Polybius had attempted to explain why Rome had been so successful in war. It is perhaps more difficult to explain what her motives were for engaging in so many wars in the first place. A traditional view has seen Rome primarily as a defensive power, reacting to events rather than creating them. According to this view the Carthaginians, Philip of Macedon, the invading Celts, were all threatening forces to which Rome had to respond as she had had to respond early in her history to those who had threatened her on the exposed plain of Latium. This view was challenged by William Harris in his book War and Imperialism in Republican Rome (Oxford, 1979), in which Harris argued that Roman society was naturally attuned to aggression. For the aristocratic elite war provided the main avenue to political success, the only way an individual could achieve glory and status, while the fruits of victory, in plunder and slaves, made war attractive for the luxurious lifestyle and status it
Brought. In Italy the confiscation of land allowed the surplus population of Rome to be settled away from the city so that social tensions could be contained. Insofar as the only obligation that Rome expected from her allies was the provision of men for war, her continuing supremacy over them also depended on frequent campaigns. A number of forces, economic, social, and political, thus combined to create an active will for war and this explains why Rome was seldom at peace.
Rome was certainly a militaristic state. She had access to large forces, showed no inhibitions about using them, and once she was engaged in a war fought it through to a conclusion, normally in her favour. As moments in the Punic Wars showed, surrender was never a considered alternative. It does not follow, however, that, because Rome had an unrivalled mechanism for winning wars and a range of incentives for doing so, every war she engaged in was of her seeking. The events described above show a rather more complex pattern. Once Rome had stumbled into war with Carthage she was tied to winning the war or risking humiliation. After the First Punic War she knew that Carthaginian revenge was possible and she took active steps against it. Her consolidation of control in the western Mediterranean can be seen, in this sense, as defensive.
It is also true, however, that Rome showed an abnormal sensitivity to any slight or any perceived threat to an area she had defined as a sphere of interest and was quick to use war in retaliation. This is how she became embroiled in Greece. How much the desire for individual glory and plunder was an element in her reaction is difficult to gauge. Victory was certainly enjoyed to the full by those who had achieved it, but there is little evidence that Rome set out to acquire permanent control of territory overseas. The empire appears to have grown piecemeal, with marked reluctance in Greece at least to annex territory until there was no alternative way of maintaining Rome’s supremacy in the area.
Between 148 and 133, a more deliberate policy of humiliation of enemies and determined annexation of further territory can be seen. This was when Macedonia and Greece were absorbed, Carthage sacked, and the wealthy kingdom of Perga-mum inherited. By now Rome had a Mediterranean-wide empire that she had to defend and administer and an ideology that, for the next 250 years, appeared to set no limits to its size. This, however, was still an immature enterprise. Often the status of the conquered was never fully resolved and the degree of independence they could enjoy after defeat never clarified. Boundaries were seldom clearly defined while unconquered peoples remained active on the edges of an empire that still had no effective administration for much of its territories. The very size of the conquered areas meant that the nature of military command was transformed as legions had to be diverted to meet different challenges and commanders kept on year after year in remote areas for fear of losing the summer’s gains. So often in the history of the Ancient Near East (see my Chapters 2 and 6) an empire had risen quickly but then collapsed a few decades later. Would Rome be the same? (See further the thoughtful analysis by Arthur Eckstein, ‘Conceptualising Roman Imperial Expansion under the Republic: An Introduction’, in N. Rosenstein and R. Morstein Marx (eds.), A Companion to the Roman Republic, Oxford, 2006.)
World History
