Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (46 page)

Caesar became dictator through force of arms. His exceptionally

long and spectacularly successful command in Gaul had turned his

army into a ferociously efficient fighting force and created an intensely

personal bond between soldiers and commander. Without this he could

not have seized and held on to power. Yet his victory in the civil war was

not inevitable. Pompey had huge resources at his disposal and had long

been acknowledged as Rome’s greatest general. The precariousness

of reputation—
auctoritas
, for the Romans—is shown by the ease with

which Caesar’s new achievements rivaled and then surpassed Pompey’s

past successes in the popular imagination. Few politicians would doubt

the need to stay in the headlines, or that respect for achievements can

rapidly fade or be pushed aside by newer stories. If anything, the pace

of the modern world and the modern media have sped up the process.

(For some, there may be the comfort that their mistakes and scandals

can also be forgotten faster.)

Much has changed, and few modern leaders, at least in the West,

could match Caesar’s battlefield achievements. That does not mean

that even in our societies, military glory (even if we would not use the

word) cannot be transferred to political advantage. Yet it remains, as

always, a precarious thing. Military failure, whether perceived or real,

can be damaging. Leaders like Napoleon and Caesar who base their

rise on military glory need to keep refreshing this glory with more

victories if their popularity and their grip on power are not to fade.

Caesar was a military dictator, but his behavior was moderate. One of

the more depressing lessons from this period of history is that it was

the far more ruthless Augustus who was able to hold on to power for

more than forty years and ended up dying in his bed.

Further Reading

The primary sources for Caesar’s career and campaigns must begin with his own
Com-

mentarii
on the conflicts in Gaul and the civil war. The additional books (book eight of

224 Goldsworthy

the
Gallic Wars
and the
Alexandrian War
,
The African War
, and
The Spanish War
, completing the
Civil Wars
) provide a slightly different perspective on his behavior. Cicero’s

extensive writings provide a great deal of material on Caesar and attitudes toward

his behavior. The biographies of Plutarch and Suetonius contain much material not

mentioned elsewhere, and both Dio and Appian supplement these works. All of these

sources must be used with some caution, since Caesar was a highly controversial figure

during and after his lifetime.

The modern literature on Caesar is extensive. Good starting points are offered by

Mattias Gelzer,
Caesar
, trans. Peter Needham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1968), Christian Meier,
Caesar
, trans D. McLintock (New York: Basic Books,

1996), and Adrian Goldsworthy,
Caesar: The Life of a Colossus
(New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2006). Almost a century after its publication, T. Rice Holmes’s
Caesar’s

Conquest of Gaul
, 2nd ed. (1911), continues to provide one of the most thorough discus-

sions of the Gallic wars.

Lawrence J. F. Keppie’s
The Making of the Roman Army
(London: Batsford; Totowa,

NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1984) is one of the best and most accessible surveys of its

development in this period. Also of interest are Emilio Gabba,
The Roman Republic, the

Army and the Allies
, trans. P. J. Cuff
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-

nia Press, 1976), Jacques Harmand,
L’armée et le soldat à Rome de 107 à 50 avant nôtre ère

(Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1967), and Richard Edwin Smith,
Service in the Post-Marian Roman

Army
(Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 1958). Nathan S. Rosenstein,

Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Re-

public
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), is useful on the

behavior expected of a Roman commander in battle, and there is further discussion of

this in Adrian Goldsworthy,
The Roman Army at War 100 bc–ad 200
(Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1996), 116–70. The collection of papers in
Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter: The War

Commentaries as Political Instruments
, ed. Kathryn Welch and Anton Powell (London:

Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 1998), includes a number of useful discus-

sions of Caesar’s presentation of his campaigns in the
Commentarii
.

notes

1 Suetonius
Caesar
30.4.

2 Pliny
Natural History
7.92.

3 Cicero
Letters to Atticus
7.11.

4 Plutarch
Sulla
38.

5 For a discussion of Caesar’s early career, see Adrian Goldsworthy,
Caesar: The Life

of a Colossus
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 65–66, 148–50, 185; Christian

Meier,
Caesar
, trans. David McLintock (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 99–189; and Mat-

tias Gelzer,
Caesar
, trans. Peter Needham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1968), 21–24, 28–29, 61–63.

6 Sallust
Catiline
54.4.

7 Peter Wiseman, “The Publication of the
De Bello Gallico
,” in
Julius Caesar as Artful

Reporter: The War Commentaries as Political Instruments
, ed. Kathryn Welch and Anton

Powell, 1–9 (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 1998).

The General as State 225

8 For the importance of rivers, see David Braund, “River Frontiers in the Environ-

mental Psychology of the Roman World,” in
The Roman Army in the East
,
ed. David

Kennedy,
JRA Supplementary Series
18 (1996): 43–47.

9 Caesar
Gallic War
4.38.

10 Plutarch
Cato the Younger
51; Suetonius
Julius Caesar
24.3; with Gelzer,
Caesar,
130–

32, and Meier,
Caesar
,282–84.

11 On Caesar’s diplomacy, see the discussion in Goldsworthy,
Caesar
, 315–17.

12 See, e.g., the career and eventual execution of the chieftain Acco, Caesar
Gallic

War
6.4, 44.

13 Dio 40.41.1, 3.

14 Caesar
Gallic War
8.49.

15 For rumors, see, e.g., Caelius’s report to Cicero, in Cicero
Letters to His Friends

8.1.4.

16 On the army in this period, see F. E. Adcock,
The Roman Art of War under the Repub-

lic
, Martin Classical Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940); Peter

A. Brunt,
Italian Manpower, 225 bc–ad 14
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Peter

Connolly,
Greece and Rome at War
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981); Emilio

Gabba,
The Roman Republic, the Army and the Allies
, trans. P. J. Cuff
(Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); Lawrence Keppie,
The Making of the Ro-

man Army
(London: Batsford; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1984); Jacques Har-

mand,
L’armée et le soldat à Rome de 107 à 50 avant nôtre ère
(Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1967); and

Richard Edwin Smith,
Service in the Post-Marian Roman Army
(Manchester, UK: Univer-

sity of Manchester Press, 1958).

17 On discipline, see Suetonius
Caesar
65, 67; Plutarch
Caesar
17; on the importance

of the general as a witness to behavior, see Adrian K. Goldsworthy,
The Roman Army at

War, 100 bc–ad 200
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 162–63.

18 See, e.g., the case of Cicero’s client Trebatius, in Cicero
Letters to His Friends
7.5, let-

ters to Trebatius,
Letters to His Friends
7.6–19; Cicero
Letters to His Brother Quintus
2.15a, 3

for quotation; see also Gelzer,
Caesar
, 138–39; on plunder, see Catullus 29.

19 Suetonius
Caesar
24.

20 On promotions of centurions for gallantry, see
Gallic War
6.40; Suetonius
Caesar

65.1; on centurions’ command style and heavy casualties, see Goldsworthy,
The Roman

Army at War
, 257–58, see Caesar
Gallic War
7.51,
Civil War
3.99; on the competition to show conspicuous valor and win promotion or reward, see
Gallic Wars
5.44, 7.47, 50;

Civil War
3.91.

21 The eagle bearer of the Tenth: Caesar
Gallic War
4.25; the Sambre: see Caesar

Gallic Wars
2.25.

22 On Scaeva, see Suetonius
Caesar
68.3–4; Appian
Civil War
2.60; Dio mentions a Scaevius who served with Caesar in Spain in 61 BC, Dio 38.53.3. For the
ala Scaevae

CIL
10.6011 and comments in J. Spaul,
ALA2
(1994): 20–21. For the social status and levels of education among centurions, see J. N. Adams, “The Poets of Bu Njem: Language,

Culture and the Centurionate,”
Journal of Roman Studies
89 (1999): 109–34.

23 Ronald Syme,
The Roman Revolution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 70, 78–79; on

the execution of unruly soldiers, see Dio 43.24.3–4.

24 Suetonius
Caesar
77, 86.

226 Goldsworthy

10. Holding the Line

Frontier Defense and the Later Roman Empire

Peter J. Heather

According to an analysis first offered by Edward Luttwak in

the mid-1970s, the Roman Empire consciously moved from a fron-

tier policy based on expansion to one based on defense in depth from

the Severan era at the start of the third century AD. From this point

on, its military effort was directed toward strategically planned belts of

fortifications designed to absorb small-scale threats, backed by mobile,

regionally based field armies held in reserve and carefully placed to deal

with larger-scale incursions.1 In the summer of 370, for instance, some

Saxon raiders used ships to avoid the frontier defenses of the northern

Rhine and landed in northern France. Substantial raiding followed, un-

til the local Roman commander gathered sufficient heavy cavalry and

infantry units to ambush and destroy the now unsuspecting Saxons,

who had been lulled into a false sense of security by a truce that osten-

sibly permitted them to withdraw unharmed.2 This is a textbook ex-

ample of the kind of frontier strategy Luttwak identified, but on closer

inspection, and despite the continuing influence of his work, which

has remained solidly in print for more than thirty years, his analysis is

substantially mistaken.

For one thing, while successive moments of energetic activity along

the frontier are detectable in the archaeological record, some of which

affected the many thousands of kilometers separating the mouth of

the Rhine from that of the Danube, campaigns and fortress building

can sometimes be shown to have had rather more to do with inter-

nal political agendas than with rational military planning. Keeping the

barbarians at bay was the fundamental justification for the large-scale

taxation of agricultural production that kept the empire in existence.

Not surprisingly, emperors liked to show the landowners, who both

paid and levied these comparatively vast sums of annually renewable

wealth, that they were tough on barbarians, and tough on the causes

of barbarism. In the 360s, for instance, the brother emperors Valentin-

ian I and Valens built fortresses energetically on the empire’s Rhine and

Danube frontiers to make the point that they were taking proper care

of the empire, even though the policy broke some agreements with

frontier groups that were currently peaceful.3 Valentinian also unilater-

ally lowered the annual subsidies being paid to some Alamannic leaders

on the Upper Rhine, in order to be able to claim that he did not buy

peace from barbarians.4 Both lines of policy were highly irrational in

terms of maintaining frontier security, because they actually provoked

disturbances, but the emperors’ internal political agendas came first.5

Offensive warfare likewise had not come to end, more or less at the

end of the third century, because of any carefully planned, strategically

informed decision making, based on the rational analysis of the capac-

ity of the empire’s economy to generate sufficient forces to defend its

existing assets. Rather, further attempts at conquest had slowly run out

of steam on all of Rome’s frontiers on a much more ad hoc basis when

it became all too apparent that the fruits of conquest—usually mea-

sured in terms of the glory generated for individual rulers rather than

any rational, strategically minded cost-benefit equation—ceased to be

worth the effort.6

Politicians’ egos and internal political agendas have long interfered

with rational military planning, however, and it should come as no

great surprise that this was also true in the ancient world. Arguably,