Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (35 page)

high priest Jonathan, “symbol of the sacerdotal aristocracy’s collabora-

tion with the alien Roman rulers and its exploitation of the people.”17

They also attacked wealthy landowners in the countryside and de-

stroyed their property, again apparently as a warning and deterrent to

collaboration with the Romans. According to Josephus, the
sicarii
were

ideologically motivated adherents of the “fourth philosophy,” which

advocated rebellion from the Romans on religious grounds.18

Josephus calls the
sicarii
“bandits” (
lestai
), and he uses the same de-

rogatory term to refer to other insurgents besides the
sicarii
. Banditry

was a very widespread phenomenon in the empire, and even when it

lacked ideological aspects it can fairly be described as insurgency be-

cause of the Roman government’s oft-stated interest in eliminating it.

Although some generals and emperors claimed in their propaganda

that they had eradicated banditry from the territory under their rule, in

fact references to banditry pervade literary and documentary evidence

from all periods of the Roman Empire and from every provenance, in-

cluding Rome’s most ancient provinces and especially including Italy.19

The Greek and Roman terms for banditry usually signified predatory

rural violence, which might include raiding, rustling, kidnap, extor-

tion, highway robbery, and murder; because of banditry, travel was

very dangerous in the Roman world, even over short distances. Bandits

often came from the margins of society; they might be slave shepherds,

168 Mattern

pastoralists who lived on the margins of civilization (this is especially

well attested in Sicily and southern Italy), retired soldiers, or deserters

from the army.

Large groups living within the Roman Empire, including certain

tribes and certain ethnic units, were also classified as bandits by ancient

sources. Among the most notable of the latter were the
Boukoloi
of the

swamps around the Nile Delta. In Cilicia, in southeast Asia Minor, the

Isaurians of the highlands never were incorporated into the Roman

Empire but maintained their own language, tribal organization around

strongmen, and predatory conflict with the more urbanized lowlands

throughout the Roman period and throughout history; the Romans

negotiated and fought small-scale wars with them as against a foreign

enemy.

In Judaea, which is the only area for which a large body of literary

evidence exists over several centuries, banditry was endemic in all peri-

ods of Roman rule. Much banditry in that province had an ideological

element: locals perceived bandits as champions of Jewish freedom from

Rome. The distinction between banditry and guerrilla warfare in this

region is difficult to draw. Networks of rock-cut caves in some settle-

ments in Judaea could be headquarters for bandits or hiding places for

guerrilla rebels, perhaps in connection with the Bar-Kokhba revolt, or

these populations might have overlapped substantially. They are diffi-

cult to date and may have functioned over decades or centuries.20

The difference between a bandit, a tribal chief, a petty king, or the

leader of a rebellion could be open to interpretation; many individuals

are located in more than one of these categories by the ancient sources.

Thus, large geographic areas within the Roman Empire were indepen-

dent of Roman authority, mostly highlands with mobile populations

and inaccessible terrain. There were pockets of Rome’s empire where

its writ did not run.

The analogy between ancient banditry and modern terrorism is

loose. Ideology might or might not figure in ancient banditry, which

was largely economic in nature, and even where resistance was ethnic

or ideological, terror (in the sense of random, unpredictable violence

designed to create instability and fear) is poorly attested as a tactic, ex-

cept for the
sicarii
. Again with the exception of the
sicarii
, those labeled

Counterinsurgency 169

bandits in antiquity operated in the countryside, often based in inacces-

sible highlands, and not in the crowded cities that are the preferred tar-

gets for modern terrorists. However, there are also significant parallels.

Bandits were not perceived as common criminals; they were enemies

of the state, against whom the Romans waged war. This was not, as

they thought, war in its truest sense, as against a legitimate state; in-

stead, they conceived the war against bandits as guerrilla, bush, or (as

we now say) “asymmetrical” warfare, though they did not use those

terms. Bandits were not imagined as working alone. They commanded

the loyalty and resources of a local community that would aid and abet

them, or else they enjoyed the protection of powerful landowners,

who employed them for their own purposes: to rob and rustle from,

kidnap, and bully their neighbors, and as shock troops in the continual

competition for land and power in which they were all engaged. Some

landlords amassed what amounted to private armies of bandits, more

than a match for anything the Roman state could muster locally.

Bandits with connections to the local community or to a landlord

were best apprehended by stealth, information, and betrayal. One

caught them by “hunting” them; our sources describe posses of sol-

diers, hired hit men, and local vigilantes.21 Professional or semiprofes-

sional experts in bandit hunting are attested; some of these were not

easily distinguished from bandits themselves.22 The law encouraged or

required communities and individuals to hunt and surrender bandits,

and individuals could kill bandits with legal impunity.23 Roman law also

took aim at those who abetted, protected, or received stolen goods

from bandits, probably with little effect.24 Some of the empire’s wealth-

iest and most powerful individuals benefited the most from banditry,

perhaps including many members of the Roman senatorial class. The

simplistic rhetoric that opposed banditry to legitimate power masked a

situation in which a rudimentary Roman state operated in the shadow

of, or as part of, a much more complex and highly developed system of

personal power that included bandits and their protectors.

The army policed for bandits. Augustus and Tiberius maintained

military detachments or
stationes
throughout Italy to control the

banditry, which had escalated during the civil wars that ended the re-

public.25 In some areas roads were militarized for protection against

170 Mattern

banditry, and some structures perceived as frontier systems were con-

structed and staffed to control banditry. In Cilicia, the Romans eventu-

ally (in the third and fourth centuries) fortified an inner frontier against

the Isaurian bandits of the highlands.26

Against large groups of bandits or outlaw peoples, Roman gover-

nors and their subordinates waged small wars. Cicero led brutal puni-

tive expeditions against bandits during his term as governor of Cilicia,

during which he razed villages and exterminated their inhabitants, and

took hostages from one settlement after a long siege, but without long-

term success. Tacitus describes further campaigns in the region under

delegates of the governor of Syria in the 30s CE and in 51.27

Roman governors and emperors sometimes tried to neutralize ban-

dit gangs by hiring them to enforce order, or by recruiting bandits into

the army individually or en masse.28 More often, Roman commanders

negotiated diplomatically with bandits. Cicero established a tie of
hos-

pitium
or hospitality with one Isaurian strongman (Cicero calls him a

“tyrant”); this and other types of “ritualized friendship” were the main

instruments of Roman foreign and internal relations in the late repub-

lic and throughout much of Roman history generally. Cicero, Pompey,

and Mark Antony all successively recognized another Isaurian leader,

Tarkontidmotos, as a “friend” of Rome or of themselves.29

In the tiny mountainous province of Mauretania Tingitana in ex-

treme northwestern Morocco, Roman provincial governors negotiated

peace with highland chiefs; records of their ritualized agreements, in-

scribed on stone, are almost the only written evidence of Rome’s expe-

rience in the area. Outside the heavily militarized zone in the lowlands,

Roman cultural influence did not extend, though this was a region

surrounded by Roman provinces of long standing. While no surviving

sources refer to the highland population of Mauretania as bandits, the

analogy with Isauria is very striking.30

As with banditry, so with insurgency in general: the military factor

is important to the equation, but the army operated parallel to, and

to some extent within, a wider set of social relationships. The Roman

army was an army of occupation as well as of external aggression and

defense. This was especially true of the provinces of Spain, Britain,

Mauretania (modern Morocco), Syria, Palestine after the Jewish revolt

Counterinsurgency 171

of 66, and Egypt. In these provinces the army was stationed in urban

centers or dispersed throughout, rather than heavily concentrated on

frontiers (the province of Spain had no frontier, and Britain’s frontier

was very short).31 A few areas of the empire were intensively occupied,

notably Judaea, a very small territory that housed perhaps 20,000 troops

in the early second century CE, and Mauretania Tingitana was essen-

tially an armed camp occupied by 10,000 troops, with little evidence of

Roman influence outside the military zone.32 In both cases, intensive

occupation proved ineffective. Judaea’s garrison failed to prevent the

Bar-Kokhba revolt or to suppress endemic banditry in the province, and

Mauretania Tingitana was abandoned in the third century.

A complicating factor is that the army was not deployed from center

to periphery, as one people dominating many others, even though the

emperor claimed ultimate authority over the whole apparatus. Dur-

ing the first century CE the Roman army rapidly changed from a force

of Italian citizen-soldiers to one that was recruited from all over the

empire, not mainly from Italy. Legionaries mainly came from citizen

populations in the provinces, notably veteran colonies. But veteran col-

onies were not isolated, ethnically distinct communities; their citizen-

inhabitants might be veteran settlers or their freedmen, or remote

descendants of those settlers or of their freedmen, having mixed for

many generations with the local population. The descendants of retired

auxiliary soldiers were probably another important source of legion-

ary recruits. The auxiliary army, recruited entirely from noncitizens,

was much larger than the legionary army. Discharged after decades of

service, these soldiers acquired Roman citizenship on retirement and

usually settled in the regions in which they had been stationed. Thus

Rome’s army was recruited from among its subjects.33

Consider the situation in Judaea before the revolt of 66: when Herod

the Great ruled with Roman support (until his death in 4 BCE), he com-

manded a typical Hellenistic army of troops from local military settle-

ments.34 These troops were mainly Sarmatians, Idumaeans, Babylonian

Jewish archers, and ethnic Palestinian Jews, although Herod also had a

famous bodyguard of Germans, Thracians, and Gauls. The indigenous

settlements continued to supply the army that supported all of Herod’s

successors and formed the garrison of Judaea after 6 CE. Much of this

172 Mattern

army remained loyal to the Romans and fought with them to suppress

the revolt of 66 CE, under the command of Herod’s great-grandson,

King Agrippa II. Conversely, Herod probably modeled his army on the

Roman army and used some ethnic Roman officers, and it is likely that

many Jews were recruited into the Roman legionary or auxiliary army

both in his reign and later. But Mel Gibson’s portrait of Latin-speaking

soldiers in
The Passion
is inaccurate. The soldiers in the “Roman” gar-

rison of Judaea spoke Aramaic.

The army that the Romans initially sent against the rebels in 66,

under the command of Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, included le-

gionary (i.e., Roman citizen) soldiers, auxiliary (i.e., noncitizen) sol-

diers, contingents from the armies of two local allied (“client”) kings,

and local Syrian militia. At the same time, the royal Jewish forces loyal

to Agrippa II moved against the rebels in three separate locations. Later,

the larger Roman army under the command of Vespasian numbered

55,000–60,000 legionary and auxiliary troops and 15,000 allied troops,

and included at least one Jewish high officer, Tiberius Julius Alexander

of Egypt.

In this example and in others that could be discussed from around