CHAPTER 2 THE NEW WORLD ORDER

IN THE SUMMER OF 280 BC, the Mediterranean world’s past collided with its future as the armies of the Roman Republic met those led by the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus on a battlefield in Southern Italy. An ambitious and adventurous commander, Pyrrhus had grown up in a Mediterranean created by the implosion of Alexander the Great’s empire following his death in 323. This was a world of mercenary armies, patchwork kingdoms, and fluid political boundaries in which Alexander’s generals and their descendants fought among themselves to try to capture as many fragments of the great Macedonian empire as they could. These kingdoms were large, but their control of territory was often precarious and the allegiances of their armies frequently seemed even weaker. This led ambitious kings and skilled commanders with the right combination of natural talent and good fortune to imagine that they might build an empire like that of Alexander. And no commander was more seduced by the idea of conquest than Pyrrhus.

A cousin of Alexander the Great who had briefly held the Macedonian throne, Pyrrhus had been summoned to Italy by the former Spartan colony of Tarentum after that city had fallen into a conflict with Rome. Greeks saw Rome as a rising and dangerous “barbarian” power that had recently come to control most of Italy, but they also felt that Rome’s recent military successes said little about its ability to fight against the leading states of the Greek world. The alliance between Pyrrhus and the Tarentines bound two parties who neither knew nor particularly trusted one another. But it served a purpose for both of them. Tarentum was a relatively wealthy city that had a history of calling upon restless commanders from the Greek mainland when it was gravely threatened. The Tarentines hoped that Pyrrhus’s arrival could prevent the Romans from threatening the independence of their city and that, after Pyrrhus had fought for them, both he and Rome would leave Tarentum alone.¹

Pyrrhus answered Tarentum’s call, however, because he saw in it an opportunity to build an empire for himself in the Western Mediterranean that he could then use to recover the Macedonian throne. Pyrrhus controlled a world-class army of professional infantry, skilled cavalrymen, and elephant-mounted shock troops that seemed likely to easily overwhelm the citizen levies of the barbarian Romans. This would, he expected, eliminate the Roman threat to Tarentum, cause the defection of Rome’s allies in Italy, and enable Pyrrhus to build a large army of allied forces to help him in further campaigns. Once he overwhelmed the Romans, a later author reported, Pyrrhus expected that Italy would become a base from which to mount additional campaigns against Sicily, Carthage, Libya, and, ultimately, Macedonia and Greece.²

The Tarentines, Pyrrhus, and the Greek cities of Southern Italy that were closely watching his campaign probably imagined that the war would end with a Roman defeat and withdrawal. The Romans had only recently established a military presence in Southern Italy and, if they behaved like any other Italian power, they would simply pull back from Tarentum and other Southern Italian cities when faced with the disciplined, well-equipped, first-world army fielded by Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus himself seems to have expected that he could induce a Roman retreat without even fighting a battle. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus preserves a letter that Pyrrhus supposedly sent to Rome offering to arbitrate the dispute among Rome, Tarentum, and Tarentum’s Italian allies so that no side would need to fight. But the Roman consul Lavinius answered curtly that if Pyrrhus had determined to make war on them, he would do well to “investigate those against whom he would be fighting.” Lavinius even sent a captured spy back to Pyrrhus with the instruction that the king himself should come “openly so as to see and learn the might of the Romans.”³

Lavinius had given Pyrrhus fair warning. When Pyrrhus got his first glimpse of the Roman forces, he was said to have remarked with some astonishment that “the discipline of these barbarians is not barbarous.” The Romans made an even greater impression when the forces clashed. Although Pyrrhus was able to attack an exposed Roman army as it crossed a river, the Romans nevertheless held their ground against a cavalry assault led by Pyrrhus himself. Pyrrhus’s horse was killed beneath him yet he emerged victorious when a charge by his elephants broke the lines of Roman soldiers who had never before fought the animals. Pyrrhus won the battle, but at an alarming cost. He had lost somewhere between one-sixth and one-half of his best troops and, because these were highly trained professional soldiers, the dead and wounded were not easily replaced. Although the Tarentines had fought well and some neighboring Italian communities provided Pyrrhus with additional troops following the battle, these reinforcements were inferior to the men that Pyrrhus had lost. In the meantime, the Romans “lost no time in filling up their depleted legions and raising others,” a fact that Pyrrhus supposedly noted with “consternation.” His dream of Italian domination now seemingly out of reach, Pyrrhus sent an embassy offering peace and a military alliance to the Romans if they would in exchange agree to free the Greek cities in Southern Italy they had recently come to control.⁴

Pyrrhus sent Cineas of Thessaly to Rome to lead the negotiation. A gifted orator and student of the famous Athenian statesman Demosthenes, Cineas could be so persuasive that Pyrrhus once remarked that his words had conquered more cities than the king’s armies. Negotiations between states in the ancient world consisted largely of emissaries making public demands that the other party either accepted or declined. This meant that, even if a victor offered lenient terms, acceptance required the vanquished to publicly admit their defeat and take a hit to their international prestige. Substantial power could be preserved but humiliation could not be avoided.⁵

When Cineas arrived in Rome, he brought with him expensive presents for the families of individual Roman senators and extremely lenient terms for the Republic. Rome could have peace, the return of its captured prisoners, and even Pyrrhus’s help in future campaigns if only Rome allied with Pyrrhus and pardoned Tarentum. The Senate, later sources say, was inclined to accept these terms until an old, blind senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the senate house by his sons. The speech this respected senator gave would become legendary. The chamber became quiet as he entered and, when he finally stood to speak, he chastised his younger colleagues. “I have previously borne the unfortunate state of my eyes,” he began, “[but now I wish that my ears had been afflicted so that I could avoid] hearing about your shameful deliberations.” He recalled how, in his younger days, Romans spoke about Alexander the Great and the defeat they would have inflicted on him had he turned west instead of east. Pyrrhus, however, is a mere shadow of Alexander. The thought of bowing to him, Appius continued, “diminishes the glory of Rome.” Although Pyrrhus promises an alliance, the Senate should not suppose that any agreement with him can end the trouble that he brought. Instead, his success will attract others and “they will despise you as men whom anyone can easily subdue if Pyrrhus leaves without his hubris being punished.” Indeed, the cost Rome will bear is its willingness to allow other Italians “to mock the Romans.”⁶

Appius Claudius’s speech did more than point out that humiliation lurked beneath Pyrrhus’s generous terms. It also emphasized that this humiliation was dangerous. Every senator in the third century understood that Roman domination of Italy was precarious. At the time of Pyrrhus’s arrival, nearly all of the three million Italians living south of the Po River were either Roman citizens or citizens of cities bound by alliances that required them to provide Rome with troops whenever it asked. These allied cities were still autonomous, and their politics more regularly focused on conflicts between local families and tensions with regional rivals than on their relations with Rome. As the most powerful polity on the peninsula, Rome could referee these disputes if necessary, but it largely stood back from them when it could to avoid inciting resentment unnecessarily. It was the universal recognition of Rome as Italy’s dominant power that ultimately held this structure together. If Rome refused to fight to maintain this primacy and avoid humiliation at the hands of an outsider like Pyrrhus, the alliance structure on which its power and security depended could rapidly fall apart. Indeed, this likely seemed an existential threat to a city that only three years before had seen a Gallic army advance within forty miles of it before a combined force of Romans and their Italian allies pushed the barbarians back.⁷

Appius Claudius’s speech convinced the Senate that Pyrrhus’s offer was sweetened poison that they must refuse. Cineas returned to Pyrrhus not just with news of Rome’s surprising refusal of his offer of alliance but also with a report detailing “the excellences of their form of government,” the impressive nature of the Senate, and the huge number of Romans and allies who were capable of bearing arms. When Cineas’s experiences in Rome joined with Pyrrhus’s own failures to capture the allegiance of any significant Roman allies in Southern Italy, Pyrrhus finally gained a full appreciation of the Republic’s tremendous ability to build political consensus among its citizens and allies. It became clear to him that, once the Republic and its allies decided on war, they would remain resolute until a victory without humiliation was achieved.

If Pyrrhus now knew the power of the Roman Republic as a governing system, he did not yet understand how strongly the Republic’s ideals shaped the behavior of its individual citizens. He would learn this only when a Roman embassy led by Gaius Fabricius Luscinus arrived to negotiate an exchange of prisoners. Pyrrhus had heard from Cineas that Fabricius was a good soldier and respected politician who was also relatively poor.⁸ Thus, when Fabricius arrived, Pyrrhus offered him “so much silver and gold that he would be able to surpass all the Romans who are said to be most wealthy.”⁹ Fabricius, we are told, responded to Pyrrhus by informing him that his assumption was incorrect. Though he did not possess great material wealth, Fabricius told Pyrrhus, he did hold the highest offices in the state, he was sent on the most distinguished embassies, he was called upon to publicly express his opinions on the most important issues, and he was praised, envied, and honored for his uprightness. The Roman Republic, he continued, provided everyone who goes into public service with honors more splendid than any possession. It also regularly made an account of the property of Romans and could easily find anyone who had become wealthy dishonorably. What good would it do, Fabricius supposedly concluded, for him to accept gold and silver when this would cost him his honor and reputation? How could he endure a life in which he and his descendants were wealthy but disgraced?¹⁰

Pyrrhus now understood precisely what sort of society he had decided to fight. The Roman Republic was simultaneously a powerful state and a frightened one that recognized it could not afford to lose any war it fought. It had a unique ability to build political consensus among leading Romans and Roman allies as well as a great capacity to mobilize armies of citizen soldiers to fight to defend it. It also possessed a powerful system of incentives that rewarded loyalty with honors that the Republic alone could generate. This was a state quite unlike anything that Pyrrhus had ever encountered—and quite unlike anything the world had ever seen. Its citizen armies looked inexhaustible, its aristocracy appeared indivisible, and its leaders seemed unbribeable. Pyrrhus had failed to beat the Romans quickly and he now understood that he could not defeat them through treachery. He had no choice but to fight on.

Pyrrhus would advance within a two-day march of the city of Rome in 280. He would win another costly battle against the Romans in 279. And he would then depart Southern Italy. As he left, he supposedly commented: “If we should win one more battle against the Romans, we will be totally destroyed.”¹¹ He would return to the Italian mainland and suffer a defeat at the hands of the Romans in 275 before leaving Italy for good and abandoning Tarentum to its fate. With the fall of Tarentum to the Romans in 272, the Republic finally and fully answered Appius Claudius’s call for vengeance.

The two speeches supposedly delivered by Appius Claudius and Fabricius to Pyrrhus and his envoys together illuminate the foundations of the Roman Republic. On its most basic level, the Republic provided a legal and political structure that channeled the individual energies of Romans in ways that benefited the entire Roman commonwealth. By the turn of the third century BC, the structures of the Republic had also evolved so that members of leading wealthy families (the nobiles, or, in English, the nobles) directed many of the collective and individual ambitions of the Roman people. The nobles usually came from famous families, but talented “new men” could break into their ranks as well. Regardless of their family background, these Roman nobles of the early third century agreed that virtue lay in service to Rome and that dishonor fell upon those who put their private interests above those of the Republic.¹²

As Appius Claudius understood, the dedication and achievements of Roman elites had made the city extremely powerful, but Rome sat uneasily atop the rest of Italy. The city did control nearly all of the peninsula south of the Po, but this control was based on an intricate web of alliances and military levies that provided Rome with its floods of soldiers. Allies continued to provide troops and citizens continued to turn up for military levies in large part because they believed that the Republic would win the wars it entered and would punish those who failed to fulfill their obligations to Rome. Any sign of weakness, however, would rebalance the equation. Allies might peel away, citizens might refuse to serve, and, because Rome lay on the western Italian coastal plain, an enemy that arrived in Italy could quickly advance on the city. Once fighting began, the structure of Roman power demanded that Rome fight until it won.

But Appius Claudius seems to have also understood that individuals are rarely moved by such larger strategic considerations for very long. This is why his appeal to his fellow Roman senators hinted at a much more powerful reason to resist Pyrrhus. Bravery in war defined a Roman man in this period and was often conspicuously displayed. A man who saved the life of a Roman citizen by killing an enemy was awarded the corona civica, a wreath of oak leaves that he could wear for the rest of his life during religious processions. The spoils he stripped from an enemy he killed in battle could be displayed in his home. And these honors also helped define who he was after his death. The sarcophagus of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, a consul in 298 BC, bore an inscription commemorating the offices he had held as well as his courage in capturing two Italian cities, subjugating the region of Lucania, and bringing back captives. The epitaph of his son, consul in 259, parallels that of his father by mentioning his own consulship as well as the fact that he “took Corsica and the city of Aleria.”¹³

This sort of honor did not just come from the conquest of cities. A eulogy given in 221 after the death of Lucius Caecilius Metellus celebrated him for being “the first to lead elephants in a triumphal procession” following his capture of them in the First Punic War. As Rome’s military victories spread beyond Italy, it became something of a custom among Roman elites to display impressive war spoils publicly in triumphs and semiprivately in the reception areas of their houses. Surrender to an adversary such as Pyrrhus simultaneously robbed individual Romans of the opportunity to excel through military service and diminished them all as cowards unwilling to do what was necessary to defeat an opponent. For individual Roman senators, these painful stings were more consequential than surrender’s implications for Rome’s grand military strategies, but the men who led the Republic in the third century also understood that their personal achievements had meaning only when they served the larger goals of Roman policy.¹⁴

The speech supposedly delivered by Fabricius highlights a different source of Roman strength. The wars of the early third century provided an arena for men to display their military virtue, but Rome offered far more to its citizens than simply a venue for military service. The Republic effectively monopolized the rewards that leading Romans most craved. Wealth mattered in Rome as it has in most societies before and since, but, as Fabricius suggested, it was not the most important factor in determining a person’s worth in Republican Rome. Romans of the third century instead judged each man’s merit by the offices he held, the honors he earned, and whether his achievements equaled those of his ancestors. The measure of a man was then largely a product of his activities in the military and political lives of the Roman state. Service was repaid with honor and, by the 280s, the Republic had come to completely control both sides of this exchange. The Republic dictated what sort of service an individual gave, it determined what sorts of rewards he would receive, and it paid these rewards out in a form of social currency that it alone controlled. Although the heirs of a figure like Fabricius would inherit a patrimony full of honors, a single dishonorable action could destroy all of the social capital that the family had spent generations building. And, as Fabricius reminded Pyrrhus, this particular form of Roman currency was not like gold or silver. It could only be earned through service to Rome.

The Republic’s ability to inspire political consensus and monopolize the rewards that mattered to Roman citizens grew out of a shared understanding that the Republic was a political system subject to no one but the community as a whole. Its decisions and rewards did not reflect the whims of a single master but the sentiments and decisions of the Roman community.¹⁵ This view of Roman political life was a relatively new thing in the 280s. Rome had only recently reached the end of a centuries-long political evolution that historians have come to call the Conflict of the Orders. The Conflict of the Orders was the process through which the patricians (a group that largely comprised Rome’s hereditary aristocracy) and the plebeians (a social order made up of everyone who was not a patrician) arrived at a system of government that preserved some patrician social and political prerogatives while also making plebeians eligible for the state’s highest offices.

The system arrived at by the 280s BC featured a complicated but elegant set of offices and procedures designed to protect this shared Roman liberty by encouraging political compromise, building durable consensuses, and ensuring the shared governance of the Republic. No written constitution governed it. The Republic instead functioned according to a combination of codified procedures and long-standing conventions that enabled influential patricians and plebeians to run public affairs with the approval of assemblies of citizens. The interaction between the elites who sought the highest magistracies in the state and the voters who elected them powered political life in the Republic, but the system had developed a set of checks and balances to make sure that neither elite ambition nor popular empowerment went too far. With the exception of the emergency office of dictator, only filled during times of acute crisis, all of the offices in the Roman state were paired—that is, occupied by two or more men simultaneously—and term-limited. The consulship, the highest regular office in the Republic, was held by two men for a one-year term. The consuls both had imperium—the authority to command armies. They also consulted the gods on behalf of the state, presided over three of Rome’s four assemblies, and called elections for the magistrates who would hold office the next year. Each consul had the power to veto the actions and initiatives of his colleague, a power that pushed consuls toward cooperation and consensus building.¹⁶

Roman nobles competed for other offices that ranked below the consulship. These included the praetorship, the next most esteemed regular office in the Republic and one that enabled its holder to perform judicial duties within the city of Rome.¹⁷ Praetors could exercise imperium outside of Rome as well, but they were required to give way to a consul in the event of a conflict. Below them were aediles, magistrates who monitored Rome’s markets and roadways, as well as quaestors, junior magistrates who managed the accounts. Like the consulship, these offices were held by both patricians and plebeians and offered notables from both orders the opportunity to prove themselves as they built a public career.

One major office was quite unlike these. The tribunes of the plebs had to be plebeians and were elected by the concilium plebis, an assembly made up exclusively of plebeians. The tribunate was a very old office whose origins perhaps date back to the very beginning of the Republic. The earliest tribunes claimed a sacrosanctity that made their person inviolate, and they used this inviolability to protect plebeians from patrician abuses by, in theory at least, physically standing between an abusive patrician and his plebeian target. As the Republic matured, tribunes came to function primarily as political agents who intervened for plebeians by opposing the actions or threats of patrician magistrates. The number of tribunes eventually grew from two to ten and their powers expanded to include a broad veto that could be exercised against other tribunes, any magistrate other than a dictator, and even the decrees of the Roman Senate. In addition to these powers to obstruct political actions, tribunes had the power to propose laws before the concilium plebis that bound all Romans, call assemblies, and schedule debates on policy issues. It is, then, not at all surprising that a number of noble plebeians used the tribunate as a launching pad to build popular support for eventual bids for higher offices.

The Republic had no formal political parties and, aside from tribunal vetoes and injunctions by high-ranking magistrates that prohibited more junior colleagues from acting in a certain way, the system had no easy way to discipline the ambition of nobles serving it in key offices.¹⁸ Whereas a government populated by ambitious nobles empowered to obstruct one another might seem like a recipe for permanent dysfunction, the assemblies and Senate, the other essential components of the Republican system, ensured that magistrates were indeed accountable if they proved ineffective or unresponsive. The Republic technically had four different assemblies, but one, the comitia curiata, had become effectively ceremonial by the third century. Its vestigial functions included tasks such as confirming adoptions and ratifying wills.

The other three assemblies played important and diverse roles in electing magistrates and passing legislation. The comitia centuriata had two main functions. It elected consuls and praetors and it was called to vote on declarations of war. Voting took place by polling the members of 193 centuries, each of which was made up of a class of people who had roughly the same amount of property. These divisions originated in the pre-Republican period, were based on the military equipment a citizen could afford to provide for himself, and gave the most votes to centuries made up of the equites (the Roman knights) and the wealthiest infantrymen. Those two groups together controlled nearly 100 of the 193 votes in the assembly, and the men belonging to the lowest property class in Rome all fell into a single century with a single vote. This meant that magistrates could not be elected in the comitia centuriata unless they commanded substantial support from Rome’s wealthier citizens. This presented a substantial barrier to third-century politicians who aimed to dramatically disrupt Roman political life.¹⁹

From the late third century until the end of the Republic, Rome’s two other assemblies, the popular assembly (which included all citizens) and the concilium plebis (in which only plebeians could vote), made legislation and elected aediles, quaestors, and tribunes. The main difference between the two assemblies seems to have been who summoned them. Consuls and praetors summoned the popular assembly, and tribunes summoned the concilium plebis.²⁰ Voting in both the popular assembly and the concilium plebis occurred according to tribes. By 241 BC, there were thirty-five tribes. Four of these were made up of citizens whose families were enrolled in the city of Rome. The other thirty-one rural tribes each represented a geographic area and were created as Roman control and citizenship expanded across Italy. Each tribe had a single vote in each assembly. The assemblies’ votes were held in Rome and, because there were four urban tribes and many more rural tribes, the votes of the few rural citizens who could travel to the city to vote as a part of their tribe were disproportionately important. In the early third century, these people were more likely to be wealthy, so, again, the voting system provided important structural buffers against political disruption by poorer Romans.²¹

Although the membership of the popular assembly and that of the concilium plebis largely overlapped, only plebeians could attend the concilium plebis. This gave it distinctive powers that the popular assembly lacked. Each year the concilium plebis elected the ten tribunes of the plebs who proposed the laws on which the assembly would vote. The tribunes also had the power to call public meetings (contiones) in which legislation was discussed. There was no discussion of policy when votes were actually cast; in the third century, voting in assemblies consisted simply of a citizen approaching the official recording the vote and announcing his choice either for a candidate in an election or regarding a proposed piece of legislation. The votes were then tallied according to tribe, and the majority within the tribe dictated that tribe’s one vote. The decision was then carried on the basis of what a majority of the tribes had chosen.

The laws approved by the concilium plebis were called plebiscites and, after 287 BC, they bound all Romans, even though only plebeians had a formal say in making them. In the third century, however, the plebeians who guided discussion and carried most votes tended, again, to be the same sort of reasonably wealthy establishment figures who naturally privileged stability and gradual reform over radical political change. The concilium plebis had the potential to push radical reforms onto all Romans, but, in the early third century, the nobles ensured that this potential remained largely unrealized.²²

The Senate represented the place from which most of the actions taken and laws made in the Republic originated. It officially served as a purely advisory body made up of former high-office holders, defined as “the best men of every order,”²³ and its formal powers were limited to conducting foreign policy and approving public expenditures of money. The Senate nevertheless exercised informal power over all major political, military, financial, and religious matters. Its words did not have the force of law, but these influential former magistrates could deploy tremendous social capital that gave current magistrates and everyday voters great pause before they defied its advice. Magistrates and assemblies usually acted as the Senate advised.

This combination of offices and assemblies created a finely balanced political system that promoted political consensus and punished those who disrupted it. Magistrates were notables who were elected by assemblies that, in the third century, were effectively controlled by their peers. Once in office, these noble magistrates were charged with implementing policies set by the Senate, a body populated by their older and more experienced peers, and by assemblies dominated by the men who had just elected them. At the end of their one-year term, they were also required to give account of their actions to the bodies that had elected and empowered them. If he wished, a magistrate could spend his entire term obstructing others or trying to disrupt the political system, but, at the end of the year, he would then be compelled to publicly acknowledge his lack of accomplishment before his social equals. He would also have to answer to a disappointed electorate should he ever decide to stand for office again.

Perhaps the most famous ancient discussion of the functioning of the Republic of the nobles comes in a history written in the mid-second century by the Greek author Polybius. Polybius wrote in part to explain to a Greek audience how the Romans, who did not fit neatly into a world divided categorically between Greeks and barbarians, had managed to defeat and conquer Carthage, Macedon, Sparta, Corinth, and many of the other old city-states on the Greek mainland by the 140s BC. And at the heart of his explanation was the idea that Rome succeeded because the consensus-building checks and balances of its constitution “made it irresistible and certain of obtaining whatever it determines to attempt.”²⁵

Polybius also argued that the true strength of a constitution became evident only in times of crisis. “The true test of a perfect man,” he wrote, “is his ability to bear violent changes of fortune with highmindedness and dignity. It is essential to examine the Republic in the same way.” For Polybius, military threats represented the clearest moments when quick and dramatic misfortune threatened Rome’s political equilibrium. Indeed, although Polybius’s narrative begins in the 260s BC with the outbreak of the First Punic War, he waited until after he described the Battle of Cannae (the third and greatest of Hannibal’s victories over the Romans, in 216 BC) to speak about the nature of Roman political life. Polybius claimed that he had not ever seen “a sharper or greater reverse than that which happened to the Romans at that moment.”²⁶

Although one can debate whether military defeats really offer the best tests of the resiliency of a political system, there is no denying Polybius’s basic premise that the threat of annihilation can amplify the positive or negative tendencies of a state’s political life. And Polybius is also generally right that, when faced with such reverses, the Roman Republic of the third century tended to rally together and remain resolute. Rome’s experience before, during, and after Hannibal’s march into Italy proves his point.

In the First Punic War, a conflict that began in 264 BC and that lasted for nearly a generation, Rome faced off on land and sea against a powerful Carthaginian adversary that it was initially uneager and ill equipped to fight. Carthage, a city in modern Tunisia roughly on the site of modern-day Tunis, sat on a natural harbor on the western edge of the narrow Strait of Sicily, which divides the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. Founded by Phoenicians as a trading colony, Carthage commanded one of the Mediterranean’s most advantageous commercial and strategic positions and soon grew into a prosperous and powerful city. By the third century BC, Carthage possessed the region’s most formidable navy, powerful mercenary armies, and an empire that extended from Spain to Sicily.

Historically, relations between Rome and Carthage had not been particularly tense. The two cities had long respected each other’s distinctive spheres of influence and, on occasion, had even cooperated militarily. This made the First Punic War something of a surprising development. In fact, this was a war that Rome seems almost to have stumbled into, with the Senate declining to recommend hostilities before the consuls asked the comitia centuriata to vote on going to war. Most of the fighting in the First Punic War occurred on Sicily and the seas around it. This put Rome at a significant disadvantage. Carthage not only controlled the eastern part of the island but also had a fleet of warships nearby. Rome, on the other hand, had no military presence in Sicily before 264 and, crucially, lacked both a significant navy and extensive experience fighting by sea. Indeed, the first large fleet of 120 ships that the Romans put to sea was built based on a prototype created by reverse-engineering a Carthaginian warship that had run aground in 261, well after the fighting had begun.²⁷

Having cutting-edge naval vessels and being able to fight with them were two different things, however. Naval warfare in the 260s involved hundreds of rowers, often manning five banks of oars, working in concert to maneuver a ship until it could smash a metal ram on its prow into the hull of an enemy vessel.

It took extensive training for the rowers of one ship to work effectively as a team; it was exponentially harder to get a fleet of 120 ships to work together when the sailors and commanders were inexperienced. The Romans responded creatively to this challenge by attaching a spiked gangplank to their ships that could grab onto an enemy ship, hold it in place, and allow Roman marines to board it. Although this innovative tactic enabled the Romans to win a major sea battle in 260 BC, the Carthaginians quickly found ways to blunt the effectiveness of this Roman technique. This compelled the Romans to expand their fleet until, in 256 BC, they were able to put 250 ships together to send an invasion force to Africa. The new ships allowed Rome to land an army in Africa, but the Roman invaders were repulsed and a storm off of Sicily destroyed nearly all of Rome’s ships in 255. When news of this disaster reached Rome, it “was taken greatly to heart,” but the Romans “did not decide to withdraw from the war but instead determined to build another 220 ships.”²⁸

2.1. Roman coin minted during the Second Punic War showing the prow of a warship and the bronze ram used to attack enemies (#41/11 in the standard catalog of M. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage [Cambridge, 1974]). Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

This new fleet was built in less than three months and put to sea in the summer of 254, but 150 of its ships were lost in another storm in the summer of 253. Another fleet that was built and equipped in 250 BC was destroyed by the Carthaginians at the Battle of Drepana in 249. Much of the fighting after Drepana consisted of inconclusive land battles in Sicily, but, by 242, it had become clear to Romans that the war could not be won unless their navy cut Carthage’s ability to resupply its forces in Sicily by sea. Polybius writes that “there was no money in the public treasury” to fund construction of a new fleet, in large part because the people would not consent to pay more taxes to build ships. Instead, “the ambition (philotimia) and patriotism of the leading men” provided the funds to pay for the fleet. Some backers were individuals, others were teams of a few men, but all paid as much as their means permitted to build and outfit a ship, with the promise that they would be repaid only if the expedition succeeded. Roman elites would gain the glory for this victory and, in 241, they did. The new Roman armada decisively defeated the Carthaginian fleet. Seeing that it lacked the resources to continue fighting, Carthage sued for peace.²⁹

In the First Punic War, Rome lost far more men and ships than Carthage, but the war ended when Carthage, which was much wealthier than Rome, found itself unwilling to bear the financial and military costs of continuing the fight. Rome’s incredible resilience in this conflict came from many sources, but one of the most potent was the way that Roman nobles competed to exceed one another in the service they provided their home city. The men who personally paid for ships in 242 BC did so because they were patriotic, but they also did so because the Republic repaid them handsomely with honor, the exclusively Roman currency whose value Fabricius had described to Pyrrhus. The resolution of the Roman nobles to keep putting resources into the fight against Carthage in the 250s and 240s, then, grew out of the same collective steadfastness and personal ambition that Appius Claudius urged and Fabricius described in 280.

The elite political consensus that prevailed during the final stages of the First Punic War seems to have frayed somewhat by the 230s. In 232, Gaius Flaminius, a tribune of the plebs, ignored senatorial and consular objections and pushed a law through the concilium plebis that distributed individual lots of land in Northern Italy to Roman citizens. Probably in part because of the popularity this earned him, Flaminius was elected consul for 223. The Senate tried to negate the election by arguing that it had occurred despite unfavorable omens, sending Flaminius a letter to this effect, but Flaminius refused to open the letter until after he defeated a Gallic tribe in battle. When the Senate then refused to vote him a public triumph in honor of the victory, the popular assembly did this instead. Flaminius was compelled by his opponents to resign his consulship before the end of the year and return to private life, but his supporters remained so influential that Flaminius was elected as censor in 220. It was while holding this office that Flaminius arranged for the construction of a racetrack (the Circus Flaminius) and the Via Flaminia, a major road linking Rome to its Northern Italian possessions.³⁰

Flaminius was a novus homo (a new man) whose ancestors had never held high office in the Republic. Many among the group of nobles who competed with one another for the consulship saw his populist appeal as an unseemly attempt to take honors and offices that were rightfully theirs. His ambition stressed the system, but he did not break it. And, despite the powerful reactions many nobles had to Flaminius’s behavior, the Republic provided a space in which he could nevertheless make meaningful and lasting contributions to the welfare of the city and its territory. The Republic was flexible enough to enable the nobles to powerfully and unequivocally express their disapproval of Flaminius while also permitting the people to enact his proposals and award him the offices and honors he desired.

This resiliency served Rome well as it again stumbled into war with Carthage in 218 BC. Whereas the First Punic War pushed Rome to its military and financial limits, Rome’s second war with Carthage posed a far greater threat to the Republic. The war began when the Carthaginian general Hannibal captured a Spanish city that had put itself under Roman protection, but Hannibal had been preparing for war with Rome for years before it came.³¹ Hannibal had learned both from the First Punic War and, in all likelihood, from the campaign journals that Pyrrhus had published after his encounter with Rome decades earlier. Hannibal understood that Rome would again outlast Carthage in war unless he was able to demoralize Romans and peel away Roman allies to such a degree that Italian unity shattered. Hannibal also understood that the only way to accomplish this was to take his army from Spain, march it into the heart of Italy, and defeat Romans on their home turf.³²

The Republic was slow to realize how much of a threat Hannibal’s plan posed. Rome never anticipated that Hannibal would take the fight to Italy, and its initial strategy involved mobilizing armies under the command of the two consuls, to be sent to Sicily and Spain. These armies were made up of levies of Roman citizens and allies. This process took time and, while Rome assembled its forces, Hannibal marched through what is now southern France. He crossed the Rhone before Roman forces could march to meet him, moved into the Alps, and appeared in Northern Italy by the late autumn of 218. Abandoning their plans to fight outside of Italy, the consuls of 218 instead fought two battles with Hannibal’s forces in the north of the peninsula, with Rome absorbing a serious defeat at the Battle of the River Trebia in December of 218 or January of 217.

Hannibal’s early victories created an odd dynamic in Roman political life. His forces were in Italy and represented a clear threat to Roman control of the Italian north, but they did not yet seem to pose an existential danger to the Republic. Indeed, it seems that Romans did not yet realize that they were facing one of history’s most gifted military tacticians. Instead of crediting the Carthaginian victories to Hannibal’s skill and, in particular, the tactical superiority of his cavalry, the Roman electorate blamed the incompetence of the noble consuls who had led the armies and, implicitly, the political consensus they represented. Consequently, in the consular elections for 217 BC, the disruptive populist Flaminius was voted into office for a second consulship.

Rome’s victory in the First Punic War made clear that the Republic of the third century BC had a remarkable ability to build and maintain political consensus during military emergencies. But neither Flaminius nor the Senate yet believed that Hannibal’s advance represented such an emergency. Both instead saw this situation as something similar to the Gallic advance that Flaminius had checked during his first consulship in 223. Indeed, Flaminius assumed that he would follow the same script. He therefore left Rome to join his armies before the Senate could again invent a religious objection to his taking control of them, a step that prevented Flaminius from performing the vows and sacrifices that a consul normally did on his first day of office.³³ Flaminius was betting that, as in 223, he could outrun domestic political opponents and neutralize them with a quick military victory over Hannibal. As a result, he again ignored a senatorial summons to return to Rome and led his forces north toward Hannibal.³⁴

Short-term domestic political competition seldom breeds good military strategy and, on a foggy morning during the spring of 217, Hannibal took advantage of Flaminius’s impatience. He lured the consul and his army into a trap beside Lake Trasimeno in Umbria. Hannibal had found a spot along the lake’s eastern shore where the hills receded slightly and formed a sort of natural amphitheater that trapped the spring fog that rose off of the lake. As Flaminius advanced along the narrow lakeshore, the thick fog prevented him from seeing that most of Hannibal’s forces waited in the hills above. When the consul led his army onto the flat lakeshore below, Hannibal pounced. Hemmed in by the hills to their north and the lake to the south, the Romans and their allies saw fifteen thousand men die in this battle, including Flaminius himself. Another ten thousand soldiers were taken captive and a reinforcement of four thousand cavalry was killed soon afterward.

The Romans responded by suspending the normal offices of the Republic and appointing Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator. Although consuls normally appointed dictators, the Senate and assembly agreed that the situation was so dire that they could not wait for Flaminius’s colleague to return to the city and do what custom demanded. Subsequent events would show that this was the right decision. A comfortable fixture of the political establishment, Fabius did not share Flaminius’s need to prevail quickly over Hannibal. Instead of confronting Hannibal, he began a strategy of shadowing the Carthaginian forces, attacking only when small detachments could be isolated from the main group, and rebuilding Roman morale. Although Fabius succeeded in preserving his forces, his strategy of delay not only earned him the unflattering nickname Cunctator (Delayer) but also permitted Hannibal to burn and pillage territory in Campania that belonged to Roman citizens. This unwillingness to act began to generate criticism within the army as well as popular discontent in Rome. As Fabius’s six-month term ended, a consensus again emerged that Hannibal must be confronted and defeated.³⁵

This led to catastrophe. Gaius Terentius Varro, a popular consul who had won election to the office by rallying people against Fabius’s strategy of delay, took the field in 216 with the largest army of Roman citizens and allies ever assembled. Perhaps numbering more than eighty thousand, these soldiers met Hannibal’s much smaller forces outside of the town of Cannae in the Southern Italian region of Apulia.³⁶ Recognizing that he could neutralize the Romans’ superior numbers by drawing them into a fight in close quarters, Hannibal created a crescent-shaped formation in his line of infantry that drew the Romans into a confined space. The rest of his forces then surrounded the Roman army on three sides, pushing the soldiers so close together that they could not move. The result was mass slaughter. Varro survived, but tens of thousands of Romans and allies died, including Varro’s co-consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the consul who had been selected to replace Flaminius following his death at Lake Trasimeno (Gnaeus Servilius Geminus), and Fabius’s former master of the horse (Marcus Minucius Rufus). With most of its troops dead or scattered, Rome itself now seemed vulnerable to attack by Hannibal.³⁷

Total panic enveloped the Republic. Working off of a contemporary report written by a senator who lived through these terrifying moments, the first-century historian Livy speaks of a frantic and chaotic scene in which patrician commanders talked of leaving the city to find refuge with a foreign king, the Senate met to organize a final defense of the city, and everyone struggled to get accurate information about what remained of the Roman army. Amid all of this, Fabius Maximus again stepped forward to calm the state. He ordered that any information about the surviving Roman forces and what Hannibal intended to do should be brought first to authorities in Rome. Families who wondered about the fate of loved ones were to wait in their homes for news and, if the news was bad, their mourning was to be done privately. He also ordered guards posted at the gates of the city so that no one could flee and suggested that it be made clear to all citizens within Rome that their best hope for survival was to remain behind its walls. Not long afterward, Roman religious authorities even tried to propitiate the gods by sanctioning the sacrifice of four people, an extraordinary ritual only repeated once more in the next seventeen hundred years of Roman history.³⁸

These radical measures would have attracted significant resistance under normal circumstances, especially since Fabius had proposed nearly all of them despite the fact that he held no office. But these were not normal circumstances. Fabius’s relative success in containing Hannibal during his dictatorship generated “unanimous support” for all of his proposals. The Senate then appointed a dictator and immediately began the extraordinary process of building four new legions and a thousand cavalry out of a mix of very young citizens, slaves purchased from their masters, convicts, and debtors. It also sent a message to Rome’s allies to marshal more troops to support Rome’s war effort.³⁹ Roman military policy would no longer be determined by time lines and objectives tied to the ambitions of individual consuls. Instead, the state had now come to a broad agreement that Fabius’s deliberate approach to Hannibal’s presence in Italy was the only viable response to Cannae.

Unfortunately, the defeats at Trebia, Trasimeno, and Cannae also upset the delicate balance that kept regional powers from challenging Rome. Over the next two years, the Roman system of alliances, colonies, and direct political control of Italian territory shattered. The perception of Roman weakness induced a number of cities in Central and Southern Italy to join Hannibal’s cause, in some cases by overthrowing pro-Roman local governments. Although many of these cities were in Southern Italy, the defection of Capua, Italy’s second largest city, stung particularly. Not only was Capua a mere hundred miles from Rome on the peninsula’s west coast but also, unlike many of the Southern Italians who turned to Hannibal, Capuans were Roman citizens. Capua’s embrace of Hannibal reflected a combination of frustration at the number of soldiers the city had lost in the recent fighting and a hope that Capua could fill the power vacuum in Italy that Rome’s seemingly imminent defeat would create.⁴⁰

The idea that Rome had now been dramatically weakened also encouraged non-Italian states to challenge it over the next two years. In 215, Hannibal persuaded King Philip V of Macedon to agree to a military alliance against Rome, a pact the Greek king signed in part because he hoped to take Roman possessions along the east coast of the Adriatic. Earlier that year, a force of Gallic invaders also entered Italy, killed the consul-elect, and destroyed his army. Then, in 214, hostilities with Macedon began and the great Sicilian city of Syracuse overthrew its pro-Roman king to side with Carthage.⁴¹

In these dark days, Rome again embraced the sentiments that Appius Claudius had so forcefully expressed before Pyrrhus’s envoys. It would not accept defeat in any theater of this sprawling war. Within Italy, the Fabian strategy of limiting Hannibal’s movements would be combined with a steady and withering effort to recapture and punish those cities that had defected to him. Though some significant Italian communities had joined Hannibal, many Roman allies still believed that Rome could prevail and relished the chance to take booty, territory, and privileges from Italian rivals whose loyalty had wavered. This meant that Rome still had a decided manpower advantage over the Carthaginians. And, whereas Hannibal needed to keep his army together to avoid being overwhelmed, Rome could field multiple armies, allowing them to attack a number of Italian cities at once.

What really distinguished the Roman response to these crises, however, was the Republic’s willingness to shift to what amounted to an ancient version of total war. While Rome fielded, on average, about four legions a year for most of the fourth century, the threats from so many fronts at once prompted a radical expansion of the number of men at arms. By 211, the Republic had filled twenty-five legions and deployed armies in Italy, Spain, Sicily, and Greece as well as two fleets positioned to guard against crossings of troops from Africa and Greece. This meant that perhaps 70 percent of the entire citizen population between the ages of seventeen and thirty had enrolled in the army. They did not sign up for a short stint either. Many of these recruits would remain in the army for the duration of the war; in the case of the survivors of Cannae, they were obliged to serve until Rome’s final victory. The Mediterranean world had never before seen a state with so large a population mobilize its citizens so completely.⁴²

Even more impressive than the Republic’s ability to form and supply such large armies of citizens was its ability to maintain political support for a war that required this level of sacrifice. And yet, for nearly a decade after Cannae, Romans allowed their sons to serve and entrusted the highest offices in the state to a narrow group of well-established generals. Fabius Maximus held three consulships between 215 and 209; M. Claudius Marcellus held three between 214 and 208, Q. Fulvius Flaccus was consul in 212 and 209. The gamesmanship that allowed Roman initiative to bounce from Flaminius to Fabius to Varro had ended. In its place stood an elite united in their desire to vanquish Hannibal, even if doing so meant subordinating their own political ambitions so that more experienced and capable men could command.⁴³

This unity of purpose made the Republic of the 210s uniquely adaptable. Traditionally, either consuls or praetors commanded armies, but, with twenty-five legions fighting across the Mediterranean, there were now more legions than magistrates who could command them. Furthermore, the distance from Rome to the battlefields in Spain or Greece was significant enough that a magistrate serving a one-year term would have little time to do much, after traveling to meet his armies, before his replacement would be selected. And, to make matters even more dire, the Roman economy, which was somewhat backward by Mediterranean standards before the war, had been profoundly shocked by Hannibal’s victories.⁴⁴ It was unclear both how Rome could continue to pay for so many armies and, in a world in which information moved only as fast as a human messenger, how it could organize commands across so many different regions. The old Republican conventions linking officeholders to specific commands could not be followed when Rome fielded so many armies in such far-flung places.

The Republic evolved rapidly to meet the needs of this sprawling war. The Senate coordinated military strategy and adjusted Roman political and financial processes so that its strategy could be executed properly. Consuls and praetors whose terms had ended were empowered by the Senate to continue to command armies far afield from Italy, taking on the titles of proconsul and propraetor. In some cases, private citizens also were given commands as proconsuls or propraetors.⁴⁵ Their terms were also extended to enable them to divine and respond to the particular situation in the military theater assigned to them. When money was short after the defection of many Roman allies after Cannae, the Senate relied on credit extended by its own members and other wealthy Romans to pay for the war. It also devalued Roman coinage in an effort to stretch what resources it did have. Then, after Rome began receiving influxes of precious metal from the capture of Syracuse in 212, the Senate pivoted again and remade the Roman monetary system so that it was based around a silver coin called the denarius; this addressed the inflation problem devaluation had caused. When this influx of precious metal proved inadequate to meet the expenses of the war, the Senate agreed to the sale of land confiscated following the reconquest of disloyal Italian allies.⁴⁶

Rome’s adaptability in these practical matters combined with a steadfast commitment to the broader military strategy it adopted after Cannae. The armies operating in Italy gradually peeled allies away from Hannibal, meting out draconian punishments for cities like Capua that resisted. Although Rome did make shows of force in Greece between 211 and 207, most of the fighting in Greece was outsourced to Greek allies like the Aetolian League. Although Rome tried to prolong the war, the Republic ultimately signed a peace treaty with Macedon in 205 after its allies lost their appetite to continue the fight. The campaign in Spain originally served merely to keep Carthaginian forces bogged down so that they could not reinforce Hannibal. As the campaign ground on, however, Roman successes under the young proconsul P. Cornelius Scipio undermined and ultimately eliminated Carthaginian control of the peninsula altogether.

The first serious questioning of Rome’s post-Cannae strategy occurred after Scipio victoriously returned from Spain in 206. Denied a triumphal procession on a technicality, the charismatic commander won the consulship for 205 with the unanimous support of all 35 tribes. Scipio then began pushing to be given a command to end the war by taking a Roman army to Africa, a proposal that attracted wide and enthusiastic support. But Scipio’s proposal seemed incredibly reckless to Fabius and the group of experienced senators who had managed the war since Cannae. Hannibal remained undefeated in Italy and, with no Carthaginian presence remaining in Spain, and Rome in control of the seas, the architects of the strategy to contain him cautioned that Scipio’s planned invasion seemed like another reckless attempt by an upstart to win glory for himself. When the Senate seemed inclined to accept the argument of Fabius and his allies that Hannibal should be defeated in Italy before anyone considered attacking Africa, Scipio hinted at the possibility of bringing the question before the popular assembly.⁴⁷ Ultimately, Fabius and his allies realized that they could not block Scipio from attacking Africa without unpredictably disrupting Roman political life. They relented, but on the condition that the disgraced veterans of Cannae (who the Senate seems to have viewed as essentially expendable) form the core of the army that Scipio would command. Then, as Scipio trained these men in the new and complicated tactics he had perfected in Spain, senatorial opponents sent a commission to investigate their fitness. Although the commissioners apparently expected that these troops could never be suitably prepared for battle, they instead left deeply impressed by their discipline.⁴⁸

Even as they erected obstacles to Scipio’s planned invasion, the Roman elite remained conscious of the need to project Roman unity during the last years of the war. As Scipio gathered and trained his invasion force, the Sibylline Books, a collection of prophecies that the state consulted in times of emergency, produced an oracle indicating that the foreign foe who had landed in Italy could only be dislodged if Rome brought the cult of the Anatolian goddess Cybele to the city.⁴⁹ The introduction of a foreign goddess could have been a source of major social friction, but the Roman nobles made sure that all factions of the city came together to greet Cybele—including, most notably, people connected to both Scipio and those in the Senate who opposed him. When the goddess’s statue arrived at the Roman port of Ostia, Scipio Nascia, a relative of the general, and Claudia Quinta, a member of a family whose long-standing hostility to the family of the Scipiones was well-known, both greeted it. They led a crowd of young women belonging to the city’s leading families who escorted the statue into the city. And, although Cybele represented a goddess who came from Asia Minor, the first priest of the cult, Marcus Porcius Cato, would later gain a considerable reputation for his fierce advocacy of Roman tradition. The introduction of the cult of Cybele was, then, a very public statement of Roman unity after the argument about Scipio’s planned African invasion.

In the end, Scipio’s invasion of Africa succeeded in ending the war. Hannibal was recalled to Africa after Scipio won a series of victories in 204, and Scipio ultimately defeated him when the two squared off at Zama in 202. Scipio then negotiated a peace treaty. Rome would retain the territory it took from Carthage in Spain, though Carthage itself would remain independent, ungarrisoned, and in control of the territory it possessed in Africa at the war’s outset. It would become a Roman ally, the size of its military would be severely restricted, and it could wage war only if Rome approved. Carthage was also required to pay an immense annual tribute in precious metals to Rome for the next fifty years.

This peace treaty helped to set the parameters of Roman public life for much of the next half century. When the war with Hannibal started, the Republic controlled territory only in Italy and its surrounding islands. It fielded perhaps four legions in any given year, its economy was underdeveloped, and agriculture depended heavily on small-scale cultivation. And the Republic had only minimal involvement with political affairs in Spain, Greece, or Africa.

The Second Punic War changed all of this. It required Roman soldiers to fight in theaters across the Mediterranean, and the conduct of such an expansive war compelled Rome to fundamentally alter both its relationship to other polities and the operations of its own government. Roman armies had campaigned on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, in Gaul, in Spain, in Sicily, and in Africa. Roman commanders and senators built military alliances with tribes in Spain, a league of city-states in Greece, and the kingdom of Numidia in North Africa. The number of legions under arms increased dramatically, as did the number of magistrates the Republic empowered to command armies. The rampant inflation during the early years of the war also forced the Republic to completely remake the Roman monetary system into one stabilized by the creation of the denarius that was supported, at least initially, by plunder taken from the capture of cities during the war. Once the fighting ended, however, Rome could neither demobilize nor dismantle the political and economic systems it had created to win it.

Rome could not pull back from the areas its forces had entered and it needed to maintain the economic, military, and political structures that allowed it to exert influence over them. The conquest of Carthaginian Spain meant that Roman administrators and soldiers now had to secure and govern territory on the peninsula. The need to protect this territory from attack by other Spanish tribes set off a series of grinding campaigns that led ultimately to the brutal conquest and pacification of the entire peninsula. Philip’s surprising declaration of war against Rome, the alliance Rome made with the Aetolian League, and the Republic’s failure to punish Philip drew Rome into Greek affairs and made the Republic extremely sensitive to any geopolitical changes that might increase the Macedonian threat. And, finally, although Rome maintained no military presence in Africa, the relationship with Carthage that the treaty had created ensured that Rome would remain involved in political affairs there as well.

Within Rome, the elite of the Republic continued to take to heart Appius Claudius’s idea that Rome must fight until it wins the wars it enters. They also embraced Fabricius’s notion that Roman ambition should be channeled toward honorable service as an officeholder and general rather than to the accumulation of wealth. Whereas the significance of these ideals seemed clear to Romans living through the war with Pyrrhus, their application became much more blurry in a world where wars did not always end, administrative appointments dragged on for many years, and conquest brought wealth as well as glory. As the second century dawned, leading Romans gradually grew to realize that elite ambition and competition were growing ever more heated at precisely the moment when the Republic was beginning to lose its monopoly on the social currency that mattered to these elites. The unity that the Republic displayed so prominently upon the arrival of Cybele would seem ever more illusory as the second century progressed.