Ancient Rome: A Military and Political History (review)

Cambridge University Press has saddled this gracefully written volume with a deceptive subtitle. Mackay's introduction states forthrightly that "the work concentrates on political institutions and activities and thus could be considered to reflect a 'traditional' view of history" (p. 1). Readers wanting to read about Scipio Africanus's brilliant tactics will be disappointed. The narrative rarely even descends to the level of the campaign, let alone the battlefield. When campaigns are discussed, the emphasis is on political decision making, not on operational phases.

Mackay offers a good, popular-level discussion of current, alternate positions on Roman expansionism during the Republic: accidental adventurism resulting from entanglements produced by Roman clientage and friendship practices vs. near-pathological, violent, rapacious tendencies embedded in Roman culture. Roman military strength was largely a product of Roman political and social customs, and it is hard to improve upon Mackay's formulation that [by the mid 3d century B.C.] "Most allies remained loyal, which meant that the Romans had an inexhaustible supply of manpower, and their leaders refused to give up. . . . Under these circumstances, no other power in the Mediterranean basin could defeat the Romans in the long run" (p. 49).

It is the more surprising, then, when Mackay seems inconsistent on related strategic issues. He falls into the language of conquest, as in his ubiquitous "conquest of Italy," but demonstrates, rather, the assimilation and alliance of Italy. He illustrates, for the 2d century B.C. in the Mediterranean, the Roman preference for shoring up local, pro-Roman elites over creating Roman provinces. On p. 175, he refers to "armies of occupation" in the early 1st century A.D., but recognizes later that legions were overwhelmingly deployed on the perimeter. Mackay's central thesis is that the Roman republic's annual election of a few magistrates combining political and military functions was doomed to fail at managing the Mediterranean world and that the autocracy of the principate was inevitable. The reviewer is not convinced that the boundless egos of the Republican "warlords," as they are termed in the title of Chapter 11, are not the original problem. She suspects that the answers lie in Roman social and cultural history and not in politics at all.

Mackay has carefully positioned himself in the very middle of the road on almost every issue and has done an outstanding job of avoiding annotation. Therefore, his few eccentricities stand out. His discussion of agrarian change (crucial to Roman military manpower issues) in the 2d century B.C. and his insistence on Marius's uniqueness in recruiting armies of the dispossessed at the end of that century stand out as old fashioned not merely in narrative form but in substance. Mackay's description of the end of the Republic seems to the reviewer to blame the victim when ascribing chaos to the "urban plebs" rather than to the manipulative political elite who competed with each other at the use of political violence.

The volume deserved better treatment at the hands of Cambridge. The author cannot be to blame for inconsistent nomenclature and eccentric selection on the maps. An editor should have prevented the use of terms and nomenclature which will be obscure to the popular audience, e.g., calling Octavianus/Augustus only "Imp. Caesar." Other terminology is introduced in one chapter while the explanation is left for a later chapter, and editing should have caught that.