Rome in 264 BC · Imperium Romanum

In the spring of the year 264 BC, when Appius Claudius Caudex assembled his transports at Rhegium and looked across the four-mile strait toward Messana, the Roman state of which he was a magistrate had completed in the space of one hundred and twenty-six years a political and military transformation without precedent in the prior history of the western Mediterranean. The catastrophe at the Allia in 390 had marked the lowest point of Roman fortunes; the crossing of 264 marked the threshold of the highest. The interval between the two moments deserves, by way of concluding this volume, a final summary statement.

Rome in 264 BC was a city of perhaps two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand inhabitants, the largest urban concentration in peninsular Italy and one of the larger in the Mediterranean world. The Roman citizen body itself — counting only adult male citizens of full standing, with the right to vote in the assemblies and the obligation of military service — numbered approximately three hundred thousand, supplemented by perhaps another hundred and fifty thousand cives sine suffragio. The total Italian allied population, of various federated and incorporated statuses, contributed perhaps half a million further adult males to the military manpower base. The total manpower available to the Roman state on full mobilization was in the order of seven to eight hundred thousand fighting men — a figure unmatched by any other Mediterranean power, including Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia. The Roman fleet, by contrast, was inconsiderable: a few dozen ships of varying size, most provided by allied Greek cities, with no tradition of naval warfare and no shipbuilding establishment to speak of. The naval inadequacy would prove the most important strategic deficiency of the period and would be corrected, in extraordinary fashion, during the first decade of the war Caudex had just begun.

Territorially, the Roman state directly controlled — as ager Romanus, taxable and incorporated land — approximately twenty-five thousand square kilometers, occupying a band from southern Etruria through Latium and the Sabine country to northern Campania. The federated and allied territories under indirect Roman control added perhaps a further hundred and ten thousand square kilometers, for a total Italian system of about one hundred and thirty-five thousand square kilometers — most of the peninsula south of the Apennine watershed at Ariminum. The northern third of Italy, including the Po valley and the Alpine foothills, remained outside the Roman system; the Cisalpine Gallic tribes (Boii, Insubres, Cenomani) were independent neighbors, and would be brought under Roman rule only after the wars of the third century's last decades.

The Roman military instrument that had been forged in the wars covered by this volume was, by any comparative measure of the period, the most effective army in the Mediterranean. The manipular legion, in its developed form, combined the disciplined heavy infantry of the Greek tradition with a tactical flexibility no Greek-style army could match. The Roman alliance system provided manpower in volumes that no other Mediterranean power could replicate. The system of Roman colonization established forward bases throughout the peninsula, providing both military positions and demographic anchoring of Roman culture. The Roman political system, despite its internal contradictions and the social tensions that would erupt periodically into civic discord, had proven capable of generating both the consensus necessary to undertake major wars and the institutional resilience to absorb major defeats. The combination of these factors — military, demographic, infrastructural, political — would constitute, across the next century, the basis of Roman expansion beyond Italy into the larger Mediterranean theater.

What had been learned, in the wars of 390 through 264, was the lesson of how to fight and win against widely different kinds of opponent across widely different kinds of terrain. The Gauls had taught the Romans that the closed phalanx was inadequate against the headlong barbarian charge in open country. The Samnites had taught them how to fight in the mountains, how to maneuver in detachments, how to use the broken terrain rather than be used by it. The Pyrrhic War had taught them how to engage a Hellenistic combined-arms army with phalanx, cavalry, and elephants — and how to lose two battles in a row to such an opponent and still continue the war until victory was achieved by attrition. The wars of consolidation had taught them how to absorb defeated peoples into a graduated alliance system, how to use the conquest of one population as the manpower-source for the conquest of the next, how to combine military force with diplomatic flexibility in proportions calibrated to the particular case. The combination of these lessons constituted, by 264, a strategic doctrine — not articulated in any single text or theory, but embodied in the institutional practice of the Roman state — that would prove capable of meeting the very different demands of the Mediterranean theater into which the Mamertine crisis was about to project the Republic.

The figures who had embodied these lessons in their individual careers — Camillus (insofar as he is historical), Manlius Torquatus, Valerius Corvus, Papirius Cursor the elder, Fabius Rullianus, the three Decii of the devotio tradition, Manius Curius Dentatus, Appius Claudius Caecus — would be remembered by the Romans of the late Republic and early Empire as the founding generation of the mos maiorum, the ancestral custom whose example was to be followed by every subsequent generation. The figures who had opposed them — Brennus of the Senones, Gellius Egnatius of the Samnites, Pyrrhus of Epirus — would be remembered as the formidable enemies against whose challenge the Roman virtues had been forged. The set-pieces of the period — the Geese of Juno, the vae victis, the yoke of the Caudine Forks, the devotio of the Decii, the senatum video regum — would furnish the moral exempla of the entire later Roman tradition.

What lay ahead, beyond Caudex's transports at Rhegium, was the war with Carthage. The First Punic War would last twenty-three years, would teach the Romans how to build a fleet and fight at sea, and would be followed within a generation by a second war with Carthage in which the institutional resilience of the Roman state would be tested by an enemy genius (Hannibal Barca) the likes of whom would not be seen again in Roman military history. The Hannibalic War would carry within it everything that the wars of this volume had taught — and more besides. The story of how the Romans came to fight, and to defeat, both Carthage and the Hellenistic monarchies, and to find themselves at the conclusion of those campaigns the unchallenged hegemons of the Mediterranean, belongs to subsequent volumes.

For the present, let the volume close with the Roman magistrate at Rhegium, ordering his men aboard the transports for the crossing. The strategic horizon visible from that strait extended only to Messana; the strategic horizon of the actions about to be taken extended to Cadiz and Cyrene, to Pergamum and Antioch, to Britain and the Caucasus and the deserts of Arabia. None of this was visible in 264 BC, to Appius Claudius Caudex or anyone else. The empire that would emerge from the next two centuries' wars was not, in any sense, projected or designed by the magistrates who undertook the first steps. The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean was, as conquests usually are, the cumulative result of decisions taken locally, in particular circumstances, by men whose strategic vision rarely extended beyond the next campaigning season. What gave the cumulative result its remarkable shape was the institutional framework within which the local decisions were taken — the framework constructed, by trial and error and adaptation, in the wars covered by this volume. That framework, more than any individual genius and more than any single battle, was the Roman achievement of 390 to 264. The wars that follow are its application to a larger theater.

End of Book I.

Book II — The Mediterranean Wars: From the Crossing to Messana to the Hannibalic Catastrophe (264–216 BC) — will treat the First Punic War, the Illyrian and Cisalpine campaigns, the prelude to the Second Punic War, and the war with Hannibal through the catastrophe at Cannae.