Battle of Magnesia – 190 BCE. Roman Republican legionaries fighting against the Greek soldiers of the Seleucid Empire. Result of the battle was a great victory for the legionaries, leading to domination by Rome of the area which nowadays is the Turkish peninsula.
The Punic Wars which broke out for the third time in 148 BC, ending two years later with the destruction of Carthage, raises too many questions not to have become the subject of fierce polemic.
The key witness in the case is one of the best historians to have come out of Greece, Polybius. Born in Megalopolis in Arcadia in 210 or 205 BC, he was still only a child at the time of the battle of Zama (202) but he witnessed the fall of Carthage in 146 at the side of his friend P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. It was a strange twist of fate for this son of an influential politician of Megalopolis. In his youth, he had campaigned against Rome and for the freedom of the Hellenes, along with Philopoemen, ‘last of the Greeks’. It was as a result of this that Polybius had arrived in Rome in 167 as one of the thousand Achaean hostages deported to Italy after Pydna. But this exiled rebel was not only captured but captivated by the great city where he lived for sixteen years, being a frequent guest at the house of the Scipio family, whose devoted friend he became.
His Histories provide a narrative of events from 264, the date of the outbreak of the first Punic war (which figures in the introduction) to the catastrophe of 146. The account is all the more valuable, firstly since this well-informed writer was a man of great intelligence, anxious to take the broad view, and secondly since his experiences in Greece had led him to reflect on the phenomenon of Roman expansion. For him, the triumph of Rome was somehow decreed by destiny, the result of a kind of law of nature. So instead of opposing it, it would be more sensible to associate the destiny of Greece with it. He tried to convince both his compatriots and the Scipios, descendants of a glorious dynasty which was moreover already converted to Greek culture and its teachings.
Polybius’ work concentrates therefore on explanations for Rome’s imperial destiny. Among today’s western historians, with their increased sensitivity to the evils of imperialism and unjust wars, the debate is seen more in terms of apportioning responsibility for the long conflict from which Rome emerged thoroughly transformed. If the collapse of earlier agreements in 218 was Hannibal’s doing, was Carthage thereby guilty of starting the war? Was Roman imperialism merely a reply to Carthaginian imperialism? Let us agree with Polybius that by laying siege to Saguntum, in an area from which his treaty with Rome ought really to have excluded him, Hannibal knowingly provided a casus belli. But the Barca dynasty did not represent the whole of Carthage; while for all the prudence of Roman policy, there had been hawks in Rome pressing for action since before the first Punic war. Was the fleet assembled at Lilybaeum there for purely defensive purposes? If it had set sail before Hannibal had attacked, would Rome then be the guilty party? In any case, war was nothing new in 218, it was simply breaking out afresh. When the Romans occupied Messina in 264, they had done so in spite of their treaty of friendship signed with Carthage in 306. In short, is it reasonable to single out any one act of hostility as carrying unilateral responsibility, when this conflict was so clearly predestined on the map of the known world?
We may conclude that the sea was simply not big enough to hold both Rome and Carthage: that they were on an inevitable collision course, fuelled by mutual distrust. The Barca dynasty, who seem to have hesitated, might possibly have consented to remain masters of Spain, without further aggression, if Rome had been willing to live with that. For Hannibal, the war was a risky, even a desperate throw of the dice. It was a miracle that his family in Spain had succeeded, in the short space of fifteen years, in creating an army of 60-70,000 men. But Rome had more than twice as many at its command. To dispatch the Punic army overland to distant Italy was an act of folly. Before it ever got there, it had lost half its men. After Trebbia, Hannibal’s soldiers had had to take to the hills to escape, ending up strung out along thirty kilometres or so of difficult mountain passes in the Apennines.
Hannibal had counted on a simultaneous uprising against Rome by the imperfectly subjugated Italian peninsula. He was right about the Celts, but almost entirely wrong about the Etruscans, the Samnites and above all the Greeks, who in the end preferred Rome to their long-standing enemy, Carthage. There was secession in Tarentum and Syracuse, it is true, and Hannibal had a master-plan which involved bringing in Macedonia under Philip V. But the latter’s army did not even reach the Adriatic.
Hannibal’s only hope lay in the comparative lack of experience of the Roman leadership. Unfamiliar with the Greek style of warfare employed by Hannibal, the Romans only slowly shed their old-fashioned ways, in some kind of ‘psychological about-turn’ which may have been the secret of their revival. Rome thus gradually created its own form of ‘modern’ warfare, one that was not simply imitated from the Greeks, since it was based on far more solid foundations than Hannibal’s strategy – which was in the end that of a brilliant condottiere. Rome refused to engage in the Hellenistic form of sportsmanship which meant that after suffering a single defeat, one immediately conceded victory without further resistance.
The tragedy of 146 bc
After the second Punic war, Carthage had been stripped of everything, even Africa. Its territory now stopped at the Numidian frontier; its currency (50,000 talents in reparations exacted over fifty years) and its fleet seemed to be irremediably stricken. Yet it continued to trade, developing its rich resources of vines and olives. Its agricultural exports were detrimental to the interests of the large Italian landowners, while its capacity for renewal revived all the old Roman fears: delenda est Carthago.
A war between Carthage and Massinissa, the Numidian king, provided the pretext for a Roman expeditionary force. It encountered fierce resistance, but Carthage eventually succumbed to the legions of Scipio Aemilianus (Africanus). The city was burnt, razed to the ground and the salt of sterility scattered over its smoking ruins. A quarter of a century later, Caius Gracchus set about restoring the stricken city, which once again flourished in the time of Caesar and Augustus. But Roman Carthage would never remotely resemble the astonishing Punic capital of old.
The Levant: a prey long pursued
As early as 200 BC, after the battle of Zama, it was predictable that Rome would probably capture the eastern sector of the Mediterranean. Being dependent on the sea, this zone was likely to fall into the hands of any power with maritime supremacy. All the great cities of the east were seaports: Alexandria in Egypt; Rhodes, at the time an unrivalled trade and financial centre, where money was cheap to borrow, 8 per cent compared to 24 per cent in Alexandria; Antioch, a caravan city but only a short distance from the coast, and thus able to attract the Seleucid Empire westwards; Pergamum, which with Byzantium stood guard over the Bosphorus; Corinth, still an important centre; and Athens, soon to become so once more. In the west by contrast, the sea was controlled by a single city which wielded enormous power once Carthage had been eliminated.
The outcome was the welding together of the eastern and western basins of the sea, two independent universes as a rule oblivious of each other. It is true that the welding process – in other words the formation of the Roman Empire – was to call for a sequence of events which hardly strikes one as logical. If the operation proved so troublesome, perhaps it was less ‘natural’ than it might seem in retrospect? It certainly took time. The first blow struck for Roman expansion, the outbreak of the second Macedonian war, occurred in 200; the last came in 61 (the conquest of Syria) and 31 (the late, or rather postponed reduction of Egypt to the status of a Roman province). From 200 to 31 BC, from Scipio Africanus to Augustus, the chronological span is almost two centuries.
This slow pace, indicative of delays of other kinds, is probably explained in fact by the difficulty Rome was experiencing in becoming the economic centre of the sea. The threads of a Mediterranean-wide network did not automatically come together around Rome. Delos was transformed by Roman policy in 167 into a free market for slaves and wheat, in competition with Rhodes, but Italian businessmen did not appear there in any numbers before 125 or even 100. The port of Puteoli near Naples, intended for the Levant trade, did not become prosperous until the late second century BC. And it was not until Attalus III, king of Pergamum, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133 BC (the future province of Asia was created in 129) that the predatory publicani (tax-farmers) descended on it like vultures. So it should not be assumed that the Mediterranean was quickly unified to Rome’s advantage. We should not set too much store by such scraps of information as the odd shipment of wheat from Egypt to Rome in 210, or from North Africa to the Aegean in the 170s, or the spread of piracy in the Levantine seas early in the second century, corresponding to increased recruitment of slaves for Italian buyers.
In general, it is true that from west to east, from Rome to the Parthian kingdom of Bactria, price fluctuations, credit rate changes, financial trends and even social disruption (according to F. M. Heichelheim), tended to echo one another over an increasingly wide area. But this was only a very general tendency. Different economic situations prevailed, even in neighbouring areas: what happened to Syria under Antiochus III was not the same thing as the violent deterioration of Egypt under Ptolemy. And if an overall pattern was eventually to dominate the Mediterranean economy, our best guess is that this did not happen before 170, 150 or even 130 BC.
The east digs its own grave
In about 200 BC, the Hellenistic world, i.e. the eastern Mediterranean under Greek domination, was neither a house threatened with ruin, nor the glorious realm described by U. Kahrstedt. It certainly possessed the best institutions, combining despotism and ‘enlightenment’, the comparative independence of the city-states and the advantages of vast territorial kingdoms. It is also true that a money economy was thriving within it, and that it enjoyed immense accumulated wealth, a high standard of living and a densely settled population. But to say that it was on the verge of being the promised land, in other words a form of capitalism about to take industrial form, and moving away from a slave-based regime, is much more doubtful. It is also far from clear that the non-achievement of such an industrial revolution is to be laid at the door of the Roman ‘barbarians’, even if they did indeed bring with them much destruction, torture and pillage.
The division of Alexander the Great’s inheritance among three powers, Syria, Egypt and Macedonia, led almost immediately to a series of wars, punctuated by short-lived alliances and unprecedented violence of the worst kind, namely civil war. In the early third century b c, some kind of balance between on the one hand the weighty power of Egypt and on the other the fast-expanding cities of Rhodes, Miletus and Ephesus, and the revival of commerce in the trading posts on the Black Sea had probably created a thriving north-south axis. Taking advantage of the divisions of the ‘big three’, lesser states had then sprung up, such as the kingdoms of Pergamum, Bithynia, Pontus, Armenia and Bactria, alongside brilliant cities like Rhodes and the clusters of towns in Crete and Cilicia, where piracy flourished. But by the end of the third century, Egypt’s power had suffered serious damage, both internally and externally: externally as a result of the crisis brought by the second Punic war, which may have slowed down silver shipments eastwards and which certainly deprived Egypt of the immense markets of Italy, Sicily and Carthage itself; and internally, since Egypt’s victory over Syria at Raphia had been achieved only with the help of native Egyptian levies (i.e. troops that were not Greek). As a result, internal disturbances (national, colonial, even racial) convulsed Egypt, which now became the ‘sick man’ of the Middle East. This weakness and the consequent power vacuum encouraged an aggressive policy by Philip V of Macedonia and Antiochus III, one characterized by hasty and ruthless offensives.
Roman brutality
This situation explains to some extent the short-term brutality employed by Rome. Roman policy took advantage of having only two great powers to deal with in the Near East (Macedonia and Syria, both of them fragile) in order to eliminate as quickly as possible the potential danger they represented.
The origins of the second Macedonian war, 200-197, in which Rome became embroiled when the Punic war was scarcely over, remain obscure. It seems unlikely that the Senate simply took fright at the improvised alliance between Philip V and Antiochus III, or that the urgent, desperate embassies from Pergamum, Rhodes and Athens were sufficient motive to send armies out into a distant conflict which could easily have been avoided, since Macedonia was trying hard not to infringe the clauses of the 205 treaty binding it to Rome. The question is better understood from the viewpoint of Roman politics: the imperialism which had flexed its muscles during the struggle with Carthage was gaining strength. The major actors of the first Macedonian war, P. Sulpicius Gallus or M. Valerius Laevinus, were not alone in wishing to return to the fray. A kind of ‘military professionalism’ had comeinto being, in which the lure of spoils, an obsessive desire for glory and the consequences of over-investment in the military all played their part. All wars that come to an end raise the problem of demobilization, and Rome had plenty of soldiers for whom it was hard to find suitable employment.
The legions, excellently commanded and trained for ‘modern’ warfare, were an irresistible force, particularly since the eastern powers, failing to learn from past experience, did not update their armies. Perhaps it is always the fate of highly civilized countries to be a war or two behind their less refined opponents. At Cynoscephalae, Philip V’s army was made to look somewhat ridiculous. Macedonia was cut down to size on this occasion and underwent another humiliation: Flaminius’ proclamation of Greek independence at the Isthmian Games of 196 gave back the Greeks their freedom, including that of indulging in petty squabbles. In 194, the legions left the Balkans. After so much pillage, extortion and killing, who would now dare rise against Rome? Then in 190, backed by the Pergamenes and Rhodes, the Scipios triumphed at Magnesia ad Sipylum over the much larger army of Antiochus III, driving that magnificent and ambitious ‘Sun King’ back across the Taurus.
Some twenty years later in 167, Rome had a similar walkover against Perseus, successor to Philip. V. L. Aemilius Paulus, the son of the consul defeated at Cannae, provided another demonstration of unfailing Roman superiority, on the field of Pydna. His triumph back in Rome displayed untold riches, the spoils of quite atrocious pillage. This time, the Macedonian monarchy and indeed Macedonia itself were wiped from the land of the living.
The trend is reversed
Such a Blitzkrieg with its attendant looting was possible only because of a degree of economic prosperity. A vanquished power had to have enough resources to recover, before it was worthwhile for warfare and looting to start up again. This was what happened in the first third of the second century BC. The economic climate remained favourable, any damage or financial losses were quickly made good and war indemnities, however crippling, were paid. Even Egypt, which had witnessed some frightening devaluations of the order of ten to one, and had had to issue copper currency, managed to recover after this bloodletting.
After 170, however, came a recession. Wheat prices were catastrophic, the standard of living fell and social unrest spread like leprosy, reaching even the distant conquerors, Rome and Italy. It must be conceded that politics was partly responsible for this sequence of upheavals. But the economic downturn also played a part. War became even more savage. Macedonia rose up and was promptly reduced to a Roman province; the policeman had come to stay (148 BC). When Greece rebelled in turn, it was savagely punished and an example was made by destroying Corinth, almost gratuitously, in the very year of the sack of Carthage. Greece too was reduced to being a Roman province in 146, and when Attalus died, his kingdom was bequeathed to Rome, becoming the province of Asia in 129.
