Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, but Verify (review)

The prominent place that intelligence activities occupy in contemporary headlines and histories can easily deceive us into thinking that throughout history governments have always been preoccupied with these matters. In Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome, Rose Mary Sheldon does much to set the record straight. She is a leading authority on premodern intelligence and espionage, specializing in intelligence-gathering in the Roman world, and author of dozens of books and articles, both technical and popular. In the current volume, she seeks to strike a balance between the scholarly monograph and popular history, mixing detailed analysis of Roman information-collection with narratives that illustrate her points. That effort at finding a middle ground is reflected in the chronological structure she has chosen for the book, which renders the material more accessible for nonspecialist readers.

Sheldon begins with a brief look at early Roman divination, which might seem odd for a volume on intelligence activities, but emphasizes the point that the Romans understood intelligence-gathering differently than we do. Her examination of the early Republican period, down to the Punic wars, demonstrates that the Romans made no meaningful arrangements for collecting and assessing information about threats, which produced repeated catastrophes, such as the humiliating defeat at the Caudine Forks, and the disaster of Cannae. Bitter experience brought change, but only slowly, thanks to a political and military culture of patriotic amateurism which made it impossible to create enduring institutions capable of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Nor did matters improve much after the Punic wars, and embarrassing failures continued, such as Crassus's disastrous defeat at Carrhae in 54 BC. Caesar made steps in the right direction, drawing exploratores from the legionary cavalry to gather intelligence, and employing couriers, or speculatores, as spies, but intelligence failures still nearly laid him low during his British expeditions. Sheldon credits Augustus with creating Rome's first regular networks for gathering various types of intelligence. Political intelligence came from informers, or delatores, and the vigiles, the urban police. Augustus made the Roman army a regular standing force, for which speculatores and exploratores collected military intelligence. Failures might still occur, as at the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9, but ultimately units of exploratores appeared on the frontier, and from the end of the first century AD rations-officers, or frumentarii, and staff orderlies, or beneficiarii, were tasked with gathering intelligence within the empire itself. The most fascinating discussions in this section of the book are Sheldon's analyses of possible Roman cyphers and signaling networks in northern Britain and in the angle between the upper Rhine and the upper Danube.

This is a very useful book, but no book is without flaws. The tension between the scholarly and the popular produces notable differences in tone between narrative chapters, such as the one on the Teutoberg Forest disaster, and technical chapters, such as the one exploring the details of codes and signaling networks. There are also numerous places where closer editing or a last pass through the proofs might have caught typographical errors. But these are at worst annoyances; they do not detract from the fact that Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome is a welcome contribution to our understanding of how the Romans built and ran their empire, from a scholar of the first rank.