The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (7 page)

Finally, it is important to emphasize that the senate was all about things military. More often than not issues of foreign policy devolved into questions of “Who are we going to fight?” Despite characteristically couching its campaigns in defensive terms, scholarship points to the senate consciously and continuously looking for new opponents to conquer.
17
And while the people retained the final say on matters of war and peace, the decision was profoundly shaped by the senate, which kept an iron grip on diplomacy. Similarly, although consuls were elected by the Comitia Centuriata, it was the senate that decided where they would serve or, more realistically, fight—and what they would fight with, since the senate also determined the size and composition of the forces allocated for each campaign.

This was highly functional and appropriate. For within the body itself, leadership, experience, and prestige largely translated into
military
leadership, experience, and prestige. When it came to warfare, the corporate wisdom of the Roman senate was impressive. As we shall see, Roman commanders made numerous tactical missteps during the war against Hannibal, but the overall strategic direction—the province of the senate—was hard to fault. Stripped to its essentials, the senatorial approach consisted of three principles: take the offensive whenever possible, keep the pressure on, and never give up. With rare exception, and even when Rome was plainly losing, the senate refused to negotiate with a hostile combatant, except on the basis of the adversary’s submission. During the Punic Wars, the worse things got, the more adamant and determined the senate became. The senate laid out a hard set of rules, and was a stern taskmaster, but it was not necessarily out of sync with those it directed.

[3]

Whatever the discordance between rhetoric and reality, between belief and actual conditions, Romans drank deeply from the fountain of patriotism, and, unlike the proverbial Kool-Aid, it made them stronger. This was a society on its way to becoming something entirely more complex, on a path that would lead eventually to civil war and the end of the republic. But at the point when Hannibal descended upon it, Rome was a unified and resilient entity, as tenacious as any other society on the face of the earth. Romans, and to a slightly lesser extent Rome’s allies, believed in Rome and, more to the point, were ready to die for it. They faced defeat after defeat at the hands of a military genius—not with passive endurance but with a grim determination to prevail, a determination epitomized by the survivors of Cannae but emblematic of the entire society.

At the upper echelons, Romans had a passion for public service in the form of elective office—an urge that in the later stages of the republic would reach maniacal proportions and become a key factor in the system’s collapse. But during the struggle with Carthage, political ambition, while intense, remained within traditional bounds. Personal success in Rome was defined by the
cursus honorum
—literally “course of honors”—the progressive election of an individual to a series of increasingly important magistracies. Polybius (6.19.4) tells us that in order to begin the process young members of the elite had to have participated in ten annual military campaigns (almost always in the cavalry). This is telling. It was a commonplace that Roman generals were politicians, but this also says that the politicians were militarized.

Given Rome’s size, the number of higher offices was remarkably few, and turnover was notably fast—basically one year, following the Warholian rubric and maximizing the number who got to be famous, if not exactly experienced. Other than the ten plebeian tribunes elected to serve as an independent check on power through their capacity to veto any official act, and the four aediles, who were mainly responsible for administration and festivals, the other key elective offices entailed some sort of soldiering. Each year twenty-four military tribunes were voted in and then assigned, six to a legion, to act as a rotating staff of commanders.
18
There were eight quaestors, who were mainly financial officers but who also served on the consul’s legionary staff and could undertake independent military duties. The next set above were the praetors, by this time four of them. These officials were originally meant to take over the consuls’ civil duties at home but instead were increasingly detailed for provincial administration and military command.

At the pinnacle of the elective rat-race were the consuls, in positions that not only ratified individual success but ensured their continuing familial influence. There were only two of them—by this time normally a patrician and a plebeian—and during their twelve months in office they were expected to wrestle with the state’s most important problems, which almost always meant they were fighting Rome’s most dangerous enemies. The basis for their power was the imperium, the right to command troops and administer justice. So that no one would miss the point, consuls, and the other few magistrates vested with the imperium, were accompanied by a designated number of lictors—attendants armed with axes bundled with rods called
fasces
, a badge indicating their chief’s capacity to inflict both capital and corporal punishment.
19

As we have seen, the consul’s power was circumscribed by the senate when the consul was within the city, but out in the field he had absolute command. Ordinarily this worked well, but in the emergency of the Second Punic War, consular armies were combined on several key occasions, raising the fundamental question of who was in charge. Cannae was one of those occasions. Perhaps because of a bitter experience with monarchy earlier in their history, Romans were deeply committed to the principle of collegiality and redundancy in their leadership, but they were also a practical people.

So, possibly as far back as 500 B.C.
20
they had created the dictator, which at least mitigated the problem of dual authority. A single official, appointed for six months by the consuls, on the basis of a
senatus consultum
, the dictator had absolute power even within the city, a status symbolized by his twenty-four lictors to a consul’s twelve. Nominated in the dead of night and customarily forbidden to serve on horseback, the dictator had the right to name an assistant with roughly the power of a praetor and named, logically enough, master of horse.
21
Dictators were designated to perform electoral and religious duties, but basically the office was a means of focusing military power in the face of disaster. As the frequency and intensity of Rome’s wars increased during the third and fourth centuries B.C., so did the reliance on dictators, culminating in the office’s archetype, Fabius Maximus. Dutifully he stepped down after six months, as was expected of dictators. But ultimately, as the careers of Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar would later demonstrate, the power vested in dictators would prove fatal to republican government. For at the heart of the system, even in a time of political stability, military power and glory trumped just about everything else.

As Rome expanded, the wealth and landholdings of its great families grew apace, as did their networks of clients. But all were a means to an end, and that end was prestige, which in turn was a function primarily of military reputation. This was the central motivation of the Roman aristocracy, the universal solvent to nearly any career obstacle, the essence of success on the Tiber. For those holders of the imperium who had won a significant victory over a foreign enemy, the senate might vote a triumph, the veritable crowning achievement of a Roman politico-military career. (Those not meeting these exacting standards might be given an ovation, the bellicose equivalent of a consolation prize.)

The triumph ceremony involved the victorious general, his face painted the same shade of terra-cotta red as statues of Jupiter, riding a chariot preceded by the senate and magistrates, along with the captured enemy leader (frequently on the way to being strangled). This procession was followed by the general’s troops in a grand march through Rome’s streets, lined with cheering crowds pelting the triumphant one with flowers. Meanwhile, within the chariot a slave held a golden wreath above the general’s head and whispered in his ear that he was not a god. The general might have wondered, since there was only one higher Roman honor, the
spolia opima
, given to a general who managed to kill an enemy leader in single combat and then strip his armor. Although the
spolia opima
was awarded only three times (once in 222 B.C. to Marcus Claudius Marcellus, of whom we will hear more), it is still worth mentioning, since it serves to illustrate the importance Romans placed on individual combat in their tactical approach. For at a certain level, every man was meant to be a heroic warrior.

If the life of an ordinary male Roman citizen was not exactly the life of a soldier, as was the case among Spartiates, his life was certainly deeply conditioned by things military and especially by military obligations. All able-bodied property holders had to serve—ten years for cavalry and sixteen for infantry—states Polybius (6.19.2–4) who adds, “in case of pressing danger, twenty years’ service is demanded from the infantry.” While military operations were seasonal, and only a minority of citizens were required for the army in a single year, this was still a substantial burden. Even before recruitment, youth were trained by drillmasters to march, run, swim, carry heavy loads, and wield weapons
22
—which is worth mentioning, since Polybius (3.70.10; 3.106.5) attributed Rome’s early defeats at the hands of Hannibal to legions filled with raw recruits without training. They may have been inexperienced, but they were not likely to have been simply civilians. It is common to refer to Rome’s army as a citizen militia, and this is probably an accurate representation of earlier armies. But by the time the Carthaginians arrived, the army better resembled the great conscript armies of World Wars I and II,
23
perhaps even the American version, filled as it was with rural draftees whose prior existence had preconditioned them for combat, with useful skills like hunting and shooting.

But the militarization of Rome was far more pervasive culturally, and even religiously. Basically the Romans worshipped the same fractious warlike gods as the Greeks, but they were particularly given over to divination. When it came to warfare, they were virtually obsessed with the proper taking of auspices and obedience to various portents. To the modern eye there is an unadulterated weirdness in reading Livy as he chronicles the hardheaded Roman moves in the Second Punic War, and then just as seriously runs on about rocks falling out of the sky, two-headed calves, and ravens pecking at the gilding on a god’s statue. Flaminius in particular is viewed as impious, and Livy all but blames the Roman disaster at Lake Trasimene on the consul’s pigheaded disregard of the gods’ obvious displeasure, such as tent standards that were hard to pull up (22.3.12–13).

As the fortunes of war continued to spiral out of their control, the Romans demonstrated a willingness to go to practically any lengths to propitiate the gods, including, after the catastrophe at Cannae, human sacrifice and even outsourcing. Thus, as noted earlier, the historian and statesman Fabius Pictor was sent to Greece to consult with the Delphic oracle as to what had gone wrong with the gods and how specifically they might be appeased. The Romans were still attempting to divine the gods’ wishes fifteen years later, with Hannibal continuing to lurk in the south of Italy. When it was brought to the senate’s attention that a prophecy in the sacred Sibylline Books indicated that a foreign invader might be driven from the peninsula by bringing the image of the Idaean Mother from Asia Minor to Rome, a delegation was dispatched to King Attalus of Pergamum to arrange the transfer (Livy 29.10.4ff). Again following the advice of the Delphic oracle, the Romans chose “the best man in Rome,” Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to receive the cult figure. While his cousin Scipio Africanus likely played a greater role in ultimately getting rid of Hannibal, the Roman people were presumably reassured.

If the sacred in Rome was soaked in blood and battle, so was the profane. This brings us to the controversial subject of gladiatorial combat. Introduced in 264 B.C. as part of funeral ceremonies, the contests quickly took on a life of their own, and are conventionally seen as exemplifying the cruelty and perversity of Roman social life.
24
Disregarding the later excesses of the games, gladiators may well originally have had a more serious purpose. Tactically the Roman army fought as individual swordsmen, psychologically the most demanding kind of combat, in its essence sheer human butchery.
25
Participation and success demanded extraordinary conditioning; training helped but it was also necessary to remove the veil of mystery from manslaughter. Gladiators showed Romans how to fight and die at close quarters, quite literally to confront mortality.
26
To modern sensibilities this must seem cruel, unnecessary, and ultimately criminal; for at a certain level it is simply impossible to bridge the gap that separates us in time and psychology from the Romans. But it may help our understanding to suggest that gladiatorial combat was, at least initially, in part a matter of instruction and not just popular entertainment. What they were seeking to instill was
virtus
, or individual martial courage, the quality one scholar calls “the root value of the Romans of the middle Republic.”
27

[4]

Accentuating the warlike stature of Rome may seem excessive or even irrelevant, since a number of other contemporary societies were also highly militarized. Yet most, particularly those dependent on irrigated agriculture, were basically tyrannies, and their armies were as much a mechanism of social control as they were implements of belligerence. Other societies, such as the Hellenic city-states, had sufficiently managed to enlist the loyalty of their citizenry to create effective and broad-based fighting formations. Yet the Greeks were forever fighting among themselves, and even the later Hellenistic coalitions forged by the more politically ecumenical Macedonians were brittle and ultimately transitory. The Romans were different.