War: What is it good for? (6 page)

Calgacus or Cicero; wasteland or wonderland? These two competing views of the consequences of war, formulated so sharply two thousand years ago, will dominate this book.

In an ideal world, we could settle the debate by just running the numbers. If violent deaths fell and prosperity rose after the Roman conquests, we could conclude that Cicero was right; war was good for something. If the results came out the other way, then obviously Calgacus understood his age better, and war made only wastelands. We could then rerun the test on later periods of history in
Chapters 2
–
5
, coming to an overall conclusion about what—if anything—war has been good for.

But reality is rarely that convenient. I mentioned in the introduction that building databases of deaths in battle has grown into a minor academic industry, but few reliable statistics go back past
A.D.
1500, even in Europe. Only one kind of evidence—the physical remains of our bodies, which often carry telltale traces of lethal violence—has the potential to span every period, going back to the origins of humanity itself. One day we can expect to have reliable statistics from this source, but right now the problem is that not many scholars have made large-scale studies of this complicated, technically challenging material, and even when they have, the picture remains rather unclear.

One study (published in 2012) of skulls in collections at Tel Aviv University, for instance, found precious few differences in levels of violence across the last six thousand years. A 2013 analysis of skeletons from Peru, however, found spikes in violence in periods when bigger states were being formed (roughly 400
B.C.–A.D.
100 and
A.D.
1000–1400)—which is roughly consistent
with this book's arguments. Until we have far more of this evidence, all we will be able to do for periods before
A.D.
1500 (and in some parts of the world, even into our own century) is bundle together all kinds of evidence, including archaeology, literary anecdotes, and anthropological comparisons, with—once in a while—some actual numbers.

This is a messy business, made even messier by the sheer scale of the Roman Empire. By Calgacus's day it sprawled across an area half the size of the continental United States and contained about sixty million people. Roughly forty million (Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians) lived in the complex, urban societies of its eastern half, with another twenty million (Celts and Germans) in the simpler rural and tribal societies of the west.

We have already heard Cicero's views on the violence of Greek Asia before the Roman conquest, and other writers made the barbarians (as Romans dismissively called them)
²
of the west sound even worse. Fights, raids, and battles were everyday activities, the Romans said, and every village was fortified. While a Roman gentleman might feel underdressed without his toga, a German felt naked without his shield and spear. The barbarians, Romans insisted, worshipped severed heads, which they liked to hang outside their front doors (suitably treated with cedar oil to stop them from smelling). They sacrificed humans to their angry gods, and sometimes even burned them alive inside wickerwork statues. Tacitus was blunt: “Germans have no taste for peace.”

Small wonder, then, that Cicero and his peers thought Rome was doing its neighbors a favor by conquering them. And it is equally unsurprising, some historians suggest, that when modern classical scholarship took shape in the eighteenth century, most of its towering intellects agreed with the Romans. Europeans liked to think that they too were doing the world a favor by conquering it, and so the Romans' arguments struck them as eminently reasonable.

On the heels of Europe's retreat from empire in the later twentieth century, however, classicists began wondering about the Romans' gory picture of the people they conquered. Ancient imperialists, some scholars suggested, might have been just as eager as the modern version to paint their victims as uncivilized, corrupt, and in general need of conquest. Cicero wanted to
justify exploiting Greeks; Caesar, to make attacking Gaul (roughly modern France) look necessary; and Tacitus, to glorify his father-in-law, Agricola.

Taking Caesar's word that the Gauls needed conquering might be as unwise as simply swallowing whole Rudyard Kipling's now-notorious claim (which I will come back to in
Chapter 4
) that governing new-caught, sullen peoples was the white man's burden. Fortunately, though, we do not have to take the Romans' word for anything, because plenty of other voices survive too.

In the eastern Mediterranean, literate upper-class Greeks wrote their own accounts, sometimes fawning on the Roman conquerors, sometimes fiercely anti-imperialist. The surprising thing, though, is that they all present much the same grim picture of a preconquest world full of failed states, vicious pirates and bandits, and spiraling wars, uprisings, and rebellions.

Take, for instance, an inscription carved on the base of a statue set up in honor of the otherwise unknown Philip of Pergamum in 58
B.C.
(Pergamum was in the province of Asia, and 58
B.C.
was just one year after Quintus Cicero's stint as governor of Asia ended; Quintus and Philip would almost certainly have known each other.) Among various good deeds, it tells us, Philip had written a history, intended as “a narrative of recent events—for all sorts of sufferings and constant mutual slaughter have gone on in our days in Asia and Europe, in the tribes of Libya, and in the cities of the islanders.” Philip apparently agreed with the brothers Cicero that without the Roman presence, Asia would be a bad neighborhood.

In the West, few among the conquered could write, and virtually none of their thoughts survive for us to read, but archaeology suggests that here too the Romans knew what they were talking about. Many—perhaps most—people really did live in walled and ditched forts before the Roman conquest, and while excavations cannot show whether men habitually carried arms, mourners certainly regularly buried their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons with weapons (and sometimes with shields, breastplates, and even complete chariots too). The way they wanted their menfolk remembered was as warriors.

Most spectacularly, Celtic and Germanic gods really did like human sacrifice. Millions of visitors to London's British Museum have seen the most famous example, a disturbingly well-preserved two-thousand-year-old corpse pulled from a bog in Cheshire in 1984 (and immediately nicknamed Pete Marsh). One day in March or April, a decade or two before the Romans arrived in Britain, this lost soul was stunned by two blows to the head, stabbed in the chest, garroted, and, just to be sure, drowned in a bog.
Analysis of his waterlogged gut produced mistletoe, which is how we know what month he died in (the year is harder to fix). Mistletoe was the sacred plant of the Druids, who—according to Tacitus and Caesar—specialized in human sacrifice, which encourages many archaeologists to think that Pete Marsh was the victim of some homicidal ritual.

Altogether, several dozen bog bodies that look as if they were sacrificed (as well as sites where people worshipped skulls) have been dug up, and in 2009 archaeologists found an astonishing two hundred corpses in a bog at Alken Enge in Denmark. Many had been hacked to pieces, and their bones were mixed with axes, spears, swords, and shields. Opinions differ on whether they were slaughtered in a battle or sacrificed after one.

Of course, we might be misinterpreting these finds. Burying weapons with the dead and sacrificing humans in bogs need not mean that war was everywhere; the excavated remains might actually mean that violence had been banished into rituals. And walls and ditches might not have been for defense at all; perhaps they were just status symbols, like the ghastly mock castles that Victorian gentlefolk liked to build on their country estates.

But none of this is very convincing. The reason that people poured thousands of hours into digging ditches and building walls was clearly that their lives depended on it. At the most fully excavated fort, Danebury in southern England, the great wooden gates and parts of the village were burned down twice, and after the second conflagration, around 100
B.C.
, about a hundred bodies—many bearing telltale wounds from metal weapons—were dumped in pits.

Nor was Danebury unique. Grisly new finds keep turning up. In 2011, British archaeologists reported on a massacre site at Fin Cop in Derbyshire, where nine bodies (one of them a pregnant woman) were found in a short stretch of ditch, buried at the same time around 400
B.C.
under the fort's collapsed wall. The excavators speculate that dozens—perhaps hundreds—more victims remain to be found.

Cicero was surely right that the pre-Roman world was a rough place, but Calgacus would probably not have disputed this. His point was that conquest by Rome was even worse.

No one really knows how many people were killed in Rome's wars of expansion, which began in Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C.
, spreading to the western Mediterranean in the third century, the east in the second, and northwest Europe in the first. The Romans did not really keep count (
Figure 1.3
), but the total might have surpassed five million.

Even more might have been dragged off into slavery. Calgacus's claim calls for serious scrutiny.

The level of violence varied, depending on Rome's internal politics and the amount of resistance offered. In extreme cases, Roman armies would devastate enemy territory so thoroughly that no one lived there for decades after, as happened to an Italian tribe called the Senones in 283
B.C.
The Greek historian Polybius, himself taken to Rome as a captive after being on the losing side in a war, says that by the end of Rome's third-century-
B.C.
wars with Carthage it became normal practice “to exterminate every form of life they encountered, sparing none … so when cities are taken by the Romans you may often see not only the corpses of human beings but also dogs cut in half, and also the dismembered limbs of other animals.”

Those who submitted without too much fighting got off more lightly,
but the Romans reserved their real rage for people who surrendered but then changed their minds. This happened quite often. After overrunning most of Gaul with relatively little killing in 58–56
B.C.
, for instance, Julius Caesar had to spend the next half-dozen years putting down revolts. Ancient authors claim that he ended up killing one million out of the three million Gallic men of fighting age and selling another million as slaves.

The worst offenders (in Roman eyes) were the Jews. According to Josephus, a Jewish general who defected to Rome early in the great Jewish revolt of
A.D.
66–73, the Romans not only burned the temple in Jerusalem and stole its sacred treasures but also killed more than a million Jews and enslaved another hundred thousand. And that was just for starters: when the Jews rose up again in
A.D.
132, the Romans really turned nasty. They “went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils,” one Jewish source claimed—exaggeration, certainly, but another half million died. The province of Judea was renamed Palestina, after its ancient Philistine occupants, and the surviving Jews—banned from Jerusalem except for one day each year—scattered into exile across Europe and the Middle East.

What Cicero had in mind when he took the opposite view from Calgacus was what happened
after
the conquests. From his vantage point in Rome's ruling class, Cicero could see that after the legions moved on and the fires of revolt were quenched in blood, peace descended. Warrior graves and bloodthirsty gods faded away. The walls of ancient cities—no longer worth spending money on—decayed and fell down, and new cities, which were sprouting up everywhere, simply did without fortifications.

Cicero would probably have accepted Calgacus's point that Rome regularly made wastelands. Despite his enthusiasm for Rome's civilizing mission, Cicero knew as well as anyone that conquest was an ugly business, for the conquerors as well as their victims. Successful war generated unprecedented plunder, and between the 80s and the 30s
B.C.
Rome's political institutions repeatedly collapsed in civil wars over the spoils. There were years when no merchant in his right mind would travel the highways of Italy without armed guards. For months at a stretch, mobs had the run of the streets of Rome, forcing elected consuls to cower in their (fortified) mansions, terrified to step outside.

First-century-
B.C.
Roman aristocrats were as touchy as anyone, constantly ready to avenge any slight with violence (not for nothing did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Rome). Cicero made his name by prosecuting a string of the worst villains before a general's henchmen sent
him to an early grave. His head and hands were hacked off and nailed up in the Forum as a warning to others to think carefully before speaking or writing against the mighty.