This is the fifth part of our four(ish) five part1 (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc) look at how the Roman legions were able to overcome the Macedonian sarisa phalanx in the third and second centuries BC.
We have covered the decisive battles in the story, although after 168 it is not entirely clear if everyone understood the magnitude and implications of Rome’s astounding run of military success in the first half of the second century. Indeed, we’ll see that the Greek poleis most certainly did not, to their great misfortune. Nevertheless, while the Romans will fight in the East after Pydna, it will never again be against anything like ‘peer’ opponents. Still, how events proceed and how gains are consolidated after ‘decisive’ victories are often as important, if not more important, than the victories themselves, and so that is what we will look at here.
This post thus forms an epilogue to the series, briefly covering the broad outlines of Rome’s role in the Hellenistic East through the second and first centuries BC down to the end of the last substantial Hellenistic state (Ptolemaic Egypt, long since reduced to military irrelevancy) in the region in 30 BC. In practice, that process has a few phases, which we might break down as:
- The Immediate Aftermath of Pydna (168)
- The Assertion of Roman Hegemony in Greece (150-129)
- The Mithridatic Wars (88-63)
- Final Consolidation (63-22)
Naturally, covering so much in a single post means this is going to be a bit of a schematic overview. But that is also largely necessary, because our sources for this period are much weaker than what we had for the main of the series. Polybius’ later books barely survive in fragments, but his Histories would have ended in 146 in any event. Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita originally covered this whole period, but the surviving books of his history cut out in 168, leaving us with just extremely brief summaries. That leaves us reliant on weaker sources for much of this period: Plutarch’s biographies (which, being biographies, don’t cover everything), Appian and – in even less depth – later ‘universal’ histories like those of Cassius Dio. These sources, writing at much greater chronological remove and with a lot less granularity, almost never give us enough detail to allow for the reconstruction of battles with the kind of specificity we’ve been doing here, so often we can say who won, but not necessarily why or how and we often lack good detail on the structure or composition of non-Roman armies.
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The Consequences of Pydna
For the Antigonid Kingdom of Macedon, the consequences of the Roman victory at Pydna were total. While the Romans have a well-earned reputation for relentlessness, they were hardly averse to peace treaties that fell well short of total conquest, so long as Rome was the clear ‘winner’ in the agreement. But on the one hand, this was the Third Macedonian War and it is clear that Roman patience with the Antigonid dynasty was over; efforts by Perseus to negotiate as a king, rather than a captive, were rejected out of hand (Livy 45.4.4-7). On the other hand, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and the Roman Republic more broadly were in a position to be so imperious and high handed because of how staggeringly complete their victory had been. As we noted last time, the reports of near total Macedonian casualties are probably exaggerated, but it is clear that Perseus was unable to reconstitute basically any army at all after the battle and the Roman victory at Pydna left the whole of Macedon open to Paullus’ armies.
And then the Romans actually capture Perseus himself (Livy 45.6-7), reportedly abandoned by all of his soldiers and supporters save for his eldest son. So the Romans could write essentially any peace they wanted.
It is striking then, in this context, that they do not simply annex Macedon. Instead, while the Antigonid treasury is seized, to the tune of c. 30m drachma (Polyb. 18.35.3, Livy 45.40.1; Plut. Aem. 33.2-24; Diod. Sic. 33.8) and the Macedonian kingship abolished, Macedon itself was divided into four rump republics (centered on Amphipolis, Thessolonika, Pella and Pelagonia, respectively). Livy understands this as the Macedonians (and Illyrians) being made ‘free peoples’ (Livy 45.19.1) but the Romans do away with the general Macedonian popular assembly, formed four new republics out of Macedon and laid tribute on those republics equal to half of the what they had paid to the king in taxes, while also shutting down some of the region’s profitable mines.
On the one hand, these are clauses that may have caused one to doubt the true ‘liberty’ of the Macedonian people – they were internally self-governing, but the terms of the peace were clearly intended to be militarily crippling. On the other hand, I suspect leaving these states in Macedon was not entirely altruistic on the Romans’ part either. The regions around Macedonia more broadly – Thrace to the East, Illyria to the West and the Danube Basin to the North – were the sort of the regions that had the habit of generating large invading ‘barbarian’ armies at regular intervals. No one was likely to have forgotten, for instance, the large-scale Gallic invasion of Greece and Anatolia by the Galatians in 279. The four self-governing republics thus also served, at least in theory, to replace the traditional kingdom of Macedon’s role as a buffer-state shielding much of Greece from their northern neighbors.
Meanwhile, the Ptolemaic-Seleucid ‘Syrian Wars’ had kicked up again, while Rome had been busy with Perseus. The Ptolemaic court evidently though that, with Rome distracted, they might be able to move against Antiochus IV (Diodorus 30.15-16), and so after preparations, invaded Seleucid-controlled Syria, initiating the Sixth Syrian War (170-168). The Ptolemaic army, however, seems to have quickly been intercepted and defeated by Antiochus IV – perhaps more prepared than they thought – and Antiochus IV then moved into Egypt proper, on the excusing that he was supporting Ptolemy VI Philometer (r. 180-145) against his younger brother Ptolemy VIII Physcon (r. 170-164, 145-132, 127-116), both of whom were ‘co-rulers’ at the time, but evidently not seeing eye to eye. In practice, Antiochus IV’s success put him on the verge of conquering Egypt.
The Romans sent several senators as legati – senatorial legates, in this case functioning as ambassadors – to deliver to Antiochus IV the senatus consultum that it was the opinion of the Senate that he ought to withdraw. The scene that results, related by both Polybius (29.27) and Livy (45.12), is both memorable but also a testament to the impact of the Roman victory at Pydna. Antiochus IV stretches out his right hand to greet the lead legate, Gaius Popilius Laenas (cos 172, 158) who curtly places the senatus consultum in his hand instead of what would basically have been a handshake. When Antiochus reads it and then attempts to stall, saying he needs to talk it over, Laenas’ response is to take a stick and draw a circle in the sand around Antiochus IV and then declares, “before you leave this circle, give me a response which I may take back to the Senate.” Antiochus hestitates, but then concedes, responding that he will do what the Senate suggests. Only then does Popilius Laenas extend his own hand in a gesture of friendship.
Polybius suggests that the only reason Antiochus IV backed down when confronted – with nothing but a few senators and a piece of paper – was his knowledge of Perseus’ defeat at Pydna. After all, that meant that Antiochus IV could know that if he chose to fight, he would have Rome’s undivided attention and moreover that Roman armies appeared still quite capable of disposing of Hellenistic armies quite handily. He might also have been aware, given the fate of Perseus, that the Romans had run short of patience with intransigent Hellenistic kings and might well abolish his kingdom too, if he chose to try the matter in war.
As a result, the Roman legati not only set up those four Macedonian republics, they also settle affairs in Egypt, reconciling the two Ptolemies (one assumes with a fairly stark ‘or else’ attached), expelled Seleucid troops from Cyprus (returning it to the Ptolemies) and in so doing essentially asserted Roman hegemony over the Eastern Mediterranean, as Rome now became the guarantor of the political order in the East. In the process, they prematurely terminated the last resurgence of the Seleucid dynasty: from this point onward, the Seleucid kingdom will slowly shrink and atrophy, beginning almost immediately with the Maccabean Revolt in 167, though this is hardly the place to get into the complexities of that. One also wonders if the promise of Roman protection contributed to the steady decline of the Ptolemaic Kingdom; shorn of the pressures to defend itself against a peer opponent, the quality of Ptolemaic rule declines markedly.
Confirming Roman Rule in Greece (150-129)
The next major episode in the East is triggered by the Fourth Macedonian War (150-148). Roman victory at Pydna had brought the Greek world under much more direct Roman control – although not yet Roman rule – and it is clear that over time quite a bit of dissatisfaction simmered in both Macedon and Greece. As with most of the events of today’s post, our sources here consist of brief descriptions of events in much larger histories rather than the sort of focused narrative we get in Polybius and Livy, which leaves us mostly only with the broad outlines of events.
Some time in the late 150s, a fellow by the name of Andriscus began claiming he was secretly the son of Perseus and thus heir to the Macedonian throne, taking the appropriately dynastic name ‘Philip.’ He bounces around a bit, briefly serving in the Seleucid army of Demetrius I Soter, who packs him off to Rome, from which he escapes back to Thrace, where the Odrysian king Teres III makes the bold decision to back him; the Romans miss a few chances to nip this problem in the bud, each time concluding that Andriscus was no threat. So naturally, in 149, Andriscus, with his handful of troops, invades Macedon and seizes control of the country and then even pushes into Thessaly.
The Roman response was complacent, with the war initial entrusted to a praetor, Publius Iuventius Thalna, with the task of reasserting control. That’s not an uncommon Roman response to what they consider popular revolts, but evidently not at all sufficient to the event, as Iuventius’ small army – we aren’t told how small, but praetors don’t generally command full-sized field armies – is intercepted and defeated by Andriscus. At this point, the Romans send a proper, full-sized army (Zonar. 21.71.28) commanded by Quintius Caecilius Metellus (cos. 143, cens. 131), the praetor of 148.
If you are wondering, “what the hell were the consuls doing in 149 and 148?” the answer is, mostly, ‘The Third Punic War’ (149-146). Both consuls in 149, Lucius Marcius Censorinus and Mancius Manilius were deployed to Africa, while in 148, of the two consuls, Spurius Postumius Albinus Magnus and Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the former seems to have been deployed to Gaul, the latter to Africa.
In any event, with a full-sized army Q. Caecilius Metellus confronts Andriscus at Pydna – the natural entryway into Macedon, for the same reasons as before – and after a cavalry skirmish in which Andriscus came off well, Andriscus opts to try to be clever and split his army and Metellus takes the opportunity to attack, routing both forces. Andriscus retreated then to Thrace, where he is captured, while Metellus spends the rest of the year and some of the next pacifying Macedon. Rome responds by implementing direct Roman control of the new provincia Macedonia, to which a praetor and at least a legion would be dispatched essentially every year. Roman control in Macedon was now permanent.
Meanwhile, relations between the Romans and the Achaean League had been souring for some time.2 There had already been, since the Second Macedonian War, tensions in the Achaean League over if they should chart an independent foreign policy, or follow Rome’s directions. Naturally for the Romans, this was a self-answering question. Here, the issue is that Greek eleutheria (‘freedom, independence’) is not quite the same as Latin’s libertas (‘freedom’ ‘liberty’). A state with eleutheria, in the Greek sense, is free and independent, with its own foreign policy; a free citizen with eleutheria accepted no masters save the community as a whole. By contrast, in the Roman mind, one could be free while still existing in systems of hierarchy: an enslaved person, once freed, for instance, became the client (cliens) of their former owner, and that status had customary expectations that came with it.
So over the decades before 146, as the Greek states of the Achaean League buck against Roman wishes, the Romans don’t immediately swing into action, but they are annoyed by it, because the Greeks are being bad clients – having been freed by the Romans they ought to show loyalty and gratitude to the Romans (who in turn would then safeguard their freedom).
The main problem here was – wait for it – Sparta. This is, I should stress, not quite the Sparta of the classical period; Hellenistic Sparta was a much more normal polis, albeit still a quite large one in terms of territory. Under the tyrant Nabis, Sparta had made a play for relevance in 195, only to have been slapped down by the Achaean League and Rome in the Laconian War. As a consequence of that, Sparta is forced into the League, but uncomfortably so, with repeated Spartan demands for more autonomy, including appeals to Rome; Rome responds by reasserting the League’s authority, mostly to not be bothered. The Spartans then broke free (in 149/8) and the Achaeans moved to crush them – of course in this moment the Romans are busy with Andriscus (and Carthage).
Metellus, the praetor dealing with Andriscus asks the Achaeans if they would please desist from attacking Sparta; Rome had promised to send a senatorial legation to settle the matter diplomatically. The Achaeans decline initially, but when Metellus presses the point in 148, the Achaeans agree to a truce, with the Spartans then foolishly violate, at which point the Achaeans drop the hammer and beat Sparta into submission.
The following year, the promised senatorial legates arrived and propose that Sparta be detached from the League, but also a number of other key cities, including Corinth and Argos; the League, infuriated, responds by clamping down on the Spartans and the Roman delegation will at least claim it was forced to flee. Gruen suggests (following Polybius) that this was a failed play by Rome at a strong opening bargaining position – that the strong terms were meant to communicate that Rome was unhappy being ignored, but that the plan may have been to get ‘negotiated down’ to Spartan independence and communicate to the League that any more wars of conquest would not be welcome, a “form of intimidation, designed to alarm the Achaeans into good behavior.”3 When that obviously didn’t work, the Romans sent a second, more cordial, delegation to smooth things over, but the Achaean strategos of the year, Critolaus, opts to try delay, further annoying Rome, while the Achaeans prepared for further action against Sparta.
Gruen’s reading of the events, which I think is broadly correct, is that the Achaeans were driven by internal politics, not to go to war against Rome, but to punish Sparta for its defiance. The Romans, looking to avoid a war, issued one polite request for peace after another, occasionally engaging in threats, which the Achaeans read as Roman unwillingness to get involved and thus a green light to proceed. But for the Senate, the repeated rejection of their kind advice wore away the Senate’s patience and so when the Achaeans went to war against their recalcitrant members, it was Rome’s turn now to drop the hammer. And of course, drop the hammer the Romans did.
The Senate sent one of the consuls of 146, Lucius Mummius to Greece to resolve the problem, but he would take some time to arrive. Quintius Caecilius Metellus, now Macedonicus, was still in Macedon settling affairs and moves south with his army, meeting the Achaean force under Critolaos at Scarpheia and smashing it before the onset of winter. At this point the other key Achaean politician, Diaeos, is elected strategos, clamps down on the pro-peace party and prepares to fight the Romans in earnest, raising an army of 14,000 infantry and 600 cavalry (Paus 7.15.7). Meeting the Romans outside of the key Achaean city of Corinth, they are promptly buried under Mummius’ 23,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry (Paus. 7.16.1). We don’t get the details of the battle or the composition of the Achaean army (though a Hellenistic-style force seems certain), but we are told that the Roman victory began with its cavalry wing overpowering the Achaean cavalry, before the Roman infantry overcame the Achaean infantry by envelopment.
Mummius then seizes Corinth – the chaos of the defeat and Diaeos’ own flight to Megalopolis had left it functionally undefended – and functionally destroys it. The Romans will refound the city in 44 BC and while the site isn’t uninhabited in the meantime, the Roman destruction was complete enough to send shockwaves through the Greek world, especially coming in the same year the Romans would also destroy Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War (149-146). The Roman Republic now sets a rather firmer policy in Greece: while the Greek states will remain nominally independent, they are demilitarized, their defensive walls removed (Paus 7.16.9) and all federal leagues disbanded. Moreover, the Romans reconfigured the internal government of the poleis towards broad oligarchies with property requirements (that is, states rather more like Rome), presumably concluding that the chaotic democracies had been part of the political pressure that had produced the war.
The final episode in this period comes a decade later with the end of the Kingdom of Pergamon. The last king of the Attalid dynasty, the son of Eumenes II of whom we’ve seen so much, was Attalus III. He died childless in 133 and in his will bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic. It’s possible that Attalus supposed the Romans would select an appropriate member of his extended family tree, but for internal political reasons intersecting with the already-quite-complicated career of Tiberius Gracchus, the Romans opted to annex the kingdom and turn it into a province. A pretender named Aristonikos attempted to lead a popular resistance to Roman rule, manages to fend off Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus (cos. 131), but was defeated by Marcus Perperna (cos. 130) the following year. We don’t have a lot of information about the tactical composition of Aristonikos’ army; our sources represent Aristonikos as primarily raising an army of slaves promised freedom if they fought for him.4
The Mithridatic Wars (88-63)
The next major set of Roman wars and Roman expansion in the East concern the Kingdom of Pontus and its king, Mithridates VI (r. 120(ish)-63). The Kingdom of Pontus was an odd fragment of Alexander’s empire: in the chaos after Alexander’s death, a noble Persian family – the Mithridatic dynasty, so named because most of its kings took the name Mithridates – who had been the rulers of Cius, a city in Mysia (which is not in Pontus, but is in Anatolia) had ended up securing control of the region and established a kingdom and a dynasty in the 280s. The kingdom was a complex one as well: the coastal regions had been exposed to steady Greek colonization in the 8th and 7th centuries, resulting in a bunch of coastal poleis, but the interior populace was Cappadocian and Paphlagonian, with an ethnically Iranian aristocracy and quite a bit of Persian Zoroastrian religion, alongside quite a bit of Greek religion and the language of the bureaucracy, at least by the Mithridatic Wars was Greek. A complex place.
The Kingdom of Pontus had been broadly pro-Roman during the later half of the second century, but that policy changed markedly in the first century with the reign of Mithridates VI Eupator. Mithridates was ambitious, aggressive, charismatic and capable and set about expanding his kingdom, engaging in early conquests along the Black Sea, in the Crimea and in central Anatolia. This eventually fell afoul of Rome in the 90s over Mithridates’ efforts to subdue the kingdom of Cappadocia. Mithridates had overthrown the relatively long-standing Ariathid dynasty in 95BC and occupied the kingdom; the Romans demanded restoration of Cappadocian rule and initially, Mithridates complied (App. Mith. 10). At roughly the same time, Mithridates had also defeated Nicomedes III of Bithynia; the Romans demanded that he back off of that too (App. Mith. 11) and it seems like at this point Mithridates was looking for a ripe opportunity to try to expel Roman influence from Anatolia.
The opportunity comes with the outbreak of the Social War in Italy (91-88), which left minimal Roman forces in the East. Mithridates took the opportunity (along with a continuing conflict with Roman-allied Bithynia) to overrun basically all of Roman-controlled Anatolia, overrunning Cappadocia and Bithynia in 89 and then the Roman province of Asia (what had been Pergamon) in 88, defeating the relatively modest Roman forces in the East. According to our sources, Mithridates also instigated the mass slaughter of Roman and Italians in the province of Asia by the local populace; these fellow would have included the publicani – the tax farmers – who collected Rome’s taxes and were widely hated for their corruption, but also a wide array of merchants, businessmen, bankers and so on, profiting off of Rome’s new empire. Our sources give various unreliable figures (Val. Max. 9.2.3 says 80,000; Plut. Sulla 24.4 says 150,000; App. Mith. 22-3 reports the massacre but gives no numbers) for the number killed in the massacre – which has become known as the ‘Asian Vespers.’
This, unsurprisingly, leads to a series of wars we generally divide into the three Mithridatic Wars (88-85, 83-81 and 75-63), though it’s not clear these were always understood as separate wars so much as phases in a continuing conflict with pauses. These wars are further complicated by the fact that they occur in some cases in parallel with Rome’s on-going civil wars. I don’t want to get too deep into the details. Those interested in a blow-by-blow should start by consulting our most thorough source for the wars, Appian.
After some civil war shennagins, Rome responds by sending Lucius Cornelius Sulla (cos 88, 80, dict. 82-80) east to Greece, where Mithridates had managed to convince many of the Greek cities to revolt, presenting himself as the champion of Hellenic identity and culture against the encroachment of Roman domination. Sulla, operating with one eye on Rome (now controlled by his civil enemies), fought Mithridates’ general Achelaus in Greece, defeating a large Pontic army at Chaeronea in 86 and then smashing him again the following year (after Achelaus had been reinforced) at Orchomenos. He also plundered much of Greece with brutality and rapaciousness (described in Plutarch’s Sulla), sacking Athens, which had joined Mithridates, in 86 as well; this left Greece back under Roman control.
Meanwhile in Asia, a second Roman army under Lucius Valerius Flaccus arrived (having taken the northern route through Macedonia) with orders to fight both Mithridates and Sulla (because of the civil war). Flaccus, however, ends up murdered in a mutiny instigated by his subordinate, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, who then proceeds to secure the province of Asia, defeating an army led by Mithridates’ son (also named Mithridates). But by that point, Sulla had also crossed in Asia and made a peace with Mithridates that left Mithridates ruling Pontus but without his recent conquests in 85. The incompleteness of the peace seems an obvious consequence of Sulla’s need to get back to Rome in the context of the civil wars, though before turning to Rome, he backs Fimbria into a corner and the latter, recognizing he had no hope of winning a battle, commits suicide. Sulla then leaves Lucius Licinius Murena behind with two legions to re-consolidate Roman control of Asia, before heading off to Rome to become a bloodstained dictator.
Hostilities only ever really briefly pause and by 83, Murena, fearful that Mithridates was preparing to resume hostilities, moved his army into Cappadocia and raided into Pontic territory (specifically the town of Comana). While Murena continued to raid (claiming that Sulla had left no written treaty), Mithridates tried to appeal to the Senate, which eventually sent Quintus Calidius to tell Murena to cool it, which Murena did not do (App. Mith. 65), instead launching an invasion of Pontic territory, at which point Mithridates defeats him and secures Cappadocia (again). At this point, Sulla (now acting as dictator) sends Aulus Gabinius to tell Murena to chill the hell out and while Murena may have figured he could ignore the Senate, he was not fool enough to ignore Sulla and so the second war ends in 81.
The Third Mithridatic War (73-63) likewise sees Mithridates taking advantage of the outbreak of civil war within the Roman Republic, in this case Sertorius, a rogue Roman governor (who had been on the wrong side of Sulla’s Civil War), operating in Spain. Appian (Mith. 68) represents Mithridates and Sertorious exchanging ambassadors and actively coordinating, though one wonders how seriously to take this. Still, it seems that, “strike when the Romans are fighting each other” was a deliberate strategy of Mithrdates’, and he invaded Bithynia, once again asserting his rule over it. The Senate dispatches Lucius Lucius Lucullus with an army and Marcus Aurelius Cotta with a fleet (both cos. 74) to deal with Mithridates (while Gnaeus Pompeius is off in Spain fighting Sertorius).
Lucullus spends the next several years first fighting Mithridates out of Bithynia, before invading Pontus. Lucullus enters Pontus proper (probably in 72 or 71), defeats Mithridates at Cabira (same dates), at which point Mithridates flees to the allied kingdom of Armenia. Lucullus finishes securing Pontus, then invades Amernia, meeting and defeating the Armenian army first at Tigranocerta (69) and then again at Artaxata (68). Mithridates manages to evade capture however and slips back into Pontus, defeating the small Roman force left there (as most of the troops were with Lucullus, dealing with Armenia) at the Battle of Zela in 67. Worried victory was slipping away from them (it wasn’t), the Romans dispatched Gnaeus Pompey to take command, which he does, arriving in 67 to find the victory essentially won, but never actually tracks down Mithridates (who escapes first to Colchis and then to Crimea), who commits suicide in 63 when his own son, Pharnaces II revolts against him.
Assessing the structure of the army of Pontus in all of this is difficult; the sources rarely give us the kind of clear information we’d like and many of the numbers they give are implausible. Still, what we see looks to be a late Hellenistic army along recognizable lines. The core of the Pontic army was evidently a Hellenistic style phalanx, perhaps mobilized from the kingdom’s Greek populace; Plutarch terms them chalkaspides (Plut. Sulla 16.7; note also App. Mith. 17-18).
Plutarch also reports that, at least by the time he is fighting Lucullus, Mithridates has troops – Plutarch says 120,000, which seems unlikely – equipped with “Roman swords and heavy thureoi (read: scuta) […] made up5 in a Roman-style phalanx” (Plut. Luc. 7.4). Here we should understand φάλαγξ (‘phalanx’) probably to just mean generally a close-order heavy infantry formation, so εἰς φάλαγγα Ῥωμαϊκήν, “in a Roman phalanx” would really mean, “in the form of a Roman legion.” Plutarch is often imprecise in his military terminology in this way. Hellenistic states attempting to imitate Roman tactics was hardly new; in 166 at a military review in Daphne the Seleucid Army featured some 5,000 soldiers armored in mail and organized as a Roman legion (Polyb. 30.25), though further ‘Romanizing’ Hellenistic military reform is contested.6
In any case, it clearly doesn’t work. On the one hand, Mithridates VI puts up a better fight than most against the Romans, but on the other hand, while he is able to take advantage of Roman in-fighting to isolate and defeat small Roman armies, every time he is faced by a major Roman expeditionary force, he is quite soundly defeated. Mithridates thus represents the last real attempt by a state with the Hellenistic military system to stand up to Rome in earnest, though if Plutarch is correct, Mithridates himself seems to have abandoned his traditional Hellenistic army in favor of an imitation Roman one in the hopes of matching Lucullus, to no avail.
Final Consolidation (63 and After)
Part of the reason Pompey was so slow to finish off Mithridates is that after he had defeated (but not captured) Mithridates, Pompey opted to make a general settlement of Roman affairs in the East. We are, at this point, well into the chaos of the first century BC, full of freelancing Roman generals, of which Pompey is the freelancer par excellence. The decaying Seleucid Empire had created a power vacuum, initially filled by Tigranes, king of Armenia (and ally of Mithridates), but which would now be filled by Rome.
Pompey opted to create – under his own authority, for the Senate had authorized no such thing – three new Roman provinces. Bithynia and most of Pontus were merged into Bythnia et Pontus, while southern coastal Anatolia became the province of Cilicia and the rump remains of the Seleucid kingdom were formed into the province of Syria, while the province of Asia was also expanded. Pompey also recognized allied client kingdoms in Galatia, Cappadocia, Commagene, Osroene, Armenia, Palmyra and Judaea (this is the Hasmonean kingdom), creating a buffer between Rome and the growing Parthian Empire to the East. Pontus’ northern holdings along the Sea of Azov, the Bosphoran Kingdom, went to Pharnaces II, Mithridates’ rebellious son, as a reward for having finally murdered his father.
The reorganization, eventually confirmed legislatively in Rome in 59 (amidst a great deal of political shenanigans) formalized Roman control in the East, although by this point Roman military dominance in the region had been quite clear for almost a century. The sole remaining major Hellenistic power, Ptolemaic Egypt, was increasingly weak and had essentially existed as a Roman vassal-stage since it had needed to rely on the senatus consultum for its continued existence in 168. It is certainly possible to imagine that an effective ruler might have turned the Ptolemaic Kingdom back into a major player, but the Ptolemaic dynasty instead produced a succession of weak and ineffective rulers (intermixed with revolt and dynastic civil war), culminating in Cleopatra VII, who was not weak, but also not effective. In 58 BC, the kingdom of Cyprus (which had its own Ptolemaic dynasty) was abolished and annexed into the province of Cilicia.
In the decades that followed, Roman rule in the region expanded in fits and starts, but there was no longer any meaningful military contest. Nor do we see any further efforts to use clearly Hellenistic-style armies to fight off Roman ones. Instead, the fighting that will matter will be Rome’s civil wars, with Roman armies (albeit some of them funded out of the pockets of Ptolemaic Egypt) fighting each other and the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean left to endure the results, whatever they might be.
The next wave of expanding Roman power came after the Battle of Actium (31), which left Octavian (soon to be Augustus) as sole ruler of the Roman world. Many of the client states of the east had supported either Marcus Antonius (or worse yet, Brutus and Cassius) and so now saw their independence curtailed. Cleopatra’s Egypt was annexed into the new Roman province of Alexandrea et Aegyptus, to be governed by a prefect under Augustus. The Galatian kingdom, on the death of its last king Amyntas (r. 36-25) was annexed as well, being made into the new Roman province of Galatia. The drift of Judaea, by this point ruled by the Herodian dynasty which had replaced the Hasmonean one, into direct Roman rule is complicated to say the least, but we may simply note that the autonomy of the kingdom (later four tetrarchies) was steadily reduced (including the imposition of a Roman governor in 6 AD), with direct Roman control permanently established in the 90s, AD. Commagene and Cappadocia were annexed into Roman provinces by the second emperor, Tiberius, in 17 AD.
Of course that wasn’t the end of the Hellenistic legacy. At least some of the trappings of Hellenistic kingship, while initially rejected – quite explicitly – by Augustus, would eventually become assimilated in part into the new imperial Roman monarchy, while of course by the late Republic, Hellenistic philosophy, literature and art were already mainstays of the Roman elite. Most of the militaria and tactics of the Hellenistic military system were abandoned – the Romans will make no use of sarisae – but Hellenistic military theory survived in military manuals, continuing into Byzantine military literature (like the Emperor Maurice’s (r. 582-602) Strategikon or Leo VI’s (r. 886-912) Tactika).
But the political and military order created by Alexander and the chaos after his death was gone, replaced by the world Rome had conquered and the legions it had used to do it.
- It would probably be best if no one told my book publisher about this sort of thing. I promise in my scholarly writing, I can actually keep to an original scope and length!
- The standard reading on this is the class E.R. Gruen article, “The Origins of the Achaean War” JHS 96 (1976): 46-69.
- Gruen, op. cit., 61.
- e.g. Diodorus 34.25, Strabo 14.1.38.
- κατασκευάζω, literally ‘prepared, furnished’ which in this context could mean ‘trained’ or ‘equipped’ or, probably, both. A frustratingly vague word also sometimes used of ships with which I have a history.
- The arguments in favor are in Sekunda, Hellenistic Infantry Reform in the 160s BC (2001) and Seleucid and Ptolemaic Reformed Armies 168-145 BC (1994/5), though subsequently, Sekunda has backed off of this position. Fischer-Bovet has argued against this for the Ptolemaic armies, at least, C. Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014). Part of the problem is that it is quite hard to tell an imitation-Roman-style soldier from mailed thurephoroi (thorakitai) or even Gallic mercenaries because they’re all taking bits and pieces from a fairly broad La Tène military koine. I don’t think, at this point, there’s a firm consensus either way, except that there is some efforts to imitate the legion, but no evidence that any state ever fully reforms their army this way, except, potentially, what Plutarch says above about Pontus, which is itself not the strongest of evidence.
Concerning footnote 1: I think one of the most important lessons I learned in university was one taught by a poli-sci professor. He was quite up-front that his length assignments for essays were ‘tight’, and that we would struggle to develop ideas to the depth demanded while also keeping in the length requirements. And he would grade harshly if you went over them. It was a hard school, but it did teach concision, and that’s stuck with me even as most of the actual political science has faded into forgetfulness.
Concerning the rump Macedonian republics, how did Rome expect them to be able to resist incoming Illyrians/Thracians/Dacians/Celts/anyone else if they were bent on crippling them militarily, closing their mines and undermining their recruiting like they seem to have done? What good is a buffer state if it can’t actually provide a buffer?
Re: buffer states, they don’t a 20,000-strong army with sarisa-phalanxes and war elephants to ward off raiders.
Buffer states don’t need to succeed militarily, they just need to succeed long enough you can get an army over there, so the fighting happens in territory you don’t own.
This sounds a lot like how the USA has treated NATO allies in Europe — Germany is kept weaker than it could be, and France and the UK are discouraged from forming their own defense policies and slapped down (Suez crisis of 1956) if they get uppity. We expected (probably still do) for a showdown with the Soviets/Russians to be fought on European territory, certainly not in North America (which no European power can threaten anyway).
Germany isn’t “kept weaker than it could be”. The US has been after Germany to *increase* its military spending since at least the second Obama term, to little avail. Even the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has barely managed to push the needle on the matter, and that not very much.
Bluntly, Germany isn’t willing to accept the tax structure required to pay for a proper army, and thus has one that is bare-bones and inadequate to requirements.
Germany is actually undergoing significant political change. It’s not really clear what the response will be long term, besides that in the short term their aversion to militarism is strong.
It’s also worth noting that what German army exists is high quality, it’s just small. This has worked perfectly well as part of a Post cold war strategic situation where German operations are very restrained.
The second Obama term is historically extremely recent. The above post was talking about the structuring of NATO during the Cold War, the sort of conflict it was designed for.
Needless to say that the role of NATO and the importance of relative military spending in its member states have been in considerable flux and subject of discussion in recent years, but I would be wary of any historical judgements of their present or future configurations due to recency bias.
Lastly, “willing to accept” is a very odd phrasing. Willing to accept from whom? Its voting public? If so, who is the one being unwilling? This phrasing assumes a strange locus of sovereignty.
It isn’t really a matter of tax structure – Germany also has an incredibly unconstructive relationship with the concept of debt spending, for example. But even more importantly, Germany has a very fraught relationship with the idea of the military and an interest-oriented foreign policy in general, so it is no surprise it is difficult to mobilize the political will required to “accept” investments into defense. Instead you get a political class that prefers to dodge these questions and hide behind moralism.
This political environment is often framed as being an outcome of learning lessons from WW2 (including, in a rather self-congratulatory way, by Germans). But it should not be ignored that this attitude was also actively fostered by the US. “Please no strong German military” WAS a consensus in the Western alliance system and that really only started to change after the US declined in relative global power and decided to re-evaluate its priorities (which do not need to follow Germany’s preferences, obviously).
The Suez crisis has less to do with a devious American plot and more to do with Britain and France pretending it was 1910 and before two world wars and a decolonization movement. Both America and the Soviets were playing a higher level of game, where wealth was extracted via trade, proxies, idealogical coups, and collaborators, while the UK, Israel, and France thought they could set up colonial rule. It was madness, and then being smacked down wasn’t a political ploy, but the teachers telling the students to shut up and learn.
The fact is that the American treatment of its allies is closer to the Socii system; we beat you, now we’re friends, send men and let us setup a colony. A better example of a buffer state was west Germany and particularly Berlin, Israel, and the modern Baltics. Israels strategic role for the USA is to be hated and bombed so the people who (justly) hate us leave us alone, while west Germany and now the Baltics were not expected to actually hold out, just attrit the enemy and introduce friction prior to American counterattacks.
The Suez crisis has less to do with a devious American plot and more to do with Britain and France pretending it was 1910 and before two world wars and a decolonization movement. Both America and the Soviets were playing a higher level of game, where wealth was extracted via trade, proxies, idealogical coups, and collaborators, while the UK, Israel, and France thought they could set up colonial rule. It was madness, and then being smacked down wasn’t a political ploy, but the teachers telling the students to shut up and learn.
“It’s OK when *we* smack down our uppity allies, because we’re better than them and it’s for their own good” is something probably every imperialistic power in history has said at one point or another.
When the native population, your major power ally, their competition, and the worldwide community all agree you’re being stupid, you’re stupid. Sorry, there’s really no legitimate interpretation of the Suez crisis that doesn’t speak to a frankly arrogant European political position. If you want proof, the UK and France would continue to become involved in colonial conflicts they’d *categorically lose* for the next two to three decades, even *when* the USA sided with them. The fact that they misread international post war politics is clear.
It has nothing to do with American imperialism.
That said, American imperialism is real. It just has zero relevance to the failures of the old colonial empires. They did that to themselves.
When the native population, your major power ally, their competition, and the worldwide community all agree you’re being stupid, you’re stupid. Sorry, there’s really no legitimate interpretation of the Suez crisis that doesn’t speak to a frankly arrogant European political position. If you want proof, the UK and France would continue to become involved in colonial conflicts they’d *categorically lose* for the next two to three decades, even *when* the USA sided with them. The fact that they misread international post war politics is clear.
Imperialism doesn’t cease to be imperialism just because the state you’re dominating is acting foolishly. The Achaean League was pretty foolish in trying to keep control of Sparta, but that doesn’t make Rome’s invasion any less imperialistic.
It has nothing to do with American imperialism.
If imposing economic sanctions on other states to make them do what you wan’t isn’t an example of imperialism, how exactly should we categorise it?
“It’s OK when *we* smack down our uppity allies, because we’re better than them and it’s for their own good” is something probably every imperialistic power in history has said at one point or another.
Protecting Egypt against British and French aggression seems more like the opposite of imperialism, really.
I don’t have a very high view of most US foreign policy during the Cold War, to put it mildly (or for that matter since the end of the Cold War), but A) I don’t think it’s properly described as imperialism, B) I don’t think it was fundamentally about pursuing wealth or power, I think it was fundamentally about ideology, and C) in the case of the Suez crisis I think the US actually did the right thing for once, and deserves credit.
As sanctions? Maybe just diplomacy? Imperialism is not simply wielding influence over another nation, it is the intentional assertion of hegemony to control the expansion or growth of a region; it’s shaping through authority, not just use of soft power.
For example, the various nations of the world were unified in asserting soft power against South Africa during apartheid, yet the end of this assertion didn’t involve capitulation to the authority and power of a hegemon; the region remains independent and has broken ranks from it’s larger alliance block to maintain it’s interests multiple times.
A view of the world politic that doesn’t allow for idealogical motives amongst populations and hence their governments and seeks to explain relations purely via political hierarchy is deficient. The United States didn’t see any real regional benefits to imposing sanity on the UK or France during the Suez crisis, for all that it was the best way forward a strict power play may have been to seize control of the canal, I don’t know. But it certainly played well to further the ideology American leadership was supposed to perform.
Basically; it was enforcing international law. That’s what we call using soft power to stop a dumb colonial war.
All that said I’m not downplaying real examples of American empire. One only needs to look at Panama to see that the political will here is at least mostly hypocritical. But the US has always been better at taking idealistic stands for sanity over the Atlantic, even as we practice hypocrisy adroitly on our side of the pond.
As sanctions? Maybe just diplomacy? Imperialism is not simply wielding influence over another nation, it is the intentional assertion of hegemony to control the expansion or growth of a region; it’s shaping through authority, not just use of soft power.
Sanctions are more than “just diplomacy”, and crippling another country’s economy or war-making capicity in order to make it do what you want goes beyond how “soft power” is usually conceptualised, even if it’s not as “hard” as outright military action.
For example, the various nations of the world were unified in asserting soft power against South Africa during apartheid, yet the end of this assertion didn’t involve capitulation to the authority and power of a hegemon; the region remains independent and has broken ranks from it’s larger alliance block to maintain it’s interests multiple times.
I would consider that an example of imperialism as well.
The United States didn’t see any real regional benefits to imposing sanity on the UK or France during the Suez crisis, for all that it was the best way forward a strict power play may have been to seize control of the canal, I don’t know.
The US expected to win the gratitude of Arab nationalists and recruit them to its side in the Cold War. Of course, things didn’t turn out that way, but it was still the US’ intention.
Basically; it was enforcing international law. That’s what we call using soft power to stop a dumb colonial war.
Again, I would consider international law an imperialist concept, because it gives those countries that benefit from the post-war order a ready casus belli for intervening in other countries.
To be frank if your definition of imperialism is that broad it no longer has unique explanatory power. You might as well call it diplomacy, as it lacks the domineering context that is vital to the term.
(It’s absolutely indefensible that South African sanctions were imperialism, but I’m not even interested in hearing you try)
Sanctions are also largely incapable of significant material damage to an economy. It’s more a political move to increase domestic pressure, not a serious restriction. A *blockade* or organized interdiction would be, but sanctions don’t go that far.
I also don’t think it’s really believable that the US was trying to get Arab countries to pick a side. It’s possible to interpret it as a political calculus to keep them from doing so, but if your political strategy is to respect the integrity of a nations borders and sovereignty then I can’t call that an imperialistic strategy.
Of course America was far too selective in it’s application of international law to make it’s global strategy non imperialistic, but The Suez crisis hardly qualifies as an imperial endeavor. I’d argue, again, that domestic politics were more significant than international interests among the politicians making decisions, and the domestic audience was never particularly fond of the old order to begin with.
Sanctions are also largely incapable of significant material damage to an economy. It’s more a political move to increase domestic pressure, not a serious restriction. A *blockade* or organized interdiction would be, but sanctions don’t go that far.
Per Wikipedia:
“The United States also put financial pressure on the UK to end the invasion. Because the Bank of England had lost $45 million between 30 October and 2 November, and Britain’s oil supply had been restricted by the closing of the Suez Canal, the British sought immediate assistance from the IMF, but it was denied by the United States. Eisenhower in fact ordered his Secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, to prepare to sell part of the US Government’s Sterling Bond holdings. The UK government considered invading Kuwait and Qatar if oil sanctions were put in place by the US.
Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, advised his Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, that the United States was fully prepared to carry out this threat. He also warned his Prime Minister that Britain’s foreign exchange reserves simply could not sustain the devaluation of the pound that would come after the United States’ actions; and that within weeks of such a move, the country would be unable to import the food and energy supplies needed to sustain the population on the islands.”
Granted, deliberately devaluing another country’s currency isn’t strictly a form of sanction, but it’s still economically damaging, and it was something the US was prepared to do to make another country do what the US wanted.
I also don’t think it’s really believable that the US was trying to get Arab countries to pick a side.
Trying to get countries to choose their side over the Russians’ was a major factor in US foreign policy throughout the Cold War, and Eisenhower explicitly offered to support Arab states against the Soviets a few years later. Frankly I find it far less believable that the US wasn’t acting with one eye on how the Crisis would be seen in the Arab world.
if your political strategy is to respect the integrity of a nations borders and sovereignty then I can’t call that an imperialistic strategy.
Roman intervention against the Achaean League had the stated purpose of securing Spartan sovereignty, so I guess that wasn’t imperialistic either?
I’d argue, again, that domestic politics were more significant than international interests among the politicians making decisions,
That’s been the case with lots of empires. Plenty of Roman generals started wars primarily to win favour with the people back home, for example.
Mr. X, in your view, is the West currently doing imperialism against Russia by imposing sanctions (in response to Russia’s attempt to do its own blatant imperialism)?
Mr. X, in your view, is the West currently doing imperialism against Russia by imposing sanctions (in response to Russia’s attempt to do its own blatant imperialism)?
Yes, both Russia and the West are currently doing imperialism. And no, the fact that the West is defending Ukraine against Russian imperialism doesn’t make the West’s actions non-imperialist. Plenty of Roman imperial ventures started with some small state asking for their protection against an expansionistic neighbour.
Your definition of imperialism is clearly meaningless and divorced from common language, to be frank. You’re describing diplomacy and international relations and using a loaded word to describe them. I’m not sure anything couldn’t be described as imperialism with such a weak definition.
That is false; unless you are only talking about the time before the start of the Korean War.
After the Korean War the US even began pressuring for/supporting the rebuilding of the German and Japanese militaries over the objections of German and Japanese anti-militarists.
The US even went so far as to deliberately ignore the pacifism they themselves had put in the Japanese constitution; and giving many former Wehrmacht officers high positions in NATO (which included appointing former Wehrmacht Lieutenant General Hans Speidel Supreme Commander of the Allied NATO ground forces in Central Europe).
(I remember such things several times having been discussed on r/AskHistorians like here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/t0cy1y/why_is_japan_forbidden_to_have_a_military_under/
)
So you call invading a country because they nationalized your property ‘getting uppity’?
I also do not see how the USA not allowing Britain and France to intervene in independent countries is comparable to Rome levying massive tributes on the Macedonian republics.
I also do not see how the USA not allowing Britain and France to intervene in independent countries is comparable to Rome levying massive tributes on the Macedonian republics.
The fact that you speak in term of the US “allowing” them to do something is, however, very comparable to how Rome treated the Greeks and Macedonians.
Only in the sense that Rome “allowed” literally all activity within range of their fleet, just like the USA.
In the 1970s the West German Army was bigger than France’s and by the 1980s, West Germany had a 12 division army and 1,000 combat aircraft (with the Bundeswehr as a whole having about 495,000 military personnel and 1.3 million reservists.) The US was hardly keeping West Germany weak during the Cold War. A strong West Germany was at the very heart of NATO.
Yes, the joke was that NATO was willing to fight the Soviet Union to the last German.
It sounds similar to how Dr. Deveraux has described the limes system working during the Imperial period; the goal isn’t to stop raids dead at the border, but to slow them down and give time for a full Roman army to fight them in the field, where the Romans will have a distinct advantage.
Any functioning urbanized Classical polity could field a militia capable of local operations. When you cut up a large one into smaller ones, you might even gain a bit in total men under arms; what you lose is the ability to move those men around both inside the former kingdom and as an invasion force.
As Death Of rats points out the buffer can serve as a speed bump until the real army arrives. However it’s important to remember that most conflict is low level conflict; the concern wasn’t primarily or even significantly armies, but rather raiders carrying off goods and livestock. Remember that Rome had been in basically seasonal wars with Gauls over their raiding northern Italy for centuries and routinely fought off Hispanic, illyrian, etc. raids, leading to frequent campaigns to put down the offending raiders. Rome routinely ended up sucked into wars if reprisal as a result of its provincial security obligations, basically.
Hence Rome would likely have not tolerated these raids without reprisal if it was their territory, but they could and did effectively tolerate it in their clients until the situation escalated. Unless the Macedonians were overrun -and they were a significant bulwark-they could basically be expected to handle security. It simplifies the Roman logistical and strategic situation, basically.
this seems a good explanation – it’s probably also notable that the minor ‘barbarian’ kingdoms could be quite capable of actually fighting Romans 1 to 1 (the Gauls, after all, were where the legions took the broad idea for their kit), they just didn’t often have anything near the manpower or resources to fight the main Roman army as a whole. I’d presume the raiding was quite costly to the individual Roman settlements where it happened, and a fully conquered kingdom is supposed to be the sort of place where actual Romans might want to live, found settlements and work in non-military positions without the threat of several hundred hostile men carrying sharp bits of metal turning up at an inconvenient time. After all, it’s all well and good them only being capable of small scale violence on the periphery, but that doesn’t matter much if you’re the one being killed in an outbreak of small scale violence.
Indeed, there was documented internal pressure to ensure the security of Roman citizens in Roman conquered territory and provinces, whereas I believe we have explicit record of the Romans offloading these responsibilities to clients in their own territory. Failure to respond by a client was bad policy, but if a Roman politician couldn’t secure the right to travel in a province? He was *never* achieving any higher office, period. Hell, not respecting a Romans right to travel was one of the crimes Cicero laid at the feet of one governor Verres feet, and was (among many) grounds for exile.
Basically, the Romans respected the right to travel a lot, and were perfectly willing to fight to preserve it. Within that context there was a tremendous political pressure to respond to violations of that right with any violence necessary, and raiders killing a citizen would count as a violation of that protection. Indeed, that was one of the primary responsibilities of the provincial administration.
It’s notable that, though Pydna is often thought of as the end of the legion v. phalanx story, Mithridates (certainly), the Achaeans (probably), Andriscos (presumably) and the Pergamenes (possibly) all used a Macedonian (style) phalanx.
The phalanx then has an interesting afterlife – you mention the military manuals; it is interesting that the Romans never seem to have developed a literature for their own military organisation (at least, not one that has survived), and under the Empire, academic study of military matters meant study of the Hellenistic system. Then under the East Romans/Byzantines, these manuals form the basis for the development of new military theories (and presumably practice). Even before that, one school of thought is that the Imperial legion increasingly resembled the Macedonian phalanx. And then it could be argued that with Renaissance and Early Modern pikes, inspired by Aelian’s version of the Hellenistic drill manual, the pike phalanx returns – in fact outlasting the legion that defeated it by 1000 years. (Discuss!).
Total amateur weighing in.
I don’t know if I can really say that the Roman army increasingly resembles the Macedonian phalanx in any coherent way. They don’t use pikes. They don’t draw their manpower from reasonably rich landowners. They seem to keep that tactical flexibility and initiative in the heavy infantry core for a very long time. I think you could, however, more accurately say that the military of the Roman Empire starts to resemble the militaries of Hellenistic kingdoms more closely in a wider sense. There’s better coordination between infantry and cavalry than you seem to get in the Republican period; and that sort of hammer and anviling is very important for those Hellenistic armies. It becomes less able to replace casualties. The notion of a soldier as a distinct class in society as opposed to taking up arms when you’re drafted starts to develop/redevelop.
And I would further argue that while there are superficial similarities, there are pretty big differences between Renaissance style pike formations and Hellenistic phalanxes. The former are much more mobile, and also much more integrated with other arms; tercios, for instance, get their name from a roughly 1/3 split between pikes, swords, and guns in the same formation. Pike and shot is, as the name implies, very much influenced by the shot element, and pike formations, especially deep pike formations, become vulnerable to ranged attack in a way that was never really the case for the successors of Alexander, and that in tur means they need to develop in ways that make them more mobile, more maneuverable, and less purely able to stand in front of a competing infantry formation and slowly poke it to death. Also, (and please someone correct me here if I’m completely talking out of my ass) the sort of landowner-pikeman that formed the core of Hellenistic phalanxes is not how Renaissance soldiery was recruited, which in turn affects their internal organization and how the relationship between the commanding elements and the rank and file work. They might look similar, but these guys are not phalanges.
Good points, though from the strictly tactical POV, you only have to read a 16th/17th C drill manual to see that low level drill and organisation is almost identical to that of the Hellenistic phalanx. Whether the similarities are superficial or not I couldn’t say – but similarities there are.
There is also a tendency to overstate the lack of mobility of the Hellenistic phalanx. Tactical flexibility comes, in large part, from drill, and the Hellenistic phalanx was much more mobile than an undrilled mass, or an amateur force in any formation. But much less mobile, of course, than a legion.
Also, I believe (though it’s not my period) that the modern pike formations differed most from the Hellenistic phalanx in something else they adopted from the Romans (or that convergently evolved as it had for the Romans, perhaps), and that is the use of independent small units rather than continuous lines. With shot, or swords, playing the same role as velites. Shot of course, eventually, made things develop in a totally different direction, but I don’t think it’s entirely fanciful to see pike and shot formations as representing Hellenistic low level drill operating in a Roman high level tactical system – enjoying the best of both worlds.
I think infantry formations from the late-medieval to early-modern period tend to integrate organic firepower in a way that formations in the ancient world don’t seem to have done.
14th century English and Italian texts talk about formations of dismounted men-at-arms with integrated archers or crossbowmen, and give advice (which works! I’ve tried it) on how to set the formation so that archers may shoot through the files on the advance.
By the 16th century, when firearms had matured, I think it was well understood that escorting missile troops around was a discreet role for the infantry, alongside its more traditional tasks. The men of the pike block could stand firm on the defense and be lethal (if ponderous) on the attack, but their integrated guns could themselves do a number on the enemy. That is, if the pike block could simply get them close enough and keep them safe from foot or cavalry charges long enough for their firepower to take effect.
By the time of the English Civil War, it was quite well understood (and mentioned in contemporary texts) that men with pikes didn’t actually have a lot to do anymore. Most of the actual soldiering, both on the battlefield and off, was done by the musketeers and arquebusiers.
“…and give advice (which works! I’ve tried it) on how to set the formation so that archers may shoot through the files on the advance. ”
You wouldn’t have a reference or a link for that, would you? I’m very interested in the historical development of that type of integrated arms unit.
It’s worth noting swordsmen in the Terico seem to have fallen out of favor for more guns rapidly. If you can afford it they effectively serve the same role, but with significantly increased striking power.
The pike and shit formations were often *explicitly* based on Roman formations and even deployed in somewhat similar spaced blocks to allow for cycling and tactical flexibility. The military aristocrats that drilled and designed these armies were at least as obsessed with Rome as we are, and the timeframe is just right for them to be reading the Roman writings and thinking about how to adapt them.
The pike and shit formations
Are those what you use when your army’s been struck by dysentery?
Whoops, more Breitenfeld, less Agincourt.
The first pike blocks moving in small units were from the Swiss cantons. While later military innovators (like Maurice of Nassau) drew heavily on Roman manuals, I can’t see the burghers of Bern or the mountain-men of Uri studying them. So the inital phases were likely home-grown.
Valid, but…can we be sure they didn’t? We’re far to narrow for my education here, but it’s not inconceivable that swiss elites had some classical education. I honestly just don’t know.
Roman soldiers did in fact begin to use pikes, in Byzantine times; such an evolution seems to have been preceded by the increasing usage of shorter thrusting spears in the later empire, paralleling the eventual development of the pike in earlier Hellenic warfare.
Yeah for all the gushing our host do to Roman military system (heavy infantry focus, non-core cavalry) it seems to only work for Roman Republic and Roman Republic alone. It doesn’t even survive the entirety of Roman Empire! (What with increasing focus on cataphracts) It brings some of his moralistic teaching and conclusions in question.
Maybe Italian Romans just never adopt Hellenistic system because their culture don’t allow it? Because they see it beneath them? After all this won’t be the first time we see a culture not adopting a superior tactics until it’s too late (as we have seen them in this blog itself!). Maybe roman culture is surprisingly compatible to Gallic/Celtic tactics for whatever reason since that’s where they adopt most from.
As someone who was never good at math but loved history, I’m feeling very seen by the numbering of this series.
A question for Bret, or anyone else who can explain his image captions: throughout this series, whenever some king’s coin has been shown, the transcription in the caption has quite obviously been different from the letters on the coin (e.g. ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΥ on the coin might be transcribed as ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΣ), specifically a final Υ gets transcribed as a Σ. What’s going on here?
The Y-form is the genitive — “Basileos Philippou” = “(A coin) of King Philippus”.
“Lucius Lucius Lucullus”
As amazing as this name would be, I think his nomen was Licinius?
I think the name Lucius Licinius Lucullus is even more luscious.
If only he’d gone west instead of east, he could have been Lucius Licinius Lucullus Lusitanicus.
His parents had to have picked that name on purpose. Or whichever ancestor named their kid that first, tradition being what it was. Favorite Roman name from a sound standpoint.
I think it probably sounded better in Latin than in English. As an English speaker, it seems natural to pronounce those three Cs three different ways.
It does, indeed, sound fine in Latin. At least to my ears and trusting this online reading.
https://forvo.com/word/lucius_licinius_lucullus/
“then invades Amernia”. Is that a typo for “Armenia”?
“had essentially existed as a Roman vassal-stage”
In this stage, I suspect it was actually a vassal-state.
I’d thought there might be something going on there with the idea of “a staging area” and of Egyptian grain being important to the sustenance of Roman military operations in the East as a whole, but yeah, you’re probably right.
typo: “Mithrdates’” = mithridates (i is missing.)
-The achaean war description is weird, going from Sparta doing something to the destruction of……Corinth. Read it twice, and I think I got the events but is odd how it went in that direction. Diplomacy is odd I guess.
It does seem like the Roman army got worse around this time, or at least had some difficulties: Carthage, difficulties in Spain, but somehow there weren’t issues in Greece. Wonder if the Roman fighhting style matched up well against Greece in a rock Paper scissors way better then against other systems in the area. (Rock, Paper, Scissors isn’t that common, as described many places, in ancient times, but kind of seems to show up here.)
Maybe part of the reason was motivation — wars in the east had a reputation for easy victories and lots of plunder, so the odds of going out, getting rich quick, and returning home to a still-intact farm were higher than if you were fighting in other theatres.
As I understand it, the issue was the Romans wanting to maintain balance of power in the Peloponnese. The League’s expansion had been convenient for Rome because it acted as a counterweight to Macedon, but with Macedon out of the picture, a dominant League was going to be an annoyance. Splitting off Sparta (a relatively recent acquisition by the League) would help to stop the League getting big ideas about intervening in areas outside its own back yard – which the League was showing signs of.
Note that Rome’s initial bargaining position as described above is splitting off not only Sparta from the League but also Corinth and Argos, which have generally been the two most important poleis in the peninsula after Sparta: the Roman view seems to be that the League, while at times previously a useful ally, is getting too big for its boots and now needs to be cut down to a more manageable size.
When eventually Rome loses patience with the League and war breaks out, the decisive battle takes place outside Corinth, for probably operational reasons, so Corinth is a convenient target for a sack: its status (and riches) also make it an attractive one, both as a warning to the rest of the League/Greece and as an opportunity to acquire loot.
If one were overly generous to Sparta, which of course our host never is, one might even see it as the Spartans’ playing their hand moderately well and allowing the Romans to intervene to give them what they wanted all along (albeit they got whipped the League a couple of times in the meantime, so they didn’t exactly come out of it brilliantly).
Sparta seems to have slyly backed most of the winners in the various Roman civil wars and was eventually rewarded with the port of Cardamyle, if memory serves. Plus not being sacked like Corinth.
The Isthmus City of Corinth is the most strategically-located polis, probably out of all of them ever. If your fleet is blockading from the Adriatic, they can be supplied from the Aegean; if your fleet is blockading from the Aegean, they can be supplied from the Adriatic. If your army is in the Peloponnese and you need to march it north you just can’t, you’ll have to ally Corinth or get two fleets and a second army that’s already in the north. If your army is in Attica and you need to march it south you just can’t, you’ll have to ally Corinth or get two fleets and a second army that’s already in the south.
If you want your army to be able to freely roam through Greece without directly owning the whole thing then Corinth can’t exist.
Yes, but the motive for sacking it brutally was probably simple greed. Else a garrison would have sufficed.
How come the Roman domination of Greece never involved bringing the Greeks into the socii system? Was it distance from Rome making it hard to participate in the dilectus, or social organization that, while having plenty of freeholders who can fight as heavy infantry, was a bit too fractious for Roman tastes?
They did. That’s what the client kings were. The problem is that it seems the Greeks didn’t understand that the nominal independence of the Socii was in fact only nominal until the Romans had enough and brought them under direct Roman rule.
If you include South Italian Greeks they did bring some, 200 years before. I suspect it has to do with timing and changing social structures? From the final subjection of the Latin League in the 330s BC to the mopping up after Pyrrhus it took something like 60 years, then a gap but already since the next conquest (Sicily) 30 years later Rome’s new conquests began paying not in troops or ships but in tribute. Despite the distance, cultural and naval inconvenience Rome could have made Sicily socii navales like it did to most of the Italian Greeks, after all they were the two halves of Magna Graecia… But it didn’t and by the late second century hadn’t done so in a very long time. I think the fancy term for all this is that the socii system ossified: not admitting new members and graduating existing members, a big part of the reason for the Social war.
The socii were notable in that they were required to provide soldiers for Rome’s wars, but didn’t generally have to pay any other form of tribute. By the time they conquered Greece the Romans already had a far bigger pool of manpower than anybody else, so perhaps they just figured that extra income would be more desirable than extra soldiers.
The Romans don’t seem to expand the socii system outside of their notion of Italy (leaving out Sardinia and Cisapline Gaul). There’s a few reason this could be. One is cultural: the Romans don’t see these conquered people as being reliable and so don’t want to rely on them for their military. Notably many of the cisalpine Gallic tribes defected to Hannibal’s ranks during his stay in Italy, so the Romans had strong reasons to doubt whether those same tribes will actually stand by you in a fight.
Another reason might be purely logistical. The mustering process for a Legion involves messengers going back and forth to Rome over the course of a couple of months. Greece might just have been too far away to do this with any speed. Much easier to just get tax revenue off of them.
Logistics yes, but not primarily because of the messengers; individual soldiers mustering from socii have to be able to get themselves to Rome to satisfy their city’s obligations. In Italian Magna Grecia, everyone who can’t bum a ride from a cousin who owns a ship can just walk, and maybe if the polis is already mostly sailors the local government might be able to organize a ship to deliver it’s men or even be it’s share of the socii obligation. Sardinia and Corsica could be treated as if they had no measurable inland population, but that just doesn’t work for Sicily with its highly distinct ethnic groups and dense (for rural areas) inland population.
“which left Octavian (soon to be Augustus) as sole ruler of the Roman world”
Nobody remembers Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the third triumvir.
That being said, at some point of his life Lepidus must’ve faced the same choice Achilles did… and made the other choice.
If I recall correctly, he made a play for independent power during Octavian’s war against Sextus Pompey, which fizzled out pretty quickly, and as a result was thoroughly marginalised, only holding onto the office of Pontifex Maximus until his death.
People who remember Lepidus remember that he had fallen out of the running ‘long’ before the Battle of Actium, which is universally regarded as the start of Augustus’ tenure as dominant figure of Rome cum first emperor.
Lepidus was forced to abdicate his titles, other than pontifex maximus, after attempting to suborn Octavian’s troops in Sicily in 36 BC. He kept his life and property: evidently Augustus felt it improper to accelerate Lepdius’ death to take the title pontifex maximus. Augustus of course made sure to force him to attend senate meetings and then call on him last among ex-consuls in senatorial debates. Dio 54.15.
While Judaea was annexed in 90s AD, the Kingdom of Bosporus was attested into 6th century AD. Yet Kingdom of Bosporus also predated Alexander. Was Bosporus a Hellenistic kingdom?
After 140s BC, Parthians conquered and held large sedentary populations that had been administered by Greeks by nearly two centuries and that had major Greek cities. How far was the high Parthian Empire rather than Roman Empire a heir of Seleucids in terms of kingship, administration and army?
Professor! Help! I’m not on Twitter and don’t know how else to contact you. But I am not receiving your emails about new blog posts suddenly, they stopped coming a few weeks (or a month?) ago. I’m a Patreon supporter, too. Has my email address fallen off your list? I finally thought to Search the homepage to see if I’d missed much (yes!) or if you had simply been too busy at the end of the academic semester to create new posts. Can my account / subscription be checked please? Thanks!
PS: I just RE-subscribed, to be safe. So maybe I’m on two lists now. But still not sure what’s gone wrong.
I think his blog simply stopped sending out any emails. I haven’t gotten any since April 6th.
I got an email announcing this one last Friday from “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
[redacted] wordpress
com”
I get emails announcing new posts, but I don’t get emails announcing new comments, even if I repeatedly tell it to do that.
Which is the feature I actually need in order to follow discussion…
> our sources for this period are much weaker than what we had for the main of the series.
This sentence at the very beginning was striking for me – the very concept that it is possible to have fewer information about later time periods without any special social disruptions, essentially by a preservation accident, never occurring to me before. Presumably because I don’t normally have much interest in antiquity and ancient history generally (besides China where information preservation is rather incremental, though, to think of it, gaps exist there too, early Western Han before Wen-di came to mind) where such an information environment is characteristic. Makes one think just how much of perception of ancient history, how certain figures and events are greatly magnified while everything else aside of those very narrow periods is nearly forgotten, is shaped not merely by some modern cultural stereotypes or media, but simply by this uneven preservation and therefore unrectifiable.
“our sources for this period are much weaker than what we had for the main of the series.
This sentence at the very beginning was striking for me – the very concept that it is possible to have fewer information about later time periods without any special social disruptions, essentially by a preservation accident, never occurring to me before. Presumably because I don’t normally have much interest in antiquity and ancient history generally (besides China where information preservation is rather incremental, though, to think of it, gaps exist there too, early Western Han before Wen-di came to mind) where such an information environment is characteristic. Makes one think just how much of perception of ancient history, how certain figures and events are greatly magnified while everything else aside of those very narrow periods is nearly forgotten, is shaped not merely by some modern cultural stereotypes or media, but simply by this uneven preservation and therefore unrectifiable.”
But aren´t there high profile gaps in China, too?
Is the Warring States period in certain sense a gap?
Because of the preservation of Spring and Autumn Annals to 481, and Zuo Zhuan, of Lu.
Lu was not one of the major states. We know other states had their Spring and Autumn Annals too, but only the Lu ones are preserved, and these only till 481.
There are other sources for Warring States period. But does the end of Zuo Zhuan leave the Warring States period as a gap?
I’m not sure if this is the best place for this, but I’m wondering what the game of Chess can tell us about Iron Age warfare. You’ve got the line of pikemen (pawns) who can’t attack directly ahead of them, presumably because their shields are in the way. You’ve got the cavalry (rooks/elephants and knights) on the wings, and you’ve got some heavy hitters grouped around the King. How does the gameplay of Chess reflect the warfare it’s trying to simulate?
Well for one I doubt they viewed queens/consorts as all-powerful warriors that could decimate the enemy army if utilized correctly.
Remember that the game of chess evolved over centuries. The game recognizably came into existence in the 1200s but predecessors had existed for hundreds of years before that. I doubt every tactical innovation of those many centuries was reflected in the game system.
Footnote #2: “The standard reading on this is the class E.R. Gruen article…”
*Classic* E.R. Gruen article?
Seems to me that besides the direct advantages of better, more durable equipment, culture of the infinite manpower cheat and incredible production capacity, the technology that pushed everything out of the window was the government. It’s incredible how Romans started to subdue neighbors and people to follow the way of Mars.
How did no other entity even try to copy the system that was in place for well over 300 years before Rome started to really dominate but was obviously doing incredible feats even before the Punic wars. Waging several wars at once, changing leaders that weren’t cutting it, making laws with rewards for loyalty and citizenship, and bureaucracy that was really doing something. Great Britain saw that it was left behind in 16. century and turned the focus to the navy (with a rough start and a small civil war) but then proceeded to dominate.
Were the many states of the Mediterranean so set in their ways that after Rome became the dominant naval power and displaced the long standing navy of the day, nobody thought maybe to take a similar approach even in the next 100-200 years?
It’s easy to see what Rome was doing right from the position of someone reading the history, but I don’t think anyone at the time, including the Romans themselves, had an entirely complete understanding of what Rome was doing right. And even if their rivals did understand, the people in power would need to break their own power to reformat their kingdoms into something that could take advantage of Rome’s strengths, and even then they’d be gambling on long odds that they could get the right institutions working and cultural tenets instilled well enough to make the whole thing work, and they’d need to gamble on that knowing that they wouldn’t be able to course-correct because the first step is breaking their own power. It’s also important to remember that, while the benefit of hindsight shows that Rome was insanely robust compared to its rivals, those rivals didn’t know that Rome wouldn’t be a flash in the pan, whose successes would melt away as unsustainable practices finally caught up with them.