There's a pretty telling anecdote in Suetonius's life of Augustus where "[Augustus] sold a Roman knight and his property at public auction, because he had cut off the thumbs of two young sons, to make them unfit for military service" (24). In fact, this was apparently not uncommon, with several more references to similar self-inflicted injuries to avoid service popping up in various texts. I think there were also direct reforms put in place that specified that men without fingers could still be deemed fit for service (I think this might have been the late imperial period but unfortunately the precise source was found in a library book that I don't have access to at the moment).
While war is obviously still horrific, I think it's a bit easier to forget that when discussing history when we don't have particularly realistic images to base our imaginations. That even the Romans, at the height of its power, feared sending their sons to war, kinda counters the notion that conquest was this glorious, honorable thing that built an empire and made men like Caesar into the immortal gods we remember.
In her book SPQR, the historian Mary Beard emphasizes that the Roman Empire was unable to conquer anything. The Roman Republic conquered the Mediterranean world, and then the Roman Empire failed at everything:
The only major, lasting conquest made by the Roman Empire was the conquest of Britain, under the Emperor Claudius. But for the most part, from the moment it was created, the Roman Empire was in a defensive crouch, trying to defend what the Roman Republic had built. The Republic had a culture that very much treated war as a glorious thing, and mobilized the public for total war, over and over again. The Roman Empire was very different, fighting became professionalized, and it became defensive.
> The Republic had a culture that very much treated war as a glorious thing, and mobilized the public for total war, over and over again.
I think there are two big differences.
Early on the legions were on “Team Rome”. Scipio Africanus and Asiaticus conquered large regions but never turned their armies against Rome. Sulla turned his armies against Rome. As did Julius. Legions were seen as more for the glory of a general than for the glory of Rome.
Second, conquering new territories was a way to increase a person’s prestige relative to their peers. So there was a kind of friendly competition with various consuls trying to outdo each other.
The Empire changed everything. The Emperor already had prestige relative to his peers. Trying to conquer new territories was a high risk activity for not that much upside (you were already emperor). For example, Augustus knew that Crassus (died at Carrhae) and Mark Antony(defeated in Parthia) had huge setbacks that undermined their position. Even Augustus suffered the disaster at the Tueteborg, but through a lot of PR effort was able to pawn it off on Varrus who conveniently was not a part of the immediate Imperial family.
The other danger was that if there was a victory, it might be enough to propel the commanding general to rivalry (see the later example of Vespasian and the Jewish rebellion). Augustus was an brilliant politician, but not that great of a commander, and had to rely on others (see Agrippa) for actual battlefield command.
Thus given these risks Augustus was not very aggressive about expansion (though he did conquer northwest Spain, and his armies made some expeditions in Germania).
Given that he was the first Emperor and ruled so long, he kind of set the precedent.
EDIT:
It is interesting that instead of launching a punitive expedition against Parthia to retrieve the captured Roman standards from Carrhae, he recovered them through diplomatic means.
> The only major, lasting conquest made by the Roman Empire was the conquest of Britain
If you consider Augustus to be the beginning of the Empire, then there were many lasting conquests under the Empire (parts of Hispania, Pannonia, Africa, etc). But even if you don't, the Empire conquered and held Dacia for over 150 years and held many parts of Armenia for long periods of time.
> mobilized the public for total war, over and over again
I'm not sure I would consider anything later than the Punic Wars to be a state of total war. At no point was Rome or Italy actually threatened in the Mithridatic Wars, Caesar's conquest of Gaul, etc. Slaves were not mobilized and property not confiscated for the state. The only times total war actually happened in the late Republic-early Empire - the period of Rome's greatest territorial gains - was during existential invading threats like the Cimbri or the Pannonian revolt. None of these were a result of Rome losing a battle in a war of aggression.
One of the reasons Christianity is considered a reason for why the Empire fell is absolutely the culture of war and nationalism that pagan Rome had though.
"One of the reasons Christianity is considered a reason for why the Empire fell is absolutely the culture of war and nationalism that pagan Rome had though."
Really? The Eastern empire (Byzantium) was Christian through and through, and yet rather warlike and survived for 1000 more years.
Even in the declining Western empire of the fifth century, there was quite a lot of fight left, with important military leaders such as Stilicho and Majorian. The problem was often the barely checked aggression within the Christian elites themselves. Both Stilicho and Majorian were killed by their internal Roman adversaries, not by an external enemy.
Stilicho and Majorian's armies were composed of at least a plurality of Germanic troops recruited from tribes that were stopped in their migrations by Rome. The Eastern Empire (and the Empire as a whole starting around Diocletian) had to force soldiers' children to serve because they had a shortage of willing recruits. All the evidence (conscription, hereditary service, large-scale incorporation of barbarians into the legions) points to manpower shortages due to the unwillingness of native Romans to serve. Republican Rome put barbarians into auxiliary units, not the legions, because they had no need for more men in the legions.
Even the Battle of Adrianople in 378 and Germanic incursions into Italy in the early 5th century did not force Rome into total mobilization of the population like when Hannibal invaded Italy. That points to a general unwillingness to defend the Roman state in the general population. Consider that Rome was able to repeatedly raise new, massive armies when Hannibal inflicted defeats, but the Eastern empire was unable to raise even a token force to combat the Goths after Adrianople.
There may have been elites with fight left in them, but the average citizen did not share the attitude of those of Republican Rome.
While they did fail when it comes to conquering, it should still not be understated how impressive the romans where in so many other areas. Their road network and how they built it is nothing but fascinating and it's always amazing seeing the roads in real life.
The Romans were also up against some adversaries who fought desperately to not be Roman. Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman ~citizen~ person if they were willing to die than submit. I’m sure honor had something to do with it, but the general trend seen in the archaeological record in the Middle East and North America is that people got shorter and had more teeth problems as they settle down into civilization than when they were hunter/gatherers or lived in settled communities for no more than a few years before hitting the proverbial road again. I’m sure the same thing applies in Europe during the Roman age.
> Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman citizen if they were willing to die than submit.
Peoples conquered by Rome did not become Roman citizens with the rights and privileges associated with that, generally.
In the graded levels of rights in Roman law, depending on whether they were just conquered or had treaty status, they were two or three steps below citizens of Rome.
Good call. I mean "citizen" in the general sense like "person who lives under Rome" but wasn't thinking that "citizen" had a very specific meaning in the Roman context. I edited my answer
The reason these tribes usually resist isn't because the Roman lifestyle is bad, it's because the Romans ran the biggest slaving empire in the world.
Those slaves that does everything in Rome, they get them from waging war.
So strictly-speaking, there is a change that they won't even get to be a "person" if they submit to Rome, they would become a slave. So would their wives and children.
If anything, a lot of people want to be Roman citizens after they have tried it. There is a whole war in Italy called the "Social War" over extending formal, normal citizenship to Roman allies.
Where Gallic, Germanic, and Iberian tribes actually hunter/gatherers? By that time I thought Europe and the Mediterranean were dominated by farming cultures.
The take-home impression I got from reading through those two Cesar wars is that the legions were almost as dependent on local grain available to steal (ready to take in granary, or just ready to harvest, doesn't really matter) as trains are dependent on rails. I assume that except for bumping into an adequate rival in the east, they just gobbled up the entire "wheatosphere", quickly running out of steam (and, with a few notable exceptions, out of motivation) whatever they ran into hunter/gatherer economies.
Central and Western Europe have been farmed for thousands of years by that point. Farming in Southern France/Iberia was already well established around 7000 years BP (before present). By the time of Romans, the hunter-gatherer's lifestyle was wholly displaced from the area, with only minuscule fraction of resident population engaging in it, at best.
After all the grain has been stolen, you are in for a rough year where hunter/gathering might reappear + cannibalism. Imagine it less as a "civilization appears" moment, and more a "metal locusts from outer space eat previous civilization and leaf behind large slave farms after years of famine.
That's what I meant: I take it as a given that if they were successfully invaded, they must have left the hunter/gatherer state behind, likely by a considerable margin.
They were farming some crops but wouldn't have been as dependent on them as Romans would have been and would have had a lot more variety including meat in their diets
Caesar in his Bellum Gallicum -- the gauls had cities (that Caesar's army had to build siege engines to take) and kings. The regions had millions of people living there. In one tribe alone (Atuatici), Caesar, to punish them sold 53,000 people from a single tribe into slavery. This isn't the entire population, just what he could round up in a single town.
I don't think small tribes of wandering hunters with small farming plots can sustain that many people.
Caesar ran around and laid sieges to these things regularly during the Gaullic Wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum
They literally Romanized the entirety of Europe to the extent we don’t even know what the Gauls spoke anymore. If that’s not conquering I don’t know what is.
It's actually surprisingly close. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_wars_and_battles, there were 21 Roman wars in the 2nd Century BC. US count (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...) for the 20th century AD is 31, but you also have to factor in the fact that the whole world is much more connected, and that the Roman war-and-intervention count was almost certainly limited by communication and transportation abilities of the time. In the context of the ancient world, 21 wars by one state in one century seems like an enormous number. The Achaemenid Persian empire, which existed a few centuries prior and was very expansionist for its time, averaged perhaps 6-8 wars per century, depending on how you quantify wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Iran).
And also rely on a lot less infantry so casualties are lower. Even with as brutal as Russia-Ukraine is, the total number of military men killed is comparable to a single decent-sized WWII battle
I don't think one can reasonably compare modern democracies with universal suffrage, with the Roman Republic which had a much more limited voting population. Also the Roman Republic was, for much of its history, at war with his neighbors, so it had the civil structures and incentives (at all levels of the society) that went with near-constant war, so choosing to continue to go to war was an easy decision.
War, battlefields and military service are three very different things. Up until the Korean war, soldiers were much more likely to die from disease than combat. Living in unsanitary war camps was more likely to kill you than the enemy. Even peacetime military service would have, in Roman times, involved marching all over the place working on fortifications and roads. Roman soldiers got sick in camp and were injured in what we would today call industrial accidents.
Even simple travel, especially if by ship, was often lethal.
So when we read of a parent not wanting to send their son to the army, do not think that it is a fear of the battlefield. That was a secondary concern to all manner of non-combat dangers.
Great point. The picture you paint seems generally like the ancient world. In Rome, malaria, unsanitary apartment buildings burning down, highway men if you travel by road, pirates if by sea, everyone was sick (I vaguely recall Cicero mentioning another senator suffering from diarrhea soiling himself in public) and the bread you ate wore down your teeth. Do you happen to know if the Romans thought that these things were especially worse on campaign (wouldn't doubt it at all)?
A soldier on the move would probably have been healthier than a slave in the heart of a Roman city. But deaths associated with day-to-day life are very different than deaths far away on campaign. Remember that it would be many months, possibly years, before a family knew whether their son had survived his military service. And a good number of sons that did survive never actually came home, instead settling in some far away place or were stuck without money enough to make the return trip.
The glory of battle is always a big lie told by old men to sucker the young.
When there’s weighty debates among Senators about sending men to kill and be killed, watch who the strident patriots are who are out for blood. In general they are fat pasty types who’ve never fought anything more dangerous than a bean burrito. It’s one thing we have in common with the Romans.
> counters the notion that conquest was this glorious...
Not really, especially in the face of so much evidence that the Romans generally thought this way. It does show, however, that not everybody thought glory was worth it. That's hardly surprising, given that societies are always diverse populations. But segments of society disagreeing with the culture at large does not disprove that the culture had certain proclivities.
People didn't want to go to war like anyone else I suspect.
Although it could be a good choice for some Romans. My understanding was the legions were one of the few paths to "move up" the social order. The rewards / rights of a solider could be pretty big if you retired and odds were pretty good you would retire. As opposed to being poor and remaining poor ... maybe an appealing choice.
It's also probably why that incorrect image exists: projecting such an image would have been absolutely vital for morale, and those stories influence the stories we tell today. In many ways, it's still vital for morale today, but it would have mattered a lot more when morale was as decisive as it was then.
While war is obviously still horrific, I think it's a bit easier to forget that when discussing history when we don't have particularly realistic images to base our imaginations. That even the Romans, at the height of its power, feared sending their sons to war, kinda counters the notion that conquest was this glorious, honorable thing that built an empire and made men like Caesar into the immortal gods we remember.