The Classical World (42 page)

There was scope for struggle on each of these points, but the most likely dangers lay with initiatives from within the upper class. A prominent Roman might break rank with his own class and, in order to be dominant, appeal for support to the lower orders. Manlius, the hero against the Gauls, was accused of such a tyrannical tactic. As riches were never static within only a few families, there was also tension in the upper levels of society over the distribution of privileges: within the growing ranks of the rich, who was to be eligible for magistracies and the Senate? Gradually, the noble patricians gave ground in order to preserve a united ruling class, but not because the poor as a class rose against them on this issue.

Historians formerly tended to see the struggling Rome of this era as out of touch with the main Greek world. Nowadays, the opposite is emphasized, with good reason. Indeed, there were acute food shortages, but they caused Romans to look outwards and send envoys to south Italy and Greek Sicily. There were wars with the migrant Gauls and others, but in 396
BC
the spoils of a Roman victory over nearby Veii were sent to Greece to be dedicated at Delphi: the intermediary was Massilia (Marseilles), an important western Greek contact of Rome who had her own ‘treasury’ already on the site.
⁴
In the 340s this same Delphic oracle was said to have been consulted by Romans in their own right and to have told them to put statues of two famous Greeks, the ‘wisest’ and the ‘best’, on their designated space for public meetings. The wisest Greek was Pythagoras (well known in south Italy and Tarentum), and the bravest Greek was Alcibiades the Athenian
aristocrat (known for his actions in Sicily and at Thurii in south Italy).
⁵
Thenceforward, the images of these two Greeks are said to have looked down on Roman public business.

In the 320s the wars of Alexander and of the Successors were marginal to the Romans, although they did probably send an embassy to the great man in Babylon. Much more important were their dealings with Carthage. Since the late sixth century a series of treaties had regulated the two powers’ access to one another’s spheres of interest. These treaties prove that ‘struggling’ Romans were certainly not cut off from interest in north Africa, either.
⁶

Each of these foreign outlets (south Italy, Sicily, Carthage and mainland Greece) were to attract Roman troops within a single lifetime, in a remarkable burst between the 280s and the 220s
BC
. But the prelude was remarkable too. Between the 360s and the 280s the Romans sorted out most of their political tensions and became dominant among the Latins who surrounded them. They also extended their power into the rich hinterland of the Bay of Naples (from 343 onwards) and even to Naples itself (in 326). A setback at the Caudine Fosks (321
BC
) against a Samnite ambush was promptly avenged (320
BC
). In 295 they won a huge battle up at Sentinum in Umbria which confirmed their growing power to the north. The battle was even mentioned by a distant Greek historian, Duris of Samos.
⁷

This surge up and down Italy occurred in what was the single lifespan of the Macedonian Ptolemy, friend of Alexander and founder of the royal line in Egypt. Ptolemy is most unlikely to have even mentioned Rome in his history of Alexander: the great Greek minds in his contemporary Alexandria were moving on a totally different level to that of the Romans. The Roman expansion was the work of people who had no literature and as yet, no formal art of oratory. At Rome, Homer was still unknown and Aristotle would have been completely unintelligible. The great arts of the most classical Greeks, thinking, drawing and democratic voting, were not talents of the Romans. Nonetheless, plain blunt Romans reformed their army and gave up their ‘hoplite’ style of tactics, arguably in the 340s–330s, the years of further concessions by the noble patricians to the non-nobles.
⁸
They also broke up the political league of their Latin neighbours and imposed settlements on its member-states one by one.

This decade (348–338
BC
) is therefore of crucial importance to ancient history. In Macedonia, King Philip, Alexander’s father, was balancing and training a new Macedonian army with a new type of tactics. In Italy, Romans were also undertaking a military revolution. It resulted in three main ranks of infantry being combined in a flexible formation and being equipped with heavy throwing-spears and swords. The two resulting types of army would dominate the East and West respectively, before clashing decisively in the 190s
BC
; the Romans’ greater flexibility won the encounter, and the tactics of this time remained the backbone of her world-conquering armies for centuries. In 338
BC
, a cardinal year, Philip had conquered the Athenians and their Greek allies and then imposed a ‘peace and alliance’ which marked a decisive limit on political freedom in Greece. In this same year, Rome imposed long-lasting settlements among the neighbouring Latins. She did the same elsewhere in Italy, in the towns then and later who submitted to her. The various grades of citizenship which she offered to these Italian towns were also to have a long, important future. They became a blueprint from which the Romans’ relations with towns throughout their Western Empire later developed.

These years of Roman struggle occurred outside the course of politics in the Greek world, but the major themes of justice and luxury were as prominent in Romans’ public life as ‘freedom’. The older Roman framework of public justice had been relatively simple. Much was left to self-help and privately initiated prosecution, but according to the Twelve Tables (in 451
BC
), a few major crimes, including murder and theft, would also be prosecuted before one of the magistrates.
⁹
In 367
BC
a major change was made to the magistrates available. A separate ‘praetor’ was introduced besides the two consuls. Thereafter Roman praetors became major overseers of justice. Their edicts while holding office were to have a fundamental impact on Roman law; praetors did not legislate, but they did grant legal actions for a far wider body of civil cases than the Tables had specified. Successive praetors took over previous praetors’ edicts which thus grew by gradual additions; the edicts filled in gaps in the civil law, becoming the ‘Roman equity’ of later legal thinking.

Within this growing framework, Roman justice was still heavily conditioned by social relations and by wide discrepancies of social
class. In the 320s one major oppression of the poor, debt-bondage, was at least brought under legal restraints. The status itself did not disappear (as it had in Athens since Solon’s reforms in 594
BC
), but henceforward a Roman creditor could put a defaulting borrower into bondage only after obtaining a judgement in court. Citizens, meanwhile, did have one major resort against physical harassment and the blatant use of force by a social superior. Inside Rome itself, they could ‘appeal’ or call out, by the famous Roman right of
provocatio
.
¹⁰
This right had begun as an informal cry for help which any citizen might make to the public at large. It acquired a new focus when tribunes of the people were established in 494
BC
. These officers had the right to interpose their persons between a bully and his victim if a citizen ‘called’ on them inside the city; the tribunes had been declared ‘sacrosanct’ by oath and could not be harassed without the wrong to them being avenged. By
c.
300
BC
the practice of appeal became formalized further in law. It became a ‘wicked crime’ for someone to execute a citizen who had appealed for justice. However, no actual penalty is prescribed in our surviving evidence for anyone who was so wicked, nor were beatings or other types of harassment outlawed.

Among the people, this right of ‘calling out’, or appeal, was a cornerstone of freedom. Among the senators, ‘freedom’ had a further connotation: equality within their own peer group. This ideal was sustained by a very strong tradition of the rejection of luxury. Great Roman leaders of the past were idealized as simple farmers, men like Cincinnatus (the namesake of modern Cincinnati) who left his plough only briefly in order to serve as Rome’s dictator. Curius Dentatus (a consul four times, with three triumphs) lived simply in a little cottage and was believed to have rejected offers of gold from the Samnites (who were idealized as a hardy, simple people too). Curius’ cottage continued to be revered, and a special ‘Meadow’ near Rome commemorated Cincinnatus.
¹¹
Roman women were also supposed to behave with restraint and here too examples upheld values, in a typically Roman fashion. Continuing tales were told of the virgin Tarpeia who had been seduced by the sight of the gold bracelets on Rome’s enemies, the Sabines.
¹²
In early days a Roman wife was said to be forbidden even to drink wine. One Roman woman who tried to steal the keys
to the wine cellar was actually said to have been clubbed to death by her husband, a cautionary tale to the others.

This ideal of austerity did not exclude the use of slave-labour by its exemplary heroes and their heirs. Such labour was freely available at Rome, because captives in war and defaulting debtors became enslaved and were readily available for the richer Romans’ use. As in Athens, there was never a Roman ‘golden age’ before slavery. Slave-owning was not, then, seen as unbridled luxury; rather, ‘luxury’ was ascribed to rival cities in Italy, south of slave-owning Rome, where it was cited as their undoing. The most effete were said to be Capua (near Naples), a city of Etruscan origin, and Tarentum (modern Taranto), the bastard child of her austere founder, Sparta. These cities’ love of scents, baths and ornaments was said to have sapped their capacity to resist or to take wise political decisions. In fact, each city marked an important staging-point on Rome’s advance southwards down Italy. In 343 Capua’s appeal to Rome first brought Roman troops into the immensely fertile land behind Naples. In 284 Rome’s attack on Tarentum ended by entrenching her power among the Greek cities of southern Italy.

During this advance through Italy Roman power was not without attractions for the upper classes in the towns along her route. Men in the upper class who feared their own lower classes were much more ready to team up with these apparently sound conservative leaders in Rome. In 343 such people in Capua threw themselves on Rome’s decision by opting for voluntary surrender (or
deditio
).
¹³
Roman troops entered the city and in the following year, an outburst of discontent among Rome’s occupying garrison was blamed on the ‘corrupting’ luxury of ‘soft’ Capua. In fact, the discontent probably had political roots too. At Rome, it led on to further concessions to the plebs by their Roman superiors: one good reason for giving them was that the commoners were needed as working soldiers.

In the 280s yet more local rivalries drew Rome even further into the south of Italy. In the south, Greek cities of considerable size and cultural distinction still regarded themselves here as ‘Great Greece’, but they had continued to be beset by non-Greek barbarian peoples and by deep-seated rivalries between each other. Rome did not hesitate to accept a request for help from distant Thurii, Herodotus’ former
refuge and the Greek city which had been founded by Pericles’ Athenians. Thurii’s immediate enemies were the non-Greek Lucanians, but a friendship with Thurii traditionally caused the hostility of another Greek city, Tarentum, further north. Tarentum, an ancient Spartan foundation, was by now a rich and cultured democracy.

Siding with Thurii, Rome then turned against Tarentum and justified herself later with a concerted campaign of historical spin. When Roman envoys arrived in Tarentum they were said to have been mocked before an assembly in the city’s theatre. One citizen, Philonides, was even said to have excreted on the Roman envoy and to have made fun of his barbaric Latin.
¹⁴
To the Tarentines, the Romans seemed like illegal troublemakers. Some of their ships had been infringing a previous agreement that they would not sail beyond a specified point on Italy’s south-east coast. For there was a long diplomatic history here in the Greek-speaking south. Fifty years before the Roman incident Tarentum had summoned the brother-in-law of Alexander the Great to help her cause locally (
c.
334–331
BC
) and the coastal agreement in question may go back to his short-lived intervention.
¹⁵

Instead, Rome pleaded an ‘insult’ by Tarentum and attacked her. Armed intervention in the south required willing soldiers and, once again, we find that important political concessions had recently been made at Rome to the common people from whom the soldiers would be drawn. Shortly before the involvement with Thurii, it was enacted that decisions of the Roman people’s assembly were to be binding on all the people, nobles included. The senators, moreover, would no longer be able to vet decisions of the assemblies before agreeing to adopt them.

This fateful rule, the Hortensian Law, was passed with a background of continuing resentment by debtors and probably did not seem an unduly dangerous concession in the eyes of the governing class at the time. From the 340s onwards magistracies at Rome had progressively been opened to non-nobles, and so a broader class of former office-holders had been gradually built up. As these same office-holders became senators, a like-minded governing class had been formed from the nobles and the rich newcomers. In the eyes of this class, there was not too much danger in giving ‘popular’ decisions
the form of law. The ‘tribal’ assembly which approved them was heavily weighted against the city-dwelling poor, the majority. It only met when magistrates summoned it, and only voted when they put proposals to it. The magistrates were usually reliable members of the governing class.

Spurred on nonetheless, Roman soldiers would fight decisively against old, civilized Tarentum. Their ally, ‘Athenian’ Thurii, was no longer a democracy, whereas their enemy, ‘Spartan’ Tarentum, was now the democracy instead. The age-old rivalry of Sparta and Athens was thus played out again, but this time in the presence of Romans, and Roman troops proved to be the decisive military force.