
men to be unoccupied; once a day, at least, they were required to take
exercise, and when there was neither enemy to fight nor intrenchment
to erect, they were employed in building roads, bridges, and
aqueducts.
=The Camp.=--The Roman soldier carried a heavy burden--his arms, his
utensils, rations for seventeen days, and a stake, in all sixty Roman
pounds. The army moved more rapidly as it was not encumbered with
baggage. Every time that a Roman army halted for camp, a surveyor
traced a square enclosure, and along its lines the soldiers dug a deep
ditch; the earth which was excavated, thrown inside, formed a bank
which they fortified with stakes. The camp was thus defended by a
ditch and a palisade. In this improvised fortress the soldiers erected
their tents, and in the middle was set the Praetorium, the tent of the
general. Sentinels mounted guard throughout the night, and so
prevented the army from being surprised.
=The Order of Battle.=--In the presence of the enemy the soldiers did
not form in a solid mass, as did the Greeks. The legion was divided
into small bodies of 120 men, called maniples because they had for
standards bundles of hay.[123] The maniples were ranged in quincunx
form in three lines, each separated from the neighboring maniple in
such a way as to manoeuvre separately. The soldiers of the maniples of
the first line hurled their javelins, grasped their swords, and began
the battle. If they were repulsed, they withdrew to the rear through
the vacant spaces. The second line of the maniples then in turn
marched to the combat. If it was repulsed, it fell back on the third
line. The third line was composed of the best men of the legion and
was equipped with lances. They received the others into their ranks
and threw themselves on the enemy. The army was no longer a single
mass incapable of manoeuvring; the general could form his lines
according to the nature of the ground. At Cynoscephalae, where for the
first time the two most renowned armies of antiquity met, the Roman
legion and the Macedonian phalanx, the ground was bristling with
hills; on this rugged ground the 16,000 Macedonion hoplites could not
remain in order, their ranks were opened, and the Roman platoons threw
themselves into the gaps and demolished the phalanx.
=Discipline.=--The Roman army obeyed a rude discipline. The general
had the right of life and death over all his men. The soldier who
quitted his post or deserted in battle was condemned to death; the
lictors bound him to a post, beat him with rods, and cut off his head;
or the soldiers may have killed him with blows of their staves. When
an entire body of troops mutinied, the general separated the guilty
into groups of ten and drew by lot one from every group to be
executed. This was called decimation (from decimus, the tenth). The
others were placed on a diet of barley-bread and made to camp outside
the lines, always in danger of surprise from the enemy. The Romans
never admitted that their soldiers were conquered or taken prisoners:
after the battle of Cannae the 3,000 soldiers who escaped the carnage
were sent by the senate to serve in Sicily without pay and without
honors until the enemy should be expelled from Italy; the 8,000 left
in the camp were taken by Hannibal who offered to return them for a
small ransom, but the senate refused to purchase them.
=Colonies and Military Roads.=--In the countries that were still only
partially subject, Rome established a small garrison. This body of
soldiers founded a town which served as a fortress, and around about
it the lands were cut into small domains and distributed to the
soldiers. This is what they called a Colony. The colonists continued
to be Roman citizens and obeyed all commands from Rome. Quite
different from a Greek colony which emancipated itself even to the
point of making war on its mother city, the Roman colony remained a
docile daughter. It was only a Roman garrison posted in the midst of
the enemy. Almost all these military posts were in Italy, but there
were others besides; Narbonne and Lyons were once Roman colonies.
To hold these places and to send their armies to a distance the Romans
built military roads. These were causeways constructed in a straight
line, of limestone, stone, and sand. The Romans covered their empire
with them. In a land like France there is no part where one does not
find traces of the Roman roads.
CHARACTER OF THE CONQUEST
=War.=--There was at Rome a temple consecrated to the god Janus whose
gates remained open while the Roman people continued at war. For the
five hundred years of the republic this temple was closed but once
and that for only a few years. Rome, then, lived in a state of war. As
it had the strongest army of the time, it finished by conquering all
the other peoples and by overcoming the ancient world.
=Conquest of Italy.=--Rome began by subjecting her neighbors, the
Latins, first, then the little peoples of the south, the Volscians,
the AEquians, the Hernicans, later the Etruscans and the Samnites, and
finally the Greek cities. This was the hardest and slowest of their
conquests: beginning with the time of the kings, it did not terminate
until 266, after four centuries of strife.[124]
The Romans had to fight against peoples of the same race as
themselves, as vigorous and as brave as they. Some who were not
content to obey they exterminated. The rich plains of the Volscians
became a swampy wilderness, uninhabitable even to the present time,
the gloomy region of the Pontine marshes.
In the land of the Samnites there were still recognizable, three
hundred years after the war, the forty-five camps of Decius and the
eighty-six of Fabius, less apparent by the traces of their
intrenchments than by the solitude of the neighborhood.
=The Punic Wars.=--Come into Sicily, Rome antagonized Carthage. Then
began the Punic wars (that is to say, against the Phoenicians). There
were three of these wars. The first, from 264 to 241, was determined
by naval battles; Rome became mistress of Sicily. It was related that
Rome had never had any war-ships, that she took as a model a
Carthaginian galley cast ashore by accident on her coast and began by
exercising her oarsmen in rowing on the land. This legend is without
foundation for the Roman navy had long endured. This is the Roman
account of this war: the Roman consul Duillius had vanquished the
Carthaginian fleet at Mylae (260); a Roman army had disembarked in
Africa under the lead of Regulus, had been attacked and destroyed
(255); Regulus was sent as a prisoner to Rome to conclude a peace, but
persuading the Senate to reject it, he returned to Carthage where he
perished by torture. The war was concentrated in Sicily where the
Carthaginian fleet, at first victorious at Drepana, was defeated at
the AEgates Islands; Hamilcar, besieged on Mount Eryx, signed the
peace.
The second war (from 218 to 201) was the work of Hannibal.
The third war was a war of extermination: the Romans took Carthage by
assault, razed it, and conquered Africa.
These wars had long made Rome tremble. Carthage had the better navy,
but its warriors were armed adventurers fighting not for country but
for pay, lawless, terrible under a general like Hannibal.
=Hannibal.=--Hannibal, who directed the whole of the second war and
almost captured Rome, was of the powerful family of the Barcas. His
father Hamilcar had commanded a Carthaginian army in the first Punic
war and had afterwards been charged with the conquest of Spain.
Hannibal was then but a child, but his father took him with him. The
departure of an army was always accompanied by sacrifices to the gods
of the country; it was said that Hamilcar after the sacrifice made his
infant son swear eternal enmity to Rome.
Hannibal, brought up in the company of the soldiers, became the best
horseman and the best archer of the army. War was his only aim in
life; his only needs, therefore, were a horse and arms. He had made
himself so popular that at the death of Hasdrubal who was in the
command of the army, the soldiers elected him general without waiting
for orders from the Carthaginian senate. Thus Hannibal found himself
at the age of twenty-one at the head of an army which was obedient
only to himself. He began war, regardless of the senate at Carthage,
by advancing to the siege of Saguntum, a Greek colony allied with
Rome; he took this and destroyed it.
The glory of Hannibal was that he did not wait for the Romans, but had
the audacity to march into Italy to attack them. As he had no fleet,
he resolved to advance by land, through the Pyrenees, crossing the
Rhone and the Alps. He made sure of the alliance of the Gallic peoples
and penetrated the Pyrenees with an army of 60,000 men, African and
Spanish mercenaries, and with 37 war-elephants. A Gallic people wished
to stop him at the Rhone, but he sent a detachment to pass the river
some leagues farther up the stream and to attack the Gauls in the
rear; the mass of the army crossed the river in boats, the elephants
on great rafts.
He next ascended the valley of the Isere and arrived at the Alps at
the end of October; he crossed them regardless of the snow and the
attacks of the mountaineers; many men and horses rolled down the
precipices. But nine days were consumed in attaining the summits of
the Alps. The descent was very difficult; the pass by which he had to
go was covered with ice and he was compelled to cut a road out of the
rock. When he arrived in the plain, the army was reduced to half its
former number.
Hannibal met three Roman armies in succession, first at the Ticinus,
next on the banks of the Trebia, and last near Lake Trasimenus in
Etruria. He routed all of them. As he advanced, his army increased in
number; the warriors of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) joined him
against the Romans. He took up position beyond Rome in Apulia, and it
was here that the Roman army came to attack him. Hannibal had an army
only half as large as theirs, but he had African cavalrymen mounted on
swift horses; he formed his lines in the plain of Cannae so that the
Romans had the sun in their face and the dust driven by the wind
against them; the Roman army was surrounded and almost annihilated
(216). It was thought that Hannibal would march on Rome, but he did
not consider himself strong enough to do it. The Carthaginian senate
sent him no reenforcements. Hannibal endeavored to take Naples and to
have Rome attacked by the king of Macedon; he succeeded only in
gaining some towns which Rome besieged and destroyed. Hannibal
remained nine years in south Italy; at last his brother Hasdrubal
started with the army of Spain to assist him, and made his way almost
to central Italy. The two Carthaginian armies marched to unite their
forces, each opposed by a Roman army under the command of a consul.
Nero, facing Hannibal, had the audacity to traverse central Italy and
to unite with his colleague who was intrenched against Hasdrubal. One
morning Hasdrubal heard the trumpets sounding twice in the camp of the
Romans, a sign that there were two consuls in the camp. He believed
his brother was conquered and so retreated; the Romans pursued him, he
was killed and his entire army massacred. Then Nero rejoined the army
which he had left before Hannibal and threw the head of Hasdrubal into
the Carthaginian camp (207). Hannibal, reduced to his own troops,
remained in Calabria for five years longer. The descent of a Roman
army on Africa compelled him to leave Italy; he massacred the Italian
soldiers who refused to accompany him and embarked for Carthage (203).
The battle of Zama (202) terminated the war. Hannibal had counted as
usual on drawing the Romans within his lines and surrounding them; but
Scipio, the Roman general, kept his troops in order and on a second
attack threw the enemy's army into rout. Carthage was obliged to treat
for peace; she relinquished everything she possessed outside of
Africa, ceding Spain to the Romans. She bound herself further to
surrender her navy and the elephants, to pay over $10,000,000 and to
agree not to make war without the permission of Rome.
Hannibal reorganized Carthage for a new war. The Romans, disturbed at
this, demanded that the Carthaginians put him to death. Hannibal fled
to Antiochus, king of Syria, and proposed to him to incite a revolt
in Italy against Rome; but Antiochus, following the counsel of his
courtiers, distrusted Hannibal and invaded Greece, where his army was
captured. Hannibal withdrew to the king of Bithynia. The Romans sent
Flamininus thither to take him, but Hannibal, seeing his house
surrounded, took the poison which he always had by him (183).
=Conquests of the Orient.=--The Greek kings, successors of the
generals of Alexander, divided the Orient among themselves. The most
powerful of these took up war against Rome; but they were
defeated--Philip, the king of Macedon, in 197, his son Perseus in 168,
Antiochus, the king of Syria, in 190. The Romans, having from this
time a free field, conquered one by one all the lands which they found
of use to them: Macedon (148), the kingdom of Pergamum (129), the rest
of Asia (from 74 to 64) after the defeat of Mithradates, and Egypt
(30).
With the exception of the Macedonians, the Orient opposed the Romans
with mercenaries only or with undisciplined barbarians who fled at the
first onset. In the great victory over Antiochus at Magnesia there
were only 350 Romans killed. At Chaeronea, Sulla was victorious with
the loss of but twelve men. The other kings, now terrified, obeyed the
Senate without resistance.
Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, having conquered a part of Egypt,
was bidden by Popilius acting under the command of the Senate to
abandon his conquest. Antiochus hesitated; but Popilius, taking a rod
in his hand, drew a circle about the king, and said, "Before you move
from this circle, give answer to the Senate." Antiochus submitted, and
surrendered Egypt. The king of Numidia desired of the Senate that it
should regard his kingdom as the property of the Roman people.
Prusias, the king of Bithynia, with shaved head and in the garb of a
freedman, prostrated himself before the Senate. Mithradates alone,
king of Pontus, endeavored to resist; but after thirty years of war he
was driven from his states and compelled to take his life by poison.
=Conquest of the Barbarian Lands.=--The Romans found more difficult
the subjection of the barbarous and warlike peoples of the west. A
century was required to conquer Spain. The shepherd Viriathus made
guerilla warfare on them in the mountains of Portugal (149-139),
overwhelmed five armies, and compelled even a consul to treat for
peace; the Senate got rid of him by assassination.
Against the single town of Numantia it was necessary to send Scipio,
the best general of Rome.
The little and obscure peoples of Corsica, of Sardinia, and of the
mountains of Genoa (the Ligurians) were always reviving the war with
Rome.
But the most indomitable of all were the Gauls. Occupying the whole of
the valley of the Po, they threw themselves on Italy to the south. One
of their bands had taken Rome in 390. Their big white bodies, their
long red mustaches, their blue eyes, their savage yells terrified the
Roman soldiers. As soon as their approach was learned, consternation
seized Rome, and the Senate proclaimed the levy of the whole army
(they called this the "Gallic tumult"). These wars were the bloodiest
but the shortest; the first (225-222) gave to the Romans all Cisalpine
Gaul (northern Italy); the second (120), the Rhone lands (Languedoc,
Provence, Dauphine); the third (58-51), all the rest of Gaul.
ROMAN WARFARE
=The Triumph.=--When a general has won a great victory, the Senate
permits him as a signal honor to celebrate the triumph. This is a
religious procession to the temple of Jupiter. The magistrates and
senators march at the head; then come the chariots filled with booty,
the captives chained by the feet, and, at last, on a golden car drawn
by four horses, the victorious general crowned with laurel. His
soldiers follow him singing songs with the solemn refrain "Io,
Triomphe."[125] The procession traverses the city in festal attire and
ascends to the Capitol: there the victor lays down his laurel on the
knees of Jupiter and thanks him for giving victory. After the ceremony
the captives are imprisoned, or, as in the case of Vercingetorix,
beheaded, or, like Jugurtha, cast into a dungeon to die of hunger. The
triumph of AEmilius Paullus, conqueror of Macedon, lasted for three
days. The first day witnessed a procession of 250 chariots bearing
pictures and statues, the second the trophies of weapons and 25 casks
of silver, the third the vases of gold and 120 sacrificial bulls. At
the rear walked King Perseus, clad in black, surrounded by his
followers in chains and his three young children who extended their
hands to the people to implore their pity.
=Booty.=--In the wars of antiquity the victor took possession of
everything that had belonged to the vanquished, not only of the arms
and camp-baggage, but of the treasure, the movable property, beasts of
the hostile people, the men, women, and children. At Rome the booty
did not belong to the soldiers but to the people. The prisoners were
enslaved, the property was sold and the profits of the sale turned
into the public chest. And so every war was a lucrative enterprise.
The kings of Asia had accumulated enormous treasure and this the Roman
generals transported to Rome. The victor of Carthage deposited in the
treasury more than 100,000 pounds of silver; the conqueror of
Antiochus 140,000 pounds of silver and 1,000 pounds of gold without
counting the coined metals; the victor over Persia remitted
120,000,000 sesterces.
=The Allies of Rome.=--The ancient world was divided among a great
number of kings, little peoples, and cities that hated one another.
They never united for resistance and so Rome absorbed them one by one.
Those whom she did not attack remained neutral and indifferent; often
they even united with the Romans. In the majority of her wars Rome did
not fight alone, but had the assistance of allies: against Carthage,
the king of Numidia; against the king of Macedon, the AEtolians;
against the king of Syria, the Rhodians. In the east many kings
proudly assumed the title of "Ally of the Roman People." In the
countries divided into small states, some peoples called in the Romans
against their neighbors, receiving the Roman army, furnishing it with
provisions, and guiding it to the frontiers of the hostile country.
And so in Gaul it was Marseilles that introduced the Romans into the
valley of the Rhone; it was the people of Autun (the AEdui) who
permitted them to establish themselves in the heart of the land.
=Motives of Conquest.=--The Romans did not from the first have the
purpose to conquer the world. Even after winning Italy and Carthage
they waited a century before subjecting the Orient which really laid
itself at their feet. They conquered, it appears, without
predetermined plan, and because they all had interest in conquest. The
magistrates who were leaders of the armies saw in conquest a means of
securing the honors of the triumph and the surest instrument for
making themselves popular. The most powerful statesmen in Rome,
Papirius, Fabius, the two Scipios, Cato, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar,
and Crassus, were victorious generals. The nobles who composed the
Senate gained by the increase of Roman subjects, and with these they
allied themselves as governors to receive their homage and their
presents. For the knights--that is to say, the bankers, the merchants,
and the contractors--every new conquest was a new land to exploit. The
people itself profited by the booty taken from the enemy. After the
treasure of the king of Macedon was deposited in the public chest,
taxes were finally abolished. As for the soldiers, as soon as war was
carried into rich lands, they received immense sums from their
general, to say nothing of what they took from the vanquished. The
Romans conquered the world less for glory than for the profits of
war.
EFFECTS OF ROMAN CONQUEST
=The Empire of the Roman People.=--Rome subjected all the lands around
the Mediterranean from Spain to Asia Minor. These countries were not
annexed, their inhabitants did not become citizens of Rome, nor their
territory Roman territory. They remained aliens entering simply into
the Roman empire, that is, under the domination of the Roman people.
In just the same way today the Hindoos are not citizens but subjects
of England; India is a part, not of England, but of the British
Empire.
=The Public Domain.=--When a conquered people asked peace, this is the
formula which its deputies were expected to pronounce: "We surrender
to you the people, the town, the fields, the waters, the gods of the
boundaries, and movable property; all things which belonged to the
gods and to men we deliver to the power of the Roman people." By this
act, the Roman people became the proprietor of everything that the
vanquished possessed, even of their persons. Sometimes it sold the
inhabitants into slavery: AEmilius Paullus sold 150,000 Epeirots who
surrendered to him. Ordinarily Rome left to the conquered their
liberty, but their territory was incorporated into the _domain of the
Roman people_. Of this land three equal parts were made:
1. A part of their lands was returned to the people, but on
condition that they pay a tribute in money or in grain, and Rome
reserved the right of recalling the land at will.
2. The fields and pastures were farmed out to publicans.
3. Some of the uncultivated land was resigned to the first
occupant, every Roman citizen having the right of settling there
and of cultivating it.
=Agrarian Laws.=--The Agrarian Laws which deeply agitated Rome were
concerned with this public domain. No Roman had leave to expel the
possessors, for the boundaries of these domains were gods (Termini)
and religious scruple prevented them from being disturbed. By the
Agrarian Laws the people resumed the lands of the public domain which
they distributed to citizens as property. Legally the people had the
right to do this, since all the domain belonged to them. But for some
centuries certain subjects or citizens had been permitted to enjoy
these lands; at last they regarded them as their own property; they
bequeathed them, bought and sold them. To take these from the
occupants would suddenly ruin a multitude of people. In Italy
especially, if this were done, all the people of a city would be
expelled. Thus Augustus deprived the inhabitants of Mantua of the
whole of their territory; Vergil was among the victims, but, thanks to
his verse, he obtained the return of his domain, while the other
proprietors who were not poets remained in exile. These lands thus
recovered were sometimes distributed to poor citizens of Rome, but
most frequently to old soldiers. Sulla bestowed lands on 120,000
veterans at the expense of the people of Etruria. The Agrarian Laws
were a menace to all the subjects of Rome, and it was one of the
benefits conferred by the emperors that they were abolished.
FOOTNOTES:
[123] Wisps or bundle of hay were twisted around poles.--ED.
[124] Regarding all these Italian wars the Romans had only a number of
legends, most of them developed to glorify the heroism of some ancestor
of a noble family--a Valerius, a Fabius, a Decius, or a Manlius.
[125] These songs were mingled with coarse ribaldry at the expense of
the general.--ED.