THE GREAT ENEMIES OF ROME

THE EARLY HISTORY OF ROME is a history of war. Its heroes are soldiers. When the city was founded and throughout its early life Italy was divided among different peoples, ruling over different parts of the country. With these peoples—the Latins, the Etruscans, the Volscians, the Samnites—the Romans fought. War with one or other of them was always going on. Its fortune varied, but in the end the Roman spirit and the Roman organization told. One by one the other Italian tribes submitted and accepted Roman overlordship. This was a long and slow business, extending over hundreds of years. While it was still going on the Romans had to meet another danger: the danger of invasion from without. Again and again the Gauls swept down upon Italy from the north. Once (390) they actually occupied parts of the city of Rome itself. After that they were finally driven out and defeated by Camillus. Later, though they came again across the northern hills, they were always beaten and driven back. When on the march, their armies were dangerous; but the Gauls had no plan of permanent conquest: after a defeat, they retired to their northern plains and hills.

Within the space of a hundred years, in the third century before the birth of Christ, the Romans had to meet two invaders of a very different and far more dangerous kind: invaders with a settled plan of conquest, who came against them in order to subdue and rule Rome and Italy. These were Pyrrhus and Hannibal. Had either of them succeeded, the whole history of Rome and of the world might have been different. In a very real sense Pyrrhus and Hannibal are heroes in the story of Rome. They were the greatest enemies the Roman people ever had to meet. They were defeated because of qualities in the Roman people as a whole, rather than by the genius of any single general. No single Roman leader at the time was a first-rate commander like Pyrrhus, still less a genius like Hannibal, a much greater man than he. It is during their struggle with Pyrrhus, in the war with Carthage that followed Pyrrhus’s defeat, and in the long war with Hannibal that ended in his defeat and the destruction of Carthage as a great power that we can see the Roman character at its best. We can appreciate it and understand it only by understanding the enemies whom it met and broke.

Pyrrhus

At the time of his attack upon Italy Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, was the most brilliant soldier of his day: and his ambition was to rule, like Alexander, over a world greater than that of his own Greek kingdom. From babyhood he breathed and grew up amid storm and adventure, all his life he was most at home in camps and on the battlefield. His father was killed in battle when Pyrrhus was but five years old: he himself was only saved from death by a faithful slave who carried him to the house of the King of the Illyrians and laid him at his feet. The baby Pyrrhus clasped the knees of the monarch who, looking into his face, could not resist the appeal of the child’s eyes, but kept him safe till he was twelve years old and then helped to put him on his father’s throne. Though only a boy, Pyrrhus held it for five years. He was driven out, but later he recovered his kingdom again. As he grew up he studied the art of war constantly and wrote a handbook on tactics. As Plutarch, who wrote his life, puts it, ‘he was persuaded that neither to annoy others nor be annoyed by them was a life insufferably languishing and tedious’. Pyrrhus’s appearance expressed the strong, generous simplicity and directness of his character and his singleness of aim. The most remarkable feature in his face was his mouth, for his front teeth were formed of a continuous piece of bone, marked only with small lines resembling the divisions of a row of teeth. Fear was absolutely unknown to him. His weakness was that he did not understand men: though a brilliant soldier he knew nothing about government. He was a soldier only. He could win battles but not rule men.

Pyrrhus came to Italy on the invitation of the people of Tarentum. Tarentum was a wealthy and flourishing city in the south. Originally a Greek settlement, its people were famous for the luxury and elegance of their houses and lives, and scorned the rude, hardy, and simple Romans as untutored barbarians. When some Roman ships appeared in their harbour they were sunk by the Tarentines, who thought that as the Romans were at that time busy—the Gauls had swept down from the north and they were engaged with a war against the Samnites—Tarentum was safe from them. But the Romans at once declared war (281). The Tarentines took fright: they had no mind for fighting themselves and looked about for some one who would do it for them. Thus they called to Pyrrhus to save the Greeks in Italy. Pyrrhus saw in their appeal his chance of realizing what for the great Alexander had remained a dream—an empire in the West. He took sail at once. He was indeed so eager that he started in mid-winter despite the storms, and lost part of his fleet on the way. Nevertheless he brought a great army with him: Macedonian foot soldiers, then considered the best in the world, horsemen, archers, and slingers; and elephants, never before seen in Italy. In Tarentum he found nothing ready. His first task was to make the idle, luxurious city into a camp. The inhabitants, who cared for nothing but feasting, drinking, and games, did not like this, but it was too late to be sorry. Pyrrhus had come, and since no other towns in Italy gave any sign of joining him, he had to make the most of Tarentum. The Tarentines, who had been used to having all their fighting done for them by slaves, now had to go into training themselves.

In the spring the Roman army took the field and marched south against the invader. When Pyrrhus surveyed from a hill the Roman camp and line of battle he exclaimed in surprise: ‘These are no barbarians!’ In the end he won a victory at Heraclea (280), partly by reason of the panic caused among the Roman soldiers by the elephants—they had never seen such beasts before—but the victory was a very expensive one. Pyrrhus’s own losses were so heavy that he said, ‘One more victory like this and I shall be ruined.’ As he walked over the field at night and saw the Roman dead, all their wounds in front, lying where they had fallen in their own lines, he cried: ‘Had I been king of these people I should have conquered the world.’

A deep impression was made on him by the envoy Fabricius. Plutarch tells the story:

Pyrrhus and Fabricius

Presently envoys came to negotiate about the fate of the prisoners, and among them Gaius Fabricius, who was famed among the Romans, as Cineas told the King, for uprightness and military talent, and for extreme poverty as well. Therefore Pyrrhus received him kindly, apart from the rest, and urged him to accept a present, of course not corruptly, but as a so-called token of friendship and intimacy. When Fabricius refused, the King did no more for the moment, but next day, wishing to try his nerves as he had never seen an elephant, he had the largest of these beasts put behind a curtain close to them as they conversed. This was done, and at a signal the curtain was drawn aside, and the beast suddenly raised its trunk and held it over the head of Fabricius, uttering a harsh and terrifying cry. Undisturbed, he turned round and, smiling, said to Pyrrhus, ‘Yesterday your gold did not move me, nor does your elephant to-day.’

At dinner all sorts of subjects were discussed, and as a great deal was said about Greece and its philosophers, Cineas happened to mention Epicurus and explained the doctrines of his disciples about the gods and service to the state and the chief end of life. This last, as he said, they identified with pleasure, while they avoided service to the state as interrupting and marring their happiness, and banished the gods far away from love and anger and care for mankind to an untroubled life of ceaseless enjoyment. Before he had finished, Fabricius interrupted him and said, ‘By Hercules, I hope that Pyrrhus and the Samnites will hold these doctrines as long as they are at war with us.’

This filled Pyrrhus with such admiration of his high spirit and character that he was more anxious than before to be on terms of friendship instead of hostility with the Romans, and he privately urged Fabricius to arrange a peace and to take service with him and live as the first of all his comrades and generals. It is said that he quietly replied, ‘O king, you would gain nothing; for these very men who now honour and admire you will prefer my rule to yours if they once get to know me.’ Such were his words; and Pyrrhus did not receive them with anger or in a spirit of offended majesty, but he actually told his friends of the nobility of Fabricius and gave him sole charge of the prisoners on the understanding that, if the Senate refused the peace, they should be sent back after greeting their friends and keeping the festival of Saturn. As it happened, they were sent back after the festival, the Senate ordaining the penalty of death for anyone who stayed behind.

Plutarch, xxx. 20.

He was yet more deeply impressed by the strength of the Roman character a little later. When he found that none of the Latins were going to join him Pyrrhus sent an ambassador to the Senate, offering terms of peace. This ambassador was loaded with costly presents for the leading Romans and their wives. All these gifts were refused. Then Pyrrhus’s envoy came before the Senate, to see whether eloquence could not do what bribes...