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Rome: A History in Seven Sackings
Matthew Kneale
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Rome: A History in Seven Sackings
Matthew Kneale
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A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Waterstone's Book of the Month, 2018
Nominated for the 2017 Pen Hessell-Tiltman
Daily Telegraph's Best History Books of 2017
Sunday Times' Best History Books of 2017 A sweeping history of the city of Rome, seen through the eyes of its most significant sackings, from the Gauls to the Nazis and everything in between. No city on earth has preserved its past as Rome has. Visitors can cross bridges that were crossed by Cicero and Julius Caesar, explore temples visited by Roman emperors, and step into churches that have hardly changed since popes celebrated mass in them sixteen centuries ago.These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the many disasters that have struck the city. Rome has been afflicted by earthquakes, floods, fires and plagues, but most of all it has been repeatedly ravaged by roving armies. From the Gauls to the Nazis, Matthew Kneale tells the stories behind the seven most important of these attacks and reveals, with fascinating insight, how they transformed the city - and not always for the worse. Using this entirely new approach to Rome's past he unveils how it became the city it is today. A meticulously researched, magical blend of travelogue, social and cultural history, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings is a celebration of the fierce courage, panache and vitality of the Roman people. Most of all, it is a passionate love letter to this incomparable city. 'A masterpiece of pacing and suspense' Sunday Times 'Fascinating... A delight' The Times 'Book of the Week'
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CHAPTER ONE
GAULS
I
FOURTEEN KILOMETRES NORTH of Rome where the river Tiber winds and turns through a small plain, it is joined by a tiny tributary – no more than a brook – called the Allia. These days it is a hard spot to notice. Beyond the Tiber trucks roar down the A1 motorway and high-speed trains hurry north to Florence and Milan. A dose of imagination – and probably a set of earplugs, too – is required to see this for what it once was: a battlefield. Here, in the year 387 BC on the 18th of July, a day the Romans would long consider unlucky, the full army of the Roman Republic, of between six and a half and nine thousand men, drew up to fight. Before them advanced an army of Gauls.
The Romans would have looked more impressive. Their soldiers were in formation and equipped with metal helmets, armour, long spears and large round shields. They used tactics invented by the Greeks, in which shields and spears formed a formidable barrier. As the enemy struggled to break through, the Romans would strike low with their spears, jabbing at legs, stomachs and groins, and then stab from up high, at necks and faces. Warfare two and a half thousand years ago was brutally up close.
By comparison, the Gauls were an undisciplined horde. Few, if any, women and children would have held back to watch the battle. This was not a tribe on the move but a war band looking for trouble, glory and treasure. Like any wandering army of this time its warriors would have stunk and been infested with lice. Though little can be said with absolute certainty about this early period, we can surmise a good deal about them. Some would have been on foot, some on horseback and others would have ridden two-man chariots that could whisk them to a key part of the battlefield. They would have been armed with small rectangular shields, swords and spears, and worn finely crafted helmets. They would have had long hair, moustaches and worn torques around their necks. Yet more noticeable was what they were not wearing. While some would have been clothed, others probably wore nothing but a belt or cloak. Later sources confirm that Gauls sometimes fought naked as they believed that this would make them more terrifying to the enemy.
Finally, they would have been confident. At this moment Celtic-speaking Gauls dominated Europe. To get an idea of the extent of their territories one has only to look to regions named Galicia, meaning land of the Gauls. One Galicia can be found in north-western Spain, a second in the Ukraine and a third in Turkey. And, of course, there is Wales, whose French name is the same again: Pays des Galles. During the two centuries before the battle on the Allia, Gallic peoples had seized northern Italy’s Po valley from the Etruscans. Around 391 BC one of these peoples, the Senones, who had settled along Italy’s Adriatic coast close to the modern seaside resort of Rimini – less than 200 kilometres from Rome – crossed the Apennines and raided the Etruscan city of Clusium. Four years later they were back. It was Rome’s turn.
The Gauls’ successes owed much to two skills in which they excelled. As the smiths of Europe, they were famous for their ironworking, and produced beautiful ornaments with complex geometrical patterns, often intertwined with animals. They were also renowned for their wheeled vehicles and the few Celtic words that managed to infiltrate Latin were mostly terms for these, from handcarts to carriages. War chariots and finely crafted weapons had carried the Celts across Europe.
When it comes to everyday life among the Senones, we rely on written sources that date from several centuries after the battle on the Allia, yet these offer some intriguing clues. Later Celtic peoples were far less male-dominated than the Romans. Female rulers were relatively common and there were even female druids. The Celts also had a certain amount in common with their distant cousins in India. They had a caste system which, like that of early Hinduism, included separate classes of priests, warriors, artisans and poor farmers. Celtic druids, who were not magician healers but priest judges and royal advisors, enjoyed the same high status as Indian Brahmins. Celts also believed in reincarnation. Julius Caesar – who became something of an expert during his years conquering them – tells us so, while early Irish legends have stories of butterflies and mayflies that are reborn as humans.
It is doubtful that any of this would have impressed the Romans. Once again our knowledge of what the Romans thought of Gauls comes from later centuries, but there is no particular reason to believe that their prejudices did not already exist in 387 BC. Later Romans saw the Celts as eloquent speakers but as primitive, woefully lacking in self-control, obsessed with war, feckless, drunken and greedy for gold. Scathing though these views were, some had an element of truth. The Gauls enjoyed a drink and their graves in northern Italy were filled with sophisticated wine-serving vessels. They had a strong liking for both fighting and gold and when possible they combined the two. They were probably doing precisely this when they marched on Rome. Just a few months after the battle on the Allia, a group of Gauls appeared in Sicily, where they fought as mercenaries for the Greek ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius, and it seems highly likely that this was the same war band who charged at the Romans on 18 July. Rome was not the Gauls’ intended destination, it seems, but it offered a chance to break a long journey with a little profitable violence.
Although later Romans may have felt superior to the Gauls they had rather more in common with them than they knew. The early Gallic and Latin languages were extremely similar, so much so that it is thought that they had a common origin around sixty generations earlier. In other words, only 1,500 years before they met by the Allia the Celts and Romans had been a single people.
But now they were strangers and enemies, embroiled in a furious battle. One would have expected the Romans to do well. Their army was at its best on flat, open ground where they could keep formation: exactly the kind of place where they now found themselves. Their tactics were far more sophisticated than those of the Gauls, who relied on the shock of a sudden charge. Yet everything went wrong for the Romans that day. The fullest account comes from the Roman historian Livy. Livy was not a dispassionate narrator. He wrote three and a half centuries after the battle, by which time Rome ruled the whole Mediterranean world, yet he felt that much had been lost during the city’s extraordinary rise. He looked back with nostalgia to an era when, as he believed, Romans had been tougher, plainer, more frugal, moral and selfless. He sought to inspire contemporary Romans with stirring tales of their ancestors’ courage.
Unfortunately, the battle of the Allia offered little in the way of inspiration. Livy did the best of a bad job and tried to find some excuses. He wrote that the Romans were greatly outnumbered, though, as we have seen, the Roman army was far from small. He may have been closer to the mark when he suggested the Romans were shocked by the strangeness of the Gauls. The two appear never to have met in battle before. The Romans may have been shaken by the speed and mobility of the Gauls hurtling towards them on horses and in chariots with their long, razor-sharp swords. And there was their nakedness. One could hardly blame the Romans for feeling intimidated by the sight of a horde of huge, mustachioed, barely clothed warriors, yelling and gesticulating and filling the air with the strange sound of their war horns.
The Romans may also have been let down by their strategy. Fighting a battle in front of a deep river was unwise. Livy wrote that their commander was worried that his army would be outflanked and so decided to split his forces in two, placing a force of reserves to their right where the ground was a little higher. The Gallic leader, Brennus – probably not his actual name, as it is very similar to the Gallic word for king – sent his full force tearing into the Roman reserves. The soldiers of the main Roman army watched as their comrades were cut down. As Livy relates, they did not wait to see if they would fare any better:
The main body of the army, at the first sound of the Gallic war-cry on their flank and in their rear, hardly waited even to see their strange enemy from the ends of the earth; they made no attempt at resistance; they had not courage even to answer his shouted challenge, but fled before they had lost a single man. None fell fighting; they were cut down from behind as they struggled to force a way to safety through the heaving mass of their fellow fugitives. Near the bank of the river there was a dreadful slaughter; the whole left wing of the army had gone that way and had flung away their arms in the desperate hope of getting over. Many could not swim and many others in their exhausted state were dragged under water by the weight of their equipment and drowned.1
Later that same day the Gauls reached Rome. The city was at their mercy. The stage was set for some of the most famous stories of antiquity, which would be told and retold over the centuries, shaping the Romans’ views of themselves, and others’ views of the Romans.
II
Before coming to these stories, and trying to piece together what really happened that summer, we should pause for a moment and see what kind of Rome the Gauls had reached. To modern eyes it hardly seems like a city that would grow into a great power. In the 380s BC it was still a small town with a population of probably no more than 25,000, and it may have been a good deal smaller. It was also primitive. At this time the Athenians had already built the Parthenon, a huge stone building with dazzlingly sophisticated friezes. By contrast, Rome, like other central Italian cities, was a city of bricks, timber and simple terracotta statues. Some parts were very simple indeed: archaeological excavations have revealed that only a century before the battle of the Allia, Rome had numerous daub and wattle, African-style huts with thatched roofs. Nearby cities had huts of this type around 387 BC and it is highly likely that Rome still had them, too. We know that at least one stood at this time: on the Palatine a hut was carefully maintained by priests as ‘The hut of Romulus’.
It was in huts of this kind that the very first Romans had lived. We can set aside the legends of Romulus and Remus, the royal princes turned shepherd bandits who were suckled by a she-wolf. Stories of newborn heirs to kingdoms cast adrift were fairly common in the archaic world, as were founder stories involving ferocious animals. Equally spurious is the later tradition that Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC. Rome’s origins were both earlier and more gradual. People were already living on the site by 1500 BC, probably as itinerant pastoralists who stayed only for some seasons of the year. By 1000 BC they were more settled, and buried their dead in the marshy valley between the hills. They lived in two villages of huts on the Palatine and Esquiline hills. Far from being romantic shepherd bandits the first Romans were farmers who grew crops and kept pigs.
Whether they knew it or not, they could hardly have picked a better spot. Their villages looked down on one of Italy’s key trade routes, which led up the Tiber valley, and along which salt was carried from the coast to people in the hills. They also overlooked a place where the Tiber was both navigable and relatively easy to cross, by the Tiber Island. The high ground on which the villages were built – which later became known as the seven hills, though in reality some were more like ridges – offered protection from marauding enemies. And it was less prone than the lowlands to malaria, which, though it probably was not present in 387 BC, soon would be.
If the stories of Romulus and Remus are myths, one detail holds some truth. Rome’s first king Romulus is said to have shared power for several years with Titus Tatius, the king of the Sabines. Romulus and his Latins lived on the Palatine Hill and Titus Tatius’ Sabines lived on the Esquiline: two peoples, diverse yet united. Intriguingly, archaeological discoveries and early traditions support the idea that Rome was originally inhabited by two separate peoples. The hut village on Palatine Hill was populated by Latin speakers from the area southeast of Rome around the Alban Hills, while the Esquiline Hill was peopled by Sabines from hills to the north. In other words, from its very beginnings Rome was a cosmopolitan place formed of two nations.
Or rather, three. Early Rome was a frontier city. Just across the river Tiber on the Gianicolo Hill – where, on a hot summer night, today’s Romans go for an ice cream and to enjoy the view – lived Etruscans. The Etruscans could hardly have been more different from the Romans. Their language, which is still little understood, was not Indo-European and so was as distant from Latin or Sabine as modern English is from Mandarin Chinese. It is thought that the Etruscans may, like the Basques, have been an ancient aboriginal people who inhabited Europe long before Indo-Europeans arrived. They would have a huge influence on early Rome, contributing kings, noble families and numerous cultural traditions, from the bundles of rods (fasces) that symbolized a state officer’s power, to purple-bordered togas for high officials, to gladiator fights.
If life were not already complex enough, two other peoples can also be added to the mix. Soon after the first villages grew up on the Palatine and Esquiline hills, Phoenicians from today’s Lebanon appeared on the Italian coast and they almost certainly traded with the Romans. Next came Greeks, who from 800 BC established cities in southern Italy and Sicily, and sold high-quality banqueting items across the peninsula. Pottery finds reveal that a small Greek colony may have existed below the Palatine Hill as early as the eighth century BC, when the Romans were still living in huts. Some of Rome’s earliest temples were to Greek gods.
It was almost certainly the Greeks who inspired the Romans to move on from village life and build a city. This did not happen through gradual evolution but seems to have been the result of an epic, planned effort. In the mid-seventh century BC the swampy valley between Rome’s first villages was cleared of huts, drained, filled with earth by the ton and paved over. The Roman Forum was born. At the time of the battle on the Allia, some 250 years later, many of the city’s first monuments – though some had burned down and been rebuilt – still existed. These included the Senate, a hall where Rome’s parliament of aristocrats met, the temple of Vesta – the goddess of the hearth and the family, whose staff of virgins were responsible for tending a perpetual fire to help keep Rome safe – and a complex of buildings that appears to have been a royal palace.
Yet the complex had no royal occupant at the time of the battle by the Allia. In the 380s BC Rome had been a republic for over a century. The fact that they had freed themselves from royal rule was a source of great pride to early Romans, much as it is to modern Americans. Livy, who wrote this first part of his great history in the early 20s BC, when Romans were slipping back into autocratic rule – now under emperors – did his best to glorify the moment when the city’s kings were thrown out. He depicted Rome’s last king, Tarquin, as a kind of Macbeth figure, brave but murderous and with an evil, scheming queen. When King Tarquin’s son raped the beautiful wife of a nobleman, Tarquin’s nephew, Brutus, led angry Romans in rebellion in 509 BC. Desperate to regain power, Tarquin treacherously allied with an enemy of Rome, the Etruscan warlord Lars Porsena, and fought against his own people, only to meet a well-deserved defeat.
The truth, as far as it can be reassembled, seems to have been rather less romantic. Rome’s kings were probably thrown out not by American-style popular patriotism but by the city’s rich, quite possibly in alliance with the same Lars Porsena with whom King Tarquin was supposed to have sided. Aristocratic takeovers were common in Italian and Greek city states in the late sixth century BC. The ranks of their heavy infantry armies were filled by the rich, as only they could afford the expensive equipment required. Knowing they were the power behind the state, aristocrats sought to flex their political muscles.
But that was probably not the only reason for the fall of Rome’s kings. Another could be seen from any part of Rome in 387 BC. Perched on the Capitoline Hill, it dominated the city’s skyline, as the Parthenon did Athens. The temple to Rome’s most celebrated god, Jupiter Best and Greatest, was built not from stone but from timber and brick, and was crude compared to Greek temples of the time – whose overall design it copied – but it made up for this in size. When first constructed it was one of the largest temples, if not the largest, in the central Mediterranean. It was built by King Tarquin, and, according to Livy, the Romans resented being forced to work on the building. No doubt they also resented paying for it. Livy describes how the temple was almost complete when Tarquin fell from power in 509 BC. He would not be the last ruler to fall victim to extravagant architectural ambitions.
Tarquin would have built the temple to give him and his city prestige, yet, like Rome’s other temples, it also had a practical role: it was expected to gi...