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Brutality was the stock-in-trade of both the Romans and their enemies. ‘Once the killing has started, it is difficult to stop’, said Tacitus in a blunt admission of an unpleasant truth. Fighting an ancient war was not for the faint-hearted. This was face-to-face combat at close quarters with swords, knives and spears, which could mean anything from massacring a rival Roman army or wiping out a barbarian force to murdering women and children in their homes and in the streets of their cities or villages. The emperor Probus was said to have paid a gold aureus for the head of every decapitated barbarian brought to him. Roman historians exulted in the stories, and Roman soldiers exulted when they were victorious. It was all part of Roman virtus, which meant honourable courage, manliness and heroism all dressed up in a semi-religious veneration of violence. There is no question that extreme brutality was engrained in Roman society and warfare. It is hard to see how that made the Romans particularly unusual by the standards of their time, but it would be true to say that they were exceptionally diligent in their use of violence to get what they wanted, and in acting on the state’s behalf to pursue its aims of conquest. It is also true that the people they fought were sometimes no less violent in their own way. The Romans were, however, usually better equipped and trained, and extremely persistent. The world of the Romans was a place where life was cheap, though no one bothered to sit down and work out the price. Death could come quickly at the point of a spear or sword, slowly through starvation in a siege, or as a result of torture or devastating wounds. In the Republic, military power over Italy, Sicily, and then further afield had been won at enormous cost both to the Romans and their enemies. It set the pace for later Roman history. In 255 BC, in the First Punic War, the consul Marcus Atilius Regulus was defeated by the Carthaginians. He escaped with no more than about 500 of his troops. Of an original force of 15,000, just 2,000 survived the battle. The disaster was merely one of Rome’s expensive stepping stones to world domination. Some societies might have been so horrified by the losses they would have ended the war there and then. The Romans only became more determined. The atrocities recorded during the days of the Roman army under the emperors had a long tradition. Polybius did not mince his words when he described Roman soldiers in action under the command of Scipio (later Africanus) in Spain during the Second Punic War in 209 BC. Scipio was only in his twenty-eighth year but was carving out a reputation for himself as a military leader of total ruthlessness. The target was Cartagena (Nova Carthago). Once the Romans were in, Scipio told his men ‘to exterminate every form of life they came across, sparing nobody’. Polybius explained that the purpose was to provoke terror, and described how in a city taken by the Romans ‘you can often see not only the bodies of human beings but also dogs sliced in two and the dismembered limbs of other animals’. As if that was not bad enough, Polybius mentioned that Cartagena’s destruction was even more brutal than usual because of its large population. Scipio was widely admired thanks to his later defeat of the Carthaginians at Zama, which brought the war to an end. No one considered him a war criminal, because the concept simply did not exist. He was a hero; someone to live up to. Just a few years earlier, in 212 BC, the great Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily had fallen to a Roman force after a protracted siege. Syracuse had been defended with ingenious defensive mechanisms and machines invented by the brilliant engineer and mathematician Archimedes. The Roman commander Marcus Claudius Marcellus was so impressed that he wanted Archimedes’ life spared. As the city fell, Archimedes was so completely absorbed in drawing diagrams in the dust on the floor of his house that when a soldier burst in looking for loot and asked who he was, Archimedes said, ‘I beg, do not disturb this [work].’ The soldier ran him through having no idea who he was, though it probably would have made no difference if he had. This example of gratuitous violence destroyed one of the ancient world’s greatest geniuses, much to Marcellus’ sadness. But then, as Valerius Maximus said, the whole scenario had only come about because of the fall of Syracuse, which had led to Marcellus’ determination that Archimedes be saved; the same context resulted in his death.
