War: What is it good for? (7 page)

One of Cicero's many enemies, Marcus Licinius Crassus, reputedly said around this time that “no one should count himself rich unless he can afford his own army,” but in the 30s
B.C.
one such man—Julius Caesar's grandnephew Octavian—showed where this logic led. Fighting his way free from the roiling mass of aristocrats, Octavian made himself Rome's first emperor. Cleverly, he defused resistance by insisting he was just a regular guy, albeit the richest such guy in the world, and also the guy who happened to be in complete control of the world's greatest army.

The only honor Octavian would accept was a new name, Augustus, literally “Most August One.” Most aristocrats, however, immediately understood what was going on. “The readier men were to be slaves,” Tacitus said, “the higher they were raised by wealth and promotion, so that, heads turned by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangers of the past.” Noblemen stopped talking like Crassus; recognizing that only Augustus could now use lethal violence, they found quieter ways to work out their differences. Leviathan defanged the aristocracy.

In his book
The Civilizing Process,
which I mentioned in the introduction, Norbert Elias suggested that Europe became less violent after about
A.D.
1500 because its turbulent aristocrats gave up on killing as a way to solve their disputes. Elias touched on Rome several times in the course of his argument but seems not to have realized that the Romans had anticipated the early-modern European pacification by a millennium and a half. Rich Romans remade themselves as men of peace and gloried in what they called the Pax Romana, the “Roman Peace,” of the first two centuries
A.D.

The whole empire seems to have breathed a collective sigh of relief. “The ox roams the fields in safety,” the poet Horace rejoiced. “Ceres [the goddess of agriculture] and kind Prosperity nourish the land; across a pacified sea fly sailors.” Educated authors showed a rare unanimity about the wonders of the age. Rome “has provided us with a great peace,” gushed the slave turned Stoic philosopher Epictetus. “There are no longer any wars or battles or great bandits or pirates; at any time we can travel and journey from sunrise to sunset.”

It would be easy to pile up examples of such fizzy prose—so easy, in fact, that when Edward Gibbon sat down in the 1770s to write the first properly modern history of Rome, he concluded that “if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of
the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus” (that is,
A.D.
96–180).

Gibbon said this despite knowing that the Roman Empire remained a rough place. The first two centuries
A.D.
were the golden age of gladiators, when huge crowds flocked to watch men murder each other (the Colosseum alone seated fifty thousand), and the violence was not always confined to the arena. In
A.D.
59, for instance, the people of Pompeii put on a big gladiatorial show, and sports fans from Nuceria, a few miles down the road, came to see the fun. “During an exchange of abuse, typical of these rowdy country towns,” the urbane Tacitus tells us, “insults led to stone-throwing, and then swords were drawn.” This might have struck wild Caledonians as perfectly reasonable, but what came next would not. Instead of exacting bloody revenge, the Nucerians complained to the emperor. Committees met and reports were filed; Pompeii's festival organizers were exiled, and the city was banned from holding gladiatorial shows for ten years (no small punishment, as it turned out, because Mount Vesuvius erupted and wiped Pompeii off the map another ten years after that). And there the matter ended.

When Bosnia erupted into ethnic violence in the 1990s, one Croat observed that before the breakup of Yugoslavia, “we [had] lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.” Yet first-century Pompeii had no such police force to impose peace; indeed, there was nothing like a modern police force anywhere in the world till London got one in 1828. So why did the killing stop?

The explanation seems to be that Rome's rulers succeeded in sending a message that only the government had the right to get violent. If Pompeians had carried on killing Nucerians in
A.D.
59, more memos would have moved up the chain to the emperor, who had thirty legions to deal with people who gave him trouble by fighting without permission and killing potential taxpayers. But the paradoxical logic of violence was at work: because everyone knew that the emperor could (and, if pressed, would) send in the legions, he hardly ever had to do so.

I mentioned in the introduction that Hobbes liked to distinguish between “commonwealth by
acquisition,
” or using force to compel people to be peaceful, and “commonwealth by
institution,
” or using trust to get them to follow rules. In reality, however, the two go together. The Pompeians laid down their swords in
A.D.
59 because centuries of war had built such a great Leviathan that they could trust it to overawe its subjects. The empire,
Gibbon pointed out, had replaced war with law. In the first two centuries
A.D.
, using force to settle disagreements became, if not completely unthinkable, then at least highly inadvisable.

Government and laws bring their own problems, of course. “Formerly we suffered from crimes,” Tacitus had one of his characters joke. “Now we suffer from laws.” A government strong enough to stamp out wrongdoing, the empire's subjects learned, was also a government strong enough to do even greater wrong.

Some Roman officials exploited this to the full, but—as usual in Roman history—the worst crimes date to the first century
B.C.
, when central government was at its weakest. Gaius Verres, who governed Sicily between 73 and 71
B.C.
, joked that he needed three years in the post—the first to steal enough to get rich, the second to steal enough to hire good lawyers, and the third to steal enough to bribe a judge and jury. Verres proceeded to do all three, beating, jailing, and even crucifying those who would not pay him.

All, though, for naught. Marcus Cicero made his name prosecuting Verres, who only escaped conviction by fleeing into exile. Over the next two centuries, prosecuting corrupt officials became the standard way for young lawyers in a hurry to get ahead, and even though villains with friends in high places regularly got off, new laws steadily narrowed the scope for using violent extortion.

The empire that Rome's wars created was no utopia, but the tone of the mass of surviving writings (by Romans and provincials alike) does suggest that it made its subjects safer than they would have been without it. And it also, apparently, made them richer. With pirates and bandits suppressed, trade boomed. To move its armies and fleets around, the government built state-of-the-art roads and harbors, which merchants used too. In return, Rome taxed the traders and spent most of the money it raised on the armed forces.

The army was concentrated in frontier provinces, few of which were fertile enough to feed so many men who did not work on the farm (by the first century
A.D.
, about 350,000 of them). The army therefore spent much of its money buying food that had been shipped by merchants from the empire's more productive Mediterranean provinces to its less productive frontier ones. This generated more profits for the traders, which the government could tax, generating more money to spend on the army, creating more profits still, and so on, in a virtuous circle.

The flows of taxes and trade tied the Mediterranean economy together as never before. Each region could produce whatever it made cheapest and
best, selling its goods wherever they fetched high prices. Markets and coinage spread into every nook and cranny of the empire.

Thanks to bigger markets, bigger ships became profitable; thanks to bigger ships, transport costs fell. And as they did, more and more people could afford to flock to the great cities, where the government spent most of the money that did not go to the army. In the first two centuries
A.D.
, a million people lived in Rome—far more than had ever lived in one place before—and Antioch and Alexandria boasted perhaps half as many each.

These cities were the wonders of the world, seething, stinking, and raucous, but full of pomp, ceremony, and gleaming marble—all of which required more people, more food, and more bricks, iron nails, pots, and wine, which meant more taxes, more trade, and more growth.

Little by little, this frenetic activity increased the quantity of goods in circulation. By the best estimates, per capita consumption typically rose about 50 percent in the first two centuries after incorporation into the empire. The process disproportionately favored the already rich, who grew even richer, but every class of objects that archaeologists can count—house sizes, animal bones from feasts, coins, the height of skeletons—suggests that tens of millions of ordinary people profited too (
Figure 1.4
).

“Who does not now recognize,” the Roman geographer Pliny (most famous for getting himself killed by standing too close to Mount Vesuvius when it erupted) asked just four years before the battle at the Graupian Mountain, “that thanks to the majesty of the Roman Empire, communications have been opened between all parts of the world? Or that standards of living have made great strides? Or that all this is owed to trade, and the common enjoyment of the blessings of peace?” The Roman Empire was no wasteland.

Stationary Bandits

To Gibbon, the explanation for the empire's joy was obvious. Rome had been blessed with good rulers, who felt themselves “over-paid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success; by the honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.”

The a-few-good-men theory has a certain appeal, above all its simplicity. If what made Rome such a success story really was just a run of great leaders, we would not need to reach the unpleasant conclusion that war was good for something in ancient times. It might simply be that an organization that has good enough bosses can survive pretty much anything. Perhaps the ancient world got safer and richer in spite of its wars, not because of them.

But the Gibbon thesis also has weaknesses. The first is that there were limits on how much ancient emperors could actually do. Rome certainly did have energetic rulers who rose before dawn and worked deep into the night answering letters, hearing lawsuits, and making decisions. But to get results, they had to work with layer upon layer of bureaucrats, lawyers, and scholars, all of whom had their own agendas. Even the most dynamic emperors—and men like Augustus were very dynamic indeed—struggled to produce change.

A second problem is that for every Augustus, the empire also had a Caligula or a Nero, men whose exquisite delight came more from fiddling while Rome burned, having sex with siblings, and appointing horses as consuls than from beholding the general happiness. According to the people who wrote the histories—that is, the bureaucrats, lawyers, and scholars—Rome had bad emperors more often than good in the first century
A.D.
(Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian all got bad press and between them reigned for fifty-six years). Yet these hundred years probably saw peace and prosperity advance faster than ever before.

On balance, it does not look as if wise shepherds can take the credit for making the mass of ordinary mortals safer and richer. Most of the time, Rome's ruling elites pursued nothing more enlightened than their own self-interest. Yet in pursuing it, they found themselves wandering down paths that did leave most people better-off.

The Augustuses of this world become rulers by defeating their rivals and keep on ruling because they have more force at their disposal than anyone else. That force, however, has to be paid for. A ruler could just plunder his subjects to pay his troops (the wasteland model), but eventually there will be nothing left to steal. And in any case, as Rome's worst governors regularly learned, the wretched of the earth will probably revolt long before reaching the point at which everything has been stolen from them.

In the long run, governments only survive if their rulers learn when to stop stealing, and even learn when to give a little back. The economist Mancur Olson made the point nicely by comparing rulers with bandits. Your typical bandit, said Olson, is a rover. He comes into a community, steals everything not nailed down, and rides out again. He doesn't care how much damage he does; the only important thing is to steal as much as possible and then move on.