The History of Rome, Book III - Theodor Mommsen
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Thus at length they came to terms. The unconquered general of a
vanquished nation descended from the mountains which he had defended
so long, and delivered to the new masters of the island the fortresses
which the Phoenicians had held in their uninterrupted possession for
at least four hundred years, and from whose walls all assaults of the
Hellenes had recoiled unsuccessful. The west had peace (513).
Remarks on the Roman Conduct of the War
Let us pause for a moment over the conflict, which extended the
dominion of Rome beyond the circling sea that encloses the peninsula.
It was one of the longest and most severe which the Romans ever waged;
many of the soldiers who fought in the decisive battle were unborn
when the contest began. Nevertheless, despite the incomparably noble
incidents which it now and again presented, we can scarcely name any
war which the Romans managed so wretchedly and with such vacillation,
both in a military and in a political point of view. It could hardly
be otherwise. The contest occurred amidst a transition in their
political system--the transition from an Italian policy, which no
longer sufficed, to the policy befitting a great state, which had not
yet been found. The Roman senate and the Roman military system were
excellently organized for a purely Italian policy. The wars which
such a policy provoked were purely continental wars, and always rested
on the capital situated in the middle of the peninsula as the ultimate
basis of operations, and proximately on the chain of Roman fortresses.
The problems to be solved were mainly tactical, not strategical;
marches and operations occupied but a subordinate, battles held the
first, place; fortress warfare was in its infancy; the sea and naval
war hardly crossed men's thoughts even incidentally. We can easily
understand--especially if we bear in mind that in the battles of that
period, where the naked weapon predominated, it was really the hand-
to-hand encounter that proved decisive--how a deliberative assembly
might direct such operations, and how any one who just was burgomaster
might command the troops. All this was changed in a moment. The
field of battle stretched away to an incalculable distance, to the
unknown regions of another continent, and beyond a broad expanse of
sea; every wave was a highway for the enemy; from any harbour he
might be expected to issue for his onward march. The siege of
strong places, particularly maritime fortresses, in which the first
tacticians of Greece had failed, had now for the first time to be
attempted by the Romans. A land army and the system of a civic
militia no longer sufficed. It was essential to create a fleet, and,
what was more difficult, to employ it; it was essential to find out
the true points of attack and defence, to combine and to direct
masses, to calculate expeditions extending over long periods and great
distances, and to adjust their co-operation; if these things were not
attended to, even an enemy far weaker in the tactics of the field
might easily vanquish a stronger opponent. Is there any wonder that
the reins of government in such an exigency slipped from the hands of
a deliberative assembly and of commanding burgomasters?
It was plain, that at the beginning of the war the Romans did not
know what they were undertaking; it was only during the course of the
struggle that the inadequacies of their system, one after another,
forced themselves on their notice--the want of a naval power, the
lack of fixed military leadership, the insufficiency of their
generals, the total uselessness of their admirals. In part these
evils were remedied by energy and good fortune; as was the case with
the want of a fleet. That mighty creation, however, was but a grand
makeshift, and always remained so. A Roman fleet was formed, but it
was rendered national only in name, and was always treated with the
affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little
esteemed in comparison with the high honour of serving in the legions;
the naval officers were in great part Italian Greeks; the crews were
composed of subjects or even of slaves and outcasts. The Italian
farmer was at all times distrustful of the sea; and of the three
things in his life which Cato regretted one was, that he had travelled
by sea when he might have gone by land. This result arose partly out
of the nature of the case, for the vessels were oared galleys and the
service of the oar can scarcely be ennobled; but the Romans might at
least have formed separate legions of marines and taken steps towards
the rearing of a class of Roman naval officers. Taking advantage
of the impulse of the nation, they should have made it their aim
gradually to establish a naval force important not only in numbers
but in sailing power and practice, and for such a purpose they had a
valuable nucleus in the privateering that was developed during the
long war; but nothing of the sort was done by the government.
Nevertheless the Roman fleet with its unwieldy grandeur was the
noblest creation of genius in this war, and, as at its beginning, so
at its close it was the fleet that turned the scale in favour of Rome.
Far more difficult to be overcome were those deficiencies, which could
not be remedied without an alteration of the constitution. That the
senate, according to the strength of the contending parties within it,
should leap from one system of conducting the war to another, and
perpetrate errors so incredible as the evacuation of Clupea and the
repeated dismantling of the fleet; that the general of one year should
lay siege to Sicilian towns, and his successor, instead of compelling
them to surrender, should pillage the African coast or think proper to
risk a naval battle; and that at any rate the supreme command should
by law change hands every year--all these anomalies could not be done
away without stirring constitutional questions the solution of which
was more difficult than the building of a fleet, but as little could
their retention be reconciled with the requirements of such a war.
Above all, moreover, neither the senate nor the generals could at once
adapt themselves to the new mode of conducting war. The campaign of
Regulus is an instance how singularly they adhered to the idea that
superiority in tactics decides everything. There are few generals who
have had such successes thrown as it were into their lap by fortune:
in the year 498 he stood precisely where Scipio stood fifty years
later, with this difference, that he had no Hannibal and no
experienced army arrayed against him. But the senate withdrew half
the army, as soon as they had satisfied themselves of the tactical
superiority of the Romans; in blind reliance on that superiority the
general remained where he was, to be beaten in strategy, and accepted
battle when it was offered to him, to be beaten also in tactics.
This was the more remarkable, as Regulus was an able and experienced
general of his kind. The rustic method of warfare, by which Etruria
and Samnium had been won, was the very cause of the defeat in the
plain of Tunes. The principle, quite right in its own province, that
every true burgher is fit for a general, was no longer applicable;
the new system of war demanded the employment of generals who had a
military training and a military eye, and every burgomaster had not
those qualities. The arrangement was however still worse, by which
the chief command of the fleet was treated as an appanage to the chief
command of the land army, and any one who chanced to be president of
the city thought himself able to act the part not of general only, but
of admiral too. The worst disasters which Rome suffered in this war
were due not to the storms and still less to the Carthaginians, but
to the presumptuous folly of its own citizen-admirals.
Rome was victorious at last. But her acquiescence in a gain far less
than had at first been demanded and indeed offered, as well as the
energetic opposition which the peace encountered in Rome, very clearly
indicate the indecisive and superficial character of the victory and
of the peace; and if Rome was the victor, she was indebted for her
victory in part no doubt to the favour of the gods and to the energy
of her citizens, but still more to the errors of her enemies in the
conduct of the war--errors far surpassing even her own.
Notes for Chapter II
1. II. V. Campanian Hellenism
2. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
3. The Mamertines entered quite into the same position towards Rome
as the Italian communities, bound themselves to furnish ships (Cic.
Verr. v. 19, 50), and, as the coins show, did not possess the right
of coining silver.
4. II. VII. Submission of Lower Italy
5. II. VII. Last Struggles in Italy
6. The statement, that the military talent of Xanthippus was the
primary means of saving Carthage, is probably coloured; the officers
of Carthage can hardly have waited for foreigners to teach them that
the light African cavalry could be more appropriately employed on the
plain than among hills and forests. From such stories, the echo of
the talk of Greek guardrooms, even Polybius is not free. The
statement that Xanthippus was put to death by the Carthaginians after
the victory, is a fiction; he departed voluntarily, perhaps to enter
the Egyptian service.
7. Nothing further is known with certainty as to the end of Regulus;
even his mission to Rome--which is sometimes placed in 503, sometimes
in 513--is very ill attested. The later Romans, who sought in the
fortunes and misfortunes of their forefathers mere materials for
school themes, made Regulus the prototype of heroic misfortune as
they made Fabricius the prototype of heroic poverty, and put into
circulation in his name a number of anecdotes invented by way of
due accompaniment--incongruous embellishments, contrasting ill with
serious and sober history.
8. The statement (Zon. viii. 17) that the Carthaginians had to promise
that they would not send any vessels of war into the territories of
the Roman symmachy--and therefore not to Syracuse, perhaps even not
to Massilia--sounds credible enough; but the text of the treaty says
nothing of it (Polyb. iii. 27).
Chapter III
The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries
Natural Boundaries of Italy
The Italian confederacy as it emerged from the crises of the fifth
century--or, in other words, the State of Italy--united the various
civic and cantonal communities from the Apennines to the Ionian Sea
under the hegemony of Rome. But before the close of the fifth century
these limits were already overpassed in both directions, and Italian
communities belonging to the confederacy had sprung up beyond the
Apennines and beyond the sea. In the north the republic, in revenge
for ancient and recent wrongs, had already in 471 annihilated the
Celtic Senones; in the south, through the great war from 490 to 513,
it had dislodged the Phoenicians from the island of Sicily. In the
north there belonged to the combination headed by Rome the Latin town
of Ariminum (besides the burgess-settlement of Sena), in the south the
community of the Mamertines in Messana, and as both were nationally of
Italian origin, so both shared in the common rights and obligations of
the Italian confederacy. It was probably the pressure of events at
the moment rather than any comprehensive political calculation, that
gave rise to these extensions of the confederacy; but it was natural
that now at least, after the great successes achieved against
Carthage, new and wider views of policy should dawn upon the Roman
government--views which even otherwise were obviously enough suggested
by the physical features of the peninsula. Alike in a political and
in a military point of view Rome was justified in shifting its
northern boundary from the low and easily crossed Apennines to the
mighty mountain-wall that separates northern from southern Europe,
the Alps, and in combining with the sovereignty of Italy the
sovereignty of the seas and islands on the west and east of the
peninsula; and now, when by the expulsion of the Phoenicians from
Sicily the most difficult portion of the task had been already
achieved, various circumstances united to facilitate its completion
by the Roman government.
Sicily a Dependency of Italy
In the western sea which was of far more account for Italy than the
Adriatic, the most important position, the large and fertile island
of Sicily copiously furnished with harbours, had been by the peace
with Carthage transferred for the most part into the possession of the
Romans. King Hiero of Syracuse indeed, who during the last twenty-two
years of the war had adhered with unshaken steadfastness to the Roman
alliance, might have had a fair claim to an extension of territory;
but, if Roman policy had begun the war with the resolution of
tolerating only secondary states in the island, the views of the
Romans at its close decidedly tended towards the seizure of Sicily
for themselves. Hiero might be content that his territory--namely, in
addition to the immediate district of Syracuse, the domains of Elorus,
Neetum, Acrae, Leontini, Megara, and Tauromenium--and his independence
in relation to foreign powers, were (for want of any pretext to
curtail them) left to him in their former compass; he might well be
content that the war between the two great powers had not ended in
the complete overthrow of the one or of the other, and that there
consequently still remained at least a possibility of subsistence for
the intermediate power in Sicily. In the remaining and by far the
larger portion of Sicily, at Panormus, Lilybaeum, Agrigentum, Messana,
the Romans effected a permanent settlement.
Sardinia Roman
The Libyan Insurrection
Corsica
They only regretted that the possession of that beautiful island was
not enough to convert the western waters into a Roman inland sea,
so long as Sardinia still remained Carthaginian. Soon, however,
after the conclusion of the peace there appeared an unexpected
prospect of wresting from the Carthaginians this second island of the
Mediterranean. In Africa, immediately after peace had been concluded
with Rome, the mercenaries and the subjects of the Phoenicians joined
in a common revolt. The blame of the dangerous insurrection was
mainly chargeable on the Carthaginian government. In the last years
of the war Hamilcar had not been able to pay his Sicilian mercenaries
as formerly from his own resources, and he had vainly requested that
money might be sent to him from home; he might, he was told, send his
forces to Africa to be paid off. He obeyed; but as he knew the men,
he prudently embarked them in small subdivisions, that the authorities
might pay them off by troops or might at least separate them, and
thereupon he laid down his command. But all his precautions were
thwarted not so much by the emptiness of the exchequer, as by the
collegiate method of transacting business and the folly of the
bureaucracy. They waited till the whole army was once more united in
Libya, and then endeavoured to curtail the pay promised to the men.
Of course a mutiny broke out among the troops, and the hesitating and
cowardly demeanour of the authorities showed the mutineers what they
might dare. Most of them were natives of the districts ruled by, or
dependent on, Carthage; they knew the feelings which had been provoked
throughout these districts by the slaughter decreed by the government
after the expedition of Regulus(1) and by the fearful pressure of
taxation, and they knew also the character of their government, which
never kept faith and never pardoned; they were well aware of what
awaited them, should they disperse to their homes with pay exacted by
mutiny. The Carthaginians had for long been digging the mine, and
they now themselves supplied the men who could not but explode it.
Like wildfire the revolution spread from garrison to garrison, from
village to village; the Libyan women contributed their ornaments to
pay the wages of the mercenaries; a number of Carthaginian citizens,
amongst whom were some of the most distinguished officers of the
Sicilian army, became the victims of the infuriated multitude;
Carthage was already besieged on two sides, and the Carthaginian
army marching out of the city was totally routed in consequence of
the blundering of its unskilful leader.
When the Romans thus saw their hated and still dreaded foe involved in
a greater danger than any ever brought on that foe by the Roman wars,
they began more and more to regret the conclusion of the peace of 513
--which, if it was not in reality precipitate, now at least appeared
so to all--and to forget how exhausted at that time their own state
had been and how powerful had then been the standing of their
Carthaginian rival. Shame indeed forbade their entering into
communication openly with the Carthaginian rebels; in fact, they gave
an exceptional permission to the Carthaginians to levy recruits for
this war in Italy, and prohibited Italian mariners from dealing with
the Libyans. But it may be doubted whether the government of Rome
was very earnest in these acts of friendly alliance; for, in spite
of them, the dealings between the African insurgents and the Roman
mariners continued, and when Hamilcar, whom the extremity of the peril
had recalled to the command of the Carthaginian army, seized and
imprisoned a number of Italian captains concerned in these dealings,
the senate interceded for them with the Carthaginian government and
procured their release. The insurgents themselves appeared to
recognize in the Romans their natural allies. The garrisons in
Sardinia, which like the rest of the Carthaginian army had declared
in favour of the insurgents, offered the possession of the island to
the Romans, when they saw that they were unable to hold it against the
attacks of the un-conquered mountaineers of the interior (about 515);
and similar offers came even from the community of Utica, which had
likewise taken part in the revolt and was now hard pressed by the
arms of Hamilcar. The latter suggestion was declined by the Romans,
chiefly doubtless because its acceptance would have carried them
beyond the natural boundaries of Italy and therefore farther than
the Roman government was then disposed to go; on the other hand they
entertained the offers of the Sardinian mutineers, and took over
from them the portion of Sardinia which had been in the hands of the
Carthaginians (516). In this instance, even more than in the affair
of the Mamertines, the Romans were justly liable to the reproach that
the great and victorious burgesses had not disdained to fraternize
and share the spoil with a venal pack of mercenaries, and had not
sufficient self-denial to prefer the course enjoined by justice and
by honour to the gain of the moment. The Carthaginians, whose troubles
reached their height just about the period of the occupation of
Sardinia, were silent for the time being as to the unwarrantable
violence; but, after this peril had been, contrary to the expectations
and probably contrary to the hopes of the Romans, averted by the
genius of Hamilcar, and Carthage had been reinstated to her full
sovereignty in Africa (517), Carthaginian envoys immediately appeared
at Rome to require the restitution of Sardinia. But the Romans, not
inclined to restore their booty, replied with frivolous or at any rate
irrelevant complaints as to all sorts of injuries which they alleged
that the Carthaginians had inflicted on the Roman traders, and
hastened to declare war;(2) the principle, that in politics power
is the measure of right, appeared in its naked effrontery. Just
resentment urged the Carthaginians to accept that offer of war; had
Catulus insisted upon the cession of Sardinia five years before, the
war would probably have pursued its course. But now, when both
islands were lost, when Libya was in a ferment, and when the state was
weakened to the utmost by its twenty-four years' struggle with Rome
and the dreadful civil war that had raged for nearly five years more,
they were obliged to submit It was only after repeated entreaties,
and after the Phoenicians had bound themselves to pay to Rome a
compensation of 1200 talents (292,000 pounds) for the warlike
preparations which had been wantonly occasioned, that the Romans
reluctantly desisted from war. Thus the Romans acquired Sardinia
almost without a struggle; to which they added Corsica, the ancient
possession of the Etruscans, where perhaps some detached Roman
garrisons still remained over from the last war.(3) In Sardinia,
however, and still more in the rugged Corsica, the Romans restricted
themselves, just as the Phoenicians had done, to an occupation of
the coasts. With the natives in the interior they were continually
engaged in war or, to speak more correctly, in hunting them like wild
beasts; they baited them with dogs, and carried what they captured to
the slave market; but they undertook no real conquest. They had
occupied the islands not on their own account, but for the security
of Italy. Now that the confederacy possessed the three large islands,
it might call the Tyrrhene Sea its own.
Method of Administration in the Transmarine Possessions
Provincial Praetors
The acquisition of the islands in the western sea of Italy introduced
into the state administration of Rome a distinction, which to all
appearance originated in mere considerations of convenience and almost
accidentally, but nevertheless came to be of the deepest importance
for all time following--the distinction between the continental and
transmarine forms of administration, or to use the appellations
afterwards current, the distinction between Italy and the provinces.
Hitherto the two chief magistrates of the community, the consuls, had
not had any legally defined sphere of action; on the contrary their
official field extended as far as the Roman government itself. Of
course, however, in practice they made a division of functions
between them, and of course also they were bound in every particular
department of their duties by the enactments existing in regard to it;
the jurisdiction, for instance, over Roman citizens had in every case
to be left to the praetor, and in the Latin and other autonomous
communities the existing treaties had to be respected. The four
quaestors who had been since 487 distributed throughout Italy did not,
formally at least, restrict the consular authority, for in Italy,
just as in Rome, they were regarded simply as auxiliary magistrates
dependent on the consuls. This mode of administration appears to have
been at first extended also to the territories taken from Carthage,
and Sicily and Sardinia to have been governed for some years by
quaestors under the superintendence of the consuls; but the Romans
must very soon have become practically convinced that it was
indispensable to have superior magistrates specially appointed for
the transmarine regions. As they had been obliged to abandon the
concentration of the Roman jurisdiction in the person of the praetor
as the community became enlarged, and to send to the more remote
districts deputy judges,(4) so now (527) the concentration of
administrative and military power in the person of the consuls had to
be abandoned. For each of the new transmarine regions--viz. Sicily,
and Sardinia with Corsica annexed to it--there was appointed a special
auxiliary consul, who was in rank and title inferior to the consul and
equal to the praetor, but otherwise was--like the consul in earlier
times before the praetorship was instituted--in his own sphere of
action at once commander-in-chief, chief magistrate, and supreme
judge. The direct administration of finance alone was withheld from
these new chief magistrates, as from the first it had been withheld
from the consuls;(5) one or more quaestors were assigned to them,
who were in every way indeed subordinate to them, and were their
assistants in the administration of justice and in command, but yet
had specially to manage the finances and to render account of their
administration to the senate after having laid down their office.
Organization of the Provinces
-Commercium-
Property
Autonomy
This difference in the supreme administrative power was the essential
distinction between the transmarine and continental possessions. The
principles on which Rome had organized the dependent lands in Italy,
were in great part transferred also to the extra-Italian possessions.
As a matter of course, these communities without exception lost
independence in their external relations. As to internal intercourse,
no provincial could thenceforth acquire valid property in the province
out of the bounds of his own community, or perhaps even conclude a
valid marriage. On the other hand the Roman government allowed, at
least to the Sicilian towns which they had not to fear, a certain
federative organization, and probably even general Siceliot diets
with a harmless right of petition and complaint.(6) In monetary
arrangements it was not indeed practicable at once to declare the
Roman currency to be the only valid tender in the islands; but it
seems from the first to have obtained legal circulation, and in like
manner, at least as a rule, the right of coining in precious metals
seems to have been withdrawn from the cities in Roman Sicily.(7) On
the other hand not only was the landed property in all Sicily left
untouched--the principle, that the land out of Italy fell by right of
war to the Romans as private property, was still unknown to this
century--but all the Sicilian and Sardinian communities retained self-
administration and some sort of autonomy, which indeed was not assured
to them in a way legally binding, but was provisionally allowed.
If the democratic constitutions of the communities were everywhere
set aside, and in every city the power was transferred to the hands
of a council representing the civic aristocracy; and if moreover the
Sicilian communities, at least, were required to institute a general
valuation corresponding to the Roman census every fifth year; both
these measures were only the necessary sequel of subordination
to the Roman senate, which in reality could not govern with Greek
--ecclesiae--, or without a view of the financial and military
resources of each dependent community; in the various districts
of Italy also the same course was in both respects pursued.