‘Poor men of humble birth sail across the seas to shores they have never seen before, where they find themselves among strangers, and cannot always have with them acquaintances to vouch for them. Yet such trust have they in the single fact of their citizenship, that they count on being safe, not only where they find our magistrates . . . and not only among their own countrymen . . . : no, wherever they find themselves, they are confident that this one fact will be their defence . . . to cry “I am a Roman citizen” . . .’ – Cicero, 70 BC.1
CIVIS ROMANUS SUM – ROMANS ABROAD
The campaigns in Gaul made Julius Caesar immensely wealthy and gave him glory on a grand scale. His victories were dazzling, skilfully advertised and resulted in the proclamation of unprecedented numbers of days of public thanksgiving at Rome. By the middle of the first century BC, the careers of men like Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar were making it ever harder to achieve something more spectacular than the victories of the past. Yet the Romans were always especially excited by the news that their legions had marched into new territories and that previously unknown peoples and rulers had submitted to them. Caesar and nostri – ‘our men’, as he described his legionaries – had reached the far north-west coast of Gaul, twice bridged the Rhine to attack the homelands of the Germanic tribes and, most dramatic of all, in 55 and 54 BC landed on the mysterious island of Britain. It did not matter that the expeditions achieved little, that he narrowly avoided disaster, or that he left no garrison behind. Even men who did not care much for Caesar thrilled at the thought of a Roman army crossing the great ocean encircling the three known continents.2
Generals won fame by being the first to overrun a region, but in truth they were rarely the first Romans to reach an area, and almost always the trader preceded the soldier. Julius Caesar found merchants or mercatores in many of the oppida of Gaul, such as the men whose stories fed the panic in his army at Vesontio. One of the two envoys he sent to Ariovistus was a certain Marcus Mettius, chosen because in the past the man had received the hospitality of the German leader. While he may well have been involved in the diplomatic exchanges which led to the king’s formal recognition by Rome in 59 BC, Mettius was almost certainly a trader doing business in the area, who had arrived months or probably years earlier.3
As we have seen, huge quantities of Italian wine were being sent north into Gaul, and the profits of this trade intensified rivalries in the tribal aristocracies and the great contest for power between the Aedui and Sequani. Roman merchants went at least some of the way with their goods, and it is hard to tell when and how often local middlemen took over. Caesar says that merchants went ‘least often’ to the lands of the Belgic tribes, and were banned from the territory of one of these peoples, the Nervii. The Germanic tribes on the other side of the Rhine were said to let traders come to them, but were keener to sell the spoils of their raiding than to buy anything. Caesar notes that they had no interest in the big draught horses bred in Gaul, in spite of their obvious superiority to their own small animals. We need to be a little cautious about some of this, for he expressly says that luxuries from the Mediterranean world corrupted a society, invoking a well-established tradition of the purity of simple cultures – a variation on the enduring image of the noble savage. In this case this was not for any sentimental reason. The Belgic and Germanic tribes were less effeminate and so far more dangerous enemies than other peoples in Gaul, which justified Caesar’s interventions in these regions and his uncompromising attitude to them.4
Caesar does not specify the nationality of the traders who reached – or tried to reach – these tribes, although he does single out imported wine as a corrupting influence. Before his first expedition to Britain he sought information about the island from traders, who were the only people to go there without a very good cause. Merchants were summoned to his camp, but the Roman commander learned very little from them. It does look as if much of the trade with Britain was controlled by the Veneti, a tribe living in the area of modern Brittany, who sailed to trading ports like the one at Hengistbury Head in Dorset. They were famous sailors, but in 56 BC Caesar shattered the tribe, executing many of its leaders and capturing their fleet in a naval battle. Survivors were doubtless unwilling to volunteer information to their conquerors, and the merchants told Caesar only a little about the coastal areas of the south-east, nearest to Gaul. It is possible that some of these men were Roman and carried on small-scale trade with the peoples of that area. Whoever the men were, some of them told the Britons of his plans. Since this prompted several leaders to send envoys promising to provide hostages and submit to the imperium of the Roman people, Caesar may well have wanted the news to reach the island, hoping as usual to secure allies before he arrived there.5
It is probable that there were Romans doing business in the far north of Gaul, and a few crossing to Britain, even if the Veneti dominated trade across the Channel until their catastrophic defeat at the hands of Caesar. In the years that followed there was a clear shift in trade so that most goods from the Continent went to the south-east of Britain, and sites further to the west, such as the trading post at Hengistbury Head, went into rapid decline. Another consequence of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul was the opening-up of the trade routes to Britain to many more Roman merchants. The quantity of goods shipped there significantly increased, and it also looks as if this produced power struggles among local leaders and kingdoms very similar to those between the Aedui and Sequani.6
Caesar was an avid collector of objets d’art, and some said that he went to Britain in the belief that he would find a rich source of high-quality pearls. If the story is true, then it was merely an additional attraction to the glory of carrying Roman arms to such an exotic place, and his hope was disappointed. Cicero commented that the profits to be made from Britain were far less than expected – ‘not a scrap of silver in the Island, nor hope of plunder except slaves, but I doubt we’ll find any scribes or musicians amongst them’ – and although he was talking mainly about the plunder from the expeditions it is likely that he was also thinking of longer-term prospects for trade had the island proved rich in anything worth having. In the second century BC the famous general Scipio Aemilianus – the man who destroyed Carthage and took Numantia – questioned merchants in Transalpine Gaul about the routes to Britain. They told him very little, which is probably once again a reflection of how far this traffic was monopolised by the tribes of Gaul’s Atlantic coast. Thus some Roman governors showed an interest in trade with lands beyond the provinces, but there is no evidence that this was ever a primary concern in decisions to expand into new territory. Rome does not seem to have fought wars to open up new markets to Roman businessmen, even if this was usually a consequence of the Republic’s expansion.7
It was as individuals in the hope of profit and not as representatives of state interests that some Romans travelled far outside the provinces of the Republic. Around the middle of the second century BC rich and readily accessible gold deposits were discovered by the Taurisci, a people living in Noricum – the region centred around the modern Tyrol in Austria. Large numbers of Italians, presumably including many Romans, flocked to the area to work alongside the locals. As far as we can tell they did not bring expertise, only an enthusiastic willingness to work in an effort to become rich, making them more like the ‘Forty-niners’ than technical supervisors. Polybius says that in just two months the price of gold in Italy plummeted by a third as the market was flooded. This prompted the Taurisci to expel the Italians and work the deposits on their own – whether to control the sheer quantities being extracted or simply to keep the profit to themselves is unclear.8
The expulsion was not seen as a hostile act, and there are signs that plenty of Romans and Italians continued to go to Noricum to do business. Diplomatic relations were good. In 113 BC the king of Noricum was clearly an ally, enjoying ties of hospitality with Rome, prompting a governor to lead a Roman army to aid him against the migrating Cimbri – unsuccessfully as it turned out. The tombstone of a man with the curious name of Pompaius Senator was found in the East Tyrol and has been dated to around 100 BC. The probability is that he was there on business.
Excavations revealed an entire Roman trading settlement outside the Norican hilltop town at the Magdalensberg. Established early in the first century BC, this covered an area some 330 feet by 179 (114 by 55 metres), with shops and houses around a central courtyard. The first buildings were of timber, but later they were rebuilt in stone with cellars for storing merchandise. By the second half of the first century some had plastered walls decorated with good-quality wall paintings showing images of gods, goddesses and figures from myth. The Magdalensberg was probably the seat of the king of Noricum, and the Romans brought in wine and oil in amphorae, functional items such as tools and pots, as well as decorated lamps and expensive black pottery from Etruria. In return the Romans traded for local produce, most of all iron, which was mined and smelted in great quantities there. This trading post gives an indication of the sort of communities set up beyond the provinces, for the area did not come under Roman rule until the end of the century.9
There were Roman traders dotted around the world, some as individuals and others congregating in communities, but it is impossible to gauge their numbers. What is certain is that they were never the only merchants at work, for there were always local men, and rarely would the Romans have been the only foreigners. Long-distance trade did not begin with the Romans, but had developed during the Bronze Age and in a few cases even earlier. Massilia (modern Marseilles) was founded by Greeks from Asia Minor in the sixth century BC and soon developed extensive trade links with the tribes on its borders. Although far more successful than most, this was simply one colony among many in a long process that saw Greek settlement all around the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Some of the colonies were small and primarily farming communities, but most engaged in trade to a greater or lesser extent.10
The Phoenicians were the great sailors of the ancient world, and early in the last millennium BC their ships often visited Spain – the Tarshish of the Old Testament – and even went to south-west Britain for tin, which was highly prized because it permitted the making of bronze. Phoenician colonies were established in Spain and North Africa, one of the latter being Carthage, founded perhaps in the eighth century BC. Over time the city outgrew its origins and became an empire and coloniser in its own right. In 509 BC the new Roman Republic signed a treaty with Carthage, which included clauses restricting the Romans and their allies from trading – or raiding, since the two were often linked – beyond Cap Bon in North Africa. Any ships blown off-course beyond this promontory were forbidden to buy anything save what was needed ‘for the repair of his ship or for sacrifice, and must depart within five days’. Roman merchants were permitted to go to other areas, but were only to conduct business in the presence of a local official.11
Later treaties restricted the Romans and their allies from other specific territories, clearly assuming that otherwise merchants would try their luck there. Some markets and sources of material were jealously guarded, and for a long time only the Carthaginians knew how to reach the north-west coast of Spain, a region rich in mineral resources. On one occasion a ship from the Punic colony of Gades (modern Cadiz) was followed by Roman vessels eager to discover the route. The Carthaginian captain lured them onto a shoal by deliberately running his own ship aground. Escaping on a piece of wreckage, he was rewarded by his city with money equivalent to his losses on the voyage. It looks as if the sailors of Gades kept the secret for some time after they became part of the Roman province, and it was only in the early first century BC that a governor secured all merchants access to the mines in the north-west.12
For all the restrictions the treaties placed upon Roman traders, in areas such as Sicily these traded on the same footing as their Carthaginian counterparts. Until the First Punic War, relations were good between the two city-states. A community of Carthaginian merchants was well established at Rome itself, and although most left when war broke out, others returned at the end of each conflict. It is possible that some Romans were established in Carthage and any of the other communities where they were permitted. Numbers may well have been small, and for a long time the sheer scale of Punic trading dwarfed the operations of Roman and Italian merchants. Carthaginian trade was based on the highly organised cultivation of well-irrigated estates in North Africa. The agriculture of Roman Italy was less sophisticated and produced a far smaller surplus for export. Yet Rome continued to grow, so that its population outstripped that of any other state. As time went on, there were simply more and more Romans looking to make money overseas. As the Republic acquired provinces, such men found fresh markets.13
MARKETS AND EXCHANGE
Amphorae break, but the fragments are virtually indestructible, and both easy to recognise and very visible in the archaeological record. An ancient shipwreck is more likely to be found if the vessel had a hold full of such large pottery containers. This makes it much easier to find evidence for the traffic in any products carried in amphorae – hence the ease with which we can confirm the shipment of so much Roman wine into Gaul in the first century BC. Other goods – whether slaves, livestock or animal products, clothing and material, minerals or anything else worth transporting – are by their nature almost invisible archaeologically. Literary mentions of such things tend to be vague and of little use in judging the scale of this activity. Thus it is clear that so much Italian wine went into Gaul, but far less clear what went back the other way.
It was said that Gallic leaders were willing to exchange a slave for an amphora of fine wine, although some scholars prefer to see this as the Romans misunderstanding the social obligation on a host to surpass in value any gift presented by a guest. If the estimate of at least 40,000,000 amphorae going into Gaul is remotely correct, then sheer numbers make it impossible that more than a tiny fraction were exchanged in this way, exploiting the cultural obligation of hospitality. We should also remember that Dumnorix of the Aedui based his position on controlling tolls levied on cargo going up the River Rhône. Both the quantity and the profits going to intermediaries indicate commercial transactions rather than exchange of gifts. Most tribes in Gaul – and those in southern Britain – minted coins matching first Greek and then later Roman standards of silver and bronze, so some of this wine may well have changed hands for money as well as goods the merchants wanted to take back with them.14
We simply cannot trace much of the trading activity or the commodities sent in either direction, still less understand the scale of such activity. Ornate tableware from the Mediterranean, whether ceramic or more often in silver or other precious metals, is similarly prominent archaeologically in Iron Age Europe, for in the main it was only the rich and powerful who enjoyed items from so far afield. Such things may turn up as grave goods or ritual deposits and are spectacular, but it is harder to say how they reached these places. Some came to tribal rulers as diplomatic gifts. In 169 BC envoys came over the Alps to Rome from a Gallic king or chieftain – Livy, who tells us the story, notes that a century and a half later there was no longer any record of the man’s tribe. His name was Balanos, and he offered to help Rome in their current war with Macedonia. A grateful Senate sent in return gifts of ‘a golden torque two pounds in weight, a golden bowl weighing four pounds, a horse with decorated tack and a cavalryman’s weapons’. We do not know whether Balanos did subsequently aid the Romans’ war effort.15
Prestigious gifts were a routine part of diplomatic exchanges. In some cases objects presented by Roman envoys may well later have been given by the recipient to cement alliances with other leaders and other tribes, and so travelled further and further away. Others might change hands through warfare as valuable spoils, and indeed in some cases first left the Mediterranean world as loot from raiding. Similar gifts could equally have come from merchants eager to win favour from local rulers in an area where they hoped to operate. Some may even have travelled as goods for trade rather than gifts, but in each of these cases the discovery of the artefacts themselves in an Iron Age context is unlikely to make clear how they arrived.
Diplomatic gifts explain the presence of some precious objects from the Greco-Roman world in lands far from Rome’s provinces, but do not alter a picture of large-scale long-distance trade continuing and growing in the last centuries BC. This is reinforced by the frequent and usually incidental mention of Roman and Italian merchants in many areas. In 229 BC ship owners complained to the Senate about the predatory attacks of pirates loyal to the Illyrian Queen Teuta. The merchants were primarily from southern Italy, whose Greek communities had long-established commercial and cultural links with the wider Greek world. This was not the first time they had complained of this ongoing piracy, but matters came to a head when a number of ships were plundered as they lay at anchor in a city stormed by the Illyrians. Some of the traders were killed and others taken prisoner. In 70 BC the orator Cicero claimed that on many occasions ‘our ancestors . . . fought great wars . . . because Roman citizens were said to be insulted, her merchant sailors imprisoned, her traders robbed’. No clear examples apart from the Illyrian war appear in our sources, and even this was a little more complicated. Yet in the same speech he also claims that outside the empire, a poor man who raised the cry ‘I am a Roman citizen!’ (civis Romanus sum) would not be harmed even by barbarians. So great was the fear of Rome’s power.16
In 146 BC the Romans razed Carthage to the ground. A small African province was created and directly administered, but most of the territory to the west was given to an enlarged kingdom of Numidia. Within a generation we hear of substantial Italian trading communities permanently resident in at least two Numidian cities, Cirta and Vaga. Similar groups tend to be more visible in the Greek world, which had a much stronger tradition of setting up inscriptions. A monument found in a small town on Sicily’s northern coast was erected in 193 BC to honour the provincial governor by men describing themselves as Italicei. Italians appear in many other Greek cities. Around 174 BC the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes paid to complete the construction of the Temple of Olympian Zeus – or Olympieion – in Athens. This sort of gesture to shared Hellenic culture was common for the Successor kings who ruled fragments of Alexander the Great’s conquests. Yet in this case the contract to do the work was given to a Roman, a certain Cossutius, who was subsequently honoured by the Athenians and so presumably did the job satisfactorily.17
Probably the largest concentration of Romans and Italians was on Delos, placed under Athenian jurisdiction and declared a free port by Rome in 166 BC in the aftermath of the Third Macedonian War. In spite of its small size, the island was well placed and had long acted as a major entrepôt for goods going east and west. The Romans were relative latecomers to the communities of foreign merchants established at Delos, but their numbers grew rapidly. Among other things they constructed a complex known as the Agora of the Italians, where a rectangle of double-storied porticoes surrounded an extremely large open and unpaved courtyard.
In the years after it was made a tariff-free port, Delos became the greatest centre of the slave trade in the eastern Mediterranean. The numbers of human beings trafficked through the little island were enormous, even if Strabo’s claim that it could process no fewer than 10,000 people in a single day is an exaggeration. Most of the Romans who went to Delos came for the slave trade, although the identification of the Agora of the Italians as a slave market is uncertain, largely because we do not yet know what such a building should look like. Other trades were conducted there as well, and we hear of Romans dealing in olive oil, but it was the buying and selling of human beings that dominated, continuing even after a failed rebellion by slaves in the port in 130 BC.
The profits of overseas expansion allowed Rome’s rich to invest in grand rural estates which required a steady supply of servile manpower as a labour force, a demand that could not always be met by war captives. At the same time Rome’s expansion destroyed or crippled the great powers of the Hellenistic world, making it harder for them to maintain navies capable of controlling piracy. Rhodes had played an important role in this, but it lost out commercially to the free port of Delos and was less able to fund an effective fleet after 166 BC. Piracy flourished in the eastern Mediterranean, and the pirates took captives whom they sold as slaves, many of them passing through Delos. If the Romans were aware of this then they were not inclined to do anything about it.18
There is no sign that being Roman or Italian gave the traders at Delos any advantage over men from other nations. They were more directly connected to the big market for slaves in Italy, but otherwise did business on the same terms as everyone else. Over time, there as elsewhere it became more and more common for men from Italy to be referred to as Romans rather than Italians. In part this reflected the growing numbers of citizens, but until the aftermath of the Social War most Italians continued to lack the franchise. To outsiders it was probably easy to lump all of them together with the City that controlled Italy, ruled several provinces, and had become the most formidable power in the entire Mediterranean world. For similar reasons, non-citizen Italians may have chosen to present themselves as Romans and felt it advantageous in business. Roman dress was distinctive, from the style of shoe to the shape of the tunic and most of all the toga, instead of the various types of cloak favoured in Greece. Even when men settled in communities and took part in local festivals, joining with Greeks and other foreigners to fund dedications in the temples or to thank local officials, most still dressed in these immediately recognisable fashions, setting themselves apart. At whatever distance, they proclaimed themselves as belonging to the great power, both out of pride and in the hope that they would be treated with more respect and care as a result. After the Social War virtually all Italians were Romans in the legal sense, as were the freed slaves they often employed in their businesses.19
Whenever a region was turned into a province, the number of Romans active in the area increased dramatically. Apart from the traders already in Gaul, many more followed Julius Caesar’s legions, with merchants, investors and money lenders operating on a small or very large scale. Some sold directly to the soldiers – we hear of the men caught at their stalls outside the walls of a winter camp by one surprise attack – while others were there to buy up the spoils of warfare, such as plunder and captives, and still more because they sensed new opportunities opening up. There were clearly far more Romans doing business in Gaul by the end of Caesar’s spell as governor. In the great revolt of 53–52 BC these men became targets of the rebels and there were several massacres of Roman civilians. Opportunity was mixed with risks, especially in newly won territory or beyond the provinces.20
In spite of the long tradition of establishing citizen and Latin colonies in Italy, the Romans were slow to do this in conquered territory overseas. Even so, communities with less prestigious legal rights were set up. Scipio Africanus settled a large number of convalescent soldiers at Italica (modern Santiponce) after he had driven the Carthaginians from Spain in the Second Punic War. It is hard to know how many soldiers took their discharge – or indeed deserted – to settle in a province where they had served. This probably became more common the longer a man spent there and by the end of the second century BC, when most legionaries were recruited from among the poorest rather than from men of property with farms and families drawing them home. In 171 BC representatives from a group of some 4,000 people claiming to be offspring of Roman soldiers and local women came from Spain to petition the Senate for a settlement of their own. Citizens were not permitted to marry non-citizens, which made their children both illegitimate and foreign, but the Senate was sympathetic. They were settled at Carteia (near Algeciras in the far south), and the community was granted Latin rights – something not otherwise done outside Italy under the Republic.21
The first overseas colony for citizens was founded at Carthage in 122 BC, but soon lost its formal status when the man who had introduced the law to create it was killed in a bout of political violence. However, some settlers had already gone out and been allocated farms, and these families remained even though the community was no longer a colony. In 118 BC Narbo (modern Narbonne) was founded in Transalpine Gaul just three years after the creation of that province. The first settlers were former soldiers, and this was also true of the community set up at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) a few years earlier. In each case the original population was soon swollen by others who visited or chose to live in the area.22
In 69 BC the orator Cicero claimed that Transalpine ‘. . . Gaul is packed with traders, crammed with Roman citizens. No Gaul ever does business independently of a citizen of Rome; not a coin changes hands in Gaul without the transaction being recorded in the books of Roman citizens.’ He lists several groups active in the area as well as the colonists – businessmen/bankers (negotiatores), tax-collecting companies (publicani), farmers (aratores) and ranchers (pecuari). Although Cicero exaggerated the ubiquity of Roman businessmen in the province, it is clear from other sources that there were a lot of them. Some Romans preceded the arrival of the legions, sometimes by decades or even longer periods. Many more followed the army, hoping to profit through business of many sorts and on a wide range of scales.23
ROMAN AND NATIVE
Gallic rebels slaughtered Roman traders and businessmen in 53–52 BC. The civilians were vulnerable, had wealth and possessions worth stealing and were symbols of the Roman conquest. In one case some were enslaved instead of killed, and we do not know whether this was to protect their lives or meant to humiliate them. Cicero claims that Narbo was besieged in the 70s BC, which suggests that even a generation or more after the creation of a province there was sometimes a risk to Romans in the area. One of the purposes of colonies and the informal settlements of citizens in the provinces was to act as garrisons, much as earlier ones had done during the conquest of Italy. More than once we hear of forces being raised from Roman citizens working in a province.24
Even traders operating outside the provinces occasionally took on a military significance. In 112 BC a struggle between rival members of the Numidian royal family erupted into civil war. Jugurtha chased his half-brother Adherbal into the city of Cirta and besieged him there, but found it difficult to capture the place because of the resistance of the community of traders – a ‘multitude of toga-wearers’, as they were called by the historian Sallust. For more than four months the city repulsed all attempts to take it, until the Italians persuaded Adherbal to surrender and trust to the fair arbitration and power of Rome. Sallust says that they were confident of good treatment for themselves because they were Romans. Jugurtha showed no such restraint, torturing his half-brother to death and executing everyone who had fought against him, Italians and Romans included. It took considerable agitation on the part of a popular politician at Rome to force the Senate to act and send an army against Jugurtha. Even so the war proved a long one, and a few years later another community of traders was slaughtered in the town of Vaga.25
The largest and most infamous massacre of Roman civilians took place in Asia in 88 BC at the orders of King Mithridates VI of Pontus. An ambitious, capable and ruthless man, Mithridates was one of the last great Successor monarchs in the Hellenistic world and was eager to enlarge his realm. This, combined with the unusually provocative and corrupt behaviour of a Roman governor of Asia and his senior subordinate, swiftly led to war. The Romans were unprepared, reliant mainly on local allies, and were quickly beaten, allowing Mithridates’ armies to advance into Asia. The Senate decided to send one of the year’s consuls and several legions to deal with the king, but then rivalry for the command led to Rome’s first civil war and those same legions marched on Rome itself. For the moment the Romans seemed very weak, while Mithridates was strong.
The king then sent a secret message to all the civic leaders and local governors or satraps throughout Asia, instructing that on a given day:
They should set upon all the Romans and Italians in their towns, and upon their wives and children and their freedmen of Italian birth, kill them and throw their bodies out unburied, and share their goods with King Mithridates. He threatened to punish any who should bury the dead or conceal the living, and proclaimed rewards to informers and to those who should kill persons in hiding. To slaves who killed or betrayed their masters he offered freedom, to debtors . . . the remission of half their debt.26
It was claimed that 80,000 died in the ensuing bloodbath. At Ephesus some of the Romans sought sanctuary in the great Temple of Artemis, only to be dragged away from statues of the goddess and slaughtered. At Pergamum their attackers were only a little more squeamish, shooting down with arrows those who clasped the images of Aesculapius, the god of healing, rather than touching them. At Adramyttium fugitives ran out into the sea only to be pursued and killed, the children with them being drowned. In another city it was claimed that the infants were slaughtered first, then the mothers and finally the men. The people of Tralles hired a foreign thug and his band to do the killing for them, who had no scruples about chopping off hands if any of the victims tried to cling to a statue of a god in the hope of sanctuary.
Some Romans changed their distinctive costume and dressed as Greeks in an effort to escape the slaughter – perhaps especially Italians only recently granted the franchise. Few were successful. A former senator named Publius Rutilius Rufus, exiled after being condemned for corruption and extorting money from the provincials while serving in the Asian province, did the same thing and survived. His conviction was considered a great injustice, proved by the fact that he went into exile in the very province where he was supposed to have committed his crimes and was welcomed by the provincials. This goodwill no doubt helped his survival. On the island of Cos, Romans took refuge in another temple to the god of healing and this time were protected by the locals.27
No doubt stories grew in the telling, as did the alleged scale of the massacre. Cicero, the source closest in time to the event, does not give a number for the dead, and modern scholars usually assume that it is grossly exaggerated. The same is true of the 20,000 said to have died in Greece and islands including Delos when Mithridates invaded a little later. Whatever the true figure, the total of deaths was clearly considerable, on a far bigger scale that any other massacre of Roman civilians. It is testament to the substantial number of people living and working outside Italy, especially in the provinces. Some would also see it as clear evidence that Rome in general, and these Roman businessmen in particular, were widely loathed by the provincial population, who readily turned on them at the first opportunity.28
As we have seen, Romans dressed distinctively, and in some places formed large communities. Such groups did not always hold themselves apart from locals and other foreigners, as joint dedications make clear, but they could also be high-handed. Cicero tells a story of a senator named Caius Verres, who was serving as a legatus (or governor’s senior representative) in Asia in 79 BC, almost a decade after the massacre. The Roman became obsessed with the unmarried daughter of a local notable, in spite of never having seen the girl, and tried to use force to have her brought to him. His host resisted, and was soon supported by a crowd of townsfolk who drove Verres and his followers out, killing a lictor and injuring several of his attendants. The next day they gathered to lynch the legatus, until Romans resident in the place managed to persuade their neighbours to disperse. Up to this point their conduct was reasonable, but later some of them took part in a trumped-up prosecution of the father for assaulting a representative of Rome. The man and his son were found guilty and both executed.29
Such gross miscarriages of justice were rare – and as we shall see, Verres was subsequently brought before a Roman court for many more abuses committed while he governed Sicily. A more common cause of ill-feeling was the activity of the publicani, the private companies who secured the rights to collect taxes in the provinces, and of the negotiatores, the bankers/moneylenders, both sometimes inclined to go to extreme lengths to extract payment from individuals and communities. We shall look at them in more detail in the next chapter, when we consider the Romans’ system of administering the provinces, but even other Romans often saw them as greedy.30
Yet it is not quite so simple. In 88 BC Mithridates’ troops overran Asia Minor, which had become a province of Rome almost half a century earlier in 133 BC. The massacre of the Romans was not the spontaneous reaction of an oppressed population now free to act because of the arrival of liberators. At Ephesus statues of Romans were thrown down, but there was no killing until the order came from the king. There and elsewhere the slaughter was carried out only after specific instructions to the leaders of communities. Some of these were newly installed tyrants or factions supported by the king and eager to justify his trust in them. The rest were faced with a stark choice of obedience or punishment. In the past they had been occupied by the Romans and now they were occupied by the army of Pontus, and in neither case did any one community have a realistic chance of resisting the might of the conqueror in the long run. Rome appeared on the verge of collapse as several years of fighting with the Italian allies was followed by civil war. The legions might never return, for Mithridates was powerful and he could no more be ignored by the peoples of Asia Minor than Ariovistus and Caesar’s arrival could be ignored by the tribes of Gaul. It was surely better to obey and turn against a distinct and clearly visible community of foreigners than to face the anger of the openly ruthless invader. The chance to share in the profits of this mass murder were an added attraction.
Mithridates had in the past and would again in the future negotiate with and make peace with Rome. His orders for the pogrom in Asia Minor were not out of sheer loathing for Romans or a desire to eradicate the Roman Republic. He allegedly ordered the gruesome execution of a senator captured in the early stages of the fighting – the man was killed by having molten gold poured down his throat – but this was to highlight the man’s greed and corruption, which had done much to start the war. Another distinguished Roman prisoner was humiliated by being led publicly as a captive. The massacre throughout Asia was a cynical but logical act. It brought a haul of plunder to help fund the war, but more importantly committed the communities to Mithridates’ cause, for they were bound to fear terrible retribution if the Romans did return. We should also remember how long a band of Roman traders had helped the city of Cirta to resist a siege. Especially if they were aided by locals, some of these Romans might have held out against him. Capturing towns by siege was time-consuming and usually costly in lives and money. Killing the Romans removed this risk.31
We do not know how far the wider population joined in the slaughter. It is possible that plenty of people resented the Romans or had old scores to settle and were willing to take part, but equally possible that the killing was mainly done by the partisans of the newly installed leaders or men commanded by civic leaders. Most people may simply have stood by, glad that they were not the targets of this appalling violence and too frightened to intervene. Perhaps few were inclined to take risks to protect Roman neighbours or refugees who had come to their community. When Mithridates was beaten, the returning Romans punished some communities, mainly by imposing heavy levies on them. It did not take long for traders and businessmen to return. The locals may have resented them, but it did not stop them borrowing money or doing business with them. There was no repeat of the bloodbath of 88 BC.
News of the massacre in Asia caused widespread anger at Rome. Yet war had already been declared against Mithridates, and once the initial phase of the civil war had run its course, a consul took his army east to deal with the king of Pontus, first expelling him from Greece and then beating him in Asia. The slaughter of so many Romans did not provoke the war, nor did it prevent the Roman general from agreeing peace terms with Mithridates – admittedly encouraged by his desire to return to Italy, where his Roman enemies had gathered once again. In 229 BC the complaints of traders had convinced the Senate to send ambassadors to Queen Teuta in Illyria, and it was the murder of one of these representatives which had led to the declaration of war. The massacre of Italians at Cirta by Jugurtha similarly outraged many Romans, but did not in itself cause an army to be sent against him. Just as wars were not fought to gain access to trade routes, there is no evidence that the killing of Roman civilians by a foreign leader or community in itself would provoke the Senate to action. In the provinces, things were very different, and it is to the administration of these that we must now turn.32
NOTES
1 Cicero, Verrines 2. 5. 167–8 (Loeb translation).
2 He was awarded twenty days of public thanksgiving, see Caesar, BG 4. 38; for excitement see Cicero, ad Att. 4. 17, ad Quintum Fratrem 2. 16. 4.
3 Marcus Mettius, Caesar, BG 1. 47, 53.
4 Caesar, BG 1. 1 for Belgians rarely visited by traders, 2. 15 for the refusal of the Nervii to admit any traders and 4. 2 for the Germans, with comments in J. Barlow, ‘Noble Gauls and their other in Caesar’s propaganda’, in K. Welch & A. Powell (eds), Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter: The War Commentaries as Political Instruments (1998), pp. 139–70; the use of the alleged morality of the simple Germanic peoples in contrast to the decadence of ‘sophisticated’ society in Rome is especially pronounced in Tacitus, Germania.
5 Caesar, BG 4. 20–21; see in general M. Todd, Roman Britain (3rd edn, 1999), pp. 1–3, B. Cunliffe, Hengistbury Head Vol. 1 (1987) and Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its peoples 800 BC–AD 1500 (2001) pp. 261–310, on Caesar and the Veneti see B. Levick, ‘The Veneti Revisted: C. E. Stevens and the tradition on Caesar the propagandist’, in Welch & Powell (1998), pp. 61–83.
6 For very different attempts to understand events in Britain after 54 BC see G. Webster, The Roman Invasion of Britain (rev. edn, 1993), pp. 41–74, J. Manley, AD 43. The Roman Invasion of Britain – A Reassessment (2002), pp. 37–50.
7 Cicero, ad Att. 4. 17; Caesar and pearls, see Suetonius, Caesar 47; Strabo, Geog. 4. 6. 12 on Scipio Aemilianus; on the absence of commercial motives in Roman decision-making see W. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327–70 BC (1979), pp. 54–104.
8 Polybius 34. 10. 10, with Strabo, Geog. 4. 6. 12.
9 See Appian, Celtica 13, with S. Dyson, The Creation of the Roman Frontier (1985), pp. 75–6; see G. Alföldy (trans. A. Birley), Noricum (1974), pp. 44 for Pompaius Senator, 44–47 on the Magdalensberg settlement.
10 On Romans abroad see A. Wilson, Emigration from Italy in the Republican Age of Expansion (1966); for Greek colonisation see in general R. Garland, The Wandering Greeks: The Ancient Greek Diaspora from the Age of Homer to the Death of Alexander (2014), J. Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade (4th edn, 1999).
11 Polybius 3. 22. 1–23. 6; on the treaties with Carthage. F. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius Vol. 1 (1970), pp. 337–56; on Carthage in general see G. Picard & C. Picard, Carthage (rev. edn, 1987), S. Lancel, Carthage (Oxford, 1995) and R. Miles, Carthage Must be Destroyed. The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization (2010), pp. 1–176.
12 Strabo, Geog. 3. 5. 11.
13 For Romans in Carthage see Appian, Punic Wars 92; E. Palmer, Carthage and Rome at Peace (1997), pp. 32–62.
14 Exchanging a slave for an amphora see Diodorus Siculus 5. 26. 3–4; on coinage see C. Howgego, ‘The Monetization of Temperate Europe’, JRS 103 (2013), pp. 16–45, esp. 26–31, 35–7.
15 Livy 44. 13. 1; Cunliffe (2001), pp. 311–64.
16 Polybius 2. 8. 1–4, with T. Frank (ed.), An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome Vol. 1 (1933), pp. 102–3 and Harris (1979) pp. 195–7 noting that the Romans appear to have let this piracy continue for some time before taking action; Cicero, Verrines 2. 5. 149–50, 167–8
17 Colonisation see Wilson (1966), pp. 44–5, 64–5; inscription from Sicily, ILS 1. 864 = CIL 12. 612; Cossutius see Inscriptiones Graecae 3. (1) 561 and Vitruvius, De architectura 8. 160, with Wilson (1966), pp. 96–7.
18 Strabo, Geog. 14. 2. 5; on Delos in general see Wilson (1966), pp. 99–121, with J. Hatzfield, ‘Les Italiens résidant à Délos’, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 36 (1912), 1431 for dealers in oil; on the Agora of the Italians see M. Trümper, Greaco- Roman Slave Markets. Fact or Fiction? (2009), pp. 34–49 who is sceptical, but presents a good bibliography of the debate over this site.
19 A. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (2nd edn, 1996), pp. 399–402.
20 Caesar, BG. 6. 37 for traders caught outside the camp; BG 7. 3, 38, 42, 55 for massacres of Romans in 53–52 BC.
21 Appian, Iberica 38. 115, with J. Richardson, Hispaniae. Spain and the Development of Roman Imperialism, 218–82 BC (1986), pp. 53, 57; Carteia, see Livy 43. 3. 1–4, with Richardson (1986), pp. 118–19.
22 Strabo, Geog. 4. 1. 5, with Wilson (1966), pp. 64–7.
23 Cicero, pro Fronteio 11–12, cf. pro Quinctio 11 describing Romans buying cattle from the province, and in Catilinam 2. 14 and Sallust, Bell. Cat. 34. 2 on a merchant who had done business with the Allobroges tribe.
24 Caesar, BG 7. 3, 38, 42, 55; Cicero, pro Fronteio 46; raising forces from Roman citizens in the provinces, see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 14. 84 for armed civilians in Judaea, and Cicero, ad Fam. 15. 4 for re-enlisting demobilised soldiers in Cilicia.
25 Sallust, Bell. Jug. 21, 23–7, 47, 67.
26 Appian, Mith. 22 (Loeb translation).
27 Appian, Mith. 22, Athanaeus frag. 5. 213, Tacitus, Ann. 4. 14; Valerius Maximus 9. 2. 3 gives a death toll of 80,000, although Plutarch, Sulla 24 claims the total was 150,000; for handy introductions to the background see P. Matyszak, Mithridates the Great. Rome’s Indomitable Enemy (2008), pp. 43–7, A. Mayor, The Poison King. The Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2010), pp. 170–75.
28 Cicero, de imperio Cn. Pompeio 11; 20,000 massacred on Delos and elsewhere, see Appian, Mith. 28; on the general hatred of Romans see Sherwin-White (1996), pp. 399–402, referring to the Sibylline Oracles circulating in the eastern Mediterranean. However, it should be noted that similar prophecies in the past had foretold the humbling of other nations, notably the Macedonians.
29 Cicero, Verrines 2. 1. 63–76.
30 Romans in provinces seen as greedy, see Cicero, ad Quintum Fratrem 1. 1. 16.
31 Humiliation and execution of Q. Oppius by Mithridates, see Appian, Mith. 20–21; see Matyszak (2008), pp. 43–8 for a good analysis of Mithridates’ motives.
32 However, anger at such an outrage might make Roman legionaries fight with more than usual fury, e.g. at Avaricum in 52 BC, Caesar, BG 7. 17, 29.
Written by Adrian Goldsworthy in "Pax Romana - War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World", Yale University Press, USA, 2016, chapter IV. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.