Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (34 page)

96 On Mogadishu, see Bowden,
Black Hawk Down
.

97 Lintott,
Violence
, 261.

98 Thuc. 1.22.

162 Lee

7. Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome

Susan P. Mattern

The Romans, like every other imperial power in history, lacked the

resources to rule by overwhelming force. The Roman economy

was by some measures advanced—population density, urbanization,

monetization, and mining activity all reached levels in the Mediterra-

nean world of the second century CE that remained unequaled until

modern times. But scholars agree that the imperial government col-

lected taxes amounting to less (perhaps much less) than 10 percent

of GDP, this tax burden being unevenly distributed in an economy in

which much of the population produced or earned barely enough to

survive. With this income the Roman state supported an army of less

than one-half million men, charged with the occupation, expansion,

and defense of an empire of 60–70 million inhabitants, with an area of

4 million km2.1 As the only large public labor force available, the army

also performed nonmilitary or paramilitary functions such as manning

tollbooths and guard posts, escorting VIPs, collecting taxes, guarding

prisons and work gangs, and construction.2 Italy, the empire’s center of

power and the homeland of the Roman people, did not export a large

number of emigrants, either as colonists or as soldiers. The excep-

tion is a brief period under Julius Caesar and Augustus, when perhaps

200,000 cashiered soldiers—mainly Italians, veterans of the civil wars

who could not safely or practically be kept under arms—received land

in overseas colonies because Italian land was in short supply. While

they were instrumental to the cultural transformation of the western

empire, they were a single generation, catalysts only; these colonies

never formed an ethnically distinct population or a ruling class. That

label belongs, in the west, to a Romanized native aristocracy, and in

the east and on Sicily, to the Hellenic or hellenized local aristocracy

that predated the arrival of the Romans.3 Nor did Rome export a large

bureaucracy; the governor of any given province, his civilian staff, and

officials of equestrian rank might number in the dozens, though they

also brought an entourage of friends, slaves, and freedmen.4 The Ro-

mans were aware of these limitations.

Modern scholars have identified forces that made the empire feel

like a compelling entity to its inhabitants. Taxation unified, monetized,

and urbanized the economy; the allure of civilization led to profound

cultural change, especially in the west; certain imperial ideals and

forms—Roman law and legal procedures, the image of the emperor,

the imperial cult—emanated everywhere and generated a sense of

shared participation in a vast project.5 But the Romans accomplished

all of this with a rudimentary state and a vanishingly small senatorial

ruling class, mainly through social mechanisms.

To prevent and respond to insurgency, the Romans relied on a com-

plicated network of relationships that reached into almost every stra-

tum of society, plus intensive military occupation of the most volatile

areas, a reputation for horrific brutality when challenged, and the

ability to muster, although with difficulty and at great cost to them-

selves, an overwhelming force when the military resources of the em-

pire were concentrated in one place. A rhetoric that distinguished the

Romans from their less civilized, less virtuous, and less disciplined en-

emies and subjects masked a reality in which elements of the subject

population worked together with the Romans, and in which it was

difficult to distinguish Romans from their subjects. None of the means

the Romans used against rebellion and insurgency worked in the sense

of eradicating the problem. The Romans managed insurgency but did

not eliminate it; innumerable major and minor uprisings are attested

throughout the imperial period, and banditry was endemic in all peri-

ods and areas of the empire. There was never a time when the Roman

army’s size could safely be reduced—its task of occupation having

come to an end—or freed for major new conquests. On the contrary,

the Roman army grew gradually as the empire’s territorial size also

grew gradually.6

164 Mattern

Major rebel ions and minor acts of insurgency are documented

throughout the imperial period. One scholar has counted references to

more than 120 separate instances of insurgency from the reign of Augus-

tus, the first emperor, through 190 CE; this counts only the events docu-

mented in ancient sources, but it is safe to assume that many episodes

escaped mention by contemporary historians.7 Shifting areas within the

empire remained mostly free from Roman domination, under the con-

trol of local “bandits” or strongmen.8 Two major rebel ions are docu-

mented in detail by eyewitness sources: the revolt of Vercingetorix in

52 BCE, which Caesar described in his
Commmentaries on the Gal ic War
,

and the Jewish revolt of 66–73 CE, chronicled by Josephus. Josephus

commanded rebel troops in the revolt, was taken prisoner by the future

emperor Vespasian, and wrote an account of the war in Aramaic (this

version has been lost) and later in Greek (this version survives).9

These were not the only violent rebellions against Rome. In an infa-

mous episode of 9 CE, the German chief Arminius defeated the Roman

legionary army under its commander Quintilius Varus in the Teuto-

burg Forest, with the stunning result that Rome never claimed domin-

ion over “Free Germany” again. Other famous incidents include the

revolt of Boudicca in Britain under Nero, the revolt of the Batavians

under Civilis during the Roman civil war of 69 CE, and the revolt of the

Jews under Simon Bar-Kokhba in 132–35 CE.10

Some scholars have described a traumatic and humiliating process

of consolidation immediately following conquest in which new taxes

and the drafting of troops were especially resented, the population was

volatile, and the danger of rebellion was high. The Romans shared this

view. Roman writers (the views of native rebels do not survive) em-

phasized the idea of liberty, the threat to ancestral values and lifestyle,

and the corruption of Roman administrators when they described the

motives for these early revolts.11 Examples of this type of revolt—led by

native leaders soon after conquest, in response to the hardships of con-

solidation—are those of Vercingetorix in Gaul, Arminius in Germany,

and Boudicca in Britain.

But insurgency and revolt also occurred in provinces long incorpo-

rated into the empire, for different reasons. In provinces with open fron-

tiers—unpacified regions beyond them, or inaccessible regions within

Counterinsurgency 165

them—a zone of long-term or permanent instability could develop as

locals switched loyalties among different power brokers in response to

shifting circumstances (such regions included northern Spain, north-

ern and eastern Britain, the African provinces, and other areas with

endemic banditry; see below).

Also, local aristocrats in “Romanized” provinces of long standing

might lead revolts when they perceived an opportunity; the best ex-

amples are from Gaul (the revolt of Julius Florus and Julius Sacrovir in

21 CE and the revolt of Julius Civilis in 69 CE). Gaul had rapidly become

urbanized and Romanized; in the first century CE many families had

Roman citizenship, and an act of Claudius in 48 CE allowed some Gal-

lic Romans into the empire’s ruling class, the Senate. But these leaders

could call on a sense of native identity, one perhaps newly developed or

more highly developed as a result of Roman conquest (“Gauls” didn’t

know they were Gauls until Julius Caesar labeled them as such). Finally,

would-be kings or emperors of high rank and great influence might in-

voke local alliances in the civil wars with which they bid for the throne

(for example, Sertorius in Spain, Vindex in Gaul, and Avidius Cassius

in the East; the civil wars that ended the republic drew on a myriad of

such alliances).12

This scheme oversimplifies; but the point that hardly any province

was reliably peaceful is valid, although the nature and intensity of in-

surgency changed over time. At least three uprisings in Asia and Achaea

were led by men claiming to be the emperor Nero, who had commit-

ted suicide when deposed in 68 CE. In the province of Bithynia, now

northern Turkey, the emperor Trajan banned organizations of any kind

(
collegia
) because of the region’s reputation for insurgency; although

we have little further evidence to shed light on Trajan’s concerns, the

emperor would not even allow a fire brigade, and his edict was part

of the basis for the persecution of Christians.13 By the time the Bar-

Kokhba revolt broke out, Judaea had been a Roman protectorate or a

Roman province for nearly 100 years. During the political and military

crisis of the third century CE, huge parts of the empire in the East and

West—Syria and Egypt under Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and Gaul

under its own line of emperors—revolted and operated independently

for decades before they were eventually subdued, but for the most part

166 Mattern

I shall leave this turbulent period out of my discussion and focus on the

better-documented era from about 100 BCE through 200 CE.

To keep the peace, the Romans relied partly on their perceived abil-

ity to punish, an idea they articulated using value terms rather than

more abstract, strategic language. Roman historians write as though

revolt were an insult and a challenge to which the appropriate response

was vengeance extreme enough to reinstill awe and fear in their rebel-

lious subjects. In some cases they attempted genocide, the extermina-

tion of a tribe or people, a concept well attested in Roman literature.

They used terror as a policy tool, in the sense that they inflicted ex-

treme brutality on a mass scale to frighten their subjects. Although

Rome never reoccupied territory across the Rhine after Arminius’s

revolt, campaigns under the future emperor Tiberius, and eventually

under the latter’s nephew and adopted son Germanicus, laid waste to

territory, slaughtered noncombatants, and aimed for the annihilation

of the Germans.14 The Romans also used mutilation, mass deportation,

mass destruction, and mass slaughter short of genocide to punish,

avenge, and deter. After the Bar-Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian,

who led the expedition to repress the revolt in person, expelled the

Jews from Jerusalem and refounded it as a Roman colony. One ancient

source tells us that over half a million souls perished in the war and that

few survived. Other evidence attests to a rich rabbinic culture in the

region after the revolt—depopulation and extermination are difficult

policies to carry out thoroughly and successfully—but the Roman in-

tent to inflict extreme brutality is documented here and in many other

examples. This is the meaning behind the saying Tacitus attributes to

the British rebel Calgacus, “when they have made a desert, they call it

peace.” Famous passages from Polybius and Josephus, historians who

described the conquest of their own people, reflect the reputation for

brutality and invincibility that the Romans wished to cultivate.15

Rome’s investment of resources in some of these campaigns was

very high. The revolt of Illyricum in 6 CE occupied ten of the em-

pire’s twenty-eight legions under the command of the future emperor

Tiberius. A few years later, after Arminius’s revolt, the same com-

mander invaded Germany with eight legions—the entire army of the

Rhine, some 40,000 men, plus an auxiliary army of unknown strength

Counterinsurgency 167

but probably equal or greater in number. The Jewish revolt of 66 tied

up four legions and a total of about 50,000 troops for several years.16

But this analysis oversimplifies. Insurgency under the Roman Em-

pire was not a series of discrete events and responses; insurgency is

attested in all periods of Roman history and in many locations. Armed

revolt and conventional warfare were only two of its aspects. How and

with what permanent institutions did the Romans prevent, manage,

and respond to resistance day by day?

Some insurgents used terror as a tactic. The example most histori-

ans point to is a group that Josephus calls the
sicarii
. According to him,

they arose in Jerusalem in the 50s CE; they assassinated their targets in

daytime, often under cover of a crowded festival; and they took their

name from the type of sickled dagger they used. Like some modern

terrorists, the
sicarii
chose symbolic targets; their first victim was the