3. A variety of ad hoc measures existed to provide jurisdiction for Roman citizens in colonies and scattered in individual assignations.
V From Italian Power to Mediterranean Power
THE REMOVAL OF the barriers against the participation of plebeians in the political and religious life of the Roman state was followed by the Roman assertion of her hegemony over Latium and then by the defeat of the Samnites and of the Gallic incursion of 295. The mixed patrician and plebeian nobility was tested and confirmed in power by the successes of those years; but it is also plausible to suppose that the opening up of avenues to power to groups previously excluded was likely to cause disturbances. The career of Appius Claudius Caecus, the earliest Roman to appear in our sources as a personality rather than the edifying stereotypes dear to the later Republic or the age of Augustus, provides evidence of such disturbances. Despite the deformation in a historical tradition often hostile to the gens to which he belonged, the essential outline is clear. His elogium, reinscribed at Arretium (Arezzo) in the age of Augustus, is startling enough, with its frequent repetition of magistracies:
Appius Claudius, son of Caius, Caecus (the blind), censor, consul twice, dictator, interrex three times, praetor twice, curule aedile twice, quaestor, tribune of the soldiers three times. He captured several towns from the Samnites, routed an army of Sabines and Etruscans. He prevented peace being made with King Pyrrhus. In his censorship he paved the Appian Way and built an aqueduct for Rome. He built the temple of Bellona (Inscr. It. XIII, 3, no. 79 – contrast the original funerary inscription of Scipio Barbatus, see here).
The most revolutionary period of Appius Claudius’ career was his censorship in 312:
Ap. Claudius had his fellow-magistrate L. Plautius under his thumb and disturbed many ancestral practices; for in currying favour with the people he paid no attention to the senate. First he built the aqueduct known as the Aqua Appia over a distance of nine miles to Rome and spent much public money on this project without senatorial approval; next he paved with stone blocks the greater part of the road named after him the Via Appia, which runs from Rome to Capua, the distance being well over 100 miles; and since he dug through high ground and filled in ravines and valleys even where substantial fill was needed, he spent all the available public money, but left an enduring monument to himself, deploying his ambition in public service.
And he changed the composition of the senate, not only enrolling the noble and eminent in rank, as was customary, but including many who were sons of freedmen; so that those who were proud of their nobility were angry. He also gave citizens the right to be enrolled in whichever regional tribe they wished and to be registered accordingly by the censors.
In general, seeing the cumulative hatred for him of the upper class, he avoided giving offence to any other citizen, contriving to gain the good-will of the masses to balance the hostility of the nobles. At the inspection of the cavalry (one of the functions of the censors), he deprived no man of the horse provided for him by the state (a way of disgracing someone), and in drawing up the list of senators, he ejected no member of the senate as unfit, unlike his predecessors. And the consuls, because of their hatred for him and their desire to curry favour with the upper class, summoned the senate not as constituted by Ap.Claudius, but as constituted by the preceding censors.
But the people, resisting these moves and sharing the ambition of Ap. Claudius and wishing to secure the advance of their class, elected as curule aedile (the election is effectively undated in Diodorus, but occurred for the year 304) Cn. Flavius, the son of a freedman, who was the first Roman whose father had been a slave to gain that (or presumably indeed any) office (Diodorus xx, 36, 1–6).
Apart from his other misdemeanours, Ap. Claudius refused to resign his censorship at the end of eighteen months according to the law and according to one tradition was still censor when a candidate for the consulship of 307. He was also remembered as the man who persuaded the family of the Potitii to make public the nature of the rites at the altar of Hercules, for which they had been responsible, and thereby invited their destruction by an angry divinity, and as the man who attacked the privileges of the sacred college of flautists (tibicines).
Much in all this may well be doubted, though hardly the uniqueness of Ap. Claudius among the politicians of his generation, but another act of Ap. Claudius, which may be accepted implicitly,1 places him in the context of other innovatory activities of the turn of the fourth and third centuries. This is his building of the temple of Bellona, vowed during a battle in the course of his second consulship in 296 (the year before the battle of Sentinum, see here); the building of this temple forms part of a whole pattern of interest in the honouring of the gods of war and victory, which shows Rome newly aware of her enormous power and, what is more, aware of the ideology of victory of the Hellenistic world. It is also interesting that the lifetime of Ap. Claudius saw Rome adopt the Greek device of coinage (see also Pl.1).
It was no doubt his awareness of the enormous power of Rome which led Ap. Claudius, towards the end of his life and in perhaps its most celebrated incident, to reject the notion of peace with King Pyrrhus of Epirus (see here), addressing the Roman senate thus:
Whither have your minds in madness turned aside, which stood four-square on the path hitherto? (Ennius, Annates, lines 202—3 V)
We have seen that by the time of Pyrrhus’ invasion, Rome controlled virtually all Italy south of the Po valley and thus possessed the power with which to defeat Pyrrhus and other enemies after him. Furthermore, the nature of Rome’s control of Italy goes far to explain the nature of Roman imperialism, of interest to us, but something the existence of which Polybius took for granted. With the Pyrrhic War, Rome faced for the first time an enemy from the civilized core of the Mediterranean world and, with his defeat, that world began to take notice of Rome (see here). Rome’s wars of the third century and after are relatively well-attested and took her between 280 and 200 from a position on the fringe of the Mediterranean world to one from which she can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to dominate it. We must consider for a moment the nature of Roman imperialism and then look at the course of Rome’s wars down to the defeat of Hannibal.
Roman society can be seen as deeply militaristic from top to bottom, in a way and to an extent that is not true of any Greek state, not even Sparta. Whatever the Romans said and no doubt in part believed about their fighting only just wars, the value attached to successful wars of conquest found expression in a number of central institutions. It was an ancient custom, revived by Sulla, for those who had extended Roman territory in Italy to be allowed to extend the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city of Rome; the censors at the end of their term in office prayed that the Roman state might be granted greater wealth and extent, and haruspices, priests from Etruria, were consulted at least from the late third century to say whether a sacrifice made at the beginning of a war portended (as hoped) extension of the boundaries of the Roman people; Ennius (Annales, line 465 V) talked of ‘you who wish Rome and Latium to grow’. That Roman territory did grow in extent throughout the period when Rome was establishing her hegemony in Italy is in any case obvious; the land taken from conquered peoples and used for the foundation of colonies or for individual assignation became ager Romanus, Roman territory, unless used for Latin colonies; its progressive extension can be plotted down to 200, after which year the pattern remained unchanged until 91. It seems in fact that the Romans supposed that success in wars of conquest was the reward for their piety and the justice of their cause.
At the level of the individual, a general who brought a war to a successful conclusion was of course rewarded with prestige, booty and the avenue to