A History of the World (23 page)

This is a story of the endless human search for meaning, belonging and consolation. And it came about because of the geography of the Middle East, its ancient wars and trade routes, and finally the awesome power of Rome. Christianity, then Islam, would destroy any chance the classical world might have had to develop a single, unified civilization on the Chinese model. But without its imperial conquerors, those materialistic, this-worldly generals, monotheism would not have got going; nor have spread until it conquered the conqueror.

The Rise and Fall of the Romans

The conquerors of the Jews had been polytheists. Like the early Jewish kingdoms, early Rome was an obscure place on the fringes of the Greek world. It has also been compared to the kingdom of Ch’in, another austere, ruthless state on the edges, which had to toughen up to survive. At about the same time as Judah was defeated by the Babylonians, the small kingdom of Rome was defeated by its neighbouring power, the Etruscans. Like the Jews, the Romans told stories about their earliest origins. Instead of the exile in Egypt, they had the tale of Aeneas leading them from Troy to their promised land, a group of small hills by a marsh. Or – another story – they had been founded by a wanderer called Romulus, who had been suckled by a wolf and later murdered his brother.

So, from the first, Roman stories involved swagger (Troy was about as good an origin as the ancient world could imagine), migration and violence. Rome turned out to be well placed. It was far enough from the centre of the Greek world to be mostly left alone. It was on a river, the Tiber, which sea-going ships could navigate at least part of the way, yet its fortified hilltops offered protection from seaborne raiders. Finally, it was on the southern edge of a part of Italy that was under the domination of the Etruscans. The Etruscans were traders as well as warriors, with a Phoenician-derived alphabet and strong links with the Greek states. They would give the Romans many of their customs, including the grouping of citizens by hundreds, or ‘centuries’, and would ensure that this small city was connected from early on with the wider Mediterranean culture. For a period the Romans were ruled directly by Etruscan kings, though they eventually rebelled and threw them out.

The essence of the Roman story is politics and war, not religion. Traditional Roman religion involved a complicated array of gods, which they would later try to align with the famous Greek pantheon; the Romans were always incorporators, or as the historian Mary Beard puts it, ‘intellectual sponges’. Their priests tried to read the future by watching how birds flew, or how sacred chickens ate.
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Offerings of slaughtered animals, omens, libations poured on the ground, naked men leaping around whipping passers-by – this is all the fairly routine
business of primitive worship, characterized by its practitioners’ credulity and in no way charming. Paying homage to local gods and worshipping, or merely revering, one’s ancestors were common in China or Japan. But societies that allow ideas to immigrate change faster. And not even the Vestal Virgins were as interesting as they sound. It is no great surprise that later on, the Romans did indeed become the ultimate soakers-up of everything from Greek philosophy to African cults, Egyptian rites to Judaism. Religion, Roman-style, only becomes properly interesting when Roman emperors declare themselves to be gods; and that was about politics, not really about religion at all.

And the politics was always interesting. One of the last Roman kings, an Etruscan warrior said to be the son of a slave, introduced a code of laws and organized regular meetings of all citizens. Once the kings had been deposed, Rome had aristocratic rulers, as did most Greek communities; but the Roman
plebs
, the poor, managed to establish basic rights of their own, defended by tribunes. From very early on, there was a rough balance of power in a city which – unlike most others – positively welcomed all comers. The Romulus story suggested the city had been founded by runaways: migrants and freed slaves could become Roman citizens and eventually work and fight for the republic. This was a hierarchical and macho society, however, in which fathers wielded almost untrammelled power over the family and women were excluded from public life. And because Rome was hemmed around by hostile rivals, jostling for space in a fertile part of Italy, it was a military society.

At the top of republican Roman society were the aristocratic families who traced their influence back to the time of the kings and who formed the Senate. Relatively early, this immigrant society also developed elections for key posts. In 367
BC
a major change took place when it was agreed that all classes, not only patricians, could be elected as consuls, so long as they were wealthy enough. A complicated, lengthy system of elections plus experience accumulated in office resulted in the Senate evolving into a tough and effective ruling body. Serving as its executives was a double-act of consuls, with a kind of super-magistrate elected each year. Then came the rest, the ordinary citizens organized into tribes and able, in their own assembly, to vote for new laws by simple majority.

If this sounds remarkably democratic, it was not. A Roman form of jerrymandering, involving block votes and the intimidation of voters, kept the well off, mostly, in control. A republic meant a ruling system without kings, not a representative one. But the Senate was able to draw in a constant supply of new talent and to balance factions among the richer citizens. The voting system and the tension between different bodies kept absolute power, the folk memory of tyrant kings, at bay. Most impressively, the Senate was able to balance its own traditional authority with rights for incomers and poorer citizens, both those living inside the walls and those farming beyond.

There was always tension, and later on, at times of food shortage or military failure, an almost revolutionary spirit could flare up. When it came to arguments about land and justice, Roman citizens had louder voices than their counterparts in most other regions of the Mediterranean world. They may have been more Philistine and more provincial than the Athenians, but the Romans had evolved a clever political equilibrium, which generally warded off any possibility of internal chaos. Their system threw up a regular supply of good administrators and law-makers, and they managed to absorb large numbers of new ‘citizens’ from far outside the city itself. Priding themselves on their austerity and plainness, the Romans of the early republic developed no literature or philosophy of their own that we know of. Their buildings were mere mimicry. But they went to war like nobody else.

Many military leaders have known that striking terror into your enemies’ hearts is half the road to victory. Roman practice, as the city extended its influence through central Italy, was straightforward. It was terroristic, or at least terror-based. If a city surrendered, it would become a vassal. If any resistance at all was offered, it was to be completely destroyed and every living thing in it slaughtered – right down to children, domestic pets, even the rats. Roman citizens were conscripted for army service and, as with the free Greek hoplites, citizenship and war-making, solidarity and attack, became intertwined ideas. Fighting in tight phalanxes with long spears and short, stabbing swords, the ancestors of the imperial legions were a fearsome force by the early 200s
BC
.

Success bred success. Cities intimidated into surrendering could provide new citizens, and therefore new soldiers; slaves poured in to take on other work. The Romans did not have the huge military might
needed to destroy and take over the rest of Italy in a flash. It was the propaganda of their terrorism – surrender fast or you will regret it – combined with their ability to put an arm around the shoulders of the local elites, reassure them, and rule through them – that did the trick. So almost every victory produced more manpower to fuel the next one. After defeating the invading Gauls, who had once managed to sack Rome itself, the Romans were able to subdue their old foes to the north, and then the Greek colonies further south.

In the end, the Greek world could no longer ignore the upstart bully-boy city in the west. And they had, it seemed, a terror weapon to terrify even the Romans. War elephants, as we have seen, had arrived in the Greek world from India. For a while they seemed a transforming military force. One of the Greek rulers who deployed them was Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, who borrowed them from the Greek rulers of Egypt. A dashing, silver-armoured leader, Pyrrhus was asked for help against the Romans by one of the Greek states in Italy under attack. He brought his elephants to Italy, the first time they had been seen there, and won two victories against Rome.

What is extraordinary, however, is that the Romans, though awed by the creatures – and not believing they were mortal until one had its trunk severed – did not break. They held these inheritors of Alexander’s power to such bloody draws that Pyrrhus famously declared: ‘Another such victory, and we shall be lost.’ Later, the Romans tried to frighten the elephants by covering pigs in fat, then setting them on fire and driving the screaming animals at them. Nasty – but it seems to have worked because Pyrrhus eventually withdrew back to Greece, where he continued to use elephants to fight, until killed when an angry woman threw a roof-tile at him.
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For the Romans, this all turned out to be good preparation. They were about to go to war with Carthage and would soon confront more of the beasts, this time led by the man synonymous with elephant war, Hannibal.

Carthage, a Lost Future?

Among the great speculations of classical history has been the thought that Carthage, not Rome, might have won the Punic wars. Its greatest
general Hannibal came within a whisker of success. After the horrendous battle of Cannae in 216
BC
, which left between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans dead, the road to Rome lay almost undefended. Roman allies defected. Romans panicked. Hannibal was urged by his cavalry commander to march south and finish the city off. He did not, but for a short time he had a huge advantage. Had he taken Rome, our world might have been very different.

Carthage, which had survived for six centuries on the North African coast protected by huge harbour walls, was essentially a sea power, whose navy at the time was as large by tonnage as those of Britain, Spain or France in the 1700s. Its merchant ships traded with the Canary Islands, sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa, picked up tin from Britain and criss-crossed the Mediterranean. Perhaps a Carthaginian West would have sailed to America centuries before the Europeans actually did. Carthage was a great manufacturing power too, producing the fabulously expensive purple dye that coloured so distinctively Roman senators’ togas, plus strong wine, ceramics and metalwork of all kinds, and many sorts of cloth. Its fleet was mass-produced and then assembled at speed, like modern flat-pack furniture, a trick that would be forgotten until the rise of Venice – and which allowed the Romans to reverse-engineer Carthaginian vessels and make themselves seafarers too.

Carthage had her theatres, her famous orators, and a constitution which, although run first by kings and later by oligarchs, gave a strong voice to the ordinary citizens. Many of them emigrated and set up colonies themselves. In his
Politics
Aristotle, writing nearly two hundred years before Carthage finally fell to the Romans, warmly praises Carthaginian institutions: ‘The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal to [it]. The Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.’
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By the time of its destruction Carthage was certainly one of the greatest cities on the planet; its population was much larger than Rome’s at the time. And of course, it was in Africa. A classical Mediterranean world whose dominant power was in North Africa, not on the Italian peninsula, would have felt different in ways we can barely imagine.

There were darker sides to Carthaginian life. Roman critics claimed the Carthaginians engaged in child sacrifice, as did their
Phoenician forebears, though modern historians are sceptical and after Cannae, the Romans resorted to it too. The Carthaginian army, unlike the Roman, was mainly composed of mercenaries, from Spain, Numidia, Libya and the Balearic islands.
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Only around three thousand Carthaginians fought as infantry, in the so-called Sacred Band. It seems to have been a suspicious society, to the point of paranoia about would-be tyrants. Unlike Roman generals enjoying their triumphs, Carthaginian generals had to risk being plotted against and even executed when they returned from their victories. Yet with all that said, the utter destruction of Carthage when the Romans finally won the third Punic war leaves a terrible gap in the historical record of the Mediterranean. We have no detailed idea of what their buildings looked like – just some foundations and pillars to go on.

We have none of their writing, poetry, plays, art, histories, family stories or hopes. It is as if, after the Second World War, nothing written in German – no German poetry – nor any German music, or buildings, survived. Had the fortunes of war gone slightly differently, of course, there would have been no imperial Rome, either. Would schoolchildren now be brushing up on their Punic verbs, studying the epic sea voyages of Carthaginian heroes to the Caribbean, listing jokes made about Hamilcar by Carthaginian orators? Sometimes, seeking deep causes, we create the illusion of inevitability. It is possible that Carthage ultimately fell because it lacked the flexible and open attitude to citizenship and the sinewy political system of the Roman republic. It is equally possible that it fell because of a few bad decisions on battlefields. Apparently insignificant causes can trigger momentous changes.

At any rate, after long years of bloodbath and struggle across Italy, Sicily and North Africa, Carthage finally fell. After his epic crossing of the Alps, when it was his cavalry rather than his elephants that mattered most, and his bloody victories over the legions, Hannibal’s ravaging of Italy eventually ended when he was defeated by Scipio ‘Africanus’ and sent into exile by his own people. Carthage would finally be annihilated in 146
BC
, wiped out in an orgy of Roman killing, rape and destruction.