The outside world: Veii and Rome
The expansion of Roman power through Italy was dramatic. It is easy to be dazzled, or appalled, by Rome’s later overseas empire, which eventually amounted to more than 2 million square miles, while taking for granted the idea that Italy was Roman. But the transformation of the small town by the Tiber in 509 BCE into a polity of more than 5,000 square miles in the 290s BCE, with effective control over at least half the Italian peninsula, and more to come, is almost as striking. How did that happen? And when?
Rome’s relations with the outside world were entirely unremarkable, so far as we can tell, until around 400 BCE. Its trading relations with the wider Mediterranean had been no more than typical for an Italian town. Its direct interactions were mainly local, above all with the Latin communities to the south, which shared a common language, a sense of common ancestry and several common festivals and sacred sites with Rome. The most that can be said is that by the end of the sixth century BCE the Romans probably had some kind of control over some of the other Latins. Both Cicero and the historian Polybius (a shrewd Greek observer of Rome, who features prominently in the next chapter) claim to have seen documents, or ‘treaties’, from that period suggesting that Rome was then the leading player in this small, local Latin world. And, as we have seen, the story of the fifth century BCE suggests more or less annual bouts of fighting but on a limited scale, in whatever grandiose terms it was later lauded. Quite simply, if there had been serious casualties every year for decades, the little town of Rome would not have survived.
The moment of change came near the start of the fourth century BCE, with two events that play a leading, and hugely mythologised, role in all ancient accounts of Rome’s expansion: the Roman destruction of the nearby town of Veii under the heroic Camillus in 396 BCE, and the destruction of Rome by Gauls in 390 BCE. What lay behind Rome’s clash with Veii is completely unknown, but it was written up as if it were Italy’s equivalent of the Trojan War: the ten-year siege that it took to capture the town, equalling the ten-year siege of Troy; and the victorious Romans eventually popping up inside the city from a tunnel under the Temple of Juno, as the equivalent of the Trojan Horse. The reality of the ‘conquest’ (which is probably too grand a term) must have been much more modest. This was not a clash of superpowers. Veii was a prosperous town, a little smaller than Rome, and just 10 miles away across the Tiber.
Yet the consequences of Roman victory were significant, even if not in the way suggested by Roman writers, who emphasised the enslavement of the population, with all their goods and chattels taken as spoils, and the total destruction of the town. Three hundred and fifty years later the poet Propertius conjured up a desolate picture of Veii in his day, as the home of no more than sheep and a few ‘idle shepherds’. This is much more a moral lesson in the perils of defeat than an accurate description (Propertius may never have been to the place), for the archaeology of the site points to a very different truth. Although there may have been vicious looting, enslavement at the moment of Roman victory and an influx of new settlers, most of the local sanctuaries remained in operation as they had been before, the town remained occupied, even if on a smaller scale, and such evidence as we have of the countryside farms points to continuity rather than rupture.
The important change is of a different kind. Rome annexed Veii and its land, instantly increasing the size of Roman territory by about 60 per cent. Soon after, four new geographical tribes of Roman citizens were created, to include Veii, its indigenous inhabitants as well as new settlers. There are hints of other important developments at roughly the same time, possibly connected. Livy claims that it was in the run-up to the siege of Veii that Roman soldiers were first paid, from Roman taxes. Whether literally true or not (and whatever they were paid in, it was not yet coin), this may well be an indication of a move towards a more centralised organisation of Roman armies and the decline of private warfare.
Defeat soon followed victory. The story went that in 390 BCE a band of Gauls – possibly a tribe on the move looking for land or, more likely, a well-trained posse of mercenaries looking for work further south – routed a Roman army on the river Allia, not far from the city. The Romans apparently did little more than run away, and the Gauls marched on to take Rome. One apocryphal tale describes how a virtuous plebeian, the aptly named Marcus Caedicius (‘disaster teller’), heard the voice of some unknown god warning him that Gauls were approaching, but his report was ignored because of his lowly status. It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too.
Roman storytelling gave extravagant coverage to the capture of the city, with various acts of heroism mitigating the widespread destruction. Another poor man gave proof of plebeian piety when he threw his wife and children out of his cart and gave a lift to the Vestal Virgins, who were evacuating their sacred emblems and talismans to safety in the nearby town of Caere. Many elderly aristocrats decided simply to face the inevitable and sat patiently at home waiting for the Gauls, who for a moment mistook the old men for statues before massacring them. Meanwhile, Camillus, briefly in exile for the alleged embezzlement of spoils, returned just in time to stop the Romans from paying a large ransom to the Gauls, to dissuade his compatriots from simply abandoning the city and moving to Veii and to take charge of refounding the city. Or that at least is one version. A less honourable telling of the story has the Gauls triumphantly carrying off the ransom.
This is another case of Roman exaggeration. The various stories, which became commonplaces of Roman cultural memory, offered important patriotic lessons: in placing the claims of country above family, in bravery in the face of certain defeat, and in the dangers of measuring the worth of the city in terms of gold. The catastrophe became so much a part of the Roman popular imagination that some diehards were using it in 48 CE as an argument (or a desperate gambit) against the emperor Claudius’ proposals to admit Gauls into the senate. There is, however, no archaeological evidence for the kind of massive destruction that later Romans imagined, unless those traces of burning now dated to around 500 BCE are in fact, as archaeologists once thought, the remains of a Gallic rampage a hundred years later.
28. An early twentieth-century drawing (from an earlier photograph) of the remains of the Servian Wall near Rome’s central train station. Sections of this fortification still greet travellers emerging from Roma Termini, though they are now rather bleakly enclosed behind railings.
The one clear surviving mark of the ‘sack’ on the Roman landscape is the vast defensive city wall, of which some impressive sections are still visible, constructed after the departure of the Gauls and built with some particularly durable stone that was one of the products of Rome’s new territory around Veii. But there were powerful reasons why this defeat was a useful episode for Roman historians to stress. It set the scene for Roman anxieties about invaders from over the Alps, of whom Hannibal was the most dangerous, but not the only one. It helped to explain why so little hard information survived for early Rome (it had gone up in flames), and so it marked the start, in ancient terms, of ‘modern history’. It answered the question of why in the later Republic the city of Rome, despite its world renown, was such an ill-planned rabbit warren: the Romans had had to rebuild hurriedly when the Gauls left. And it opened a new chapter in Rome’s relations with the outside world.