From founding of Rome to Mediterranean superpower

Review of A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BC by H. H. Scullard

According to its foundational myths, Aeneas, the cousin of Hector, arrived in Rome as a refugee from Troy. This directly connects Rome to the Iliad and Greek culture. His grandson, Romulus (suckled by wolves), founded the city in 753 BCE. It was a dictatorship, based on the murder of his twin brother, Remus, who was a competitor for leadership. The Romans, a ragged band, then made war on the neighboring Sabines, taking their women as wives in what can only be called mass rape. This rough beginning was a big part of the Roman identity.

Over the next 244 years, as myth merges into documented history, Rome was ruled by kings, each elected for life by the Senate. In 509 BCE, a group of revolutionaries – all aristocratic patricians led by Brutus, the direct ancestor of Caesar’s assassin – ousted the last king, establishing the Republic. Henceforth, for almost 500 years, 2 executives (the Consuls) were elected every year and ruled together. The evolution of Roman government and law is essential reading: rotating magistrates were elected for a year, the Senate ruled fairly well, participation was gradually widened, and laws were written in the Twelve Tablets. What they achieved was far more stable and long-lasting than anything the Greeks accomplished at that time.

Unfortunately, Scullard writes about these issues clinically, rather than telling them as stories. He also fails to incorporate archaeological evidence, relying instead on the surviving written sources. It is very dry.

According to Scullard, the next great step was to consolidate control over the entire Italian peninsula. Rather than simply conquering and trying to occupy and exploit – the traditional goals of empire that tend to reach natural limits in the generation after the charismatic conqueror-leader – the Romans sought to create allies. They did so by bringing prosperity (with roads and other infrastructure) and a comparatively lasting peace, enforced by a supposedly noble group. This was purported to have established a strong base of loyalty that, when put to the test by invasion, largely held. It also provided a rationale for why the Roman Empire was able to expand and last: they co-opted elites into the system (offering jobs and status) and "civilized" them via immersion in Roman legal culture. Importantly, they allowed religious toleration of local cults. The Republic itself was exalted with a religious significance and had its own sponsoring Gods. Scullard more or less buys into this version rather than questioning its veracity. I think a lot of it is mythic propaganda.

Things began to change once Rome began to grow beyond the Italian peninsula. After the sack of Rome by a Celtic tribe (390 BCE), it encountered the Hellenistic Greeks (Pyrrhus and his Pyrrhic victories, starting in 280 BCE). But its greatest adversary was Carthage, which led to a monumental, existential war between 264 and 146 BCE. You get the story of Hannibal, a general of genius who invaded Italy and nearly crushed Rome forever; his methods forced the Roman military to become more professional, essentially training troops to take more initiative than was possible in their phalanxes, whose rigidity had resulted in the Cannae annihilation. (When marching toward Roman lines, Hannibal had ordered his center to fall back and appear to give way, encircling the approaching phalanx with cavalry and destroying it from behind.) During this time, Rome also built a navy, eventually becoming the most powerful in the Mediterranean.

Scullard’s coverage ends with the total destruction of Carthage, in 146. As the only remaining Mediterranean superpower, the conquest of Greece and Seleucid Syria was something of a game after Hannibal's defeat by Scipio, and the start of an empire under the republic. With the razing of Carthage, Rome had no immediate adversary that could threaten its existence.

There is a final section tacked on about religion, literature, and socio-economic organization. It is by far the worst chapter of the book. With many interesting nuggets, it is worth a skim, particularly on the transmogrification of the animistic spirits of early Rome into the personalities of the Greek gods, as Rome itself became civilized during the Hellenistic period.

Rome at that time was, in a sense, the "new world": highly organized rather than "barbaric" anarchic state, but uncultivated. The Romans were doers, the ultimate pragmatists, hence their supreme excellence in warfare, their development of large-scale administration, and disinterest in the other arts. They did not even establish a coin currency until they needed to manage war debt while Hannibal was in Italy. In their parochialism, the Romans strove to meet certain ideals, the mos maiorum of honor, piety, and duty to the state; it offered a career trajectory to people of the right class. Nonetheless, the Romans could in no way match the states of the east in terms of culture, i.e. art, literature, philosophy, mathematics, architecture. The book ends before the Greek arts were absorbed to create the hybrid Greco-Roman culture.

Scullard presents the traditional view of how Rome was changing by 146. In a nutshell, with easy revenue from its conquests, the Romans began to get lazy and decadent. Their initial spirit – relentlessly picking itself up from defeats and trying again, pushing for strategic, total victory rather than easy tactical compromise – was waning. Furthermore, given its size and the remoteness of governors appointed for one year, the treatment of its subject peoples tended to be worse than the “judiciousness” meted out to the Latin tribes, other Italians, and Etruscans. Indeed, even their Italian allies began to feel treated as subjects. Corruption set in, decline became inevitable. While to a degree this is certainly true, it fits too cleanly into a morality tale for my taste. Nonetheless, that is Scullard's view, and he presents it well, if not quite convincingly.

A deeper analysis of the state of the Roman Republic at 146 is missing in this book. In my opinion, given the violent internal upheavals and botched attempts at institutional reorganization that Rome would experience in the coming decades, it was needed.

I see Rome at that time as still acting like a city-state (a localized government better suited for small areas and a single capital city), though it had grown beyond that into a nascent empire that was far more complex in institutional structure and custom than the simple autocracy of, say, Alexander the Great. Unfortunately, its institutions remained poorly suited to the tasks of maintaining an empire. Moreover, there were domestic civil issues that were coming into existential crisis on 2 fronts. On the one hand, the plebians wanted to participate in political institutions, sharing power with the aristocratic patricians. This would lead to serious unrest and an evolution of institutions, becoming more democratic but decidedly less functional. On the other hand, the Italian peoples were tired of being treated like second-class citizens, lacking the rights of “pure Romans”. Both would lead to civil wars at regular intervals over the next 150 years.

I would recommend this book with these caveats. I am glad I read it, but it was a slog and definitely dated with its somewhat romantic take. Much of it is dull. This is an old history of Rome, originally written in the 1930s. There are long sections of descriptions of encounters of various tribes and peoples (now utterly obscure) with the Roman war machine, listed like a catalogue. The prose is also lackluster and uneven, with academic jargon and sometimes turbid syntax, but for the most part clear. For the casual reader, there must be livelier histories of this period. I would recommend it for students and serious history enthusiasts.

Related reviews: