Tom Holland: Rubicon

I never cared much about antiquity, so never learned much about it. The idea of rooting all of western civilization in the Greeks never had much appeal to me. When I did survey the ancient philosophers I saw that every misbegotten idea in the western canon could be attributed to one fool Greek or another. The Romans were scarcely any more appealing. Every subsequent empire to emerge in Europe took them as a model -- Britain, especially -- making them an enduring scourge. Nonetheless, in the interest of rounding out my sense of history, I've been reading Tom Holland's Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. To some extent this was provoked by the HBO series Rome -- I like to know some background, and wonder about America's newfound fascination with past superpowers.

Writers like Robert Kaplan wax eloquent over the enduring relevancy of Thucydides' accounts of the Pelopennesian War, but that's just their way of trying to keep war romantic -- timelessly rooted in human nature. War today is certainly not romantic, and certainly not in most people's nature. Nowadays war's mostly rooted in greed and outlandish notions of personal glory. That much appears to have changed little since antiquity. One can even find Roman examples of rhetoric about civilizing missions, but for the most part the Romans were, compared to us, refreshingly crass about their motives. And, of course, none more so than Crassus, the senior member of the triumvirate that dominated Rome in the late days of the Republic.

For Romans, greed and glory were filled by war and plunder, which came from the margins of the Empire. The alliance between Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar enabled them to move out from Rome as proconsuls, ruling far-flung provinces, marshalling legions, looting whatever they found. As the richest and most powerful man in Rome, Crassus chose Syria as his stomping ground, the gateway to the riches of the east. Pompey settled for Spain, which Crassus and Caesar had previously conquered. Caesar headed to Gaul on his way to HBO. The following quote tells us what happened to Crassus (p. 259-260):

All was ready. In the spring of 53 [BCE] Crassus and his army crossed the Euphrates again. The great adventure had begun.

At first the emptiness appeared to mock the scale of Crassus's preparations. Ahead of his army, to the east, nothing could be seen save the haze of the heat. Then, at length, the advance guard came across hoofprints, the tracks of what appeared to be a large cavalry division. These turned aside from the road and vanished into the desert. Crassus decided to follow them. Soon the legions found themselves marching across a desolate plain with not a stream, nor even a blade of grass, in sight, only scorching dunes of sand. The Romans began to wilt. Crassus's ablest lieutenant, a quaestor by the name of Cassius Longinus, urged his general to turna round, but Crassus, so skilled at making strategic retreats in the political arena, would not hear of it now. On the legions advanced. Then came the news for which their general had been hoping. The Parthians were near, and not just a cavalry division, but a large army. Eager to ensure that the enemy did not escape him, Crassus ordered on his legions. They were now in the heart of the baking, sandy plain. They could make out horsemen ahead of them, shabby and dusty. The legionaries locked shields. As they did so, the Parthians dropped aside their robes to reveal that both they and their horses were clad in glittering mail. At the same moment, from all around the plain, came the eerie sound of drums and clanging bells, a din "like the roaring of wild predators, but intermingled with the sharpness of a thunderclap." To the Romans, it seemed barely human, a hallucination bred from the shimmering heart. Hearing it, they shuddered.

And all that long day was to have the pattern of a bad dream. The Parthians fled every effort to engage them, fading like mirages across the dunes, but armed, as they wheeled and galloped away, with steel-tipped arrows, which they fired into the sweating, parched, immobile ranks of legionaries. When Publius led his Gauls in pursuit, they were surrounded by the enemy's heavy cavalry and wiped out. Publius himself was decapitated, and a Parthian horseman, brandishing the head on a spear, galloped along the ranks of Romans, jeering them and screaming insults at Publius's father. By now the legions were surrounded. All day long the Parthians' deadly arrows rained down on them, and all day long, doggedly, heroically, the legions held out. With the blessed coming of dusk the shattered remnants of Crassus's great expedition began to withdraw, retracing their steps to Carrhae, the nearest city of any size. From there, under the resourceful leadership of Cassius, a few straggling survivors made their way back across the Roman frontier. They left behind twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.

Crassus himself, stupefied by the utter ruin of all his hopes, was lured by the Parthians into a parley. Having tricked so many, he now found himself tricked in turn. Caught up in a scuffle, he was struck down. Death spared Crassus a humiliating ordeal.

There is a certain poetic justice in that the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana that so inspired the advocates of Pax Americana, found its limits so rudely in the desert of Iraq. That the Romans' civilizing mission, their legacy of republicanism, only thinly veiled Crassus' greed and quest for glory, shouldn't be much comfort for Bush. That the US can't possibly suffer a similar defeat may well be hubris -- there's certainly plenty of that in this administration, and indeed in the nation as a whole. Of course, the Roman Empire lasted almost 500 years after Crassus' defeat. But it only took four more years before the Republic fell to Caesar, and war became not a ticket to win elections but an increasingly desperate struggle to fend off the have-nots -- the so-called barbarian invasions.

posted 2005-10-13