THE ENEMIES OF ROME: From Hannibal to Attila the Hun
by Philip MatyszakThames & Hudson £18.95 pp296
It is an intriguing and suggestive fact that the enemies of ancient Rome tend to be far better known than the generals who conquered them. Marcus Crassus, when he defeated a slave revolt in 71BC, was so desperate to advertise his victory that he nailed captives to crosses all along the Appian Way, billboards grotesque even by the standards of Roman self-promotion; yet it was Spartacus, the slave he had defeated, who would end up being played by Kirk Douglas, and having a film named after him.
Mass crucifixions, of course, tend to lack voter-appeal nowadays, and it might be thought that anyone who indulged in the practice richly merited oblivion. Yet even when Rome’s enemies matched the superpower atrocity for atrocity, they were not necessarily forfeiting their chances of posthumous fame. Who, for instance, should have a memorial in the heart of London but a woman whose single contribution to the city was to burn it down? The bare breasts of Boudicca’s two daughters in the statue that stands opposite Big Ben are grim (no doubt unintentional) reminders of the tortures inflicted by the warrior queen. It was her practice, wrote the historian Cassius Dio, “to hang up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and then cut off their breasts and sew them to their mouths, in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the entire body”.
No wonder that the cover of Philip Matyszak’s The Enemies of Rome is splashed with gouts of blood. Like the ancient historian Plutarch, Matyszak has written a series of interlinked biographies, but while Plutarch confined himself to celebrating the lives of famous Greeks and Romans, Matyszak is more interested in leaders whom the Romans themselves dismissed as barbarians: men and, in certain exceptional circumstances, women who dared stand up to the most lethal military power in the ancient world. Many of their names have reverberated through the ages: Spartacus and Boudicca, of course, but also Hannibal, Cleopatra and Attila the Hun. Matyszak tells their stories stylishly and well, but it is when he turns his attention to leaders whose lives have not been endlessly dug over that his book comes into its own. “Vriathus the Lusitanian” or “Decebalus the Dacian” might sound like characters out of a Roman Blackadder, and yet, as Matyszak demonstrates, their careers were no less touched by heroism and brutality than those of Rome’s more celebrated foes. Vriathus, a shepherd turned guerrilla leader, spent years tormenting, and on occasions destroying, the legions of the Roman Republic as they tried to pacify what is now Portugal during the 2nd century BC; Decebalus, almost three centuries later, led his people, the Dacians, in a series of bruising wars with the neighbouring superpower. After triumphantly holding his own, and sometimes even taking the fight into Roman territory, he ultimately came off second best against the best general ever to wear the imperial purple, the Emperor Trajan, and ended up, like many of Matyszak’s subjects, a victim of suicide. The scale of Trajan’s ultimate triumph can be gauged by the fact that what had once been Dacia is still known to this day as Romania.
Vriathus, the freedom fighter who took to the hills, harassing heavily armoured legions with hit-and-run raids; Decebalus, the charismatic war hero who led his people in a desperate independence struggle: here, for the historian of Roman imperialism, are two particularly suggestive archetypes. All the subjects of Matyszak’s various biographies blend them to varying degrees. Nor, of course, do they have resonance merely for the student of ancient history. Vriathus was not the only insurgent to have exploited the potential of guerrilla tactics against the better-armed troops of an occupying power — just as Decebalus was hardly the last warlord to have steeled his own authority with an appeal to nationalism. Matyszak does not allude to any post-Roman liberation movements, but it is possible to guess, had he done so, how his sympathies might have been expressed. “It was reduced to ashes,” he writes of a city obliterated during a war against the king of Macedon,“as a warning to others who withstood their liberators.”
This is not a book, it is safe to say, that has much time for empires of any kind. Yet to a degree that Matyszak never really acknowledges, his distaste for Roman imperialism draws its sustenance, not from the enemies of Rome, who are largely silent, but from their conquerors. When he compares the Pax Romana to a desert, for instance, or contrasts the “sterile, sick and ossified” civilisation of the Caesars with the supposedly more vibrant freedoms of the German tribes, he is echoing the great Roman historian Tacitus — as mordant a critic of his own culture as has ever written. Indeed, virtually all the grand speeches that Matyszak attributes to his subjects, all the defiant perorations on independence and liberty, were put into their mouths by Roman authors. He asserts that “we see many of the alternative European and Mediterranean cultures in their last years before they were overwhelmed”. But do we? Up to a point: but what we see far more clearly, preserved within Matyszak’s narratives, is a sense of how remarkably sophisticated the Romans could be as their own sternest critics.
Is empire better than anarchy? Should those who lack civilisation be civilised by force? Are those who resist occupation freedom fighters or terrorists? Timeless questions, perhaps, but it was the historians of what the author describes as the Graeco-Roman “monoculture” who first framed them. Had he written outside the inherently classical genre of biography, then Matyszak, perhaps, would have found it easier to escape the Romans’ own terms of reference. As it is, however, his pacey and compelling book fascinates as a study, less of the enemies of Rome, than of Rome itself.
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