Polybius: The Histories. Robin Waterfield translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 

 

A Greek from Megalopolis, Arcadia, researching, thinking, writing in Rome during the second century BC, Polybius acknowledges that all preceding historians have held that “knowledge of past events” provides an excellent “corrective of human behavior” because there is no better way “to prepare and train oneself for political life” than the study of those events and because “there is no more comprehensible and comprehensive teacher of the ability to endure with courage the vicissitudes of Fortune than a record of others’ catastrophes” (I.i). Among the possible topics for such study, Rome ranks at the top—specifically, Rome under the republican regime. “Is there anyone on earth who is so narrow-minded or uninquisitive that he could fail to want to know how and thanks to what regime almost the entire known world was conquered and brought under a single empire, the empire of the Romans, in less than fifty-three years [that is, between 220 and 167 BC]—an unprecedented event?” (I.i). By the known world, Polybius means those regions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, extending from the Persians in the east to the Iberians in the west, from the Byzantines and Gauls in the north to the Egyptians and Carthaginians in the south. Greeks were of course aware of regions farther afield (Alexander had reached India two centuries before Polybius died) but the Mediterranean was known familiarly by trading, soldiering, and diplomacy. 

The Romans “have made themselves masters of almost the entire known world, not just some bits of it, and have left such a colossal empire that no one alive today can resist it and no one in the future will be able to overcome it. My work will make it possible to understand more clearly how the empire was gained, and no reader will be left in doubt about the many important benefits to be gained from reading political history” (I.ii) Political history: as a student of Aristotle, Polybius knows that political life centers on regimes, and that regimes consist of rulers, ruling institutions, the purposes set by the rulers acting through those institutions, and the ways of life fostered by the rulers and institutions in pursuit of those purposes. This explains a feature of Polybius’ history which may seem odd to modern readers. After the first five books, the first “pentad,” he offers a book describing the Roman regime itself—an exercise in political science, not history. Polybius’ history is indeed the story of the Roman regime in motion; but to help his reader understand the regime’s structure he needs to bring the action to a rest, to look at its form, its animating principles, and the human ‘type’ it brings forth. Only an account of Rome’s regime can clarify Rome’s actions and explain their success. As Aristotle teaches, politic is architectonic.

Persia, Sparta, and Macedon had built empires before Rome. None of them was as extensive. The extensiveness of Rome requires an equally wide-ranging history—what we would now call a ‘geopolitical’ account of Rome’s conquests. “Before this time, things happened in the world pretty much in a sporadic fashion, because every incident was specific, from start to finish, to the part of the world where it happened. But ever since [the time of “the so-called Social War in Greece” beginning in 220] history has resembled a body, in the sense that incidents in Italy and Libya and Asia and Greece are all interconnected, and everything tends towards a single outcome” (I.iii). “The distinctive feature of my work (which is at the same time the most remarkable feature of our epoch)” is precisely that “Fortune has turned almost all the events of the known world in a single direction and has forced everything to tend towards the same goal.” Polybius intends to show how Fortune accomplished this; “no one else in our times has attempted to write [such] a universal history,” centered on “the finest thing Fortune has ever achieved, and the one from which we can learn most” (I.iv). Unlike many modern geopolitical writers, however, Polybius does not explain geopolitics in terms of ‘power,’ simply, as if ‘states’ resembled billiard balls differing only in size, density, and velocity. He understands geopolitics in terms of rival regimes, each with its own ruling persons, complex structure, purposes, way of life. He describes not only the Roman regime but the regimes of Carthage, Macedon, the Greeks, Egypt, the Gauls. The first two books of the history will therefore treat particularly of the intentions of the Roman rulers and the point at which they decided to found an empire, not only of their forces and resources (which all geopolitical writers discuss).

To understanding the starting point, the archē, of the Roman empire, Polybius reaches back several decades the final consolidation of Rome’s rule over Italy. In the wars leading up to that, “their trials of strength against the Samnites and Celts had already made them true athletes of warfare” (I.vi). This is the first suggestion that the Roman regime was a specific kind of republic, a military republic—as contrasted with the largely commercial, seafaring republics of Carthage and much later, of Great Britain and the United States. By 280 BC, Romans “for the first time set out against the rest of Italy, treating it not as foreign soil, but for the most part as if it were already theirs and belonged to them” (I.vi). The occasion was the invasion of Italy by Pyrrhus, king of the Greek polis, Epirus, who was called in by the people of Tarentum, who were frightened of the Romans but lacked the strength to fight them alone; the people of Rhegium, themselves threatened both by Pyrrhus’ forces and the Carthaginian navy, in turn called in the Romans to defend them. Roman troops betrayed Rhegium, seized it, but were eventually killed or taken prisoner by a subsequent Roman expeditionary force; the Romans, enraged at the betrayal of an ally by their own men, “lost no time in returning the land and the city to the people of Rhegium” (I.vii). As for Pyrrhus, he defeated the Romans in several battles but, famously, incurred such heavy losses that he was forced to return to Greece. Rome’s military republic thus exhibited resiliency and honor, keeping its army under civilian rule while encouraging the military spirit amongst its citizens while uniting Italy under its hegemony.

That left the Carthaginians as their main rival in the western Mediterranean. The Romans saw that “the Carthaginians had subjugated not only Libya but much of Iberia too, as well as controlling all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian seas, and they were worried that, if the Carthaginians came to dominate Sicily too, they would become too much of a threat and a danger on their borders, since they would surround the Romans and threaten Italy on all sides” (I.x). Although the aristocratic Senate was cautious, the people wanted to defend the Sicilian city of Messana from the Carthaginians, motivated not only by geopolitical concerns but by “the certainty of significant profit for each and every one of them” if Roman rule over Sicily could be secured (I.xi). “That was the first time an armed force of Romans left Italy by sea” (I.xii), touching off the first war with Carthage. Just as in the United States, debate in the 1890s centered on the question of acquiring an ‘overseas empire’—as distinguished from the Jeffersonian ’empire of liberty’ extending across North America, which preoccupied American statesmen from the founding until 1890, a series of land purchases and conquests that had come to be described as the nation’s ‘Manifest Destiny’—so for Rome the advance to the neighboring island, Sicily, into the Mediterranean itself, was understood as a major step towards a ‘real’ empire. In this first imperial venture, the Romans won, defeating the Carthaginians and securing a foothold in Sicily. Their position strengthened when the Syracusan monarch, Hieron, chose to side with the Romans, becoming the Romans’ “source of provisions in times of emergency” and enjoying, in return, “safety for the rest of his life” (I.xvi). As for the Romans, in the ensuing conflicts with Carthage, they “were saved…by the excellence of their institution,” which (for example) habituated their soldiers to stand fast at their posts during a surprise raid by the Carthaginians (I.xvii).

The Romans did well in the Sicilian land war, soon capturing the Carthaginian stronghold at Acragus. But “as long as the Carthaginians had undisputed control of the sea, the outcome of the war hung in the balance,” with coastal towns especially inclined to switch allegiance as easily as shifts in the sea breeze (I.xx). Therefore, “the Romans committed themselves to taking the sea along with the Carthaginians,” in the hope not only of defending their own coast against enemy raids but of taking the war to Libya (I.xx). “Their shipwrights had no experience at all” in building ships “but this is exactly what reveals, more clearly than anything else, the scope and daring inherent in the Romans’ decision”—a daring bred into them, as it were, by the military ethos of their form of republicanism (I.xx). By the year 260, having built a fleet modeled on a captured Carthaginian vessel, they were launching their own raids on enemy territory; with their own technical innovation the ‘raven,’ which enabled their men to board rival ships easily, they won a number of their early encounters with the far more experienced sailors of Carthage. 

A couple of years later, they mounted a serious naval offensive, “want[ing] the Carthaginians to feel that their very existence and their homeland were at risk”—the “last thing the Carthaginians wanted, because they were aware that Libya was vulnerable to an offensive and that any invader would easily subjugate the entire population there” (I.xxvi). They made an unsuccessful attempt to intercept the Roman fleet at sea; the Romans went on to seize one of their coastal cities. Desperate, the Carthaginians appealed to the Spartans, who sent an experienced general to their aid; the Spartans had no interest in seeing Rome continue its expansion. With his advice and training, the Carthaginians defeated the invaders, capturing their general. 

“There are a number of lessons to be learnt here, by any man of discernment, that should help him improve his life” (I.xxxv). First, “Regulus’ ruin brought home to everyone at the time in the most stark manner the advisability of distrusting Fortune, especially when things are going well” (I.xxxv). Second, in dealing with Fortune (as Euripides wrote), “A wise plan is stronger than many hands”: “just one man,” the Spartan general, Xanthippus, “one intellect, overcame a host that had seemed invincible and irresistible, revived a state that had plainly hit rock bottom, and alleviated the despair that had gripped its armed force” (I.xxxv). Third, it’s better to learn such things from reading a judicious historian than from the school of hard knocks; as Polybius drily puts it, “opportunities for changing one’s life for the better are afforded by both one’s own setbacks and those of others, and while learning from personal disasters drives the lesson home most forcefully, learning from others’ afflictions is less painful” (I.xxxv). “And so we see that there is no teacher better at preparing one for real life than the experience of reading political history, because only political history delivers, without pain, the ability to judge the better course of action, whatever the occasion or the situation” (I.xxxv). 

The Romans evacuated their troops but the returning fleet was destroyed by a powerful storm along the Sicilian coast. “No record has survived of a greater single catastrophe at sea, and blame for it must go not, as one might unthinkingly assume, to Fortune, but to the commanders,” who had been warned by experienced pilots not to sail along the coastline facing the Libyan Sea, since “it was too wild for safe anchorage” during one of the frequent storms there (I.xxxvii). “Generally speaking, the Romans rely on force for everything,” regarding “nothing as impossible once they have made up their minds” (I.xxxvii). Such martial bravado often serves them well, especially on land, but the sea is more yielding to Fortune, and Fortune there is far more powerful than men, even Romans. 

The war thus proved an equal struggle for many years, gouging each other on land and at sea “like pedigree fighting cocks” (lvii). Or, deploying another metaphor in describing the battles led by the great Carthaginian commander Hamilcar Barca and the Roman, Lucius Junius Pullus , “I cannot here give a thorough account of these struggles; the opposing generals were like a pair of exceptionally brave and skillful boxers fighting it out in a contest for first prize, who pummel each other so incessantly with blow after blow that it is impossible for either the contestants or the spectators to note and anticipate every single attack or punch, thought the overall vigor and determination displayed by the two men can be used to gain an adequate impression of their skill and strength and courage” (I.lvii). After twenty-four years of such struggle, the Romans’ persistence in fighting at sea finally made the Carthaginian occupation of Sicily untenable; they agreed to evacuate not only Sicily but all the islands between Sicily and Italy. 

“Powers beyond the Romans’ control, such as Fortune, had no bearing on the assurance with which they set out to make themselves rulers and masters of the whole world; they had perfectly reasonable grounds for this, because of the training they received in the course of this critical and colossal war, and it was this training that enabled them to attain their objective” (I.lxii). The experience gained in this initial, prolonged struggle in effect both toughened and refined the overall character of their regime, which Polybius will describe more fully in Book VI—where it will, he assures us, “receive the prominence it deserves and will repay careful attention from my readers” (I.lxiv). 

In the aftermath of their defeat, the Carthaginians faced a major civil war, a war caused by the commercial republican character of their own regime. Commerce lends itself to sea-craft, and Carthage held their own in the Mediterranean. Commerce does not lend itself to land armies, at least not to the extent that the military ethos of Roman republicanism did. As a result, the Carthaginians employed mercenary troops consisting of “various barbarian tribes”—unhesitatingly warlike, to be sure, but none too amenable to military organization and discipline (I.lxv). Having lost a long and expensive war, the Carthaginians couldn’t pay their troops, assuming “that they could get the mercenaries to forgo some of their back pay, if they made them all welcome en masse in Carthage” (I.lxvi). Still wanting the money owed them, and little scrupulous about how to obtain it, the barbarians almost immediately took to crime; more generally, “the unruliness of the mob became a matter of concern” (I.lxvi). Even after they were relocated to the town of Sicca, in Tunis, mutiny threatened. “But all the different peoples and languages created nothing but an incoherent muddle, and the state of the army may truly be described as one of frenzy”; “while ethnic pluralism in any army is a good way of reducing the chances of concerted dissidence or insubordination, it is a very bad idea when the men are resentful or hostile or mutinous, and need to have things explained to them, to be calmed down, and to have their false impressions corrected” (I.lxvii) Such men “behave in a deranged fashion, like the most savage of beasts” (I.lxvii). Too late, “the Carthaginians clearly understood how stupid they had been, and the magnitude of their errors” (I.lxviii). Even when the Carthaginians were able to meet their initial demands, the mercenaries upped the price of settlement.

On top of that, Libyan rebels organized the mercenaries and “openly made war on the Carthaginians” (I.lxx). “The Carthaginians had always depended on the produce of their farmland [in Libya] to sustain them in their private lives,” with “mercenary troops [to] do their fighting for them. But now they had lost all of these resources at once, and as if that were not enough, these resources were being deployed against them” (lxxi). “Previously, they had been challenging the Romans for possession of Sicily, but now, with a civil war on their hands, their very existence and their homeland were at stake,” far more than it had been when the Romans sent their naval forces against them (I.lxxi). As a result of the Sicilian War, they had no ships in reserve; they had no supplies in the territories beyond the contested ground of Libya, and “there was no chance of any support from friends and allies abroad,” perhaps because a civil war didn’t threaten foreigners (I.lxxi). 

They had no one to blame but themselves because “during the Sicilian War they had felt themselves justified in treating their Libyan subjects harshly,” taking half of their agricultural produce from them for decades and doubling the tax rate in Libyan cities and towns (I.lxxii). This notwithstanding, the commercial republic, despite its paucity of homegrown soldiers, did have capable generals. Hamilcar Barca was the greatest of them, but Hanno, who had served as military governor of the province so harshly during the Sicilian War, was a better general than civil administrator. The Carthaginians put him in charge of suppressing the revolt. Unfortunately, although he was good at war preparations he was “generally incompetent and negligent” on the battlefield (I.lxxiv). He had never fought battle-hardened troops before, having been detailed to defend Carthage against the Numidians, a nation whose troops “would vanish over the horizon and flee for two or three days once they had been turned in battle” (I.lxxiv). The mercenaries were tougher than that. Hanno was relieved by Hamilcar Barca, who made alliance with a young Numidian aristocrat who had Carthaginian ancestors. Combined, the Carthaginian and Numidian troops crushed the rebels in one battle, only to suffer reverses later on—reverses so severe that Carthage itself was besieged.

Enter Hieron of Syracuse, who sent aid to Carthage after making “sure that it was in his own best interests…that Carthage should survive,” as “he did not want to see the stronger side in the Rome-Carthage balance to gain its objective without any struggle” (I.lxxxiii). “This was sound and sensible thinking on his part: such a situation should never be ignored, nor should one help anyone gain so much power that disagreement becomes impossible even when everyone knows where justice lies” (I.lxxxiii). Even Rome itself backed Carthage, perhaps because it preferred to deal with a civilized rival that it had defeated than an uncivilized one of the sort which had threatened Rome itself in years past. This policy served them well in the short run, although in the longer term they would regret it.

Polybius hints at why the Romans might regret the preservation of Carthage against the barbarians when he recounts the end of the war. True, “the mercenaries proved themselves the equals of their opponents in terms of tactics and daring, but often found themselves at a disadvantage because of inexperience. In fact, it looks as though it was possible at that time to see at first hand the great difference between generalship, with its scientifically acquired experience, and the mindless knack of soldiering, which lacks such experience.” (I.lxxxiv). Hamilcar fought “like a good backgammon player,” dividing and trapping his enemy in ambushes; “anyone taken alive was thrown to the elephants” (I.lxxxiv). “In the end,” the mercenaries “were reduced by starvation to cannibalism—divine retribution for their violation of the laws of gods and men in the way they treated others” (I.lxxxiv). First, they ate their prisoners, then their slaves; when “the officers were sure that the men would be driven by the severity of their suffering to make them their next victims” (officers, after all, tend to be sleeker and better-fed than common soldiers) they treated for peace. Hamilcar seized them as hostages when they arrived in his camp to negotiate the surrender then surrounded the Libyans and their barbarian allies and “slaughtered them all” (I.lxxxv). One of the rebel leaders was “crucified for all to see” (I.lxxxvi). His partner in rebellion escaped and managed to inflict more damage on the Carthaginian forces before his final capture.

At this point Rome took its short-term reward. Over Carthaginian protests, Roman forces seized Sardinia. “With little choice in the matter,” the Carthaginians “not only gave up Sardinia, but paid an additional 1,200 talents to the Romans, to avoid facing another war for the time being” (I.xxxvii). But as civilized masters of war, they were not yet done with the Romans.

Indeed, “as soon as they had settled affairs in Libya, the Carthaginians mustered an army and sent Hamilcar to Iberia,” a mission he undertook with his usual skill (II.i). He stayed there for nine years “and succeeded, by military means or diplomacy, in getting a great deal of the Iberian population to accept Carthaginian dominion” (II.i). He died in battle, not before apprenticing his son, Hannibal, to military and civilian rule, and swearing the boy to nurse a lifelong hatred of Rome. 

The Romans had turned their imperial attention to Illyria and eastern Europe, where Demetrius II, king of Macedon, had bribed the Illyrian king to attempt to lift the siege of the Greek city of Medion, besieged by the Aetolians. The Illyrians and Medionites routed the Aetolians, lifting the siege. Polybius takes the opportunity to emphasize the power of Fortune. “It was as though Fortune were deliberately using [the Medionites’] situation to demonstrate her power to all of us, by allowing them to do to their enemies exactly what, not long before, they had expected their enemies to very shortly be doing to them. the lesson the Aetolians taught everyone else by their unexpected setback was never to treat a future event as if it were a fait accompli, and never to look forward with any certainty to anything that may yet turn out quite different. mere mortals should always make allowance for the unexpected, especially in warfare.” (II.iv). 

Nor was Fortune done with her instruction. The Illyrian king died of pleurisy after his drunken victory revels, leaving his wife Teuta as inheritor of the throne. “Typically, given the way a woman’s mind works, she could see nothing apart from the victory they had just won and failed to take account of what was happening elsewhere” directing her officers to go on a plundering expedition along the coastline of Elis and Messenia (II.iv). They seized the Epirus by bribing Gaul mercenaries stationed there; the Epirots asked both the Aetolian League and the Achaean League for assistance in retaking their polis. Unaccountably, after their allies succeeded in expelling the Illyrians, the Epirots entered into an alliance with their erstwhile enemies against the two leagues. “The stupidity of this way of treating benefactors was obvious, but it showed how fundamentally their policies lacked intelligent guidance. When disasters are unforeseeable, as happens in the lives of men, we blame not the victims, but Fortune and any human agents who were responsible; but when someone’s stupid behavior brings utter ruin down on himself, when he could have avoided it, everyone recognizes that the victim himself is at fault.” (II.vi-vii). From trusting the Gauls to betraying their allies, the Epirots blundered their way towards a more lasting defeat, later on.

Meanwhile, Queen Teuta’s continued depredations began to interest Rome. She treated Roman envoys “with an air of arrogance and disdain” (II.viii), pretending that the marauding Illyrian ships were mere privateers over whom she exercised no control. When the younger of the two envoys reprimanded her for this policy she had him murdered “in defiance of the law of nations” (II.viii). “When news of the murder reached Rome, the woman’s crime aroused such anger that military preparations became the first order of priority, and they set about calling up their legions and gathering a fleet” (II.viii).  For her part, Queen Teuta ordered her forces to besiege the Greek city of Corcyra, both the Aetolians and the Achaeans sent ships in an effort to lift the siege. But the Illyrians won the ensuing naval battle. Then the Roman navy arrived in Corcyrea, where they were welcomed by Demetrius of Macedon, who had allied with Teuta, occupied the city, but now saw good reason to cede it to the Romans, rightly calculating what the new balance of power in Greece was likely to become. With their habitual thoroughness, the Romans proceeded to wrest several Greek cities from Illyrian hands, leaving their administration to their newfound ally, Demetrius. Reduced to a more sensible mood, Queen Teuta concluded a peace treaty with the Roman general, Postumius, who then sent embassies to the Aetolians and Achaeans to “explain why they had fought a war on foreign soil” and to show them the treaty with Illyria. “The treaty made life considerably more secure for the Greeks, because at that time the Illyrians were not particular about whom they attacked; no one was spared their hostility” (II.xii). The Romans followed up this first military expedition to Greek territory with diplomatic missions to Corinth and Athens. 

In Iberia, Hamilcar Barca’s son-in-law, Hasdrubal, succeeded him as provincial governor of Iberia. “The Romans could see that the Carthaginians were creating a larger and more formidable empire than before, and they committed themselves to a course of interference in Iberian affairs. They realized that they had been caught napping while the Carthaginians assembled a large army, so they wanted to move things along as quickly as possible, but in the short term they did not dare to give the Carthaginians an ultimatum or go on the offensive against them, because of the looming threat of a Celtic invasion, which they expected any day. They decided they had to pacify Hasdrubal and make sure he was no kind of threat, so that they could then attack the Celts and fight to the finish.” (II.xiii). They enacted a treaty with Hasdrubal, whereby the Carthaginians pledged not to cross the Ebro River in northeastern Iberia with their troops. “And then the Romans immediately embarked upon the war against the Celts” (II.xiii).

Polybius takes care to describe the Celtic regime, which pervaded a set of tribes, ruling no fixed polis or empire. “Their villages were unwalled and lacked any other civilized amenities. They lived simple lives, sleeping on straw and eating meat skilled in nothing apart from warfare and farming, without the slightest inkling of any other science or craft. their wealth consisted of cattle and gold, because they were easily transportable wherever they went; whatever the circumstances, they could move these possessions from one place to another at whim. The most important thing was for a man to have a following, because whoever was thought to have the largest number of attendants and retainers was held in awe as the most powerful chieftain among them.” (II.xvii). They had warred with the Romans off and on for a long time, sometimes in alliance with the Gauls, who proved no more reliable allies of theirs than they did anywhere, with anyone. 

By 232 BC, the troubles renewed, and in 226 the Gauls entered the fray, crossing the Alps into Italy. This actually helped Rome, as “the people of Italy were so frightened by the approach of the Gauls that they no longer thought of themselves as fighting in support of Rome, nor did it cross their minds that the purpose of the war was Roman supremacy; all the allies took the danger personally and saw it as a direct threat to their own cities and lands, and were happy to do what the Romans wanted” (II.xxiii). After inflicting heavy casualties on Rome and its allies, putting Rome itself in “terrible danger,” the Celts were defeated (II.xxxi). “In terms of the depravity and recklessness of the contestants, and also of the numbers of combatants and casualties involved in the battles,” this war “was second to none in recorded history” (II.xxxv). More than that, it is worth recording because “if future generations are unaware of these events, they will be utterly distraught at sudden and unexpected barbarian invasions, when all they need to do is briefly bear in mind that any barbarian threat is temporary and easily disposed of, and then they can endure the invasion and exhaust every last resource at their command, rather than give up anything important” (II.xxxv). Despite the “myriads of men” in the barbarian host, despite “all their fearlessness and their armament”—all elements of their regime, their way of life—they were “destroyed by the resolve and the resources of those who faced danger intelligently and rationally” (II.xxxv). No civilized people uncorrupted by luxury need be “dismayed by immense quantities of supplies and weapons, and hordes of troops, into abandoning all hope and failing to fight for his land and the country of his birth,” as the Greeks were in Polybius’ time, but as the Romans were not, and as the Greeks were not before that, when they confronted the Persian invasion chronicled by Herodotus (II.xxxv). 

In Iberia, after Hasdrubal’s assassination by a Celt who harbored a personal grudge against him, young Hannibal took over the Carthaginian forces. True to his vow to the gods before his father, “right from the start of his command, he made no secret of his intention to make war on the Romans” (II.xxxvi). His spectacular crossing of the Alps and the ensuing “Hannibalic War” will occupy Polybius’ attention throughout Book III.  But it is the war between the Aetolian League and the Achaean League (with Macedon as its ally) serves as Polybius’ final topic in Book II. This war effected the beginning of the unification of the Peloponnese in a federal system of poleis. As a political historian, Polybius will explain how this unifying movement compared and contrasted with the successful unification of Italy under Rome.

“There had been many attempts in the past to unify the Peloponnesians, but none of them succeeded because each polis was interested only in its own supremacy, not in freedom for all alike” (II.xxxvii). By Polybius’ time, he writes, “this cause has made considerable progress” because the regimes by then were “more or less identical from city to city” (II.xxxvii). It was the Achaeans who unified Greece for a time, as a result of their victory in the so-called “Social War.” “Why,” Polybius asks, “were they and everyone else in the Peloponnese happy to take on the Achaean system of government and the Achaean name? What induced them to do so?” (II.xxxviii). To say ‘Fortune’ will not do. “We need to look deeper for a reason, knowing that even things that seem improbable have causes, just as much as comprehensible events, because otherwise they would not happen” (II.xxxviii).

Polybius locates that cause in the same place he locates the cause of Roman rule: the regime. “One would be hard put to find equality and the right to speak one’s mind in assembly—in short, the regime and principles of true democracy—in a purer form than among the Achaeans” (II.xxxviii). This mattered ‘geopolitically’ because democracy “won over” Greeks initially suspicious of it “by the persuasive power of reason”; those not so persuaded acceded at first to “the timely application of force” but soon “exchanged resistance for contentment” because democracy “reserved no privileges for any of her original devotees and treated all as equals, regardless of when they came over to her side”—a lesson followed by the Framers of the United States Constitution when they granted each new state equal standing in the American Union (II.xxxviii). “Democracy, then, was the instigator and agent, and we look no further to explain how the Peloponnesians came to cooperate and forge their current prosperity,” as well (II.xxxviii). Whereas Greek cities had been “rife with murder, conflict, and mayhem of all kinds,” it was only “the Achaeans whose integrity they trusted and to whom they looked for a solution to their current troubles” (II.xxxix). 

The League was founded in 280 BC, with four members; in ten years it had ten members. Its founders had a model in the original Achaean League, founded long before but conquered by the Macedonians. Although that league featured monarchic regimes, the relations among them were democratic, with each of its twelve poleis having an equal vote on common policies. The new league was democratic in respect of both its federal relations and the regimes of the poleis composing it.

A major advance for the League came in 243 BC, when the twenty-year-old Aratus “liberated his city,” Sicyon, “from tyranny through his own valor and courage, and brought Sicyon into the League. He had always been an admirer of the Achaeans’ political principles.” (II.xliii). As a general, he liberated Corinth and Megara, at the same time that Rome forced the Carthaginians to evacuate Sicily. All [Aratus’] policies and all his actions were directed towards a single goal: expelling the Macedonians from the Peloponnese, banishing the tyrants, and guaranteeing every polis its ancestral freedom, as a member of the League” (II.xliii). Initially, the Aetolians allied with the Macedonians in attempted to destroy the League, but after the death of the Aetolian monarch in 239 the two leagues joined forces against the Macedonians. Ten years later, with the death of the Macedonian king, Demetrius II, the remaining tyrants in the Peloponnese abdicated, seeing that they could no longer maintain their rule without their principal backer. This unified the Achaean region in a single federation.

The Aetolians, “an innately aggressive and rapacious people,” soon broke their alliance and renewed their alliance with Macedon (II.xlv). They also hoped to bring the Spartans into their alliance. “In all probability they would soon have met with success, except they overlooked a critical flaw in their plans. They failed to take into consideration that this initiative of theirs would bring them up against Aratus, a man who could cope with any crisis.” (II.xlv). Aratus did the Aetolians one better, making a secret alliance with the Macedonian king, Antigonus Doson, persuading him that the Aetolians were more dangerous to Macedon than the Achaeans. Defeated in three battles by the Spartans, he then called upon the Macedonians for assistance; the Achaeans appointed Antigonus as the commander-in-chief of the allied armies. In 222, he defeated the Spartans. Crucially, and despite the harshness of the Spartans during the war (they destroyed the Achaean polis of Megalopolis, Polybius’ home town), his treatment of the enemy “was nothing but generous and humane, and he reestablished their ancestral regime,” which had been overthrown by the tyrant Cleomenes, the Spartan ruler during the war (II.lxx). “He had personally made it possible for all the inhabitants of Greece to look forward to a better future, not just as a result of what he had done for them in the field, but even more because he was a man of principle and integrity” (II.lxx). 

The Cleomenean War, as this one was called, preceded the Social War, to which Polybius will turn in a subsequent book of this pentad. He has shown how the Romans, having established hegemony in Italy, began their overseas empire by taking Sicily and Sardinia from the Carthaginians and by a short-lived foray into Illyria. He has described the Carthaginian consolidation of rule in Iberia and the founding and defense of the Achaean League. All of these events will contribute the establishment of the Roman empire throughout the Mediterranean, the “known world.”

In the course of relating these events and establishing their causes, Polybius clearly presents the elements of the political education he intends to provide through political history, which provides those who aspire to statesmanship or to historiography (Polybius was an accomplished practitioner of both arts) with some of the experience needed to build up the practical wisdom necessary for success in either of those fields of endeavor. He invites his readers to learn politics by considering four main topics.

First, he measures the strength and limitations of Fortune. No doubt, there are forces beyond human control—the sudden storm, the untimely illness, the small accident that brings on a calamitous outcome. But although Polybius would never claim that Fortune can be mastered, as his admirer Machiavelli contends, he does think that intelligent and experienced statesmen and generals can minimize it, often by avoiding extremes of passion and the actions prompted by them. This is the advantage civilized peoples enjoy over barbarians, and he takes care to notice both the Carthaginian defeat of barbarian mercenaries and the Roman defeat of the combined forces of Celts and Gauls—demonstrating that two sharply differing republican regimes could knock down the worst efforts of warlike, sizeable but ill-organized and ill-disciplined tribal hordes.

Second, and with respect to regimes, he contrasts the military republic of Rome with the commercial republic of Carthage. The disadvantage of the commercial republic is its practice of trying to buy the armies that defend it; mercenaries prove less reliable than one’s own troops (and here Machiavelli wholeheartedly concurs). A potential weakness of the military republic is over-reliance on force; accordingly, Polybius emphasizes Rome’s civilian control of its military, its successful diplomatic efforts, and the effectiveness of a prudent mixture of persuasion and military action seen in Aratus, the great statesman/general of the Achaean League. 

Third, in addition to regimes he addresses the matter of what might be called ‘states’—political communities organized not only according to the number and types of rulers, ruling institutions, purposes, and ways of life but with respect to size and degree of centralization. Tribal organizations are too small by themselves, too apt to fall into frequent disputes amongst themselves when confederated, and almost always too impassioned to think straight. Empires consist of the rule of one people over a collection of subordinate peoples. They defeat barbaric tribes, thanks to their superior organization and rationality. They can be vulnerable to civil war, including civil wars fomented by their enemies, who aim at re-dividing them out of self-defense or in the hope of conquering them and incorporating them into their own empires. Despite the spectacular success of Rome, Polybius seems to favor the federal state, seen in his native Achaea, whereby democratic-republican regimes combine for purposes of defense and commerce.

Finally, in terms of geopolitics he describes the beginnings of the interconnectedness of Italy, Libya, Greece, and Asia. He does so, however, in a manner distinct, and distinctly more accurate than, the ‘geopoliticians’ of the last century-and-a-half, often devotees of the German school of Realpolitik, who reduce politics to power relations. That is, not only are the Mediterranean regions shown to be interconnected militarily, politically, and commercially, his four topics intertwine, as well. Under Polybius’ Aristotelian gaze, Realpolitik looks not so real and not so politic.

 

 

 

Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret: COVID-19: The Great Reset. Cologny: Forum Publishing, 2020.

 

 

Written six months into the coronavirus pandemic, this book urges the use of the disease to accelerate the project variously known as ‘world government,’ ‘global governance,’ or ‘globalism’. Both authors are economists (the senior author no less than the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum); they keep their ultimate goal vaguely stated, but the end game is fairly obvious. More than three decades ago, I had a conversation with a young middle-management fellow who worked on Wall Street. He earnestly explained how the world would be much better off if executives of international corporations ruled it. Our authors are less blunt in their advocacy for a global oligarchy but it’s safe to say that that’s what they want.

Their rhetorical strategy cannot be described as subtle. The pandemic is “our defining moment”; “many things will change forever.” Luckily, such “deep, existential crises” as this “favor introspection and can harbor the potential for transformation.” Indeed “people feel the time for reinvention has come.” What people? People like themselves, at least for starters, and what a heady thought that is: “A new world will emerge, the contours of which are for us to both imagine and draw,” now that “a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory” has so happily occurred. How fundamental? Well, “Radical changes of such consequence are coming that some pundits have referred to a ‘before coronovirus’ (BC) and ‘after coronovirus’ (AC) era.” That would be fundamental, all right. One could almost say ‘messianic.’

Past epidemics, notably the Black Death, have led to pogroms, wars, famines. Admittedly, this one “doesn’t pose a new existential threat,” as “whole populations will neither be exterminated nor displaced.” Nonetheless, “the pandemic is dramatically exacerbating pre-existing dangers that we’ve failed to confront adequately for too long,” the chief of which is “the partial retreat from globalization” seen in the rise of nationalism. The authors therefore undertake to show that the only cure for such a horror is a firm move towards internationalism, assuring their readers that “the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse.” “We should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world, in a bid to make it a better and more resilient one as it emerges on the other side of this crisis.” “Better and more resilient” means (they assure us) “more egalitarian” not “more authoritarian,” with “more solidarity” not “more individualism,” “favoring the interests of the many” not “the few.” Exactly how the administrative rule of organizations like the World Economic Forum would make things more egalitarian, fraternal, and people-favoring has proved a puzzle for ‘progressives’ for the last two centuries or so. For the most part, our authors tiptoe around questions regarding the underlying political question: the regime they have in mind.

Economists to the bone, they deploy textbook jargon in labeling the book’s three main topics: the “macro reset,” the “micro reset,” and “possible consequences at the individual level.” The “macro reset” consists of five categories: economic, social, geopolitical, environmental, and technological; it is noteworthy that “geopolitical” substitutes for political, which would bring up such messy problems of conflicting political regimes which rule sovereign countries.  Throughout the discussions of these categories they provide a “conceptual framework” which identifies “three defining characteristics of today’s world”: interdependence, velocity, and complexity. By “interdependence” they mean “the dynamic of reciprocal dependence among the elements that compose a system.” The “system” they have in mind is of course the world itself, which they liken to a cruise ship currently afflicted with a contagious disease spreading from cabin to cabin,” owing to “global governing failure.” By “velocity” they mean the “culture of immediacy” the Internet has wrought. Velocity engenders impatience, a time lag between events and the ability of rulers to react to them, and an overload of information that slows rulers’ decision-making still further. By “complexity” they mean “what we don’t understand or find difficult to understand”—the results of categories 1 and 2 combined with “non-linearity,” which means that “a change in just one component of a system can lead to a surprising and disproportionate effect elsewhere.” One might suppose that this would lead our authors to worry that “global governance” might well prove a hopeless task. One would be mistaken. For example, “Many Asian countries reacted quickly” to the pandemic “because they were prepared logistically and organizationally,” thanks to the previous SARS epidemic, to say nothing (which is exactly what they do say) about the lack of civil liberty under those many regimes. 

How would global governance work? Planning, my boy, planning. In terms of economics, we already know that because “wars destroy capital while pandemics do not” economies rebound faster in the aftermath of wars, as people rebuild their cities and factories. When, at the beginning of the pandemic, “governments worldwide made the deliberate decision to shut down much of their respective economies”—a choice the authors endorse because a higher death rate would injure economic life even more—this caused “an abrupt and unsolicited return to a form of relative autarky, with every nation trying to move towards certain forms of self-sufficiency” at the cost of “a reduction in national and global output,” especially in such countries as the United States, where the ‘service sector’ (more seriously injured by policies of ‘social distancing’ than any other) provides 80% of the jobs. “Such a scenario will almost inevitably lead to a collapse in investment among business and a surge in precautionary saving among consumers, with fallout in the entire global economy through capital flight, the rapid and uncertain movement of large amounts of money out of a country, which tends to exacerbate economic crises.” Additionally, the pandemic will accelerate replacement of jobs with machines; while this normally boosts employment in the long run, the velocity of the current shift will lead to greater dislocations, especially among “low-income workers in routine jobs.” The rich may or may not get richer, but the poor will get poorer.

Crucial to our authors’ ‘globalization’ argument is their need to link the global pandemic to another main ‘globalist’ talking point, climate change. Originally, internationalists advocated world government as a cure for war, but now that nuclear weapons have made world wars considerably less palatable to ambitious rulers, climate change has taken its place. “The deep disruption caused by COVID-19 globally has offered societies an enforced pause to reflect on what is truly of value. With the economic emergency responses to the pandemic now in place, the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future.” This in turn “will require”—notice the imperative language—a “shift in the mindset of world leaders”—no longer merely statesmen—to “place greater focus and priority on the well-being of all citizens and the planet.” This means a concurrent shift in the “metrics” by which those “leaders” measure “progress”—specifically, a shift from emphasis on quantitative, material well-being measured by ‘gross domestic product’ (now much too gross and much too domestic—indeed, a form of “tyranny”) toward such ‘quality of life’ activities as “the care economy” (childcare, eldercare), education, and medicine. In keeping with the rhetoric of ‘progress,’ our authors identify “forward-looking countries” as those which “prioritize a more inclusive and sustainable approach to managing and measuring their economies, one that also drives job growth, improvement in living standards and safeguards the planet.” 

This is all very well for countries that can afford it, our authors remark, but what about “emerging and developing economies”? “Most of them don’t have the fiscal space required to react to the pandemic shock.” This may well lead to a scenario that any respectable member of the World Economic Forum well might dread: politicians might push central banks into finance “major public projects, such as an infrastructure or green investment fund”—policies leading to huge financial deficits as governments give the banks’ money to their constituents and the consequent “uncontrollable inflation” as governments aim at paying for those expenditures with devalued money. Even in the affluent countries, politicians will be tempted to pursue such policies. If they occur in the United States the dollar itself—long the most trusted currency in the world and the lynchpin of the American economy as it has interacted with the rest of the world—could result in “a much reduced geopolitical role or higher taxation, or both” and more, the possible abandonment of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency. 

“To a large extent, US global credibility also depends on geopolitics and the appeal of its social model.” Turning next to the “societal reset,” our authors cite the criticisms of governing institutions throughout the world, very much including the United States, and the exacerbation of social problems in the poorer countries. Countries that have fared better in the pandemic were (sure enough) those for whom “inclusivity, solidarity, and trust” are “core values.” In less hazy terms, that means “cost-effective and inclusive healthcare” systems, bureaucratic preparation, “rapid and decisive decisions,” and “citizens” (one would not wish to say ‘subjects’) who “have confidence in both the leadership and the information they provide” (not to be stigmatized as ‘propaganda’). Therefore, our authors rather breathlessly anticipate a “post-pandemic era” characterized by “massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labor,” the “death knell of neoliberalism” which favors “competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare.” “It is no coincidence,” they intone, “that the two countries that over the past few years embraced the policies of neoliberalism with most fervor—the US and the UK—are among those that suffered the most casualties during the pandemic.” Ah yes, the frightful Reagan and Thatcher: into the dustbin of History with them! “Massive social turmoil” is in the future of such malefactor societies, and they deserve it. 

Help is on the way. “One of the great lessons of the past five centuries in Europe and America is this: acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state.” This time, too, “governments will most likely, but with different degrees of intensity, decide that it’s in the best interests of society to rewrite some of the rules of the game and permanently increase their role,” “as happened in the 1930s.” They will move toward “a broader, if not universal, provision of social assistance, social insurance, healthcare and basic quality services” and toward “enhanced protection for workers and for those currently most vulnerable.” In particular, “the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the inadequate state of most national health systems.” One might ask, “inadequate” for what? An worldwide emergency—that is, a thing by definition insusceptible to fully effective national responses. And what might meet such an international or global crisis other than “improved global governance”? Our authors hope that you will answer, “Nothing!” and take your bearings from precisely the global crisis instead of the routine national and even regional or local crises. 

Hence their central “reset,” the “geopolitical reset.” In this century, “the determining element of geopolitical instability is the progressive rebalancing from the West to the East,” particularly the confrontation between the “rising power,” China, and the “ruling power,” the United States. The “progressive disengagement” of the United States from the world additionally causes countries which had relied on the United States for such “global public goods” as defense of sea lanes and counterterrorism “to tend to their own backyards themselves.” “The 21st century will most likely be an era devoid of an absolute hegemon”; “as a result, power and influence will be redistributed chaotically and in some cases grudgingly.”

Economic globalization will continue, although the pandemic will slow and even reverse it for a time. Our authors instead maintain that economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation state are “mutually irreconcilable.” One of them will need to go, and it isn’t hard to anticipate which one they would like to kiss goodbye. “The rise of nationalism” is their bugbear, “global governance” their preference. As they define it, global governance isn’t exactly equivalent to a world government, at least not yet. Global governance is “the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems,” encompassing “the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiative through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges”—an “effort bound to be toothless without the cooperation of national governments and their ability to act and legislate to support their aims.” That is, global government resembles the law of nations, except that “transnational actors” must seek to bring national actors into line with what transnationalists want to do. For this, the pandemic (added to climate change) may prove a useful crisis, as “COVID-19 has reminded us that the biggest problems we face are global in nature,” yet it hasn’t “triggered a set of measures coordinated globally,” but has instead done the opposite: “a stream of border closures, restrictions in international travel and trade introduced almost without any coordination, the frequent interruption of medical supply distribution and the ensuing competition for resources.” “In a functioning global governance network, nations should have come together to fight a global and coordinated ‘war’ against the pandemic” but the existing system “failed, proving either non-existent or dysfunctional.” Alas, the authors sigh, “the United Nations organization has no power to compel information sharing or enforce pandemic preparedness.” 

You can tell that a contemporary political writer is getting desperate when he reaches for analogies to quantum mechanics. Supposedly, the quantum mechanics model teaches us that when it comes to political principles and regimes, “there isn’t a ‘right’ view and a ‘wrong’ view, but different and often diverging interpretations that frequently correlate with the origin, culture, and personal history of those who profess them.” That is, nature as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics yields moral and cultural relativism in world politics. You may “think that observation and measurement define an ‘objective’ opinion, but the micro-world of atoms and particles (like the macro-world of geopolitics) is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics in which two different observers are entitled to their own opinion (this is called a ‘superposition’: ‘particles can be in several places or states at once’).” Therefore, “a ‘Chinese’ view and a ‘US’ view can co-exist, together with multiple other views along that continuum—all of them real!” 

What an entertaining sophistry! I exclaim, demonstrating that I too can deploy exclamation points. If nation-states are like subatomic particles, then they too should be capable of being in several places or states at once. But they’re not. A nation-state has borders over which it is sovereign. Those borders may change but they scarcely act as subatomic particles act, or seem to act, depending upon the position of the observer. What our authors could argue to make their argument coherent, if still dubious, is this: habits of mind and heart generally shared in one regime—or, more broadly, in one civilization—often differ radically from habits of heart and mind generally shared in another; the differences between those sets of habits may differ so radically that citizens or subjects within those regimes may form far different opinions concerning moral and political phenomena. Their divergent opinions are indeed equally ‘real’ in the sense that they are sincerely and deeply held. This reality must be taken into account by statesmen—sorry, ‘global leaders.’ But that doesn’t mean that “two different observers are entitled to their own opinion.” It only means that each does in fact have one.

As with almost every political appeal to moral or cultural relativism, our authors’ quantum-mechanics jive covers their own political agendum. Sure enough, a few pages after instructing us on modern physics’ correlation to political science we read: “Wealthier countries ignore the tragedy unfolding in fragile and failing countries at their peril.” A consistent quantum mechanist in politics would add, “or not.” But now our authors have discovered themselves entitled to make such judgments despite their self-alleged incapacity to do so.

Indeed, they insist on it. Both the pandemic and climate change amount to “existential threats to humankind”—objectively speaking, in their opinion. They share five attributes: first, “they are known…systemic risks that propagate very fast in our interconnected world and, in so doing, amplify other risks from different categories; second, “they are non-linear, meaning that beyond a certain threshold, or tipping point, they can exercise catastrophic effects” regionally or globally; third, “the probabilities and distribution of their impacts are very hard, if not impossible to measure”; fourth, and crucially for the ‘globalist’ argument, “they are global in nature and therefore can only be properly addressed in a globally coordinated fashion”; fifth, “they affect disproportionately the already most vulnerable countries and segments of the population.” Finally, both are tied to worldwide population growth, as crowding facilitates viral contagion and larger populations expend more of the pollutants that are said to contribute significantly to global warming. To combat both, “it will be incumbent on us all to rethink our relationship with nature and question why we have become so alienated from it.”

I can answer that last one. We have become alienated from nature because nature can be harsh, with or without global warming. The same science that has theorized quantum mechanics was inaugurated as an effort to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate—deemed to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short by one of modern science’s earliest advocates. One need not take so extreme a view, or project so optimistic a solution, to see the point. 

But to return to our authors. They propose four main preliminary approaches to these troubles. “Enlightened leadership” will “make ‘good use’ of the pandemic by not letting the crisis go to waste.” They “may want to take advantage of the shock inflicted by the pandemic to implement long-lasting and wider environmental changes”—clearly the intention behind this book. They will emphasize that “we ignore science and expertise at our peril”; that is, we should be more compliant with policies proposed and enforced by people like our authors. This means we must change our “behavior,” acknowledging that we have “no choice but to adopt ‘greener living.'” We should applaud “the motivation for change” which has been “emboldened” by the pandemic, “trigger[ing] new tools and strategies in terms of social activism.” How those “tools” differ from those familiar to anyone who recalls the ‘Movement’ politics of the 1960s remains unclear. However, unlike many on the old New Left, and many in the environmentalist movement, our authors would have us embrace technology, especially contact. But will technology turn into a tool of social and political oppression, as it has done in many of those regimes whose ‘points of view’ (we’ve been assured) are entitled to their own opinions? “It is for those who govern and each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms,” they intone, neglecting to suggest how they, and we, might go about doing that. They hurry on to the next level, the “Micro Reset.”

Our authors define “micro” institutions as those governing business and industry. The message is simple: Get on board, or fail. Forget about “a return to business as usual. This won’t happen because it can’t happen.” For capitalists, “the key issue will be to find the apposite balance between what functioned before and what is needed now to prosper in the new normal.” More specifically, this means accelerating the trend toward “stakeholder capitalism,” a term that evidently denotes not simply concern for the demands of consumers and of workers but for the those of climate change activists, advocates of “gender diversity,” and similar groups self-classified as proponents of social justice (typically defined as social egalitarianism). “The pandemic leaves no doubt in boardrooms that the absence” of such considerations “has the potential to destroy substantial value and even threaten the viability of a business” through the “reputational cost” of lawsuits and boycotts. “The ‘price’ of not doing so will be too high in terms of the wrath of activists, both activist investors and social activists.” If sufficiently frightened by the scarecrow of activism, capitalists too can be deployed in cooperation with rather than in opposition to the global governors; both ‘sides’ will work (intentionally or not) at the service of globalists.

As Tocqueville taught his readers nearly two centuries ago, such ‘intermediate’ institutions as townships and counties can inhibit the ambitions of statist centralizers and maintain the spirit of liberty among citizens. On the level of globalism, nation-states serve that function, but so do many capitalist institutions, cities, and universities. Our authors therefore applaud what they take to be the likelihood of de-urbanization in the pandemic’s wake, as companies shift their employees from working in offices to working at home. This will result in “far fewer tenants to rent empty office buildings,” “puncturing the global real estate bubble that [has] been years in the making” and bringing much of the residential real estate market in cities down with it. Same for universities (“particularly the expensive ones in the Anglo-Saxon world”): they, too, “will have to alter their business model or go bankrupt because COVID-19 has made it obsolete.” Why pay “the same high tuition for [the] virtual education” to which universities have resorted? Sure, the online model of education, or some hybrid form resulting from mating it with in-person education, “has the disadvantage of erasing a large aspect of social life and personal interactions on a campus.” Too bad, but that’s the way it will be. The noteworthy, if unstated, theme here is ‘divide and conquer.’ The fewer social “interactions” at work and at school and the more social life becomes ‘virtual.’ the less real resistance to global governance there can be. Traditional institutions capable of resisting globalism will weaken, and flash mobs organized by online agitators won’t stand up for long against well-organized, trained law enforcement officers—especially if they learn to talk the talk of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ which are becoming the (largely rhetorical) price of doing real business.

Finally, the “individual reset.” Whereas natural disasters usually “bring people together,” pandemics “drive them apart.” “Psychologically, the most important consequence of the pandemic is to generate a phenomenal amount of uncertainty that often becomes a source of angst,” then shame, as we hesitate to step up and help one another for fear of infection. “Often, the fear of death ends up overriding all other human emotions.” Fueled by such fear, false rumors and conspiracy theories erode social trust. But this too is only one more crisis not to be wasted, as it invites a debate over what the common good is. For example, in the United States and Britain—those two bastions of the ‘neoliberalism’ our authors earlier scorned—there are persons who argue that recessions kill people as surely as diseases do, and that governments should not be too quick to shut down economic activity in an attempt to control the coronavirus. Ah, yes, our authors riposte, “in the US, recessions do indeed kill a lot of people because the absence of limited nature of any social safety net makes them life-threatening.” And so we are left with what is “ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favor the destiny of the community.” Individuals, too, stand in the way of global governance. Community “destiny” ‘must’—as a matter of both historical and moral necessity—take precedence. From complacency about social life in workplaces and schools, our authors now veer toward an endorsement of sociality. “We are social animals for whom the many minor and often nonverbal clues that normally occur during physical social interactions are vital in terms of communication and mutual understanding”; without such communicative clues, our brain is “simply overwhelm[ed], and “we get the feeling of being drained of energy and left with a sense of profound dissatisfaction,” which “in turn negatively affects our sense of mental well-being.” This points to a “reset” of sociality, away from workplaces and schools—let alone the civil associations of self-government Tocqueville admired in America—towards a bureaucratized society, its global governors well out of the reach of its subjects, in which sociality is somehow experienced through government-sponsored social welfare programs. It will be called a worldwide ‘social democracy’ but it will be a socialist oligarchy. 

In preparation for this new order, ‘we’ shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste. “Offering as it did the gifts of more time, greater stillness, more solitude (even if an excess of the latter sometimes resulted in loneliness), the pandemic provided an opportunity to think more deeply about who we are, what really matters and what we want, both as individuals and as a society.” Alone, we can undergo a “period of enforced collective reflection”—a very fine turn of phrase, indeed, for connoisseurs of adroit self-contradiction. And what shall ‘we’ think about? Our authors stand ready with helpful suggestions: “Do we know what is important? Are we too selfish and overfocused on ourselves? Do we give too great a priority and excessive time to our career? Are we slaves to consumerism?” Having already pointed us toward their preferred answers, Mssrs. Schwab and Malleret hit their ‘environmentalist’ key: “One clear message has emerged from this: nature is a formidable antidote to many of today’s ills.” “Nature makes us feel good.” Very well then, as the Sixties Left once insisted, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Forward with global governance in the name of climate protection.

“We need to change; we should change. But can we?” “Simply put, will we put into motion the Great Reset?” The Great Reset is “about making the world less divisive, less polluting, less destructive, more inclusive, more equitable and fairer than we left it in the pre-pandemic era.” And what can ‘we’ do to effect this consummation so devoutly to be wished? “The absolute prerequisite for a proper reset is greater collaboration and cooperation within and between countries.” Without “shared intentionality” to “act together towards a common goal” we “simply cannot progress.” In the face of the prospect of a world “even more divided, nationalistic and prone to conflicts than it is today,” ‘we’ have “an opportunity to embed greater societal equality and sustainability into the recovery, accelerating rather than delaying progress towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and unleashing a new era of prosperity.” For those so benighted as not to know what the “Goals” are, suffice it to say that they were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 (during the Obama administration) and center on the rather ambitious goal of ending poverty in the world.

Our authors are confident that this can be done because “a multitude of surveys conclude that we collectively desire change,” including “international surveys finding that a large majority of citizens around the world want the economic recovery from the corona crisis to prioritize climate change and to support a green recovery.” Quite apart from the question of how effective wishful thinking is likely to be, this raises a problem our authors do not consider. What “international survey” of public opinion could register public opinion in, say, China, Russia, or any of the other illiberal oligarchies? And if regimes still matter, where does that leave the claim that all ‘opinions,’ like all subatomic particles, are entitled to vibrate with equal velocity? And if they are, where does that leave this rather dodgy ‘we’ for which our authors so confidently speak?

Titus Livy: The History of Rome. Books I-V. Valerie M. Warrior translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.

Titus Livy: Rome’s Italian Wars. Books VI-X. J. C. Yardley translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Tocqueville describes the advance of equality in civil societies throughout the modern era in the West, an advance concurrent with the retreat of aristocracy. He identifies that the advent of Christianity as the archē of this movement, which he understands not as an effect of ‘History’ but as the increasing awareness by all human beings of their own nature as humans, beings equal first of all before God and therefore among one another. Philosophers, Tocqueville said, had understood this for centuries, but Christianity brought this truth to ‘the many.’ The eighteen centuries since Christianity began, civil-social equality or “democracy” had pervaded Christendom; America, he wrote, was the “sample democracy,” the regime in which democracy had been most thoroughly instantiated in the habits of mind and heart of the people. Such a civil society could support a republican regime, as in America, or a despotism, as in Russia. In time, it might also generate a new form of aristocracy or oligarchy—perhaps in the form of industrial corporations or in the form of an administrative state. (Or, one might now think, so combination of the two.) Tocqueville called upon the remaining aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it toward well-founded republicanism.

The reader of Tocqueville who comes to Livy will see a similar movement in the first pentad of The History of Rome. Rome moves from kingship to tyranny to aristocracy to a mixed regime that saw the plebeian class, ‘the many,’ gradually if unsteadily assume more ruling authority. Conflict between plebeians and patricians within the mixed regime continued throughout the second half of the fifth century BC, near the end of which time Marcus Furius Camillus first comes to sight as one of a set of eight newly-elected military tribunes. In Livy’s estimation, Camillus was the preeminent Roman statesman of his generation and more, a model statesman for any time or place.

In the sixty years preceding Camillus’ first election to high office, Romans enacted several important law enhancing plebeian authority. Perhaps the most important of these was introduced by plebeian tribune Gaius Terentilius Harsa in 462 BC. During a war with the Volsci, when both consuls were out of the city, leading the armies, Terentilius “spent several days complaining to the plebs about the arrogance of the patricians, criticizing in particular the power of the consuls as excessive and intolerant in a free state” (III.ix.173). In ridding themselves of the monarchy, Romans had merely exchanged one master for two. He proposed a law establishing the election of a five-man committee to “write up laws concerning the power of the consuls,” so that “the consuls’ whims and license would not serve in place of laws” (III.ix.174). Thwarted initially in the senate, the Terentilian Law would remain the focus of Roman class struggle for many years. 

By the mid-450s, in negotiations with the senators, the tribunes argued that if the patricians “disliked plebeian laws, they should allow lawmakers to be appointed jointly from plebeians and patricians who would pass measures that were advantageous to both sides and would ensure equality before the law” (III.xxxi.201)—the principle underlying the mixed regime as outlined by Aristotle. The patricians agreed, with the caveat that only a patrician could propose a law. A delegation was sent to Athens to “write down the famous laws of Solon and acquaint themselves with the institutions, laws, and customs of other Greek states” (III.xxxi.201). With this information in hand, in 451 BC the senate agreed to a major change in the regime, whereby authority passed from the consuls and the tribunate to a board of ten, the Decemvirate. “It did not last long” (III.xxxiii.201); within a year, the Decemvirs began to rule by terror over plebeians and senators alike. “If anyone should utter a word that was reminiscent of liberty, either in the senate or before the people, the rods and axes were immediately at the ready, if only to frighten the rest” (III.xxxvi.207). They employed squads of young patricians as enforcers, granting them the property of those they beheaded. “Corrupted by these rewards, the young nobles not only did not resist such injustice but openly preferred license for themselves, rather than liberty for everyone” (III.iiivii.208). By 449 BC, “liberty was mourned as lost forever” (III.iiixiii.209).

It took a military emergency, a Sabine invasion of Roman territory concurrent with an Aequian attack on Rome’s allies, the Etruscans, to move the senate to action. Senator Marcus Horatius Barbatus now called the Decemvirs “the Ten Tarquins” (III.iiiix.211), but the senators, hating the plebeian tribunate even more than the Decemvirs, failed to move against them. After the leading Decemvir committed an outrage against a plebeian girl and plebeian soldiers refused to fight until the tribunate was restored, the senate yielded, abolishing the first Decemvirate and allowing a new election of plebeian tribunes and reestablishing the consuls. Moreover, laws enabling the plebeians to self-legislate, restoring the right of appeal of a consul’s judgment (“the sole defense of liberty”), and establishing the sacrosanctity of the tribunes ensured that return to old institutions did not leave the plebeians back where they had begun before the founding of the Decemvirate (III.lv.229-30). This enhancement of ‘the democracy’ even reached the army, as Horatius, now a consul leading troops against the Sabines, assured his men that “whatever strategy and spirit I am going to use will be up to you soldiers” (III.lx.239). After the victories, when the senate refused to grant a triumph to either victorious consul, the people themselves granted them a triumph—the “first time [that] a triumph was celebrated at the bidding of the people,” through their tribal councils, “without the authorization of the senate” (III.lxiii.241).

Factional strife continued, nonetheless. Although the plebeians “were quiet,” “the younger patricians began to maltreat them” again (III.lxv.243). They did so in accord with “cabals of the more powerful” (III.lxv.244). The tribunes were too weak to protect the plebs and, “on the other hand, the older senators, though thinking their young men too headstrong, preferred to have their excessive spirit on their own side rather than that of their adversaries, if moderation had to be disregarded” (III.lxv.244). Livy comments, “So difficult it is to be moderate in the defense of freedom. By pretending to want equality, an individual raises himself up in order to put another down. By protecting themselves against fear, men actually make themselves the object of fear, and, when they have defended themselves from injustice, we proceed to injure others, as if it were a necessity either to do or to suffer wrong.” (III.lxv.244).

A few years later, another step towards democratization occurred with the passage of the Lex Canuleia. Plebeian tribune Gaius Canuleius proposed a law reinstating marriage between patricians and plebeians. When the senate tried to promote a war scare to distract the plebeians, Canuleius blocked the troop levy and demanded discussion of his bill. Complaining that “the tribunes’ madness could no longer be tolerated” and “that there was more war being stirred up at home than abroad,” the consuls charged that passage of the law would only reward sedition, encouraging it in the future” (IV.ii.254-55). “The patricians,” they continued, “should recall the majesty of the senate that they had inherited from their fathers, which they were likely to pass on to their children in a diminished state; whereas the plebs could boast of their growing strength and importance. There was no end to this, nor would there be one as long as the leaders of sedition gained office in proportion to the success of their sedition.” (IV.ii.255). Intermarriage would “defile” patrician families “and create confusion in both public and private auspices, so that nothing should be pure, nothing unpolluted,” and “no one would recognize himself or his own kin” while “patricians and plebeians mat[ed] together like beasts” (IV.ii.255). What is more, another proposed law would allow plebeians to be elected to the consulship itself; “leaders of the rabble were now getting themselves ready” to assume that hitherto distinguished office (IV.ii.255).

In reply, Canuleius argued that plebeians are “fellow-citizens” who “inhabit the same native land, even though we do not possess the same wealth” (IV.iii.256). Citizenship is “more than intermarriage,” and we plebeians already have it (IV.iii.256). He asked the plebeians, “Don’t you realize in what an atmosphere of contempt you live. They would deprive you of part of the daylight, if they could. They resent the fact that you breathe, that you speak, that you look like human beings,” claiming in effect that “it is a religious abomination to elect a plebeian consul.” (IV.iii.257). But in fact many kings of Rome were foreigners. “As long as no stock was spurned that was prominent for excellence, Roman dominion increased”; foreigners can become patricians and consuls but according to patricians most native Romans should not marry into the patrician class or be elected to a consulship (IV.iii.257). Some of “the vilest of mortals” were patricians who served as Decemvirs; some of “the best of the kings” were “newcomers” (IV.iii.258).

“Must no innovation be made?” (IV.iv.258). If so, no pontiffs or augurs would have been created by Numa, no census and division by centuries and classes by Servius Tullius, no consuls after the expulsion of the monarchs. “Who doubts that, in a city that is founded for eternity and is growing immeasurably, new powers, priesthoods, and rights of families and individuals should be established?” (IV.iv.258). And as for intermarriage between members of the two classes, no one will be compelled “to make a marriage contract against his will” (IV.iv.259). The children will belong to the father’s class, and the parents of the couple will choose whether they approve of this outcome.

Finally, and crucially, “does the ultimate power belong to the Roman people or to you,” the patricians, or do “all men” in Rome deserve “equal liberty”? (IV.v.260). For their part, the plebeians “are ready for your wars, be they genuine or false, on the following conditions: if you finally unify this citizen body by restoring the right of intermarriage; if they are enabled to unite, be connected and joined with you in the ties of family and kinship; if brave and vigorous men are given hope and access to high offices; if they are granted a share in the partnership of government; and if, as is the mark of true liberty, they are allowed to take their turn, both in obeying the annually elected magistrates and in exercising magisterial power” (IV.v.260). Livy’s Canuleius defines liberty exactly as Aristotle defines politics, as ruling and being ruled in turn; to complete the resemblance, a law permitting patrician-plebeian intermarriage tracks Aristotle’s location of political relations in the household relationship between husband and wife, where the habit of ruling an being ruled in turn originates.

The marriage law passed. Election of plebeian consuls did not win favor, but the two factions reached a compromise whereby patricians and plebeians alike could elect military tribunes with consular power. In the first such election, all those elected were patricians. “Where will you now find”—under the regime of the emperor Augustus—in “one individual that moderation, fairness, and loftiness of mind that characterized the entire people at that time?” (V.vi.262). Democratization took another step forward.

Plebeian advancement hardly moderated factionalism, however. If, as James Madison wrote, republicanism is to faction as air is to fire, Rome could not escape that danger. Livy considers it dangerous, indeed: Factional strife “has brought and will continue to bring destruction to more people than have foreign wars, famine, disease, or other national disasters that men attribute to the anger of the gods” (IV.ix.266). And, given the fact cited by Canuleius, that Rome was “growing immeasurably,” one source of faction might well be the “various kinds of religious practice, mostly foreign, [which] assailed [Roman] minds,” especially during times of drought and plague, practices that arise “because men who make a profit from superstition-prone people were posing as seers and introducing new rituals of sacrifice into Roman homes,” rituals imported from Greece which turned Romans’ attention away from the noble and politic Olympians towards the cthonic gods of the underworld. And finally, the ever-calculating patricians often blunted plebeian sway by persuasive speech “if,” as one smart senator put it, “from time to time they adopted a rhetoric that was mindful of the situation rather than their own grandeur” (IV.xlviii.314-315). With a bit less self-preening grandiloquence, a couple of tribunes usually could be found to veto the democratizing proposals of the others. Once the senators voted to pay the soldiers, the same senator hit upon the notion of demanding year-round military service, which would keep many plebeians out of the city and away from political life.

Such was the political condition of Rome in 403 BC, when Marcus Furius Camillus won election as one of eight military tribunes. Since (as editor Kathleen Warrior observes) a camillus is a boy who assists priests in religious rites, it is likely that he was understood to be a pious young man, and he remained mindful of the gods throughout his career. He exhibited virtue beyond that of his colleagues several years later in a war against the Veientines. The war had not gone well, but when Camillus was chosen as dictator “the change of commander suddenly changed everything. Men’s hopes were different, their spirits different; even the fortunes of the city seemed different” (V.xix.356-57).

Why? First, while still in Rome, he unhesitatingly re-imposed military discipline on the soldiers who “had fled in panic from Veii” during the initial engagement (V.xix.357)—discipline being central to the Roman way of war. He thereby “prov[ed] that the enemy was not the worst thing that the soldiers had to fear” (V.xix.357). He also declared a military levy to raise fresh troops for the campaign before “hastening in person to Veii to strengthen the soldiers’ morale” (V.xix.357). Returning to Rome, he made a religious vow to celebrate the Great Games and to restore and rededicate a temple if his troops were victorious. 

Thus prepared, he fought a couple of minor battles as he proceeded toward Veii. “All his actions were carried out with consummate planning and strategy and so, as is usual, were attended with good fortune” (V.xix.357); for the Livyan statesman, Fortuna cannot be mastered, but at times she can be persuaded. He had most of the spoils turned over to the quaestor, the treasurer, “and not too much to the soldiers,” whose minds he wanted to concentrate on fighting not pillaging (V.xix.357). Upon reaching Veii, he commanded the men to build forts and to refrain from fighting without orders; they also built a tunnel into the enemy citadel, working the men in six-hour shifts to prevent exhaustion and to ensure that the work would be continuous. “There was no letup by night or day until they had made their way into the citadel” (V.xix.358). Rightly anticipating victory, but knowing what controversy distribution of the spoils from such “a very wealthy city” would spark, he turned the matter over to the senate, which eventually decided to solidify plebeian approval for the expedition by giving them a share (V.xx.358). Finally, before engaging the enemy, he spoke a public prayer to Pythian Apollo, vowing a tenth of the spoils to his temple, while vowing to Veii’s divine patroness, Juno Regina, “a temple worthy of your greatness” in Rome if she switches sides—a traditional ritual of evocation described by Fustel de Coulanges (V.xxi.359). Camillus proceeded “to attack the city from all directions with overwhelming numbers in order to minimize the perception of the danger that was coming from the tunnel” (V.xxi.359). Victory came easily and the Veientine citizens were sold into slavery, the money going to the state treasury. “This was the fall of Veii, the wealthiest city of the Etruscan people, which showed her greatness even in her final overthrow. For ten continuous summers and winters she was besieged, inflicting more disasters than she sustained. In the end, when even fate was against her, she was taken,” like Troy, “by siegeworks and not by force.” (V.xxii.362).

In a military republic, the path to political prominence will pass through the battlefield. So with Camillus. As a military commander, Camillus distinguished himself from his contemporaries by exhibiting the ability to organize. Even before he had engaged the enemy he planned for ‘the postwar’ in a way that showed his recognition of the political factions in Rome and his intention to moderate them. Indeed, one of the few mistakes he made in his career occurred during the magnificent triumph he was granted upon his return to the city. He rode into the city “in a chariot drawn by four white horses, seemingly superior to not only citizens but also mortals. Men thought it tantamount to sacrilege that the dictator was making himself the equal of Jupiter and the Sun by using these horses.” (V.xxiii.362). He further offended the plebeians by following through on his pious promise to allocate a portion of the spoils to Apollo and his priests instead of giving it all to the plebeians.

On this latter point, Camillus stood his ground against this “disgraceful contentiousness,” “harangu[ing] the people over and over again” for being “more concerned about everything else than about discharging its religious obligation” (V.xxv.364-65). The senate backed him, but “as soon as men’s minds were relieved of their religious obligation, the plebeian tribunes renewed their political unrest, arousing the crowd against all the leading men, but especially against Camillus” (V.xxv.365). The senators, however, elected him to the military tribunate in 394 BC. 

In the ongoing war with the Faliscans, Camillus exhibited the virtue of justice alongside his well-established virtues of courage and prudence. A Greek tutor of some children of Faliscan aristocrats led his students to the Roman camp, offering them to Camillus as hostages. Camillus spurned the offer. “A criminal yourself,” he told the Greek, “you have come with a criminal gift to a people and a general who are not like you” (V.xxvii.367); that is, your ethos and ours contradict. Further, not man but “nature” implants that ethos in we Romans: “There are laws of war as well as of peace, and we have learned to exercise them justly, no less than bravely” (V.xxvii.367). He will conquer the Faliscans “by Roman skills, valor, siegeworks. and arms, just as I did at Veii” (V>xxvii.367). “He had the man stripped, his hands tied behind his back, and gave him to the boys to be led back to Falerii, handing them rods with which they were to beat the traitor as they drove him back into the city” (V.xxvii.367). When the Faliscans saw the children, “the entire citizen body now united in demanding peace,” praising “Roman fair dealing [fide or trustworthiness] and their commander’s sense of justice” (V.xxvii.368). Faliscan ambassadors went to Rome and told the senators that “you and your commander have won a victory over us that neither a god nor man could begrudge,” having convinced us by this act that “we shall live better lives under your rule than under our laws” (V.xxvii.368). They surrendered, and “Camillus was thanked by both the enemy and his fellow citizens” (V.xxvii.36). In sharp contrast to their treatment of the Veientines, the senate merely required the Faliscans to pay the salaries of the Roman soldiers for the year. “Camillus returned to the city, distinguished by a far better kind of glory than when the four white horses had drawn him in triumph into the city, since he had conquered the enemy by justice and fair dealing” (V.xxviii.368).

In addition to the dispute over the distribution of the Veientine war spoils, the plebeians also coveted Veientine land, some going so far as to say that they would prefer to move the capital of Rome to Veii. Two plebeian tribunes who opposed this and vetoed the bill were indicted by their colleagues and heavily fined. “Camillus openly charged the plebs with wrongdoing, since they had turned against their own and failed to understand that they had subverted their veto by their perverse judgment of the tribunes and, by subverting their veto, overthrown tribunician power” (V.xxix.371). Recalling his successful prayer to Juno Regina to leave Veii and accept a Roman temple as her new home, “he thought it a sacrilege that a city that had been deserted and abandoned by the immortal gods should be inhabited” (V.xxx.371). On the basis of this religious appeal, the senators went amongst their own tribes, “begging them not to drive the Roman people into the city of their enemies,” deserting their household gods (V.xxx.372). The appeal worked, and the tribes rejected the bill by one vote. The senators then apportioned Veientine farmland to every plebeian family, while keeping the city itself uninhabited.

Still resentful of Camillus’ intervention on the issue of the Veientine spoils, a plebeian tribune indicted him. To avoid the dishonor of an unjust conviction, Camillus went into exile in 391 BC.

That same year, a new and formidable enemy appeared, attacking the Etruscans. The Gauls turned toward the Etruscan town of Clusium, a Roman ally, which desperately requested Roman aid. The Romans sent envoys to negotiate a settlement with this unknown invader. The envoys failed to negotiate a peace settlement, rejecting the Gallic demand for some Clusian territory and the envoys themselves “took up arms, contrary to the law of nations” (V.xxxvi.379). When the Gauls sent ambassadors to Rome to protest this conduct, the plebeians elected those same envoys to the military tribunate “When this happened, the Gauls were enraged, as they had every right to be, and returned to their own people, openly uttering threats” (V.xxxvi.380). The Gallic army then advanced on Rome.

With “tribunes whose rashness had brought about the war” in “supreme command” of Roman forces, the city lacked adequate defenses because no one had anticipated such a sudden attack. That is, Romans had lacked exactly the things the exiled statesman excelled in; prudent foresight and the ability to rightly order an army. Defeated in a battle near the Allia River, most of the Roman troops fled to Veii, leaving Rome unguarded. The few remaining men of military age and the senators withdrew to the citadel, and a plebeian brought the Vestals and many of the city’s sacred objects to Caere. The Gauls entered the capital unopposed, but were repelled by the defenders of the citadel; having found no grain in the city that would support a siege of its citadel, they simply withdrew, taking to plundering the surrounding countryside.

At Ardea, Camillus was “grieving more for the fortune of the state than his own,” blaming gods and men alike (V.xliii.388). “In wonder and indignation”—in mind and in heart—he “asked where were those heroes who, with him, had taken Veii and Falerii and also waged other wars often with more bravery than good fortune” (V.xliii.388). His lamentations were cut short when he learned that the Gauls were approaching Ardea. At that, “touched by nothing less than divine inspiration,” he headed for the Ardean assembly to rally the people (V.xliii.388). Citing their “shared danger,” he offered the Ardeans the service of one whose “skill” in wartime service gave him high standing in his native land (“unconquered in war, I was driven out by my ungrateful citizens in a time of peace”) (V.xliv.389). Establishing the common ground for action and his hosts’ need for his military prowess, he next assessed the enemy. The Gauls are “a race to whom nature has given a physique and a spirit that are large rather than reliable”; they “bring more terror than strength into every conflict” (V.xliv.389). As proof, he pointed to their actions after their conquest of Rome. Instead of taking it over, they have taken to wandering through the countryside, filling themselves “with the food and wine they have hastily consumed” and laying themselves down to sleep “like wild beasts, without any protection, any guards or outposts” (V.xliv.389). Now is the time to strike, “when they are constrained by sleep and ready to be butchered like cattle” (V.xliv.389).

And so they were. Meanwhile, at Veii, the Roman army reorganized, “a strong body [that] lacked a head” (V.xlvi.391). Reminded of Camillus simply by being in Veii, the city he had conquered, upon the approval of the senate the soldiers summoned Camillus from Ardea. In Rome itself, a contingent of Gauls launched a night attack; the Romans were awakened by the sacred geese of Juno, which hadn’t been killed and eaten by the besieged but still pious Romans in the citadel. Although they warded off the attack, they were starving and soon capitulated to the besieging Gauls.

“Both gods and men prevented the Romans from living as a ransomed people” (V.xlix.394). Camillus and his forces arrived, routing the Gauls in two battles. “Everywhere the slaughter was total” (V.xlix.395). Camillus “was hailed with sincere praise as a Romulus and as father of his country and second founder of the city” (V.xlix.395). But once again Camillus thought not only of the war but its aftermath. The plebeians and their tribunes again wanted to migrate to Veii, now that Rome had been burned by the invaders. Camillus therefore did not resign his dictatorship after receiving his triumph but moved to prevent the migration. 

As before, he first attended to religious obligations. In gratitude to the citizens of Caere for receiving Rome’s sacred objects, permitting worship of the gods to proceed uninterrupted, Rome should “establish ties of hospitality” with them; additionally, Capitoline Games should be held in honor of “Jupiter Best and Greatest,” who has “protected his own abode and the citadel of the Roman people at a time of peril” (V.l.396). Addressing the citizens of Rome, Camillus took the occasion to deplore the plebeians’ intention to leave the city, despite “the religious obligations established” at its founding and the most recent evidence of the gods’ favor, allowing the city’s recovery from the Gauls. With this, “I would think that no human being will ever neglect the gods’ worship” (V.li.398). Punished by the gods for having violated the law of nations, making us “an object lesson to all the world,” Romans nevertheless enjoyed divine mercy because they never departed from “our worship of the gods” (V.li.398). “Therefore they have restored to us our homeland, victory, and the longstanding renown for warfare that we had lost,” turning “terror, flight, and slaughter upon our enemy” (V.li.398). As there is “no place [in Rome] that is not filled with a sense of religion and gods,” will you plebeians now “abandon all these gods,” “both those of the state and those of the family” in time of peace, when no necessity requires it? (V.lii.398-99).

Apart from these religious considerations, he continued, it would be “pitiful and shameful for us, but glorious for the Gauls” if Romans abandoned Rome (V.liii.401); the Gauls would return and occupy the deserted city where the Capitol and the citadel still stand, despite the destruction of so much else. A city is more than its infrastructure. “Does the soil of our homeland and the earth that we call our mother have no hold on us? Does our love for our homeland depend on buildings and their beams?” (V.liv.402). Not only the gods of Rome but the nature upon which Rome rests—its “hills and plains, the Tiber and the region familiar to my eyes, and this sky beneath which in was born and reared”—these too are Rome (V.liv.402). To this patriotic sentiment he joins an appeal to reason. “Not without reason did gods and men choose this place for the foundation of a city—the health-giving hills; a convenient river by which crops can be brought down from inland areas and foreign goods received from abroad; a sea nearby for usefulness, though not exposed by being too near to danger from foreign fleets; an area in the middle of Italy—a place, indeed, uniquely and naturally suited to the growth of a city” (V.liv.402). With an oath, he condemns the intention to leave such a sacred place with such natural, rationally understandable features. “Though your valor may be able to go elsewhere”—he is careful not to impugn their virtue, the source of their pride in Romanness—the “fortune of this place surely cannot be transferred” (V.liv.403).

As that fortune would have it, a centurion passed through the Curia Hostilia with his cohort as the senators deliberated. He called for his men to plant the standard, saying, “It will be best for us to stay here” (V.lv.403). Fortified with an event which they could interpret as a good omen, the senators rejected the migration bill and the plebeians concurred with their decision. They began to rebuild the city. “The city was then reborn, from its original roots, as it were, with greater vigor and fecundity, and from that point on, from its second beginning, its history on the home front and in the military field will be presented with greater clarity and certitude” (VI.i.6).

After this new founding, “the city’s stability initially depended on the support it found in its leading citizen,” “who was also the prop responsible for its recovery” (VI.i.3) and indeed “the mainstay of Rome” (VI.iii.5). Camillus presided over the first elections of military tribunes in the renewed city before overseeing the conduct of wars against the Etruscans, the Volsci, the Latins, and the Hernici, peoples hoping to take advantage of Rome’s apparent weakness. By now, his military reputation was so great that his mere arrival at a foreign city would cause it to surrender, as the Etruscans did at Satricum.

While “his colleagues admitted that, when there was any urgent threat of war, the overall direction of affairs should rest with one man, and they had already decided that their imperium should be secondary to his” (VI.vii.11), one patrician of “illustrious reputation,” Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, envied his preeminence (VI.xi.15). Observing that “his own influence among the senators was not as great as he felt it should be,” Manlius “became the first of all senators to champion the popular cause” (VI.xi.15). “Denouncing the senators and flirting with the commons, he was driven along by popular favor rather than by his use of judgement, preferring to have a grand reputation rather than a good one” (VI.xi.15). He conspired with groups of plebs, pointing out that the same men who showed such bravery in battle in building an empire, in ruling foreigners, lost their spirit when “attempting to achieve (rather than defend) liberty” (VI.xviii.24). When arrested and arraigned before the senate, the prosecutors turned the plebeians against him by charging him with aspirations to monarchy. He was executed, thrown off the Tarpeian Rock.

Camillus needed to do nothing to counter Manlius’ threat to the regime, but in Lucius Furius, a young military tribune who incited the soldiers against him in their campaign against the Latin city Praeneste. Its citizens had defected from it alliance with Rome, then joined with the Volscians to seize Satricum, now colonized by the Romans, whom they abused. “The Romans were angry over this,” and appointed aging Camillus as the sixth member of the military tribunate (VI.xxii.29). When the Roman army arrived in front of Satricum, Camillus deliberately held back from attacking, “seeking to use strategy to augment his strength” before doing so (VI.xxiii.30). Infuriated by the enemy’s taunts, the soldiers listened to the impatient younger tribune, who told them that “the old man’s ideas were feeble and spiritless” (VI.xxiii.30). Far from countermanding his impatient young colleague, who was legally his equal in the command, Camillus contented himself with building up the reserve forces and positioning himself “on some higher ground, where he kept a close eye on how another’s strategy would turn out” (VI.xxiii.31).

It did not turn out well. In their over-eagerness to attack and pursue, the Roman troops under Lucius Furius’ command overextended themselves and fell victim to the enemy’s counterattack. As the Romans retreated in disorder, Camillus intervened, shamed them into following him, and reassigned the chastened Lucius to the cavalry command. Camillus regrouped the infantry, and personally led them to victory. But this lesson in the advantage of experience over youth isn’t the main lesson Livy intends to draw. That comes in his account of Camillus’ conduct after returning to Rome, seeking senate approval for a campaign against Tusculum. Although everyone in the army and in Rome “was saying the same thing, that amid the fluctuating fortunes of the war with the Volsci the blame for the unsuccessful battle and flight lay with Lucius Furius, while all the kudos for the successful engagement went to Marcus Furius,” when he was asked to name his adjutant in the campaign against the Etruscans Camillus “took everyone by surprise and chose Lucius Furius” (VI.xxv.33). “By such forbearance Camillus alleviated his colleague’s disgrace while at the same time winning great distinction for himself” (VI.xxv.33). When they learned of Camillus’ appointment and saw his troops marching into their territory, the Etruscans wisely sued for peace. Having “won fame for his prudence and bravery in the war with the Volsci,” he won it again for “his outstanding forbearance and self-restraint to his colleague in both operations” and for the resultant peace with the Etruscans (VI.xxvii.35). He stepped down after once again overseeing the election of the next year’s military tribunes.

Plebeian agitation recurred. The senate attempted to dampen the unrest by keeping the plebeians out of the city on military expeditions, but plebeian tribunes Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextus organized resistance around three bills: one to reduce debt by deducting monies already paid in interest from the principal of the loan; another to limit the extent of rural property allowed to any one property owner, which would reduce patrician sway in the countryside; and a third to prohibit the election of military tribunes and to require that one of the two consuls be a plebeian. “What was being proposed put at risk simultaneously those things for which all human beings have an inordinate craving: land, money, and high office” (VI.xxxv.44-45). By the year 369 BC, Licinius and Sextus had become “experts at manipulating the feelings of the plebs” (VI.xxxvi.46).

Elected dictator once again, this time to face a domestic threat, Camillus addressed the tribal councils, which were considering these bills. As before, he argued that “tribunician capriciousness” undermined the veto the plebs had won by their secession (VI.xxxviii.49). When the tribunes “reacted with disdain” to this, Camillus threatened to conscript all men of military age and take them out of the city; this “struck sheer terror into the plebs” but not into the plebeian tribunes (VI.xxxviii.49). Camillus resigned, probably (in Livy’s judgment) because it was discovered that the auspices conducted prior to his election were unfavorable. All the bills passed, and in the following year, having been reinstated as dictator, he negotiated a compromise whereby the plebeians were guaranteed one plebeian tribune in exchange for patrician control of the office of praetor, the official charged with overseeing the law courts. “So it was that, after a long period of bad blood between them, the orders were restored to harmony” (VI.xlii.56). Camillus died two years later, in 365 BC, “certainly a man without peer in all circumstances” (VII.i.57).

The factual accuracy of Livy’s account may be left to historians. Since Livy writes a political history in both senses of the word—a history of how Rome was ruled and a guide for Roman citizens and statesmen—his reader should first of all consider his account in light of that intention, attending to the lessons the historian finds in his portrait of Camillus. What made him peerless in all circumstances?

Camillus confronted troubles arising from the increasing democratization of republican politics in Rome. As a military republic, Romans united across class lines in honoring warlike virtues, as the patricians found glory in battle, the plebeians protection. The plebeians often went so far as to defer their demands for democratization of Roman institutions to the need for mutual defense, although their leaders would sometimes persuade them to withhold military service in exchange for political concessions. Even military success brought difficulties with it, as territorial expansion could lead to sharpened factionalism, thanks (for example) to the introduction of foreign religions.

As a military tribune, Camillus imposed discipline on his troops through a combination of force, religiosity, and morale-building rhetoric. Having established that indispensable prerequisite to victory, he attained victory itself with careful planning, overwhelming numbers, and careful division of war spoils between soldiers, ordinary citizens, and priests. That is, he exhibited the virtues of courage (fighting in the front line with his men), prudence (holding back, for example, when young Lucius Furius insisted on attacking Satricum without adequate preparation), and justice both in punishing dereliction of duty and in distributing rewards. After his display of hubris during his first triumph, he learned moderation, as well. Finally, he exhibited the crowning virtue, magnanimity, remaining loyal to Rome during his exile in Ardea (a small-souled man would have delighted in the Gauls’ humiliating conquest of his city) and in rescuing rash Furius from retaliation and installing him as second-in-command for his next campaign. In rescuing Rome first from the Gauls and then from the Romans themselves, when the plebeians wanted to abandon the city for what they took to be greener pastures, doing so in the latter case with words not deeds, invoking religiously-grounded patriotism. 

Above all, he served as a one-man balance-wheel in Rome’s ‘mixed’ regime, opposing the plebeians’ passions when they threatened to dominate the patricians (while forbearing with Furius, he made no attempt to rescue the rabble-rousing Manlius Capitolinus). When opposed by the plebeian demagogues, he refrained from force and forbearance alike, preferring to negotiate a political settlement whereby both plebeians and patricians were accorded institutional privileges. More than once, he presided over elections of officials replacing him. 

Camillus was indeed the mainstay of the republic. In effect, he served as a sort of much-needed monarch, one careful to act and speak in ways that preserved the regime by alternatively granting and denying plebeian ambition to rule. As such, he demonstrated the grandeur of Rome while exhibiting its weakness. Absent ‘the one,’ and a supremely virtuous ‘one’ at that, ‘the many’ and ‘the few’ would continue their rivalry, and factionalism would at last ruin the republic. Rome needed a middle class to go along with the occasional middle man.