The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ seemed absolutely obvious; for shortly before they had inflicted the supreme penalty on some of their own citizens for illegally seizing Rhegium; now to seek to help the Mamertini, who had behaved in much the same way not only towards Messana, but also towards Rhegium, involved misconduct hard to condone. The Romans did not ignore any of these factors, but they realized that the Carthaginians had not only subjugated Africa, but also much of Spain (Polybius or his source here exaggerates), and controlled all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas; and the Romans were worried lest if the Carthaginians became masters of Sicily they would be overpowering and dangerous neighbours for them, surrounding them and threatening all parts of Italy. It was clear that they would rapidly subjugate Sicily, unless the Mamertini received help; for if Messana were handed over to their control, they would rapidly conquer Syracuse, being already masters of almost all the rest of Sicily.

      The Romans foresaw all this and thought that they must not abandon Messana and allow the Carthaginians as it were to acquire for themselves a stepping-stone over to Italy; they debated for a long time and eventually the senate did not pass the motion (to help Messana), for the reasons I have just outlined; for the illogicality of helping the Mamertini balanced the advantages to be derived from helping them.

      But the assembly took a different line; the people had been worn out by recent wars and badly needed a change for the better in their circumstances; in addition to the arguments I have just outlined on the desirability of the war from the point of view of the state, the generals-to-be spoke of the clear and considerable advantage (in terms of booty) which each individual might expect; the people voted to help the Mamertini (Polybius 1, 10, 1–11, 2).

      After some successes, including the acquisition of Hiero of Syracuse as an ally, Rome found that the war had reached a position of stalemate, with the Carthaginians masters of the sea, the Romans masters of Sicily apart from a few fortified places. As capable of innovation in the technical sphere as elsewhere, the Romans took to the sea:

      When they saw that the war was dragging on for them, they set to for the first time to build ships, a hundred quinqueremes and twenty triremes. And since the shipwrights were totally inexperienced in building quinqueremes, none of the communities of Italy then using such ships, their project caused the Romans considerable difficulty. All this shows better than anything else how ambitious and daring the Romans are as policy-makers. (Using a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a model the Romans duly built a fleet and put to sea.) (Polybius 1, 20, 9–11)

      The war was settled by Roman persistence, a characteristic which had already helped to defeat Pyrrhus and which was to help defeat Hannibal, the chief Carthaginian general in the Second Punic War; Rome built one more fleet than Carthage was capable of building and in the peace imposed in 241 made Carthage withdraw from Sicily and pay a large indemnity. By a piece of what even Polybius regarded as sharp practice, Rome acquired Sardinia and Corsica shortly after.

Not altogether surprisingly, there were those in Carthage who did not regard the verdict of the First Punic War as final; the creation of an empire in Spain and the acquisition thereby of substantial military and financial resources were followed by Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218 (the Roman tradition attempted to make the entirely justified attack on Saguntum by Hannibal into the casus belli, in order to salve its conscience over the failure to respond effectively to the appeal by Saguntum to Rome, see here). By a curious irony, the decisive confrontation between Rome and Carthage came at a moment when trading links between the two communities were greater than ever before – a large part of such fine pottery as Rome exported in the third quarter of the third century went to Carthage and her neighbourhood.²

      Hannibal’s initial success was electrifying; invading Italy with 20,000 infantry and 6000 cavalry, he defeated the Romans in a succession of battles; at the River Ticinus and the River Trebia in the Po valley in 218, at Lake Trasimene in Etruria in 217 and at Cannae in south-east Italy in 216. Given his small forces, it was inevitable that he should seek to supplement them with such allies as became available and indeed ultimate success depended on detaching the majority of the members of the Roman confederacy. Given the secular enmity between the Romans and the Gauls settled in the Po valley and the Roman attempts immediately before 218 to plant colonies in the Po valley, it was inevitable that the Gauls should be anxious to join him, quite apart from the prospects of plunder. Their adhesion, however, was unlikely to endear Hannibal to the rest of Italy.

      5 Map showing places to which Roman fine pottery was exported in the middle of the third century BC

      Hannibal’s spectacular initial successes in fact only masked a deeper long-term failure. The battle of Cannae was followed by the revolt of a number of Italian communities and conspicuously of Capua, some eager to abandon Rome, others constrained to do so by military force; Hieronymus, the grandson of Rome’s ally of the First Punic War, Hiero of Syracuse (see here), was persuaded to join Carthage. But most of Rome’s allies remained loyal and the community of interest between them and Rome remained the most important factor in deciding the outcome of the war.

      It was clear in the immediate aftermath of Cannae that Rome had no intention of ever surrendering; given that, her allies recalled her leadership in the series of battles against Gallic raids and the fact that the Gauls were now allied with Hannibal. They recalled the sense of identity which Rome had created for an Italy united under her leadership. Above all they recalled the shared rewards of success.

      Syracuse was recaptured by M. Claudius Marcellus in 211, having held out so long only because of the ingenuity of the engines designed by Archimedes (who was killed in the sack). In 209 P. Cornelius Scipio captured the Carthaginian base in Spain, Nova Carthago. Meanwhile in Italy, Hannibal was forced to watch the superior manpower of an essentially unshaken Roman confederacy slowly subjugating the cities which he had won over and which he was unable to defend. In 207 he summoned Hasdrubal and the remaining Carthaginian forces from Spain, but they were destroyed in a battle beside the River Metaurus in north-east Italy. Hannibal’s departure from Italy and ultimate defeat in 202 at Zama by a Roman expeditionary force under P. Cornelius Scipio, as a result surnamed Africanus, were only a matter of time.

The measure of Rome’s control over her allies is her response to the plea in 209 of twelve of her Latin colonies that they could neither provide more men nor pay for them:

      There were then thirty (Latin) colonies; twelve of these, when representatives of all were at Rome, informed the consuls that they no longer had the resources to provide men or money … Shocked to the core, the consuls hoped to frighten them out of such a disastrous state of mind and thought that they would get further by rebuke and reproof than by a gentle approach; so they claimed that the colonies had dared to tell the consuls what the consuls would not bring themselves to repeat in the senate; it was not a question of inability to bear the military burden, but open disloyalty to the Roman people … (The remaining colonies produced more than their quota; the delinquent colonies were temporarily ignored and later severely punished by the imposition of additional burdens.) (Livy XXVII, 9, 7)

      Just as the rewards of success kept her confederacy loyal to Rome despite occasional rumblings, so they held the lower orders loyal to the rule of the oligarchy, again with occasional rumblings. The career of the novus homo, a man without ancestors who had held office, Manius Curius Dentatus, undoubtedly depended on popular support. Consul in 290, he defeated the Samnites and the Sabines, and celebrated two triumphs, and he then distributed land taken from the Sabines among the Roman needy. Not surprisingly he went on to hold command again, against a Gallic tribe, the Senones, in the 280s; he then held office yet again, to inflict defeat on Pyrrhus in 275. A final consulate in 274 was his reward.

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