The Romans versus Alexander the Great
What followed was a revolution in the size, scale, location and consequence of Roman conflict. True, the basic pattern of more or less annual warfare continued. Ancient writers thrilled to a long list of Roman battles fought in the fourth century BCE, celebrating, and no doubt exaggerating, heroic victories while lamenting a handful of shameful defeats and humiliating walkovers. The Battle of the Caudine Forks, in 321 BCE, at which the South Italian Samnites trounced the Romans, became almost as resonant as the Battle of the Allia or the sack of Rome seventy years earlier – even though it was not really a battle at all. The Romans were trapped in a narrow mountain gully, the Forks, with no water, and they simply surrendered.
Yet between the sack of Rome in 390 BCE and the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE, the manpower involved in these conflicts increased dramatically. Campaigns were fought further and further from Rome. Whereas Veii was 10 miles up the road, Sentinum was some two hundred miles away, across the Apennines. And the arrangements made between Rome and the defeated had far-reaching consequences for the future. The military impact of Rome by the end of the fourth century BCE was so great that Livy felt it worthwhile to compare Roman prowess with that of the world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India. Livy wondered who would have won, the Romans or the Macedonians, if they had come head to head, a military conundrum that armchair generals still ponder.
There were two particularly significant conflicts in Italy in this period. First was the so-called Latin War, fought against Rome’s Latin neighbours between 341 and 338 BCE. Shortly after followed the ‘Samnite Wars’, the occasion of Barbatus’ victories. They were fought in phases between 343 and 290 BCE against a group of communities based in the mountainous parts of southern Italy: Samnites, who were much less rough and primitive than it suited the Romans to portray them but less urbanised than those in many other parts of the peninsula. Both of these ‘wars’ are rather artificial constructions, isolating two enemies and giving their names to the much more widespread, endemic fighting of the period, from a decidedly Romano-centric point of view (no Samnite ever fought a ‘Samnite War’). That said, they do spotlight some important changes.
According to the usual story, the first was prompted by a revolt of the Latins against the dominant position of the Romans in the region. It remained a local conflict, but it was notable, even revolutionary, for the arrangements made afterwards between the Romans and the various Latin communities. For these gave Roman citizenship to vast numbers of the defeated, in numerous towns throughout central Italy, on a scale that went far beyond the precedent set at Veii. Whether this was a gesture of generosity, as many Roman writers interpreted it, or a mechanism of oppression, as it may well have seemed to those who found Roman citizenship imposed upon them, it was a crucial stage in the changing definition of what it meant to be ‘Roman’. And it brought, as we shall soon see, enormous changes to the structure of Roman power.
Almost fifty years later, the decades of Samnite Wars ended, with more than half the peninsula under Rome’s thumb in various ways, from treaties of ‘friendship’ to direct control. Roman writers presented these wars as if they were a struggle between two states for Italian supremacy. They were certainly not that, but the scale of the conflict was something new and set the stage for the future. At the Battle of Sentinum, the Romans faced a large group of enemies (‘alliance’ may be too formal a word for it): the Samnites themselves, as well as Etruscans and Gauls from the far north of the peninsula. The sheer number of combatants seems to have attracted the attention of Duris of Samos, who recorded a vast but implausible total of 100,000 Samnite and allied casualties. Roman writers saw this as a particularly heroic victory. It even became the theme of a jingoistic Roman tragedy two hundred years later, complete with a tragic chorus of Roman soldiers and featuring one of the Roman commanders who gave up his life to ensure his army’s success. But they too debated, as modern scholars have continued to do, just how big this biggest of all battles was. Livy had no patience with estimates on the scale of Duris’ or with even more inflated figures he came across in his researches. Whether his estimate of Roman forces at around 16,000 men (plus as many allies) is correct, it is impossible to know. One thing is certain, however: this was a different military world from the low-level skirmishes of the fifth century BCE.
It is a world we can still glimpse in an extraordinary discovery made in the 1870s in excavations at what would have been the edge of the ancient city of Rome: a tantalisingly small fragment of painting, from a tomb, probably dating to the early third century BCE. Originally much more extensive, covering a whole wall, it is arranged in a series of registers, one above the other, which are thought to feature scenes from these conflicts between Rome and the Samnites. If so, this is the first surviving painting in the West to show an identifiable, real-life military campaign – unless a rather generic scene of combat painted on a tomb in South Italy is actually, as some archaeologists have optimistically imagined, a proud depiction of the Samnite victory at the Caudine Forks (see plate 6).
The interpretation of the painting has been hugely controversial, and it is now sadly eroded, but the main outline is clear enough. The lowest register depicts hand-to-hand fighting, dominated by a man whose elaborate helmet extends into the scene above; higher up some imposing battlements still stand out. Each of the two best-preserved scenes shows a man in a short toga holding a spear. One of these, and possibly both, is named ‘Q Fabius’, plausibly the Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus who was commanding officer at Sentinum and who gave Barbatus his only known cameo role in the battle, instructing him to ‘bring up the reserves from the rear’. Here he is shown – with a retinue of hangers-on behind him on a distinctly smaller scale – apparently in negotiation with ‘Fannius’, a warrior with no weapons, dressed in military kit including heavy leg guards and in one case a plumed helmet, who is extending his bare right hand. Is Fannius a Samnite, surrendering to a representative of ‘the race that wears the toga’ – here, already in the third century BCE, depicted as exactly that?
Seen in these simple, stylised images, the Romans may not look much of a match for Alexander the Great. But whether or not they would have been is precisely the issue Livy raises in the long digression in his History just after the description of the impressive Roman recovery from the humiliation at the Caudine Forks. It did not escape his notice that the Samnite Wars were taking place in Italy at the end of the fourth century BCE, which was more or less when the Macedonian king was on his devastating campaigns in the East. By Livy’s day, Roman generals had long been keen to emulate Alexander. They had imitated his distinctive hairstyle, they had called themselves ‘the Great’ and both Julius Caesar and the first emperor, Augustus, had made a pilgrimage to Alexander’s tomb in Egypt, Augustus – so it was said – accidentally breaking off the corpse’s nose as he paid homage. So it is perhaps not surprising that Livy pondered a classic counterfactual question: who would have won if Alexander had turned his army westward and faced the Romans instead of the Persians?
Alexander, he concedes, was a great general, though not without his faults, drunkenness among others. But the Romans had the advantage of not depending on a single charismatic leader. They had depth in their command, supported by extraordinary military discipline. They also, he insisted, could call on far greater numbers of well-trained troops and – thanks to Roman alliances throughout Italy – summon reinforcements more or less at will. His answer, in short, was that, if given the chance, the Romans would have beaten Alexander.