War and Society in the Roman World

Dr John Rich, Graham Shipley, Dr John Rich, Graham Shipley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000158816
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

This volume focuses on the changing relationship between warfare and the Roman citizenry; from the Republic, when war was at the heart of Roman life, through to the Principate, when it was confined to professional soldiers, and to the Late Empire and the Roman army's eventual failure.

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The Roman conquest of Italy

Stephen Oakley

Recent studies of Roman imperialism in the later Republic are abundant,¹ and there are classic narratives of her early history.² Yet it is hard to find many works devoted primarily to the dynamics of the conquest of Italy before the First Punic War,³ and the main concern of this essay will be to identify the structures which led Rome to expand in the period before 264,⁴ and to discuss their origin, nature, and development; we shall also consider the rather cruder question of whether or not one should term Rome ‘aggressive’ or ‘imperialistic’ in this period.¹

An outline of Roman expansion

Our survey begins when Rome was no more than the largest city in Latium, a position attained as a result of synoecism with other villages in the Tiber valley in the seventh and sixth centuries.² Indeed between the battle of Lake Regillus (499 or 496) and the Gallic sack (390) she fought all or most of her wars in alliance with the other Latin communities and, after 486, the Hernici – thereby using for the first time allied manpower to counteract the numerical superiority of her opponents. During this century all her campaigning, with only a few isolated exceptions,³ took place in a rather circumscribed area around the city and the Latin plain against three main opponents: the southern Etruscans and in particular Veii, a city with which Rome struggled for control of the Tiber until its destruction by Camillus in 396; the Aequi, a hill tribe living in the Aniene valley above Tibur and Praeneste, whose frequent sorties out of the mountains threatened those two towns in particular and northern Latium in general; and, most menacing of all, the Volsci, a Sabellian tribe based in the mountains of the Liri valley and in the M. Lepini. In the early fifth century these Volscians had descended into the Latin plain and had overrun the land between Tarracina and Ardea; and from this powerful base they were a constant threat to the Latin states on the lower slopes of the Alban hills and to Roman territory beyond.

The triple alliance of Romans, Latins, and Hernicans had met with considerable success and Rome had become increasingly preeminent in it, when in 390 she was suddenly sacked by a band of marauding Gauls. This inevitably meant that her campaigning over the next few years continued to be limited to the same constricted area; and between 389 and 359 her armies operated against the Latins and Hernici (both no doubt seeing an opportunity to rid themselves of an ally growing uncomfortably powerful), against Satricum, Antium, and the other Volsci of the Pomptine plain, and in 389 and 386 against Etruscans, amongst whom Falerii was doubtless prominent. And it was only in the next fifteen years that Rome’s influence began to spread further afield, culminating in the dramatic alliance with Capua (343) and subsequent First Samnite War.

From Polybius (1. 1. 5) onwards a justly recurring theme in discussions of Roman imperialism has been the short time within which Rome transformed herself from being the mistress of Italy to the dominant power in the whole Mediterranean world; but in fact the speed with which she arrived at this domination in Italy between 343 and 264 is quite as striking. This period, despite twenty-five years of uneasy and intermittent peace between the two nations, was dominated by the Samnite Wars. The First (343–341) was a small affair provoked by Rome’s involvement in Campania; but the Second (327–304) developed into a grim duel for supremacy in southern central Italy; and during the Third (298–291), and what should perhaps be called the Fourth (284–272), the Samnites participated in coalitions which tried in vain to stop Rome dominating the whole peninsula. When the series began the two powers must have seemed evenly matched, and Roman territory was limited; but the Samnites at some time or other involved most of peninsular Italy in alliances against Rome, and, when Rome had finally defeated them, she had no difficulty in overrunning their erstwhile allies, whom she now had a pretext for attacking. The decisive campaign in these years was waged in 295, when the coalition of Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans, and Umbrians ranged against Rome brought the Samnite wars to their crisis; and the victory of Fabius Rullianus at Sentinum in that year was certainly more spectacular than any previously won by a Roman general, and probably the single most important event in Rome’s march to dominion in Italy.

The Romans regularly confiscated land from their defeated foes, and thus the final result of these campaigns was not just a series of treaties by which every independent state was linked to Rome, but a vast expansion of her territory. For if we adopt the approximations of Beloch, then out of a total of 130,000 sq km for peninsular Italy as a whole the ager Romanus (Roman territory) grew from 822 sq km in 510 to 1,902 sq km in 340, to 23,226 sq km in 264.¹ The economic consequences of this will be discussed below, but here we should note the important strategic fact that much of this territory was contiguous: the ager Romanus now ran unbroken from the Caudine Forks to Ostia and from Ostia to Sena Gallica. Here, then, is a classic application of the principle of ‘divide and rule’, and never again would it be easy for the Samnites or any other state to establish the kind of alliance ranged against Rome at Sentinum.

The nature of Rome’s early warfare

These early campaigns should be placed in the context of a series of conflicts in central Italy between those dwelling in the mountains and those, like the Romans and Latins, dwelling on the plain. Overpopulation has always been a recurring problem for Italian mountain communities, and in antiquity the legends of the ‘sacred springs’ of Italic peoples bear testimony to how surplus warriors would depart to pastures new;² and the most agreeable pastures in central Italy were those plains near the coast. Hence there was constant pressure from the mountains upon coastal communities, and this explains both the downward movement of the Volsci and Aequi and the behaviour of the Samnites. A wave of Samnite invaders in the fifth century had seized Capua and Cumae from Etruscans and Greeks; but their descendants were in turn to be threatened in the mid-fourth century by further excursions of mountainfolk, and this was a prime cause of Rome’s First Samnite War. Samnite pressure, moreover, was not limited to the Tyrrhenian seaboard, and Livy (9. 13. 7) tells us how they also threatened Apulia, describing the conflict specifically in terms of the clash between plainsmen and mountainfolk. He used the terms of ancient ethnography, which will hardly carry conviction today; but it is a fact that throughout the history of the Mediterranean the cultures of the mountain and the plain have differed: The mountain dweller is apt to be the laughing stock of the superior inhabitants of the plain. He is suspected, feared and mocked.’ Thus Fernand Braudel on the early modern period;¹ but the same tensions were found in antiquity and were often resolved more violently.

The loss of land consequent upon the descent of the Volsci and Aequi must have led to the impoverishment of many Romans and Latins; but above all it exposed most of Roman and Latin territory to the threat of frequent raiding. Thus the wars of the fifth century began as a struggle for survival, and, if there be any truth in the tale of Coriolanus, it lies in the fear inspired by Volscian assaults on Rome.² As the century progressed, the allies gradually recovered much of their land, and it is easy to see how the first expansion beyond lands held in the sixth century involved merely an extension of this defensive mentality. For it must have been believed that security would never come until the menace of the Volsci and the Aequi had been eliminated, and so a gradual advance was made into their heartland. The Samnite Wars, moreover, began before the final Roman conquest of the Volsci, and it is easy to believe that something of the mental outlook which had been formed in those years of desperate struggle in Latium was carried forward by the Romans into the wars against this new and more powerful federation of mountain dwellers (see also Sherwin-White 1980, 178).

Thus far we have scarcely implied that the campaigns of the early Republic were anything but regular warfare; but given their early date and what must have been the relatively primitive organization of both sides, many will have been no more than raids for plunder. This is not a matter on which one would expect our sources to be particularly trustworthy, but it is nevertheless interesting that enemy attacks are often viewed in this way.¹ In general Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus stress the regularities of Roman offensives, organized as they were by consuls and dictators; but even they sometimes state that the Romans did little more than plunder.² Though one should be very cautious in using details from the early books of Livy, it may be that these and other similar passages go back to authentic information. By the mid-fourth century, however, Rome must have long given up such irregularities; and certainly after the siege of Veii and the associated introduction of legionary pay in 406 (4. 59. 11) her campaigning will have become increasingly systematized and professional. Nevertheless, we shall see that Romans were obsessed with booty throughout the Republic, and this outlook may be a survival from her earliest fighting.

Thus it was in the fifth century that many of the classic structures leading to Roman expansion were born: the use of allied manpower, the need for land, the hope of profit from war, and above all the expectation that one would have to fight almost every year.

Annual warfare and the allies

For one factor will always be apparent in an account of Roman expansion in Italy: these were years in which the Romans were almost constantly at war; and no one has done more to teach us the importance of this than Harris, who demonstrated (1979, 9–10) how rare after 327 were years withou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Roman conquest of Italy
• 2 Fear, greed and glory: the causes of Roman war-making in the middle Republic
• 3 Urbs direpta, or how the Romans sacked cities
• 4 Military organization and social change in the later Roman Republic
• 5 Roman poetry and anti-militarism
• 6 The end of Roman imperial expansion
• 7 Roman peace
• 8 Piracy under the principate and the ideology of imperial eradication
• 9 War and diplomacy: Rome and Parthia, 31 BC–AD 235
• 10 Philosophers’ attitudes to warfare under the principate
• 11 The end of the Roman army in the western empire
• 12 Landlords and warlords in the later Roman Empire
• Index