Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (36 page)

the empire, it is difficult to distinguish the Romans from their subjects,

a procedure made even more complicated because natives, when en-

franchised, took Roman names, and many cannot be distinguished in

the historical record from ethnic Italians. For example, while several of

Herod’s military officers had Roman names, we do not know if they

were enfranchised Jews or soldiers imported or borrowed from Rome’s

legionary armies. Should we count all Roman citizens as “Roman,” in-

cluding King Herod and his successors and Josephus himself, and all

retired auxiliary soldiers, their freedmen, their descendants, and the de-

scendants of their freedmen? Should Paul of Tarsus, whose family had

acquired Roman citizenship from an unknown patron, therefore count

as Roman, along with any freedmen in his family? Should we rather

count only the staff sent from Italy, the procurator and his entourage?

Should we count only legionary soldiers—but there were no legions

deployed in Judaea before the revolt of 66? One scholar, writing on

Gaul, has described the term “Roman” as a social status, not an ethnic-

ity, and as such it was fluid: one could be more or less Roman, more or

Counterinsurgency 173

less enmeshed in the web of Roman culture and influence, and there

was no sharp line between ruler and subject.35

What most historians refer to simplistically as the conquest of Ju-

daea by Pompey in 66 BCE and its subjection to Rome through a series

of puppet kings, Josephus describes as a bafflingly complex process en-

twining Jewish dynastic intrigue, Roman civil war, a triangular set of

international relations and conflicts among Romans and Parthians, Ro-

mans and Jews, and Jews and Parthians, as well as a more local sphere of

relationships, especially between Judaea and Arabia. Every withdrawal

of Roman troops from the region saw a new uprising under a new can-

didate for leadership and a reassertion of local power bases until finally

a period of relative stability followed Herod’s defeat of Aristobulus in

37 BCE. Rome’s incorporation of the Greek East or Caesar’s conquest

of Gaul could be described in a similar way: only close attention to

tensions and conflicts indigenous to the area can adequately explain

Roman intervention and describe its results.36 The story of Roman im-

perialism is not the story of an invincible army deployed from the em-

pire’s center against a surrounding ring of hapless, less sophisticated

future subjects, nor did it govern its empire as a militarized ruling class

controlling ethnically and culturally distinct populations.

Modern studies of any aspect of how the Roman Empire worked

go badly astray when they underestimate the role of personal power

as compared to the power of the state. One scholar notes that in his

exhaustively detailed history of Judaea under Roman rule, Josephus

hardly discusses the Roman state and does not seem to understand

the concept of state power.37 The army was by far the largest institu-

tion of the Roman state; but it was social relationships, and not mainly

the army, that knit the empire together. Much of “Roman” rule was

done by local aristocracies, petty kings, chiefs, “big men,” and large

landowners acting out their own agendas and bringing in the Roman

army or the Roman government when it suited them. Taxes were col-

lected by local agents, and many local governing institutions continued

to operate. Parties to local feuds and rivalries turned to their Roman

governors to settle disputes—this was the essence of Roman law and

of Roman provincial government, not edicts and occupation. Even in

places where indigenous institutions were transformed by their contact

174 Mattern

with the Roman Empire, many people never saw an official representa-

tive of Rome apart from the occasional soldier, and in some provinces

even these were rare. The traffic in favors and injuries that governed

Roman social relations governed the empire as well.

One could go even further and say that to describe Rome’s prov-

inces as distinct territorial regions is to oversimplify. Although Roman

law and policy recognized the province as an administrative unit, each

under a governor of senior senatorial rank, areas like Sicily, Gaul, or

Judaea did not have a single uniform relationship with Rome. Rather,

each was a network of communities and individuals with a unique set

of relationships to the Roman state, represented by the Senate and the

emperor (or, in the republic, the “Senate and the People of Rome”),

and to individual Roman aristocrats. That is true even where Rome

ruled provinces directly; but at all times we hear of a bewildering array

of petty kings and local chiefs allied to Rome and considered part of

its empire. These are complicated points, which I illustrate with two

examples.

It would raise few eyebrows among scholars of Roman history to

say that in Judaea, the Romans supported a friendly king, Herod the

Great, for several decades until his death in 4 BCE. However, it would

be more accurate to say that first Julius Caesar, then the tyrannicide

Cassius, then Mark Antony, and eventually the emperor Octavian sup-

ported Herod and that Herod supported each of these men in turn.38

In the turmoil that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44

BCE, even though Herod’s father owed his Roman citizenship and

status as king to Caesar, Herod accepted troops from Cassius in re-

turn for a presumed alliance. When Mark Antony defeated Cassius,

Herod switched allegiances and offered his support to Antony. When

the Parthians invaded Syria and Judaea and deposed its high priest and

set up their own nominee, Antony supported Herod in his efforts to

get them out and had the Senate formally declare him king of Judaea.

Herod and his army also took part in Antony’s unsuccessful campaigns

against Parthia that occurred at the same time. Finally, when Octavian

defeated Antony at Actium in 31 BCE, Herod made a famous pilgrimage

to Octavian to switch sides once again. After he convinced the emperor

that he would be as loyal to him as he had been to Antony, Octavian

Counterinsurgency 175

acknowledged his friendship. He also gave Herod possession of certain

cities in Palestine that the Romans at the time considered subject to

them or to the deceased queen of Egypt.

Herod supported his Roman friends with troops when they asked

him to, and he was a promoter of their interests in other ways. But in

return, Herod received the means with which to defeat his dynastic

rivals and enlarge his kingdom. His story inextricably entwines Jewish

politics and Roman civil war with regional and international politics. It

is largely through these complex relationships that the Roman Empire

managed foreign and internal threats, which in this system are not al-

ways easily separable; and the system worked better to the extent that

all parties benefited.

After Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided among his four sur-

viving sons until 6 CE.39 At that time, amid civil unrest, the Romans

deposed Archelaus and established as the prefecture of Judaea a part of

Herod’s kingdom that included Jerusalem. But Herod’s sons continued

to rule the rest. In 41 the emperor Claudius gave Herod’s grandson,

Agrippa I, sovereignty over the whole kingdom once ruled by Herod.

After Agrippa I died in 44 CE, Claudius made most of that territory sub-

ject to a Roman procurator of equestrian rank, except that Agrippa I’s

son, Agrippa II, continued to rule part of Galilee. This is the situation

in the province we know most about; whether its history was more

complicated than that of other provinces is not known. But clearly a

definition of empire that mainly relies on direct military or bureau-

cratic control fails to capture the essence of the situation. Only one

that takes account of dynamic relationships among Rome the state,

individual Romans, and local elites can capture it.

The most accessible window onto a province long under direct Ro-

man rule—that is, subject to a Roman governor—are the speeches that

record Cicero’s prosecution of its corrupt governor Gaius Verres in 70

BCE. At that time Sicily had been part of the Roman Empire for nearly

two centuries. Cicero’s orations
Against Verres
reveal the complexity of

Rome’s relationship with Sicily and of the social ties that connected

the Roman ruling class to its indigenous, hellenized urban ruling class.

Most of the province paid one-tenth of the grain crop as tax. The

contract to collect the tax was sold in Sicily, to local corporations; this

176 Mattern

was, or was at least perceived to be, the same system that prevailed

under the last king of Syracuse, Hiero II, who ruled during the first

two Punic Wars. Throughout his long speeches Cicero refers to the

“law of Hiero” with reverence, as an institution for which disrespect

amounted to gross misrule. Besides this, five cities were exempt from

taxation; two paid on their own without contracts; and the contracts

to collect taxes from some cities were sold at Rome, an arrangement

less advantageous to them.40 The terms of each community’s rela-

tionship to Rome reflected the circumstances of its participation in

the First Punic War or in subsequent conflicts, or its relationship to

individual Roman patrons. The Claudii Marcelli and Cicero himself

considered themselves patrons of the province as a whole; Cicero calls

the Sicilians “allies and friends of the Roman people and close con-

nections of myself.” Some individual cities, such as Segesta, Syracuse,

and Messana, had relationships with specific aristocratic families.41

And individuals from among Sicily’s hellenized elite also enjoyed spe-

cial relationships with Roman senators that continually surface in the

course of the trial; the one most commonly mentioned is
hospitium
.

It is an especially damning sign that evidence against Verres can be

extracted, on cross-examination, from his own
hospes
, Heius of Mes-

sana, or that he presided over the unjust conviction of another of his

hospites
, Sthenius of Thermae.42

There was no Roman army in Sicily. When Verres needed shock

troops to carry out his extortionist schemes, he called on the slave

guards of the local Temple of Aphrodite at Eryx, whose normal job

was to protect the temple treasury.43 He took kickbacks from local tax

corporations and from feuding aristocrats prosecuting their enemies

in his court.44 Seeking redress, Sicilian individuals went to Rome and

cities sent delegations pleading their cases to their patrons and connec-

tions in the Senate, before whom he would be tried.45 Verres’s rule was

corrupt and rapacious, but it was only his social connections inside and

outside Sicily that allowed him to get away with it. Cicero makes no

references to insurgency in this period and characterizes the Sicilians

in paternalistic terms as a docile, childlike people.46 A more plausible

explanation for the low level of insurgency in Sicily in Cicero’s time—

if this characterization is accurate—is the density of the connections

Counterinsurgency 177

between the local ruling class and the Roman aristocracy, which Ci-

cero’s speeches illustrate very well.

What, then, is insurgency, and what is counterinsurgency? One way

to view insurgency, resistance, and banditry is as attenuated areas or

holes in the network of social relationships that linked the empire to-

gether and bound it to the senatorial aristocracy and to the emperor.

In other cases one of the nodes in the network—a petty king, a Roman

aristocrat, an auxiliary commander—might yank its strings in a new

direction, activating a new set of connections at cross-purposes with

the dominant ones. Foreign relations, local politics, and rivalries inter-

nal to the Roman ruling class worked inextricably together or against

one another.

The Romans negotiated diplomatical y with petty kings, tribal chiefs,

bandits, and nomads.47 They paid subsidies and made treaties. They

granted citizenship, titles, or military support. They formed an infinite

variety of personal connections that linked the Roman ruling class to

local aristocrats and strongmen. When this social network failed, as it

often did, they ruled by force. They occupied territory, in a few cases

very densely. They waged major wars against rebels and took pride

in defeating them with their superior discipline, tenacity, and military

engineering. They fought bandits with patrols, posses, and occasional

military campaigns. They terrorized rebel ious subjects with harsh re-

prisals. Whether these latter measures worked is difficult to say. The

Roman Empire endured a long time, but no era was free of insurgency

and banditry. My argument, however, is not about the efficacy or inef-