The fruits of all these wars of conquest were varied. Sometimes the territory won became a Roman colony: the land was annexed, divided up and allotted to Roman citizens. Sometimes Rome came to an alliance with autonomous Italian communities, its basis being the agreement to come to each other’s military aid. Sometimes Rome conferred the privilege of citizenship (either with or without the right to vote), and in this instance, while these communities had two citizenships at once, they had also become absorbed into the Roman commonwealth. The language, customs and culture of the Romans were thus slowly spread throughout Italy.
All these forms of conquest demanded one thing: loyalty to Rome. That loyalty would create Rome’s greatest asset in building an empire beyond the perimeters of Italy – an endless supply of citizens and allies, and hence an endless supply of military manpower. In analysing the superior power of the Roman citizen militia over other armies of the Mediterranean, the Greek historian Polybius wrote: ‘. . . even if the Romans have suffered a defeat at first, they renew the war with undiminished forces. . . Since the Romans are fighting for country and children, it is impossible for them to relax the fury of their struggle; they resist with obstinate resolution until they have overcome their enemies.’4
In the fire of these wars of conquest, the military mindset and culture of the resilient Roman peasant-soldier was forged. The Roman consuls who wielded the power of imperium and led the campaigns were on a quest for glory, seeking to bring honour to the ancient family names of their more humble ancestors, the shepherds and farmers of Etruria and Latium. Above all, the character of the tough, unwavering peasant, in whose work there was no quarter for comfort or self-indulgence, was reflected in the Roman attitude to these wars. As they liked to see it, the conflicts were undertaken with pious respect for the gods, with integrity, honour and, above all, justice.
The war that completed Roman control of Italy in the south was sparked in 280 BC. The Greek city of Tarentum, on the heel of Italy, had sent out messages of defiance towards Rome. Indeed, fearing Roman expansion into their territory, the Greeks of Tarentum had called for military aid from overseas, and Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (in northern Greece) had agreed to help them. He had ideas for a western Greek empire of his own.
Furious at this impertinent show of disrespect from Tarentum, Rome wanted reparation for the so-called ‘insults’ levelled at it. Here was another opportunity to act in ‘self-defence’ and to requite what Rome considered its due. A new and very real Trojan War was beckoning. It was not now between the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas and the legendary Greek kings Agamemnon and Menelaus. This time it pitted their descendants, the ‘Trojan’ Romans against the Greek army of King Pyrrhus.
Tarentum was too far away from Rome for the meticulous rituals with which Roman priests now traditionally initiated hostilities. There was, for example, no time for the arrival of a herald-priest on the enemy’s frontier. Here such a man would bind his head with wool, call upon Jupiter as his witness that he came lawfully and piously, and announce that the ‘guilty’ party had thirty-three days to surrender.5 Neither was there time to ensure the favour of the gods by throwing a spear into the designated enemy’s territory. The Romans found an expedient solution to this problem, however. They forced a prisoner seized from Pyrrhus’s army to buy a small plot of land in Rome and the priests threw their symbolic spear into that.
Pyrrhus invaded Italy at the start of the campaigning season in 280 BC. In two brutal and bloody battles he successfully defeated the Romans. The Greek king, though, having seen so many of his soldiers slaughtered in achieving this success, was said to have remarked, ‘With another victory like this, we will be finished!’ (Hence our modern phrase ‘pyrrhic victory’.) By 275 BC, however, the Romans had turned their fortunes around. They defeated Pyrrhus at Beneventum near Naples, expelled his invading army, and were now free to consolidate their grasp over the rest of southern Italy.
With the ambitious Greek king Pyrrhus defeated, however, the Mediterranean world outside Italy had been forced to sit up and take notice. There was a new player in the region. Breaking over their seven hills, the waves of Aeneas’s Romans were now lapping at foreign shores. The power of Rome had arrived.
I
REVOLUTION
In 154 BC the grand public funeral of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a hero of the Roman republic, took place. His corpse was carried into the Forum dressed in the clothes of a triumphant generaclass="underline" the purple toga was covered in silver stars and accompanied by the rods and axes of office that befitted his exceptional career. The noblemen in the procession, unshaven as a mark of respect, wore black and their heads were veiled; the women beat their breasts, tore at their dishevelled hair and cut their cheeks with their fingernails in grief. There were also professional mourners in attendance, as well as dancers and mime artists imitating the dead man with exaggerated gestures. The most haunting feature of many men in the procession, however, was the funeral mask they wore, each one moulded from beeswax to an eerie likeness of Gracchus and his ancestors, each one faithful in colour and shape. In this way the men who wore them bore a striking family resemblance to the dead man now propped up on the speaker’s platform of the Forum before the onlooking rich and poor of Rome.
As the ancestral representatives of the family took their ivory seats on the platform, one of them delivered an oration celebrating the dead man’s achievements in life. There was much to commemorate. Gracchus had twice achieved the office of consul, the highest post in the republic, as well as the distinguished and influential office of former consuls, that of censor. As a soldier, he had led successful campaigns on behalf of the republic in Spain and Sardinia. For both of these he had been awarded a triumph, the name given to the famous procession in which a conquering general crossed the sacred limits of the city and returned to civilian life in Rome. Yet despite the achievements that had covered his name in glory, Gracchus was not reputed to be someone who looked to personal success. His funeral was a public celebration of one virtue above all. The Romans liked to think of him as having put the service of the republic before his own ambitions, for making the welfare of the Roman people his first and foremost guide. The funeral speech would therefore have had the same effect as the wax masks. It reminded the onlookers that ‘the glorious memory of brave men is continually renewed; the fame of those who have performed any noble deed is never allowed to die; and the renown of those who have done good service to their country becomes a matter of common knowledge to the multitude and part of the heritage of posterity’.1
But the renewing of Gracchus’s achievements, both through the masks of his family and the speech in his memory, had another, more specific function. It served as a reminder for his sons, grandsons and subsequent descendants to live up to those achievements. The desire to honour the glory of one’s father by emulating his success in the service of the republic, whether in war, empire-building or politics, was among the key motivations of the Roman aristocratic élite. It is easy to imagine that nowhere did this desire burn more brightly than in the heart of a nine-year-old boy, Gracchus’s son, also named Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.