Ancient wars
M.I.Finley
The Army of the Caesars Michael Grant (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.50) It used to be said that military academies trained officers to win the last war but one. Whethenor not that is still the case I am not in a position to know, but I can assert with confidence that war and armies induce acute intellectual paralysis in historians in general and ancient historians in particular, with honourable exceptions. The ubiquity of war and the ambivalence of the responses it generates, oscillating from horror to glory, seem to be too much for rational analysis to cope with. So, because Tacitus was the greatest Roman historian, he must be right in his fierce hatred of the Roman imperial system, yet at the same time the Roman Empire was the incomparable civilising organisation, created and maintained by the legions, giving half the inhabited world a golden age of peace, prosperity and universal happiness. An occasional madman, a Caligula or a Nero, somehow managed to turn Rome overnight into a combination of charnel-house and live sex show, but decency and Roman virtue quickly righted the situation, again through the legions. That is of course a caricature of modern histories of Rome, but, like every caricature, it merely exaggerates features that are prominently present. An attractive side of Michael Grant's work has been his persistent pricking, in his own words, at "the current habit of condoning in the ancient world (unlike many ancient thinkers themselves) pernicious conduct, such as aggression, which must not be condoned today." That was written in 1951, in the preface to his Ancient History (a Methuen 'Home Study Book'), half of which was devoted to the causes of war, and he has repeatedly returned to the struggle. His new book is not, as the title might suggest, a full study of the Roman imperial armies (on which we lack a good book) but primarily, and by design, an account of the part the army "played in the internal affairs of the capital and the empire."
The subject is hardly an unfamiliar one. Every school and university student of Roman history knows about the year 69, when the assassination of Nero was followed by four successive emperors, each projected on to the throne with the backing of a sector of the standing army. Tacitus's comment, "The secret of the empire had been revealed: an emperor could be created elsewhere than in Rome," has been set for countless essays and examinations. That sums up Dr Grant's theme in a phrase, to which the qualifier must be added that in the two centuries or so between the foundation of the imperial system by Augustus and the death of Marcus Aurelius, military rebellion was in fact a rarity. Grant estimates that one hundred and ninety years were free from the curse, only ten were subject to it.
But fear of military mutiny and rebellion is a permanent obsession in his account (and that of most historians of Rome). Two questions thus present themselves urgently. Why this obsession? Why did rebellions break out when they did, and only when they did?
These may seem too obvious questions even to write out. Yet the first of them customarily receives an axiomatic answer, as if ancient historians have not bothered to remember that not all states have lived in such high tension about army revolts. After August when he brought his long struggle to seize power to a successful conclusion, he reorganised and stabilised the .army, reducing the number of legionaries to about 150,000 men (with an equal number of 'auxiliaries).
That might be thought an astonishingly small number in a popularion of fifty or sixty million, with a territory of some 150,000 square 'miles to *police and also to defend against outside threats; astonishing, too, because, we are assured, Augustus's position was "wholly dependent on the Roman army," and again that the army was "the only effective cement" in "the vast Roman empire." Dr Grant offers the standard explanation: shortage of volunteers, primitive agrarian economy and risk. "A bigger army," he writes, "would have been a perilous security risk." Indeed, "if his army had been. largerits rebellions would have been more serious."
Nothing could be neater both the tendency to, and the magnitude of, military revolt are a simple function of the size of a standing army. The reader will then be surprised to learn that Augustus stationed none of his legions in Italy, where the bitter civil war which brought him to power had been fought; or that in AD 98, after the praetorian prefects murdered Domitian and the Senate placed one of its own aged members, Nerva, on the throne, the rank and file of the praetorian guard, who "admired and loved" Domitian, sat quietly by, and that, "more remarkably," so did the legions in the provinces. Why? The only answer proposed is that "somehow or other, for the moment, they were calmed," just as, when Augustus was still far from secure in his power, "somehow or other he tidied over the crisis."
The contrast in AD 98 between the officers and the troops of the praetorian guard points to the central difficulty. I can perhaps make it clearer in contemporary terms. How were the Greek colonels able to overthrow first Parliament and then the monarchy, only to be overthrown in turn by generals? How does one explain the difference between the almost simultaneous military coups in Chile and Portugal? Or between Caetano's army and Franco's next door? No study of the role of armies in internal affairs that does not face up to this kind of question I do not go so far as to ask for a sufficient answer will advance our understanding beyond the caricature with which I began.
The prior question is, Who is the army? Dr Grant's opening chapter, 'Introduction: the Roman Soldier,' unfortunately turns out to be a quartermaster's catalogue of his stores plus long quotations about pay, training and the table of organisation. The soldier himself is absent, though he, after all, was the man who rebelled or failed to rebel. 'Loyalty' is of course there repeatedly, in the book, but that label merely restates the question. It is not an explanation.
Nor, to return to prefects and privates, are we helped by an encomium of Caesar's way of addressing his men, or by a long propagandistic passage by Josephus, which includes the following: "Their generals are held in even greater awe than the laws. For the high honours with which they reward the brave prevent the offenders whom they punish from regarding themselves as cruelly treated." Dr Grant makes no comment, not even though Josephus had Just written that they "punish with death not merely desertion from the ranks but even a slight neglect of duty."
The Army of the Caesars thus turns out to be a surprisingly old-fashioned book about the Roman emperors and' their troubles, punctuated by bits about their armies. It is also punctatetir-ashi4„the fashion these days, by sixteen pages of appallingly reproduced pictures, wrireirtrdd nothing to the account but which presumably add enough to the price to bring it to £6.50 for some 120,000 words of text.
M. L Finley is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge.
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