Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 31 Jul 2024Continuing “The conquered and the proud”, this time we look at Julius Caesar as dictator in Rome, about his activities and reforms and his murder on the 15th March — The Ides of March — in 44 BC. We talk about Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators and what motivated them.
January 7, 2025
Caesar’s dictatorship and the Ides of March – The Conquered And The Proud 11
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January 5, 2025
QotD: The customary Dictatorship in the Roman Republic before 82BC
It’s important to note at the outset that the Romans had no written constitution and indeed most of the rules for how the Roman Republic functioned were, well, customary. The Roman term for this was the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancestors”, but Roman practice here isn’t that different from how common law and precedent guide the functioning of something like the British government (which also lacks a written constitution). Later Roman writers, particularly Cicero, occasionally offer theoretical commentary on the “rules” of the Republic (as a retrojected, ideal version), but just as often their observations do not actually conform to the practice we can observe from earlier periods. In practice, the idea here was that the “constitution” of the Republic consisting in doing things as they had always been done, or at least as they were understood to have always been done.
Consequently, as historians, we adopt the formulation that the Republic is what the Republic does – that is that one determines the rules of offices and laws based on how they are implemented, not through a hard-and-fast firm legal framework. Thus “how does the dictatorship work?” is less a question of formal rules and more a question of, “how did the eighty-odd Roman dictatorships work?”
The basic idea behind the office was that the dictator was a special official, appointed only in times of crisis (typically a military crisis), who could direct the immediate solution to that crisis. Rome’s government was in many ways unlike a modern government; in most modern governments the activities of the government are carried out by a large professional bureaucracy which typically reports to a single executive, be that a Prime Minister or a President or what have you. By contrast, the Roman Republic divided the various major tasks between a bunch of different magistrates, each of whom was directly elected and notionally had full authority to carry out their duties within that sphere, independent of any of the other magistrates. In crude analogy, it would be as if every member of the United States cabinet was directly elected and none of them reported to any of the rest of them but instead all of them were advised by Congress (but in a non-binding manner). Notionally, the more senior magistrates (particularly the consuls) could command more junior magistrates, but this wasn’t a “direct-report” sort of relationship, but rather an unusual imposition of a more senior magistrate on a less senior one, governed as much by the informal auctoritas of the consul as by law.
In that context, you can see the value, when rapid action was required, of consolidating the direction of a given crisis into a single individual. This is, after all, why we have single executive magistrates or officials in most countries. So, assuming you have a crisis, how does this process work?
The typical first step is that the Senate would issue its non-binding advice, a senatus consultum, suggesting that one or both of the consuls appoint a dictator. The consuls could ignore this direct, but almost never did (save once in 431, Liv. 4.26.5-7). The consuls would then have to nominate someone; they might agree on the choice (which would make things simple) or one of them might be indisposed (out of the city, etc.), which would leave the choice to the one that remained. If both consuls were present and did not agree, they’d draw lots to determine who got to pick (which happens in the aforementioned instance in 431 after the tribunes got the consuls of that year to relent and pick someone, Liv. 4.26.11).
The nominating consul could pick anyone except himself; if you, as consul, wanted to be dictator, you would need your co-consul to so nominate you. There were no formal requirements; of course nominations tended to go to experienced commanders, which tended to mean former consuls, but this was not a requirement. Publius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 249), enraged when the Senate directed him to appoint a dictator (because of his own bungled military command) infamously nominated his own freedman, Claudius Glicia, as dictator (Liv. Per. 19.2; Seut. Tib. 2.2), which was apparently a bridge too far; Glicia was forced to abdicate but his name was duly entered onto the Fasti because the appointment was valid, if ill-advised (despite the fact that, as a freedman, Glicia would have been ineligible to run for any [office]). Nevertheless, dictators were usually former consuls.
Once the name was picked, in at some cases the appointment may have been confirmed by a vote of the Comitia Curiata, Rome’s oldest voting assembly, which was responsible for conferring imperium (the power to command armies and organize law courts; essentially “the power of the kings”) on magistrates; not all magistrates had imperium (consuls, praetors, proconsuls, propraetors, dictators and their magistri equitum did; quaestors, aediles, tribunes, both plebeian and military, and censors did not). We do not know of any instance where the Comitia Curiata put the kibosh on the appointment of a dictator, so this step was little more than a rubber-stamp, and may have been entirely optional (Lintott, op. cit., 110, n. 75), but it may have also reflected the notion that all imperium had to be conferred by the people through a voting assembly. It is often hard to know with clarity about pro forma elements of Roman politics because the sources rarely report such things.
The dictator was appointed to respond to a specific issue or causa, the formula for which are occasionally recorded in our sources. The most common was rei gerundae causa, “for the business to be done” which in practice meant a military campaign or crisis. In cases where the consuls were absent (out on campaign), a dictator might also be nominated comitiorum habendorum causa, “for having an assembly”, that is, to preside over elections for the next year’s consuls, so that neither of the current consuls had to rush back to the city to do it. Dictators might also be appointed to do a few religious tasks which required someone with imperium. Less commonly but still significantly, a dictator might be appointed seditionis sedenae causa, “to quell sedition”; only one instance clearly under this causa is known, P. Manlius Capitolinus in 368, but several other instances, e.g. L. Quinctius Cincinnatus in 439, also dealt with internal matters. Finally, once in 216, Marcus Fabius Buteo held the office of dictator senatus legendi causa, “to enroll the Senate”, as the Battle of Cannae, earlier that year, had killed so many Senators that new inductions were needed (Liv. 23.23).
The dictator then named a subordinate, the magister equitum (“master of the horse”). The magister equitum was a lieutenant, not a colleague, but interestingly once selected by a dictator could not be unselected or removed, though his office ended when the dictator laid down his powers. We should note Marcus Minucius, magister equitum for Q. Fabius Maximus in 217 as an exception; his selection was forced by the people via a law and his powers were later made equal to Fabius’ powers. This turned out to be a substantial mistake, with Fabius having to bail the less prudent Minucius out at Geronium – the undermining of Fabius generally during 217 was, in retrospect viewed as a disaster, since the abandonment of his strategy led directly to the crushing defeat at Cannae in 216.
One of the ways that legal power was visually communicated in Rome was through lictors, attendants to the magistrates who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods (with an axe inserted when outside the sacred bounds of the city, called the pomerium). More lictors generally indicated a greater power of imperium (consuls, for instance, could in theory give orders to the praetors). Praetors were accompanied by six lictors; consuls by 12. The dictator had 24 lictors when outside of the pomerium to indicate his absolute power in that sphere (that is, in war), but only 12 inside the city. The magister equitum, as the dictator’s subordinate, got only six, like the praetors.
It also seems fairly clear that while dictators had almost complete power within their causa, those powers didn’t necessarily extend beyond it (e.g. Liv. 2.31.9-11, the dictator Manius Valerius, having been made dictator to resolve a military problem, insists to the Senate that he cannot resolve internal strife through his dictatorial powers and instead lays down his office early). The appointment of a dictator did not abolish the other offices (Cicero thinks they do, but he is clearly mistaken on the matter, Cic. De Leg. 3.9, see Lintott, 111). In essence then, the dictator was both a supreme military commander and also expected to coordinate the other magistrates with his greater degree of imperium, though of course in practice the ability to do that is going to substantially depend on the individual dictator’s ability to get cooperation from the other magistrates (but then, on the flip side, the dictator has just been designated as the leader in the crisis, so the social pressure to conform to his vision must have been intense). Notably, dictators could not make a law (a lex) on their own power or legislate by fiat outside of their causa; they could and did call assemblies which could by vote approve laws proposed by a dictator, however.
The dictator served for six months or until the task for which he was appointed was resolved, whichever came first. There is a tendency in teaching Roman history to represent a figure like Cincinnatus, who laid down his dictatorship after just fifteen days in 458, as exceptional but while the extreme shortness of term was exceptional, laying down power was not. Indeed, Cincinnatus (or perhaps a relative) served as dictator again in 439 and again laid down his power, this time in merely 21 days. In practice, the time-limited nature of the dictatorship meant there were few incentives to “run out the clock” on the office since it was so short anyway – better, politically, to solve the crisis quickly and lay down power ostentatiously early and “bank” the political capital than try to run out the period of power, accomplish relatively little and squander a reputation for being public-spirited.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
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December 30, 2024
QotD: The auxilia troops of the Imperial Roman armies
But almost immediately we see the emergence of a new system for incorporating non-Romans, this time provincial non-Romans, into the Roman army. These troops, called auxilia (literally, “helpers”) first appear in the Civil Wars, particularly with Caesar‘s heavy reliance on Gallic cavalry to support his legions (which at this time seem not to have featured their own integrated cavalry support, as they had earlier in the republic and as they would later in the empire). The system is at this point very ad hoc and the auxiliaries here are a fairly small part of Roman armies. But when Augustus sets out to institutionalize and stabilize the Roman army after the Battle of Actium (31BC) and the end of the civil wars, the auxilia emerge as a permanent, institutional part of the Roman army. Clearly, they were vastly expanded; by 23 AD they made up half of the total strength of the Roman army (Tac. Ann. 4.5) a rough equivalence that seems to persist at least as far as the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212.
Of course it was no particular new thing for the Romans to attempt to use their imperial subjects as part of their army. The Achaemenid army had incorporated a bewildering array of subject peoples with their own distinctive fighting styles, a fact that Achaemenid rulers liked to commemorate […] The Seleucid army at Magnesia (189) which the Romans defeated also had numerous non-Macedonian supporting troops: Cappadocians, Galatians, Carians, Cilicians, Illyrians, Dahae, Mysians, Arabs, Cyrtians and Elamites. At Raphia (217) the Ptolemaic army incorporated Egyptian troops into the phalanx for the first time, but also included Cretans, Greek mercenaries, Thracians, Gauls and Libyans, inter alia. Most empires try to do this.
The difference here is the relative performance that Rome gets out of these subject-troops (both the socii and the auxilia). Take those examples. Quite a number of the ethnicities on Xerxes monument both served in the armies of Darius III fighting against Alexander but then swiftly switched sides to Alexander after he won the battles – the Ionians, Egypt, and Babylon greeted Alexander as a liberator (at least initially) which is part of why the Achaemenid Empire could crumble so fast so long as Alexander kept winning battles. Apart from Tyre and Gaza, the tough sieges and guerilla resistance didn’t start until he reached the Persian homeland. The auxiliaries in the Seleucid army at Magnesia famously fell apart under pressure, whereas the Roman socii stuck in the fight as well as the legions; our sources give us no sense at any point that the socii were ever meaningfully weaker fighters than the legions (if anything, Livy sometimes represents them as more spirited, though he has an agenda here, as discussed). And the Ptolemaic decision to arm their Egyptian troops in the Macedonian manner won the battle (turns out, Egyptians could fight just as well as Greeks and Macedonians with the right organization and training) but their subsequent apparent decision not to pay or respect those troops as well as their Macedonians seems to have led quite directly to the “Great Revolt” which crippled the kingdom (there is some scholarly argument about this last point, but while I think Polybius’ pro-Greek, anti-Egyptian bias creeps in to his analysis, he is fundamentally right to see the connection (Plb. 5.107). Polybius thinks it was foolish to arm non-Greeks, but the solution here to saving the Ptolemaic kingdom would have been arming the Egyptians and then incorporating them into the system of rule rather than attempting to keep up the ethnic hierarchy with a now-armed, angry and underpaid underclass. The Greek-speakers-only-club system of Ptolemaic rule was unsustainable in either case, especially with Rome on the horizon).
By contrast, the auxilia were mostly very reliable. The one major exception comes from 69 AD – the “Year of the Four Emperors” to give some sense of its chaos – when the Batavian chieftain Julius Civilis (himself an auxiliary veteran and a Roman citizen) revolted and brought one ala and eight cohorts drawn from the Batavi (probably around 4,500 men or so) with him, out of an empire-wide total of c. 150,000 auxilia (so maybe something like 3.3% of the total auxilia). Indeed, the legions had worse mutinies – the mutiny on the Rhine (Tac. Ann. 1.16ff in 14AD) had involved six legions (c. 30,000 troops, nearly a quarter of Rome’s 25 legions at the time). This despite the fact that the auxilia were often deployed away from the legions, sometimes in their own forts (you’ll see older works of scholarship suggest that the auxilia were kept logistically dependent on the legions, but more recent archaeology on exactly where they were has tended to push against this view). Indeed, the auxilia were often the only military forces (albeit in small detachments) in the otherwise demilitarized “senatorial” provinces (which comprised most of the wealthy, populous “core” of the empire); they could be trusted with the job, provided they weren’t the only forces in their own home provinces (and after 69, they never were). And the auxilia fought hard and quite well. The Romans occasionally won battles with nothing but the auxilia, was with the Battle of Mons Graupius (83 AD, Tac. Agricola 35ff) where the legions were held in reserve and never committed, the auxilia winning the battle effectively on their own. Viewers of the Column of Trajan’s spiral frieze have long noted that the auxilia on the monument (the troop-types are recognizable by their equipment) do most of the fighting, while the legions mostly perform support and combat engineering tasks. We aren’t well informed about the training the auxilia went through, but what we do know points to long-service professionals who were drilled every bit as hard as the famously well-drilled legions. Consequently, they had exactly the sort of professional cohesion that we’ve already discussed.
Why this difference in effectiveness and reliability? The answer is to be found in the difference in the terms under which they served. Rather than being treated as the disposable native auxiliaries of other empires, the Romans acted like the auxilia mattered … because they did.
First of all, the auxilia were paid. Our evidence here is imperfect and still much argued about, but it seems that auxilia were paid 5/6ths of the wages of the legionary counterparts, with the cavalry auxilia actually paid more than the infantry legionaries. While it might sound frustrating to be systematically paid 1/6th less than your legionary equivalent, the legions were paid fairly well. The auxilia probably made in wages about as much as a normal day-laborer, but the wage was guaranteed (something very much not the case for civilian laborers) and while the cost of their rations was deducted from their pay, that deduction was a fixed amount that seems to have been set substantially below the market value of their rations, building in another subsidy. Most auxiliaries seem to have been volunteers, because the deal in being an auxiliary was good enough to attract volunteers looking to serve a full tour of duty (around 20 years; this was a long-service professional army now so joining it meant making a career out of it).
And most importantly, eventually (perhaps under Tiberius or shortly thereafter) the auxilia began to receive a special grant of citizenship on finishing that tour of duty, one which covered the soldier, and any children he might have had by his subsequent spouse (including children had, it seems, before he left the army; Roman soldiers in this period were legally barred from contracting legal marriages while serving, so the grant is framed so that it retroactively legitimizes any children produced in a quasi-marriage when the tour of service is completed). Consequently, whereas a soldier being dragooned or hired as a mercenary into other multi-ethnic imperial armies might end his service and go back to being an oppressed subject, the Roman auxiliary, by virtue of his service, became Roman and thus essentially joined the ruling class at least in ethnic status. Auxiliaries also clearly got a share of the loot when offensive warfare happened and while there is a lot of debate as to if they also received the praemia (the large retirement bonus legionaries got), epigraphically it is pretty clear that auxiliaries who were careful with their money could establish themselves fairly well after their service. I should also note that what we see of auxiliaries suggests they were generally well armed (with some exceptions, which may have more to do with stereotyped depictions of certain kinds of “barbarians” than anything else): metal helmets, mail shirts (an expensive and high quality armor for the period), oval shields, a spear and the spatha – a Roman version of the classic Gallic one-handed cutting sword – are the standard visual indicator in Roman artwork for generic “auxiliaries”. That is actually a fairly high-end kit; it is no surprise that the auxilia could win battles with it.
The attentive should already be noting many of the components of the old socii system now in a new form: the non-Roman troops serve under similar conditions with the Romans, get similar pay and rations (forts occupied by the auxilia show no deviation from the standard Roman military diet), a share of loot and glory and can finally be rewarded for loyal service by being inducted into the Roman citizen body itself (which could mean their sons might well enroll in the legions, a thing which does seem to have happened, as we do see a fair bit of evidence for “military families” over multiple generations).
(For those looking for more detail on the auxilia, a lot of this is drawn from a book I have already recommended, Ian Haynes, Blood of the Provinces: The Roman auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans (2013). Also still useful for the history of the development of the auxilia is D.B. Saddington, The Development of the Roman auxiliary Forces from Caesar to Vespasian (1982); this is, alas, not an easy book to find as it is – to my knowledge – long out of print, but your library may be able to track down a copy.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
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December 27, 2024
The First Triumvirate – The Conquered and the Proud 10
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 10, 2024This time we take a look at the Fifties BC, the formation of the first triumvirate, Caesar’s consulship, Clodius and Milo’s organised violence, Caesar in Gaul, Crassus in Syria and Parthia. The context is conquest and Roman success abroad with spiralling chaos at home. A big theme is the build-up to the Civil War and Caesar crossing the Rubicon in January 49 BC. We end with a quick run through the campaigns of the Civil War.
Primary sources include Caesar’s War Commentaries, Cicero’s letters and speeches, Plutarch’s Lives, Appian’s Civil War.
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December 11, 2024
Rome: Part 5 – Between Two Wars, 241-218 BC
seangabb
Published Jul 21, 2024This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.
Lecture 5: Between Two Wars (241-218 BC)
• Carthage after the First Punic War
• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Rome and the East
• Rome and the Gauls
• The Emergence of Hannibal
• The Outbreak of the Second Punic War
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November 29, 2024
Greek History and Civilization, Part 8 – The Hellenistic Age
seangabb
Published Jul 17, 2024This eighth lecture in the course covers the Hellenistic Age of Greece — from the death of Alexander in 323 BC to about the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.
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November 18, 2024
HBO’s Rome Ep. 3 “The owl in a thorn bush” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 17, 2024Episode Three: Now that Caesar has crossed the Rubicon, the Civil War has begun and the series gathers pace.
Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript
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November 10, 2024
The Sixties, Cicero, Catiline, Cato and Caesar – The Conquered and the Proud Episode 9
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 3, 2024Continuing our series on the the history of Rome from 200 BC to AD 200, this time we look at the turbulent decade following the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC. These years saw Pompey being given major commands against the pirates and Mithridates. Men like Cicero, Caesar and Cato were on the ascendant. Cicero’s letters can make the decade seem calm, but further consideration reveals the threat and reality of political violence, seen most of all in Catiline’s conspiracy which led to a brief civil war.
In this talk we explore the themes we have already considered and consider how imperial expansion continued to change the Roman Republic.
This talk will be released in July — and as this is the month named after Julius Caesar, it seemed only appropriate to have a Caesar theme to most of the talks.
Next time we will look at the Fifties BC and the start of the Civil War in 49 BC.
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November 4, 2024
Cicero 101: Life, Death & Legacy
MoAn Inc.
Published 31 Oct 2024A Bit About MoAn Inc. — Trust me, the ancient world isn’t as boring as you may think. In this series, I’ll talk you through all things Cicero. I hope you guys enjoy this wonderful book as much as all us nerds do.
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October 29, 2024
QotD: The Roman Republic after the Social War
Mithridates’ effort against the Romans, begun in 89 relied on the assumption that the chaos of the Social War would make it possible for Mithridates to absorb Roman territory (in particular the province of Asia, which corresponds to modern western Turkey) and eventually rival Rome itself (or whatever post-Social War Italic power replaced it). That plan collapsed precisely because Rome moved so quickly to offer citizenship to their disgruntled socii; it is not hard to imagine a more stubborn Rome perhaps still winning the Social War, but at such cost that it would have had few soldiers left to send East. As it was, by 87, Mithridates was effectively doomed, poised to be assailed by one Roman army after another until his kingdom was chipped away and exhausted by Rome’s far greater resources. It was only because of Rome’s continuing domestic political dysfunction (which to be clear had been going on since at least 133 and was not a product of the expansion of citizenship) that Mithridates lasted as long as he did.
More than that, Rome’s success in this period is clearly and directly attributable to the Roman willingness to bring a wildly diverse range of Italic peoples, covering at least three religious systems, five languages and around two dozen different ethnic or tribal identities and forge that into a single cohesive military force and eventually into a single identity and citizen body. Rome’s ability to effectively manage and lead an extremely diverse coalition provided it with the resources that made the Roman Empire possible. And we should be clear here: Rome granted citizenship to the allies first; cultural assimilation only came afterwards.
Rome’s achievement in this regard stands in stark contrast to the failure of Rome’s rivals to effectively do the same. Carthage was quite good at employing large numbers of battle-hardened Iberian and Gallic mercenaries, but the speed with which Carthage’s subject states in North Africa (most notably its client kingdom, Numidia) jumped ship and joined the Romans at the first real opportunity speaks to a failure to achieve the same level of buy-in. Hannibal spent a decade and a half trying to incite a widespread revolt among Rome’s Italian allies and largely failed; the Romans managed a far more consequential revolt in Carthage’s North African territory in a single year.
And yet Carthage did still far better than Rome’s Hellenistic rivals in the East. As Taylor (op. cit.) documents, despite the vast wealth and population of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid states, they were never able to mobilize men on the scale that Rome did and whereas Rome’s allies stuck by them when the going got tough, the non-Macedonian subjects of the Ptolemies and Seleucids always had at least one eye on the door. Still worse were the Antigonids, whose core territory was larger and probably somewhat more populous than the ager Romanus (that is, the territory directly controlled by Rome), but who, despite decades of acting as the hegemon of Greece, were singularly incapable of directing the Greeks or drawing any sort of military resources or investment from them. Lest we attribute this to fractious Greeks, it seems worth noting that the Latin speaking Romans were far better at getting their Greeks (in Southern Italy and Campania) to furnish troops, ships and supplies than the Greek speaking (though ethnically Macedonian) Antigonids ever were.
In short, the Roman Republic, with its integrated communities of socii and relatively welcoming and expansionist citizenship regime (and yes, the word “relatively” there carries a lot of weight) had faced down a collection of imperial powers bent on maintaining the culture and ethnic homogeneity of their ruling class. Far from being a weakness, Rome’s opportunistic embrace of diversity had given it a decisive edge; diversity turned out to be the Romans’ “killer app”. And I should note it was not merely the Roman use of the allies as “warm bodies” or “cannon fodder” – the Romans relied on those allied communities to provide leadership (both junior officers of their own units, but also after citizenship was granted, leadership at Rome too; Gaius Marius, Cicero and Gnaeus Pompey were all from communities of former socii) and technical expertise (the Roman navy, for instance, seems to have relied quite heavily on the experienced mariners of the Greek communities in Southern Italy).
Like the famous Appian Way, Rome’s road to empire had run through not merely Romans, but Latins, Oscan-speaking Campanians, upland Samnites, Messapic-speaking Apulians and coastal Greeks. The Romans had not intended to forge a pan-Italic super-identity or to spread the Latin language or Roman culture to anyone; they had intended to set up systems to get the resources and manpower to win wars. And win wars they did. Diversity had won Rome an empire. And as we’ll see, diversity was how they would keep it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
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October 24, 2024
QotD: From the OG Pontifex Maximus to the Pope
The Protestants might be happy to hear Misanthrope claim this would make you sick, because they’d correctly state that absolutely none of this is in the Bible. The entire liturgical structure of the Catholic Church is pagan, an inherited but corrupted structure from classical antiquity. Thus, a great majority of historic Christianity is syncretic. You might even say haphazardly pagan. The very idea of a high priest who would oversee the spiritual and religious duties is copped by the Pope’s role in Catholicism. The vestments worn by Catholic clergy, the use of incense (especially frankincense, the main herb used by invocations in Hellenism), chants, the sanctification of holy spaces, and the very architecture of Catholic cathedrals are derived from religious practices of pagan Rome. Let’s not get into art. The processions, the veneration of saints (akin to the Roman household gods or Lares), ancestor worship (which Catholics pretend they don’t do), and the hierarchical structure all reflect a continuity from Rome’s Hellenic pagan past. The Catholic Church’s liturgy, with its detailed rituals and sacraments is a direct continuation of the Greco-Roman pagan way of embedding religious practice into every aspect of public and private life. The transformation of its pantheon of gods into a multitude of saints, each with specific roles and domains is indistinguishable from how they interacted with their deities.
Fortissax, “Spiteful Mutant Christians”, Fortissax is Typing, 2024-07-19.
[NR: Glossary links added.]
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October 16, 2024
Roman Historian Rates 10 Ancient Rome Battles In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider
Insider
Published Jun 18, 2024Historian Michael Taylor rates depictions of ancient Rome in Gladiator, Spartacus, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
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October 10, 2024
HBO’s Rome – Ep. 2 “How Titus Pullo brought down the Republic” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 26, 2024A look at episode 2 of the first series/season of HBO’s Rome drama. Once again we talk about the actual history and how the characters, events and institutions are presented in the series. This time this includes Antony becoming tribune of the plebs, as well as a meeting of the Senate and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Vidcaps taken from the dvd edition, so copyright belongs to HBO.
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September 30, 2024
Sulla, civil war, and dictatorship
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 5, 2024The latest instalment of the Conquered and the Proud looks at the first few decades of the first century BC. We deal with the final days of Marius, the rise of Sulla, the escalating spiral of civil wars and massacres as Rome’s traditional political system starts breaking down.
Primary Sources – Plutarch, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Cicero and Caesar. Appian Civil Wars and Mithridatic Wars.
Secondary (a small selection) –
P. Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic & The Fall of The Roman Republic
A. Keaveney, Sulla – the last Republican
R. Seager, Pompey the Great: A political Biography
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September 29, 2024
QotD: Pyrrhus, King of Epirus
This week, we’re going to look at Rome’s first experience of that military system, delivered at the hands of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus (r. 297-272). The Pyrrhic Wars (280-275) are always a sticking point in these discussions, because they fit so incongruously with the rest. From 214 to 148, Rome will fight four “Macedonian Wars” and one “Syrian War” and utterly demolish every major Hellenistic army it encounters, winning every single major pitched battle and most of them profoundly lopsidedly. Yet Pyrrhus, fighting the Romans some 65 years earlier manages to defeat Roman armies twice and fight a third to a messy draw, a remarkably better battle record than any other Hellenistic monarch will come anywhere close to achieving. At the same time, Pyrrhus, quite famously, fails to get anywhere with his victories, taking losses he can ill-afford each time (thus the notion of a “Pyrrhic victory”), while the Roman armies he fights are never entirely destroyed either.
So we’re going to take a more in-depth look at the Pyrrhic Wars, going year-by-year through the campaigns and the three major battles at Heraclea (280), Ausculum (279) and Beneventum (275) and try to see both how Pyrrhus gets a much better result than effectively everyone else with a Hellenistic army and also why it isn’t enough to actually defeat the Romans (or the Carthaginians, who he also fights). As I noted last time, I am going to lean a bit in this reconstruction on P.A. Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020), which does an admirable job of untangling our deeply tangled and honestly quite rubbish sources for this important conflict.
Believe it or not, we are actually going to believe Plutarch in a fair bit of this. So, you know, brace yourself for that.
Now, Pyrrhus’ campaigns wouldn’t have been possible, as we’ll note, without financial support from Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Antigonus II Gonatus and Ptolemy Keraunos. So, as always, if you want to help me raise an Epirote army to invade Italy (NATO really complicates this plan, as compared to the third century, I’ll admit), you can support this project on Patreon.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIIb: Pyrrhus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-08.
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