Bellum

The fascinating history of Ancient Rome – from the monarchy to the republic, the empire and its decline – has always held a special appeal for the general reading public, who are intrigued by the prospect of a spontaneous ‘refresher’ of their school days.

With this "Bellum", the scholar, lecturer and researcher Marco Rocco presents a work of the utmost academic and historiographical rigour. Through a meticulous reconstruction of twelve major battles, the author traces the key stages of the events that led, over the course of several centuries, to the establishment of the most important empire in world history. Each chapter begins by describing the historical and political context leading up to the clash, the complexity of the various alliance systems (what we now call ‘geopolitics’) and the specific topography of the terrain where the events took place, illustrated with various maps. Great attention is paid to the evolution of weaponry, equipment and military formations, as well as to engineering works and the increasingly complex and sophisticated war machines. The account begins with a resounding defeat: the ignominious humiliation inflicted on the Romans by Gavius Pontius’s Samnites at the Caudine Forks, two deep, impassable and wooded gorges, where the Roman army became trapped and was forced to surrender. On this occasion Erennius, Gaius’s wise and elderly father, advised his son either to release all the prisoners in exchange for a peace treaty or else to kill them all. The victor, however, chose to humiliate his enemies by making them pass one by one under the yoke, unarmed and wearing nothing but their tunics. The Romans’ revenge would be ruthless.

The book then goes on to recount various other epic battles, from the naval battle of Milazzo against the Carthaginians, to Caesar’s famous victory at the siege of Alesia against Vercingetorix’s Gauls, to Octavian’s triumph at Segesta in Dalmatia, and so on.

The author accurately quotes all the famous historians of the period (Livy, Strabo, Plutarch, Tacitus and others) but does not fail to give a voice to the vanquished, with the bitter invective that Calgacus – overwhelmed in Britain by Agricola’s legionaries – directs at the Romans: “They are the predators of the world: since there are no more lands to conquer, they gaze greedily out to sea; if their enemy is rich, they are greedy; if poor, they are arrogant. Neither the East nor the West can satisfy them: unique amongst all, they crave both wealth and poverty with equal greed. To steal, to slaughter, to plunder: this, under a false name, is their ‘empire’; and when they turn a land into a desert, they call it peace.”

Marco Rocco
Bellum
Carocci, 265 pp., 26 euros