The Enemies of Rome

From Hannibal to Attila the Hun

Philip Matyszak

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

The gripping stories of the most colourful and formidable characters to challenge the might of Rome. This engrossing book looks at the growth and eventual demise of Rome from the viewpoint of the peoples who fought against it. Here is the reality behind such legends as Spartacus the gladiator, as well as the thrilling tales of Hannibal, the great general, Boudicca, the rebel leader and Mithridates, the connoisseur of poisons, among many others. Some enemies of Rome were noble heroes and others were murderous villains, but each has a unique and fascinating story. Philip Matyszak is the author of several books on the classical world, including 'The Sons of Caesar', 'Chronicle of the Roman Republic' and 'Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day', all published by Thames & Hudson.

HANNIBAL

PHILIP V

VIRIATHUS

JUGURTHA

From the Ebro to the Nile – the Birth of the Roman Superpower

As Rome prospered and grew strong, across the Mediterranean sea Carthage watched with a jealous eye. Carthage was long used to dominating the western Mediterranean and her leaders quite rightly saw the growing power of Rome as a threat to that dominance. It was inevitable that the two greatest powers in the western Mediterranean should clash, and they did so in 264 BC. The war began because of Roman support for a Sicilian city hostile to Carthage, and the battles of this war were fought in Sicily and the seas about that island.

Rome, which had so far confined itself to the Italian peninsula, was forced to become a maritime power. It has been said that the Romans took to sailing like a brick to water: their inability to keep their ships afloat in anything but the calmest waters lost them entire armies through shipwreck. On those occasions that they stayed above the surface (for example at Mylae in 260 BC), the Romans did well in their naval battles, often defeating the more experienced Carthaginians. By the time the Carthaginians were forced to terms in 241 BC both Rome and Carthage were drained of money and manpower.

Then, in 218 BC, the Romans discovered that they had to do it all again. The Barcids, one of the leading families of Carthage, had always regarded peace with Rome as a truce during which they could muster fresh forces. Rome was becoming increasingly assertive and was interfering in areas such as Spain, which the Carthaginians saw as within their sphere of influence. Furthermore Carthage had recovered quickly from the earlier war, and could reasonably hope that Rome’s recovery had been slower. Friction in Spain caused war to break out again, but Carthage’s leaders had decided to take the war to their enemy. Led by Hannibal (Chapter 1), the Carthaginians invaded Italy itself. The following years were among the darkest in Roman history. Hannibal was a superb tactician who defeated the Romans in battle after battle. The low point came in 216 when the Romans were trounced at Cannae. Several of Rome’s subject cities rebelled, and for a moment it seemed as though Rome itself might fall.

Hannibal’s success encouraged the Macedonian king Philip V (Chapter 2) to ally himself with Carthage against Rome. The Mediterranean powers were now taking note of Rome, and their attention was not friendly. Philip had observed the rise of Rome and the narrowness of the seas that separated his realms from this new and expansionist power. He realized that if Rome became involved with the feuding city-states of Greece, his own rule would be threatened. Philip made an alliance with Hannibal. His military involvement in the war against Rome was minimal, but his hostile intent was noted. Immediately after Carthage had once again been forced to surrender, Rome launched a serious attack on Philip. Their victory left them with interests to defend in Greece, and conquests to consolidate in Spain. The Romans, hereto uninterested in affairs outside Italy, suddenly found themselves embroiled in diplomatic and military adventures from Andalusia to Athens.

Even before the end of the Carthaginian wars, a more cosmopolitan outlook was taking hold among the Roman elite. Scipio Africanus, the general who eventually defeated Hannibal, was among those who admired Greek life and culture, much to the disgust of curmudgeonly diehards such as Cato the Censor who saw these new foreign ways as subverting old Roman values.

The wars with Carthage had changed Rome forever, and not for the better. The huge loss of Roman manpower led to the extensive use of slave labour in the countryside. This process was worsened by the fact that Rome’s citizen army now campaigned ever further afield. The small peasant farmers who made up the backbone of the army were unable to farm their lands, which began to fall into the hands of the Roman elite.

Even as Rome’s peasantry were excluded from the fruits of victory, Rome abandoned its old inclusionist policy and began to divide its peoples into ‘conquerors’ and ‘conquered’. While Roman citizens enjoyed the benefits of Empire, Rome’s new subjects in Spain were mercilessly exploited by a string of venal and corrupt governors. The Iberian peoples did not take this lying down and, for decades after Hannibal’s war, the mood of the Celtiberians and Lusitanians varied between restlessness and outright revolt, a situation made worse by Roman inexperience. Most of Rome’s conquests to date had been against people close to their own level of civilization; governing wilder tribes far from Rome was a new experience. Furthermore, the Romans did not have as their primary interest the welfare of the Iberians, but rather the exploitation of the peninsula’s natural resources, especially silver. In the cycles of brutal oppression and bloody revolt which resulted, Rome was eventually victorious, but the price in blood and economic devastation was high. The great Lusitanian leader Viriathus (Chapter 3) showed the Iberians that the Roman legions were not invincible, and that the rugged Spanish countryside was well suited to small wars and the sudden ambushes at which the peninsula’s warrior peoples excelled.

Carthage and Macedon had been world-class powers, and defeating them gave Rome confidence which sometimes crossed into arrogance. With Philip V of Macedon forced to cede to Rome his hegemony over Greece, the Seleucid kings took Philip’s discomfiture as an opportunity to extend their western borders. Several bruising clashes with the Roman war machine eventually made it plain to the Seleucids that the eastern Mediterranean did indeed have a new master – but it was not themselves.

The Romans brutally exploited their superiority. When Carthage began to recover strongly from her crushing defeat of two generations earlier, Rome provoked a war and then razed Carthage to its foundations (though it later rose again as a Roman city). At home, two reformers from one of Rome’s greatest families, the Gracchus brothers, tried to correct some of the imbalances in social justice that were threatening the Roman state. They ran into venomous resistance from vested interests which selfishly and corruptly killed not only the reform programme but also the brothers themselves. The death of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC marked the beginning of the slow death of the Roman Republic.

After the Punic wars, Roman culture blossomed under foreign influences. The playwrights Terence and Plautus produced plays that entertain audiences even today, and Polybius (a Greek exile) introduced the Romans to historiography. Among Rome’s first home-grown historians was Sallust, a former politician who was deeply disillusioned with the situation in Rome. His history of the war with the Numidian king Jugurtha (Chapter 4) pitilessly exposes the arrogance and corruption of Rome’s ruling class. This greed and selfishness was unscrupulously exploited by Jugurtha to his own advantage, and public disgust with the venality of their own ruling class helped to bring a new generation of demagogues to power.

Despite internal stresses, this period sees the Roman Republic at its height. Rome was supreme from the shores of the Atlantic to the beaches of the Lebanon. Rome was trying new styles of poetry, theatre and architecture. Even the traditional Roman pantheon was having to accommodate new gods in its midst. Though the aristocracy kept a tight grip on political office, internal conflicts among the great families meant that the votes of the common man counted, and the people had an important part in Roman political life. But beneath the surface, all was not well.

CHAPTER 1

Everything that happened to both peoples, Romans and Carthaginians, was, at base, caused by one thing – by one mind, one man. By this I mean Hannibal.

Polybius 9.12

More than five hundred years before Hannibal was born, while the site of Rome was still a barren marsh, a storm blew a shipload of refugees onto the African shore near the newly founded city of Kart Hadasht, known today as Carthage.

The queen of that city was Dido, daughter of a Phoenician king. Fleeing from her native land, she had been offered by an African ruler both sanctuary and all the land she could cover with the hide of a bull. With the spirit that was to typify Carthaginian merchant venturers of future generations, Dido had the bull’s skin cut into tiny strips, and used these strips to enclose an area of land large enough to form the basis of her future city.

Now, with this city thriving, Dido welcomed the newcomers from the sea in the hope that they would swell the ranks of Carthage’s citizenry. The new arrivals were led by Aeneas, a favourite of the goddess Venus, and a nobleman from the fallen city of Troy. Dido fell passionately in love with him. While out hunting, the pair sheltered from a storm in a cave, and there consummated their love.

Dido had no sooner found pure happiness than it was snatched from her. While he slept, Aeneas was visited in his dreams by Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Mercury reminded Aeneas that his destiny lay in Italy, and that he should forthwith abandon his present dalliance.

Dido noted the change in her lover, and became hysterical at the thought that he might abandon her. Torn between love and duty, Aeneas could not bring himself to bid Dido a proper farewell. Instead, one morning, Dido awoke to find that Aeneas had boarded his galley, and was even then setting sail. Distraught, she ordered her sister Anna to make a pyre of all those possessions which the Trojan had left behind in his guilty flight. Before anyone could suspect her intentions, she threw herself into the flames and perished. Her last words were a malediction to Aeneas and his descendants:

‘These are my prayers, and this my dying will;

And you, my Carthaginians, must every curse fulfil.

Perpetual hate and mortal wars proclaim,

Against that prince, his people, and their name….

Our arms, our seas, our shores, opposed to theirs;

And the same hate descend on all our heirs!’

Virgil Aeneid 4

So, according to legend, began the enmity between Carthage and Rome. The reality was hardly better. Their first-known diplomatic contact marked the warmest point in their relationship, and even that was no more than wary tolerance. At the time, Rome was a fledgling power in Latium, while Carthage was the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. The first known treaty between the two states was in 508 BC, by which the Romans agreed not to interfere with Carthaginian trade in the region, and Carthage agreed to stay out of Rome’s affairs in Italy.

In 280 BC, the Carthaginians shared with Rome a common interest in repelling the invasion of one of the successors to Alexander the Great, King Pyrrhus. In fact the Carthaginian fleet fought on the Roman side. But the growth of Roman power after the war caused deep unease in Carthage, and hastened the inevitable clash.

This clash came when the Romans involved themselves with affairs in Sicily. Messana in north Sicily was seized by a band of mercenaries called the Mamertines. At this time Carthage controlled the west of the island, and the Greeks the east. Wars between the two were frequent and both sides now hastened to seize Messana for themselves. The Mamertines sought protection from the remaining regional power – Rome. War was not inevitable, but neither goodwill nor diplomacy was forthcoming. In 264 BC Rome and Carthage became locked in a grim struggle that lasted for the next twenty-three years.

The war cost hundreds of thousands of lives and was fought in Africa, Sicily and the adjacent seas. The Romans invaded Africa, but their general, Atilius Regulus, was defeated and his army destroyed. In the war at sea the Romans raised fleet after fleet, only to see each destroyed in turn. Some were sunk by the Carthaginians but more by the weather, since the Romans were remarkably poor sailors.

In Sicily the Romans had more success. As formidable by land as they were vulnerable at sea, the forces of Rome rapidly drove the Carthaginians from the hinterland and penned them under siege in their port cities. That they did not drive Carthage from the island altogether was due to the efforts of a remarkable Carthaginian commander, Hamilcar Barca.

Hamilcar was a Barcid, one of the leading Carthaginian families of that time. He had begun his war by raiding along the Italian coast, and when he arrived in Sicily, he established himself near the modern city of Palermo. From there he conducted a daring guerrilla campaign. In 244 BC he captured the city of Eryx, and made this his base of operations. By 241 Carthage, though almost completely drained of money and manpower, made a last desperate effort to supply Hamilcar with men and munitions. At the Aegates Islands, the Romans under the admiral C. Lutatius Catulus intercepted the Carthaginian supply ships and destroyed them. For Carthage, this was the last straw. They made peace with Rome, agreeing to abandon their possessions in Sicily and to pay a huge indemnity of 3,200 talents of silver (a talent was a weight of just over 25 kilograms).

This treaty indirectly precipitated another conflict. The size of the indemnity meant that Carthage could not afford to pay the mercenaries who had fought for her, and who now rose in mutiny. Hamilcar returned from Sicily and played a leading part in the subsequent campaign, the viciousness of which can be judged from its name – the ‘truceless war’. To Carthage’s impotent fury, Rome took blatant advantage of her rival’s weakness and annexed the Carthaginian province of Sardinia.

With the mercenaries defeated, Hamilcar set off north again, this time to Spain, where Carthage intended to build a new empire and gain from it the silver and manpower to stand against Rome. Polybius takes up the story at the point where Hamilcar had sacrificed to the gods for the success of his mission.

Then he [Hamilcar] called his son Hannibal to him, and asked him with fatherly tenderness if the boy wanted to go with him [to Spain]. As a boy would, the overjoyed Hannibal begged his father to allow him…. Hamilcar took Hannibal by the hand and led him to the altar. There he commanded Hannibal to lay his hand on the body of the sacrificial victim, and to swear that he would never be a friend to the Romans.

Polybius 3.11

Hannibal was about nine years old at this time. He must have had an exciting boyhood in Spain as Hamilcar expanded Carthaginian influence from his base at Gades...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prelude
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Epilogue
• Further Reading
• Sources of Illustrations
• Sources of Quotations
• Index
• Copyright