The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire

441 Pages·2012·3.37 MB·English

by  Anthony Everitt

Copyright © 2012 by Anthony Everitt
Maps copyright © 2012 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Penguin Group (UK) for permission to reprint
approximately 1,202 words from The Rise of the Roman Empire by Polybius, translated by Ian
Scott-Kilvert, selected with an introduction by F. W. Walbank (Penguin Classics, 1979), copyright
© 1979 by Ian Scott-Kilvert; approximately 856 words from The Early History of Rome: Books I–V
of The History of Rome from Its Foundation by Livy, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt with an
introduction by R. M. Ogilvie (Penguin Classics, 1960. Reprinted with a new introduction 1971),
copyright © 1960 by the Estate of Aubrey de Sélincourt, introduction copyright © 1971 by R. M.
Ogilvie; approximately 146 words from Rome and Italy: Books VI–X of The History of Rome from Its
Foundation by Livy, translated and annotated by Betty Radice, introduction by R. M. Ogilvie
(Penguin Classics, 1982), copyright © 1982 by Betty Radice, introduction copyright © 1982 by
the Estate of R. M. Ogilvie; approximately 439 words from The War with Hannibal: Books XXI–
XXX of The History of Rome from Its Foundation by Livy, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt,
edited with an introduction by Betty Radice (Penguin Classics, 1965), copyright © 1965 by the
Estate of Aubrey de Sélincourt; approximately 137 words from Rome and the Mediterranean: Books
XXXI–XLV of The History of Rome from Its Foundation by Livy, translated by Henry Bettenson,
introduction by A. H. McDonald (Penguin Classics, 1976), copyright © 1976 by Henry Bettenson,
introduction copyright © 1976 by A. H. McDonald. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group
(UK).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Everitt, Anthony.
The rise of Rome: the making of the world’s greatest empire/Anthony Everitt.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64516-0
1. Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C.–284 A.D. 2. Rome— History—Empire, 284–476. I. Title.
DG276.E84 2012
937′.63—dc23 2011048318
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Anna Bauer
Cover photograph: G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini
Picture Library/ Getty Images
v3.1
PREFACE
pondered the decline and fall of the
ROM EDWARD GIBBON ONWARD, HISTORIANS HAVE
F
Roman Empire. But how was the empire won? What was it that
enabled a small Italian market town by a ford on the river Tiber to
conquer the known world? I seek to answer these questions by telling
the story of the rise of Rome. This is the first time in many years that an
account of the Roman Republic has been written for the reader with a
general interest in history, and more particularly in the origins of the
West. It is a taster of the treasures in store for anyone who wishes to dig
deeper into the subject.
is worth the trouble of exhuming because the Romans
THIS REMOTE PAST
remain relevant to us. They still inspire us, still have an effect on how
we view social, political, and moral values. We live in a world they
made.
The idea of Rome is imprinted on our genes. It has generated
proverbs, maxims, and phrases that we use in our everyday lives with
scarcely a thought for their old significance: all roads lead to Rome, the
grandeur that was Rome, when in Rome do as the Romans do, Rome
wasn’t built in a day, Rome the eternal city.
Every few years, Hollywood produces a film that re-creates this
vanished civilization—among them Gladiator, Spartacus, Ben-Hur, and
Quo Vadis. We stand in awe of Roman power and ruthlessness. We are
frightened, but also enthralled, by their “Games”—the bloodstained
entertainments in which gladiators fought one another for the
amusement of huge audiences.
The Romans were a practical people fascinated by engineering. They
pioneered the art of building long-lasting roads. They showed how living
in towns could be comfortable and civilized, even if mainly for the rich.
A community is not just about bricks and mortar. The Romans were
practical in another way, for they believed deeply in the rule of law.
From their earliest years, they created a legal system, which they went
on improving throughout their history. Roman law has influenced the
legal systems of many modern European countries and also that of the
United States.
Although Latin died out as a living language after the Western Roman
Empire came to an end in the fifth century , it has had a long afterlife.
A.D.
Until the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council, the religious services of
the Roman Catholic Church were conducted in Latin. Even today,
flowers and plants, and medical names for parts of the body and for
diseases, are in Latin. The constellations in the night sky are called by
Latin names and reflect the heroes and heroines of Greco-Roman
legends. The names of many American institutions—such as Senate,
Congress, and President—come from Latin. Courses in Latin are still
offered in some high schools and in many colleges and universities.
Translations of Rome’s poets and historians are on sale in American and
European bookshops.
The founding fathers of the United States of America were brought up
on the classics of Roman literature. They were fascinated by the Roman
system of republican government. They liked its balance between three
sources of power: kingship (all-powerful Roman consuls); oligarchy, or
rule by a few noble families (the Roman Senate); and democracy, or rule
by the People (the Roman citizens’ assemblies, which passed laws). The
first Americans imitated this model and designed a three-part
government, full of checks and balances, with a President, a Senate and
a Chamber of Representatives, and a judicial system.
myths and the events of its early centuries are almost
THE CITY’S FOUNDATION
entirely unhistorical, but they were what Romans believed of
themselves. They are a rich and poetic feast that has nourished European
civilization for two thousand years. It is only in the past few generations
that our collective mind has begun to jettison them. If this book serves
any purpose, it is as a reminder of what we are losing.
I reflect on the big themes and analyze the development of Roman
politics, warfare, and society. But above all this is history as story, and I
seek to bring to life the extraordinary personalities who lived it—from
Tarquin the Proud to Marius, from Coriolanus to Sulla, from Scipio
Africanus to the brothers Gracchi. The most charismatic of them all was
not even a Roman but the man who came closest to destroying Rome—
the great, tragic, embittered Hannibal.
One of the curious features of Roman history is that it often suggests
parallels between then and now, but such comparisons can be
dangerous, and I leave readers to make their own connections unaided.
underpins the hopes and ambitions of many of the
AN UNQUENCHABLE LEGEND
actors in this long drama—that of the siege and sack of the city of Troy
(or Ilium, as Homer had it in his epic poem the Iliad) and the tragic
heroism of the Greek warrior Achilles, doomed to die young but
glorious. A latter-day Achilles, the astounding Alexander the Great, also
blazed a trail that many young Greeks and Romans, from Pyrrhus to
Pompey, did their best to emulate. And it was generally agreed that
Rome was Troy reborn, ready to avenge itself on the once victorious
Greeks. When he invaded Italy, Pyrrhus (also the name of Achilles’ son),
the king of Epirus, believed that he was refighting the Trojan War, and
mythical divinities, such as Jupiter’s wife, Juno, and the demigod
Hercules, were deployed by Hannibal as weapons in his propaganda
campaign against Rome.
One of my protagonists is the city of Rome itself. Its temples, statues,
rituals, and symbols were a visual register of collective memory. The
Romans were fascinated by the historical associations of the places,
shrines, temples, and statues of their city. Ceremonial customs often
included enigmatic allusions to events that took place along ago.
Interpreted carefully, the urban landscape was its own history book. The
past was reincarnated in the present. The living sensed that they were
treading in the footsteps of greater ancestors and that distant happenings
had a way of repeating themselves, in a light disguise.
The Romans were fighters and spent much of their time battling with
their neighbors in Italy and then with powers beyond the Mediterranean
Sea. Politics and warfare were inextricably intertwined in their system of
government. Ambitious men had to combine the art of the public
speaker at home with that of the general in the field if they meant to
attain power. And power, imperium, was what they were educated to
seek—less for the general good than for their own gloria, or public
esteem.
My stress on narrative and the deeds of famous men (it is usually men)
is, in fact, how the Romans saw their past, and I aim to offer not so
much a complete history as a portrait sketch, which they themselves
would recognize. Inevitably, there is much war, death, and blood to
wade through in these pages, but, as occasion offers, I attend to the
diversions of peace as well.
By great good fortune, many of the private letters of the first-century
orator and politician Cicero have survived. They open a window into the
minds of men faced with the collapse of their state. As a remedy against
pessimism about the present, they studied the history and antiquities of
early Rome. If he and like-minded friends had not pursued their
researches, not only would we know less about their city’s history; we
would know less of what this city had about it that meant so much to
them.
, questioned the historicity of events in the literary
SCHOLARS HAVE, RIGHTLY
sources. Ancient historians did their best with the materials at hand;
where there were information gaps they were tempted to fill them in
with what seemed plausible. The greatest of them, Livy, was as much an
artist as a scholar and his master-work, the multivolume Ab urbe condita
(From the Foundation of the City) possesses some of the qualities of a good
historical novel. He is a wonderful author, but not always a trustworthy
guide.
On occasion, contemporary academics overreach themselves. They
dismiss incidents because they are, to the rational mind, simply
implausible; they must have been made up. Unfortunately, much in
history is implausible. It is in the nature of human affairs that this
should be so.
Throughout the time span of this book and especially in the first
centuries, academic crux succeeds academic crux. Sometimes agreement
has been reached, elsewhere debate continues, often fierily. Every now
and again, one suspects an excess of ingenuity. While I nod in the
direction of these uncertainties, if not in the main text then in the
endnotes, I do not spend too much time on difficulties of interpretation,
which are of little interest to anyone but the specialist.
Taking the variable nature of the literary sources into account, I have
divided the book into three parts: Legend, the age of the kings, where
most of the events never took place, at least not in the manner
described; Story, the conquest of Italy and constitutional conflict, where
fact and fiction cohabit; and History, the Republic as a Mediterranean
power, where the literary sources make a serious attempt at objectivity
and accuracy.
narrative with the bitter civil war between Sulla and Marius in
I CLOSE MY
the first century ., and the statesmanlike eastern settlement of Pompey
B.C
the Great. The contrast between external triumph and domestic collapse
could scarcely be greater.
Although more conquests were to come, the Republic was now the
undisputed ruler of a vast Mediterranean empire; at the same time, it
was on the verge of a final and irrevocable constitutional breakdown.
The men who governed the world were unable to govern themselves.
Readers who want to know what happened next may wish to consult
my lives of Cicero and Augustus, which trace at some length Rome’s
bloody transition from a partial democracy to a total autocracy.
When I refer to a year or to a particular century, it should be
understood as ., unless specified otherwise.
B.C
Roman nomenclature is complicated and requires an explanation.
Most male citizens had three names. The first was the given name, or
praenomen. In the late Republic, only eighteen of these were in general
use, the most popular being Aulus, Decimus, Gaius, Gnaeus, Lucius,
Marcus, Publius, and Quintus. As a rule, an eldest son took his father’s
praenomen—annoyingly, because it requires care to distinguish between
different historical figures with identical names.
Then followed the nomen, or family name, the equivalent of our
surname. After this came the cognomen. Originally, this was a nickname
attached to a particular person (thus Cicero means “chickpea” and
presumably referred to a pimple on the face of a once-upon-a-time
Tullius), but over the years it came to denote branches of the larger
family, or clan. A successful general would be given an additional
cognomen, or agnomen, which referred to the enemy he overcame. So,
after defeating Hannibal in northern Africa, Publius Cornelius Scipio
became Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.
The subordinate status of women was exemplified by the fact that they
were allocated only one name, the feminine version of the family
nomen. So the daughter of Marcus Tullius Cicero was called Tullia.
Sisters had to share the same name, which must have caused confusion
in the family circle. They usually kept their nomina after marriage (so
Cicero’s wife was called Terentia, not Tullia).
When using his full official designation, a Roman citizen inserted after
his nomen his father’s praenomen and his tribe. So the complete Cicero
was Marcus Tullius M[arci] f [ilius, or “Marcus’s son”] Cor[nelia tribu,
“in the Cornelia tribe”] Cicero.
When readers use this book’s index, they should refer to the nomen.
So when looking up Cicero, they will find him listed under the T’s as
Tullius Cicero, Marcus. Tiresome, but that is how it is.