Roman Siege Warfare

4. The Republic

80 foUR THe RePUBLiC asiege is not an event so much as a process, its extension in time as essential as its fixedness in space. Roman siege warfare emerges into history only when a historian fashions a siege narrative, a story of particular actions transpiring against a backdrop of generic expectation. moreover , we can only be confident in a historical reading of this story when we possess enough work by the same author to understand how he goes about working raw material—observed facts or written sources—into a story.1 in one sense, then, Roman siege warfare begins in Livy, who sprinkles accounts of sieges through the early books of his history. But Livy’s understanding of early Roman history is limited and cannot be considered historical in the conventional sense of being factually secure. To know what we are reading about we need a number of narratives by a writer knowledgeable about both the technical and cultural aspects of military affairs— which means, in practice, that the writer must be contemporary (or nearly so) with the events he describes.2 Later we will find Caesar, Josephus, and 1. i am influenced here, loosely but not insignificantly, by White (1973). However, the goal throughout this book is to understand something of siege warfare as it was actually experienced by Roman armies. There are problematic gaps between historical narrative and historical event, but this should not mean that treating a literary text as if it can indeed represent reality (however imperfectly) is therefore pointless. This would be to throw the baby out just because the bathwater has grown cloudy with post-modern bath salts. 2. See pages 12–14. The Republic • 81 ammianus, but in the long centuries before Caesar we have only Polybius. Therefore, this chapter centers on a handful of the surviving siege narratives in his histories. Yet Livy is also useful, not least in that he sometimes works directly from lost sections of Polybius. Comparing the different choices of the two authors—one greek and avowedly devoted to historical truth; the other Roman and, while also professing fealty to truth, more comfortable with the literary possibilities of historical narrative—can be illuminating. given the fragmentary nature of the sources, a comprehensive and balanced account of Roman siege warfare is not possible. Rather than attempting to leap from stone to protruding stone across the inundated areas of history, the goal here is to provide further support for the general arguments of chapter 3 while also equipping the reader to interpret the scores of other sieges mentioned in the sources. This is best accomplished by looking both at a few representative case studies and at the accounts of particularly significant or unusual sieges, in rough but not perfect chronological order.3 The emphasis throughout will be on the literary handling of sieges. The physical and technological details will be discussed only when they are really necessary to the imaginative reconstruction of human experience .4 We are aiming at a “truth” less exact than the most secure archaeological data—yet this sort of truth has the virtue of involving both mind and matter, and of describing movement in time and space, which are, after all, crucial factors in siege warfare.5 LivY While we can catch fleeting glimpses of actual siege processes in his early books, Livy’s “prose epic” of early Rome depends upon a number of different now-lost sources. Yet Livy is a strong author, and the very fabrication of these narratives render them usable. it may be patchwork underneath, but Livy weaves freely around whatever bare events the annalistic tradition 3. i make only sparing use of appian and Plutarch, and none of Cassius Dio— additional “facts” are counterproductive if we can’t read the author well enough. 4. See pages 2–4. 5. Two complementary works, then, are Campbell (2005), an accessible and wellillustrated study of Roman sieges, with emphasis on the physical details of fortifications and machines but too great an assumption of historical continuity between and among the few well-attested sieges and their narrators; and Davies (2006), which provides a useful typology of siege works, based on excavations, but deals rather briskly with texts on unexcavated sieges. 82 • Roman Siege WaRfaRe or collective memory insisted upon, creating the whole cloth of the Roman siege story. Livy lived under augustus—after, that is, Caesar’s influential commentaries had been published, and...