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Reconsidering Roman power

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Katell Berthelot

The dynamics of power

Devastation: the destruction of populations and human landscapes and the Roman imperial project

Myles Lavan

Resumen

This paper explores how the violence that Roman forces deployed against enemy and rebel populations was represented in Roman culture. Although the imperial elite did not think that they engaged in mass destruction widely or indiscriminately, they regarded the capacity to destroy human populations and their landscapes as an essential aspect of Roman power. Long after the period of rapid expansion in the late Republic, a language of erasure (verbs such as deleo, excido, tollo and uasto) remained an essential part of the lexicon of aristocratic achievement and good government, its connotations of ameliorative action euphemising the violence it described. In the visual sphere, images of Roman soldiers torching enemy settlements and barbarian families atomised through slaughter and enslavement were elevated into symbols of the enduring triumph of the imperial order against the enemies that threatened it. The paper traces the connections between the iconography of devastation on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, the language of erasure in Roman public discourse and the idea of annihilating whole peoples. The goal is to elucidate the verbal and visual tropes that elevated mass destruction by representing it as part of a larger imperial project.

Texto completo

Where they create a desert they call it peace. (Calgacus at Tacitus, Agricola 30.5)

We pitched camp for four days near Alexander’s Altars in the foothills of the Amanus, employing the whole period in erasing whatever was left in the mountains and devastating the countryside. (Cicero, Ad Fam., 15.4.9)

  • 1 This paper benefitted greatly from robust discussion at the Regarding Roman Power conference in Ma (...)
  • 2 The imagery of devastation is comparable in its polyvalence to the imagery of slavery and mastery. (...)
  • 3 Brunt 1978, p. 183-184; Harris 1979, p. 50-53 and 263-264; Veyne 1993, p. 353-359; Ziolkowski 1993 (...)

1A landscape emptied of human life is a powerful image of the effects of empire.1 It is most familiar from the (imagined) rhetoric of empire’s victims, as in the famous speech of Tacitus’ Calgacus. Yet claims that Roman arms have destroyed human landscapes are no less at home in the report of a Roman senator such as Cicero. Responding to the editors’ invitation to reflect on how Roman power is imagined, this paper explores the polyvalence of the imagery of devastation.2 Since its appeal to the victims of empire, real and imagined, is relatively obvious, I concentrate on its significance for the Roman imperial elite. Many scholars have already drawn attention to the brutal violence that Roman forces employed against enemies and rebels.3 My concern here is not violence per se, but how it was represented in Roman culture. I explore representations of the destruction of populations and their human landscapes (settlements, cultivated land and livestock), tracing the connections between an iconography of devastation (images of the torching of native settlements and the dissolution of barbarian families), a language of erasure (verbs such as deleo, uasto, tollo and excido) and the idea of annihilating whole peoples. The goal is to elucidate the verbal and visual tropes that elevated mass destruction by representing it as part of a larger imperial project.

  • 4 See e.g. Gell. NA. 6.3.52 on Cato the Elder’s speech on the Rhodians (nunc clementiae, nunc mansue (...)
  • 5 Van Wees 2010.

2The argument requires two qualifications. First, I certainly do not mean to imply that the ruling elite saw the destruction of subject populations as the telos of the Roman imperial project. On the contrary, they prided themselves on the rarity and restraint with which they resorted to such measures. It is a commonplace of Latin literature that Rome was distinctive in the consideration it showed towards defeated enemies and its willingness to co-opt them as future allies.4 But the idealisation of this policy never entailed a rejection of annihilation as an imperial strategy, to be employed selectively whenever it was appropriate. In situations where annihilation seemed necessary, it was described frankly and without any explicit justification. Second, Roman culture is in no way unusual in this respect. The images and texts discussed here stand at the end of a long Near Eastern and Mediterranean discourse of state formation and empire, in which the capacity to destroy populations and landscapes was an important index of state power.5 The point is that Rome was no exception to this tradition, not even under an emperor as supposedly enlightened as Marcus Aurelius.

The iconography of victory

  • 6 Josephus uses ἐρημία two to three times more often than Thucydides, Xenophon and Arrian and around (...)
  • 7 Josephus, B.J. 6.6-8 and 7.115.
  • 8 Ibid. 1.355.
  • 9 Ibid. 5.373.
  • 10 Ibid. 6.288.
  • 11 Ibid. 7.403.

3I begin not with the rebel ‘Calgacus’, the construct of a Roman historian, but with a real outsider, the Judaean aristocrat and historian Josephus. The imagery of devastation plays an important role in his Bellum Judaicum. One crude index of its importance is the fact that Josephus uses the noun ἐρημία ("desert", "desolation") significantly more often than any other Greek historian.6 Of course Josephus’ narrative is set in a desert landscape and the Roman siege of Jerusalem clearly devastated the city’s hinterland. Yet these real deserts are not sufficient explanation for the thematic importance of desert imagery in the narrative, as a few prominent examples should illustrate. Josephus twice highlights the devastating effects of the siege of Jerusalem by describing the city as having been reduced to desert (ἐρημία).7 But the image is also used more widely, standing by synecdoche for the entire disaster that befell the Jews. It appears first in Book 1, in what appears to be a foreshadowing of the coming catastrophe. After Herod captures Jerusalem with Roman support in 37 BCE, he intervenes to stop the Romans sacking the city, saying that it would leave him "king of a desolation (ἐρημίας βασιλεύς)" – an ominous intimation of what is to come.8 Later, Titus urges the Jews in Jerusalem to surrender, promising leniency since it is not in the Romans' interest to have "either a depopulated city or a devastated country (χώρα ἔρημος)", again anticipating the ultimate outcome of the war.9 The synecdoche is even clearer in Josephus’ account of the portents that had presaged the destruction of the Temple but been ignored: "They neither heeded nor believed in the manifest portents that foretold the coming desolation (ἐρημία)".10 It is also significant that the image appears again at the end of the final act of the war, when the Romans enter Masada, after the mass suicide of its defenders, to find nothing but "an awful desolation (ἐρημία)".11 In short, the desertification of Jerusalem’s hinterland during the war seems to have been transformed into a central image of the awful outcome of the revolt against Rome.

4Josephus’ description of the great Flavian triumph of 71 CE is well integrated into this system of imagery. He describes an extraordinary procession including soldiers, 700 choice captives, the spoils of war, wild beasts, statues of the gods, ships and a series of floats presenting a visual narrative of the war – on which he dwells at length:

  • 12 Ibid. 7.139-146, trans. Thackeray (Loeb).

But nothing in the procession excited so much astonishment as the structure of the moving stages; indeed, their massiveness afforded ground for alarm and misgiving as to their stability, many of them being three or four stories high, while the magnificence of the fabric was a source at once of delight and amazement. For many were enveloped in tapestries interwoven with gold, and all had a framework of gold and wrought ivory. The war was shown by numerous representations, in separate sections, affording a very vivid picture of its episodes. Here was to be seen a prosperous country devastated, there whole battalions of the enemy slaughtered; here a party in flight, there others led into captivity; walls of surpassing compass demolished by engines, strong fortresses overpowered, cities with well-manned defences completely mastered and an army pouring within the ramparts, an area all deluged with blood, the hands of those incapable of resistance raised in supplication, temples set on fire, houses pulled down over their owners’ heads, and, after general desolation (ἐρημία) and woe, rivers flowing, not over a cultivated land, nor supplying drink to man and beast, but across a country still on every side in flames. For to such sufferings were the Jews destined when they plunged into the war; and the art and magnificent workmanship of these structures now portrayed the incidents to those who had not witnessed them, as though they were happening before their eyes.12

5The focus on destruction and desolation is striking. What Josephus describes is a representation of the devastating aftermath of Roman victory rather than the war itself. This must be at least partly a matter of perspective or focalisation. It would be no surprise if a Jewish viewer focused on the intimations of devastation in a broader iconographic program. And Josephus has very good reason to do so, given the importance of the imagery of desolation in his narrative. So there are good grounds not to take Josephus’s account at face value as a description of the iconography of the Flavian triumph. But there are other, independent reasons to think that his reading is not just an example of discrepant experience – a Jewish viewer reading it with very different emphases than a metropolitan Roman. Other evidence suggests that imagery of devastation was indeed a central feature of the Roman iconography of victory.

  • 13 See Östenberg 2009, p. 189-261 for a survey.
  • 14 Scenes are cited following the now standard system of Petersen, Domaszewski and Calderini 1896. At (...)

6The question is complicated by the fact that the representations displayed in Roman triumphal processions were often ephemeral and have been lost.13 But echoes of their iconography survive in related genres. The parallels with Josephus’ description are best traced by working back from the single most graphic representation of Roman warfare to survive from the high empire, the column of Marcus Aurelius. Several of its recurring motifs are illustrated by Scene CII (fig. 1), one of numerous scenes showing the destruction of a native settlement by Roman troops.14

Fig. 1 – Column of Marcus Aurelius, Scene CII (from Petersen et al. 1896).

Fig. 1 – Column of Marcus Aurelius, Scene CII (from Petersen et al. 1896).
  • 15 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Robert 2000, p. 180.
  • 16 Zanker 2000, p. 167.

7The setting is evoked by the crude dwellings in the upper third of the composition. It has been captured by Roman soldiers, one of whom raises a burning torch to the roof of the building on the right; the structure to the left is already on fire. Another armoured soldier appears to be binding the hands of an unarmed German. Further to the right, two more Germans are having their arms bound behind their backs by two other soldiers. To the left of the soldier holding the torch are a woman and child. The woman raises a hand in a conventional gesture of supplication as she tries to shield her child.15 Her downturned face and what survives of her expression convey misery and mourning.16

  • 17 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 304-307.
  • 18 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Dillon 2006, p. 262.
  • 19 On the trope in this and other contexts, see especially Kampen 1991, p. 235; Zanker 1998, p. 59; D (...)
  • 20 Zanker 2000, p. 164-170.

8For the purposes of this paper, I want to focus on two symbolically important details in this composition. The first is the Roman soldier torching native buildings. This is a prominent motif on the column, neatly labelled "barbarism on fire" by Elizabeth Wolfram Thill. Seven scenes show native buildings being burnt or destroyed by Roman troops (more than half of all the scenes in which native buildings appear); they are emphasised by their concentration in the lower, more visible spirals of the column.17 These scenes encapsulate the destruction of human landscapes in a single recurring image that takes on a thematic importance in the column as a whole. The second symbolically significant detail is the manipulation of the family unit in the representation of the German men, woman and child. The natural family unit is literally broken up here by the armoured Roman soldier who stands between the first male captive and the woman and child. The figures are turned in opposite directions, suggesting a future apart. The intimation of the destruction of a family is heightened by the emasculation of the male figure (disarmed and bound) and by the vulnerability of the woman, whose unbound hair and bared shoulder suggest vulnerability and hint at the prospect of rape and enslavement.18 The presence of the child, representing the next generation, evokes the future – or rather the lack of a future for this particular family unit. The composition is a visual trope for the destruction of a population as a human community, as it is reduced to isolated captives without a collective future.19 Variations on it recur on numerous other scenes where women and children are separated from male figures who are killed or captured.20

  • 21 Zanker 2000, Dillon 2006.
  • 22 See e.g. Scenes XX and XCVII (women dragged by hair) and XCVIII (woman stabbed in the chest) with (...)
  • 23 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Ferris 2009, p. 115 and 120-121.
  • 24 Smith 1987, p. 115-119. See also Emmanuelle Rosso Caponio’s paper in this volume.

9The Aurelian column is unusual in its representation of warfare, not least in its use of images of women and children (though the corpus of comparable monuments and images is small).21 But its iconography did not emerge from nowhere. One of the column’s most striking features is its representation of overt violence against women: several Roman soldiers dragging Germanic women, sometimes by the hair, and even one stabbing a woman through the chest.22 Such violence against native women – presumably common in ancient warfare – is entirely absent from Trajan’s column and most earlier Roman public monuments. But the iconography of the Aurelian column was not entirely unprecedented.23 The lower register of the Gemma Augustea portrays a barbarian woman being dragged by her hair by a Roman auxiliary. The Sebasteion at Aphrodisias contained relief sculptures of female personifications of Britannia about to be killed by Claudius and Armenia slumped beneath Nero (both drawing on the Hellenistic Amazonomachy tradition).24

  • 25 Scenes are cited by the scene numbers assigned in Cichorius 1896.

10The two tropes that are my focus here – the Roman soldier torching native settlements and the fractured barbarian family – also had precedent. Although Roman violence against non-combatant populations is much more muted on Trajan’s column, antecedents for the motifs on the Aurelian column can be seen, for example, in Scenes XXIX and XXX (fig. 2).25

Fig. 2 – Trajan’s Column. Scenes XXIX and XXX (photo: Jon Coulston).

Fig. 2 – Trajan’s Column. Scenes XXIX and XXX (photo: Jon Coulston).
  • 26 On the composition of Scenes XXVI-XXX see Lepper – Frere 1988, p. 74.
  • 27 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 289-290.
  • 28 Fortification: Stefan 2015 ("un tour"). Settlement: Cichorius 1896, p. 141-142; Settis 1988, p. 22 (...)
  • 29 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 286-296. She argues that, juxtaposed with repeated images of Roman soldiers (...)
  • 30 Slaughtered by Dacians: Cichorius 1896, p. 142. Slaughtered by Romans: Lepper – Frere 1988, p. 76. (...)
  • 31 Tacitus, Ann. 14.37.1, discussed later in this paper. Coarelli 2008, p. 229 and 260 identifies ani (...)

11These scenes end a series of vignettes showing various Roman operations in the aftermath of the first battle and Roman victory on the column (Scenes XXIV-V).26 The lower left of Figure 2 shows Roman auxiliaries killing cowering and fleeing Dacian men, with bodies strewn below. Above, three auxiliary cavalrymen, each carrying a torch in his right hand, ride towards a stone building. The foremost raises his torch to the roof of the structure to burn it down.27 Some have identified the building as a "fortification", but most have interpreted it as part of a settlement.28 As on the Aurelian column, the torching of native structures (less primitive than those represented on the later column) is a recurring motif. Seven scenes show twenty-two Dacian structures ablaze or threatened by fire.29 The bottom right of Figure 2 shows the bodies of slaughtered sheep and cattle, an arresting detail because it seems gratuitous. Some have assumed that the livestock are supposed to have been killed by the Dacians themselves during their flight, but the close proximity to other acts of Roman destruction makes Roman agency a more natural interpretation (though by no means certain).30 The image is not repeated elsewhere on the column and has no obvious parallel in surviving Roman art (though Tacitus’ Annales provides a near contemporary account of Roman soldiers gratuitously killing draught animals after a battle).31 Given its position relatively low on the column, it may have been an early experiment that was abandoned as the artists of the column settled on a standard iconography for Roman campaigning.

  • 32 The women are separated and bid farewell: Cichorius 1896, p. 143-145; Settis 1988, p. 221. All are (...)

12The vignette in the upper right is also somewhat enigmatic. A single Dacian woman carrying a child is gestured towards a waiting boat by Trajan himself. Behind her are other women, some of them also carrying children, marshalled by two Roman soldiers. The singling out of the lead woman and the presence of the emperor have suggested to most commentators that she is to be understood as some important captive. The other women and children have elicited divergent interpretations. Are the soldiers leading them towards the ship too, or are they being kept back while she is taken alone? Are the women (including the lone figure) raising their right hands in ineffectual supplication, despairing at imminent removal from their homeland, or are they raising them in farewell as the one woman is separated from the others?32 The image itself is certainly ambiguous, but the immediate context must matter: the separation of the women and children from the slaughtered and fleeing adult males to the lower left. Combined with the images showing the destruction of Dacian buildings and slaughtered livestock, this steers the viewer’s reading of this admittedly ambiguous image towards a sense of dissolution – Dacian women and children removed from their home and sundered from their menfolk.

  • 33 On the interpretive instability of the medium, see especially Beard 2000, a case study of Scene LX (...)
  • 34 On the compositional unity of Scenes XXIX and XXX, see Settis 1988, p. 221 and Wolfram Thill 2010, (...)
  • 35 Pirson 1996, p. 173.

13There is an irreducible ambiguity to this medium and modern commentators have tended to interpret the images in Scenes XXIX and XXX in line with their assumptions of how Roman warfare was normally represented.33 I am, of course, no exception. But I do believe that the parallels from the Aurelian column and Josephus’ description of the Flavian triumph as well as the textual comparanda I discuss in the following section tilt the balance against any attempt to contain Roman violence to the battle scene in the lower left. To my eyes, the overall effect of the four vignettes in Scenes XXIX and XXX – framed as a compositional unit by the trees to the left and right – is to suggest that Roman victory led to the destruction of Dacian communities and their human landscapes.34 The theme is certainly much less prominent on Trajan’s column than on the column of Marcus.35 But these scenes show that imagery of the latter Column developed rather than invented the imagery of devastation.

  • 36 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 309 and Beckmann 2011, p. 197 draw the same conclusion.

14The thread of imagery that runs from the Aurelian column back to Trajan’s column can be traced further back to Josephus’ description of the visual programme of the triumph of 71 CE.36 Josephus describes "the hands of those incapable of resistance raised in supplication". In the light of the columns, he is plausibly describing images of women, perhaps with children, whose hands were raised in ineffectual appeal, as in Figure 1 and perhaps Figure 2. He also evokes "temples set on fire, houses pulled down over their owners’ heads". His reference to fire and to the destruction of houses anticipates the demolition work of the torch-wielding Roman soldiers on the two columns. His description ends with a description of desolation: "rivers flowing, not over a cultivated land, nor supplying drink to man and beast, but across a country still on every side in flames". The reference to rivers has no direct parallel in the imagery I have discussed, but the representation of a landscape in flames anticipates the recurring image of burning buildings on both columns (see the flames emerging from the central house in figure 1). The intimation of a landscape no longer cultivated and empty of beasts as well as men has parallels in the slaughtered livestock in Scene XXX of Trajan’s column and the recurring images of the abduction and/or slaughter of livestock on the Aurelian column. In sum, the striking focus on devastation and desolation in Josephus’ description of the visual narrative conveyed in the Flavian triumph is not necessarily a Jewish supplement to a Roman narrative with very different inflections.

  • 37 See Wolfram Thill 2011 on "barbarism on fire" and Kampen 1991, p. 235; Zanker 1998, p. 59; Dillon (...)
  • 38 Zanker 1998 and Zanker 2000.

15The two columns demonstrate that images focusing precisely on the destruction of human landscapes were part of the repertoire of Roman public monuments. Josephus’ testimony allows us to trace their imagery of devastation back to the middle of the first century CE. There is no reason to doubt that the tradition went further back. In short, the Roman soldier torching native buildings, the barbarian family dissolved and perhaps even slaughtered livestock were familiar images from the iconography of victory.37 Well before the intensification of this imagery on the column of Marcus Aurelius, the devastating effects of Roman violence on hostile landscapes and populations was celebrated in visual culture. As Paul Zanker has shown, these images are part of a much larger iconographic system in which barbarians are constructed as the emperors’ great adversaries and images of barbarian suffering symbolise the emperor’s success in keeping them at bay.38

The lexicon of aristocratic achievement

  • 39 Romans (or their allies) are the agents in 7 of 10 (70%) instances of uasto in Caesar, BGall., 16 (...)
  • 40 Tacitus, Agr. 20.2.
  • 41 Ibid. 22.1.
  • 42 Tacitus, Ann., 1.56.4, trans. Woodman (Hackett).
  • 43 Ibid. 1.60.3, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

16The role of the torch-wielding soldier and other images of devastation in the iconography of victory is paralleled in the lexicon of public service and aristocratic achievement by the prominence of verbs such as uasto, tollo, excido and especially deleo. The verb uasto – the source of the English idiom "lay waste" a landscape – is a commonplace of Latin historical writing. Literally, it means to make a landscape empty and desolate (uastus). While uastatio is sometimes the work of enemies or bandits, the most frequent agents of devastation in Roman narratives are Roman armies campaigning against foreign enemies.39 Tacitus’ account of the governorship of his father-in-law’s seven years as governor of Britannia is revealing in this respect, given his idealisation of Agricola’s governorship. Agricola repeatedly devastates landscapes at the margins of Roman control in order to terrify their populations into submission. In his second campaigning season, "he allowed no peace to the enemy but devastated (popularetur, a common synonym for uasto) them with sudden attacks".40 The following year "the tribes as far as the Tyne were laid waste (uastatis […] nationibus)".41 Agricola’s actions are paralleled by those of Germanicus, another idealised commander (to whom I will return). At the start of the second year of campaigning across the Rhine, "[Germanicus], having burned down Mattium (that is the headquarters of the race) and pillaged (populatus) the open terrain, turned towards the Rhine".42 In another expedition the following year, "the whole area between the streams Amisia and Lupia was devastated (uastatum)".43

  • 44 See TLL s.v. deleo, 435.51-436.75.
  • 45 Pliny, H.N. 15.74 and Florus 1.31.4. Cf. Diodorus Siculus 34/35.33.3, Velleius Paterculus 1.13.1, (...)
  • 46 ILS 20.
  • 47 CIL vi 41705 with Birley 2005, p. 37-43.
  • 48 ILS 264. On the inscription and its context, see Millar 2005, p. 119-122 and Caroline Barron in th (...)
  • 49 ILS 374.

17Even more resonant with connotations of aristocratic achievement is the verb deleo. "Destroy" is the usual English translation, though that does not convey the connotations transferred from its regular use in the context of writing.44 I consistently translate it as "erase" to better convey both the intimation of total obliteration and the sense of creating a blank space to be filled by something else. The verb is most familiar from the elder Cato’s famous mantra (delenda est Carthago).45 But it was used much more widely. It features prominently in honorific inscriptions, with their pithy discourse of public service. L. Mummius, the consul of 146 BCE who won the Achaean War and sacked the great city of Corinth, celebrated his achievement on the dedicatory inscription of the temple of Hercules Victor that he built from the spoils of the war: "Achaea having been captured and Corinth erased (deleto) under his auspices and command, he re-entered Rome in triumphal procession".46 The epitaph of the consular Q. Veranius (consul 49 CE) from a tomb in the environs of Rome records among a long list of his achievements that he "stormed and erased (deleuit)" a settlement of the Tracheotae while governor of Lycia.47 The inscription from a triumphal arch in the Circus Maximus, dedicated to the emperor Titus in 81 CE but now lost, celebrates the destruction of Jerusalem: "the city of Jerusalem, which all previous commanders, kings and peoples had either failed to capture or left untouched, he erased (deleuit)".48 Particular emphasis falls on deleuit here because of its position at the very end of the inscription and the long adjectival phrase that separates it from its object. An inscription from a monument, possibly another arch, dedicated to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus in 175/6 CE honours them for their victories over the Germans and Sarmatians: "very warlike tribes having been erased (deletis) and subjugated".49 Its recurring presence in these lapidary texts honouring magistrates and emperors illustrates that deleo was an evocative word. To claim to have erased a people or a city was to inscribe oneself into a long tradition of Roman excellence.

  • 50 Unfortunately, we do not have the official letter that Cicero sent to be read to his peers in the (...)

18Cicero sought to place himself in this tradition in the very full account of his achievements as governor of Cilicia that he sent to Cato the Younger in late 51 or early 50 BCE.50 Cicero was seeking Cato’s support in his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to secure a triumph. Having described his exemplary administration of the province and his strenuous efforts to defend it against an imminent Parthian threat (which never materialised), Cicero goes on to explain how he repurposed the army he had raised for an incursion into the mountains between Cilicia and Syria – the ancient Amanus, modern Nur:

  • 51 Cicero Fam. 15.4(=110 SB).8-9, trans. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified.

I had come with the intention of lending aid to either province, if occasion arose. Moreover, I had already decided that it was in the interest of both provinces to bring peace to the Amanus and eliminate the inveterate enemy from those mountains (pacare Amanum et perpetuum hostem ex eo monte tollo). I therefore proceeded with this objective. Pretending to withdraw from the mountains and make for other parts of Cilicia, I pitched camp near Epiphanea, one day’s march from the Amanus. On 12 October, as evening drew on, I marched the army in light equipment so rapidly during the night that by daybreak on 13 October I was moving up the mountain. The cohorts and auxiliary formations were divided into three forces, one commanded by my brother Quintus (Legate) along with myself, another by Legate C. Pomptinus, the third by Legates M. Anneius and L. Tullius. We took many of the enemy by surprise, cutting off their escape and killing or capturing them (occisi captique). Erana, the capital of the Amanus region, which was more like a city than a village, together with Sepyra and Commoris, fell to us after a strenuous and lengthy resistance (Pomptinus was in that part of the mountains) lasting from early twilight till four in the afternoon; a large number of the enemy were killed (occisa). We also took a number of strongholds by storm, and burned them. After these operations we pitched camp for four days near Alexander’s Altars in the foothills of the Amanus, employing the whole period in erasing whatever was left in the mountains and devastating the countryside (in reliquiis Amani delendis agrisque uastandis) – that part of the mountains which falls within my province.51

  • 52 On Roman claims of peace-making and the semantics of the verb pacare, see Lavan 2017.
  • 53 It is worth noting that Cicero sees killing and enslavement as contributing equally to the destruc (...)
  • 54 Cicero evokes a similar image of a devastated landscape in the parallel narrative he sent to his f (...)

19Cicero goes on to describe a second campaign against the Eleutherokilikes, another "hostile" population somewhere else in his province, but my focus is on this narrative of his depredations in the Amanus. His representation of the incursion as part of a grand project of peace-making (pacare Amanum) is a familiar trope of the Roman discourse of imperialism in the late Republic.52 In this case Cicero equates peace with annihilation. The landscape is to be made peaceful by the elimination of its population. The verb he uses, tollo ("remove", "eliminate"), is another staple of the Roman lexicon of achievement, only slightly less common than deleo. Cicero narrates a brief campaign consisting in the destruction of settlements and the slaughter or enslavement of their inhabitants.53 Having destroyed the major settlements, he spent a few more days "erasing (deleo again) whatever was left in the mountains and devastating (uasto) the countryside".54 Together, the verbs deleo and uasto suggest a landscape left empty and desolate.

  • 55 Cicero, Off. 1.34-8 with Brunt 1978, p. 175-183 and Riggsby 2006, p. 157-189.
  • 56 To Caelius Rufus: "Meanwhile I harried the people of the Amanus, who are perpetually at war with u (...)
  • 57 See e.g. Riggsby 2006, p. 171.
  • 58 So Millar 1984, p. 9-10.
  • 59 Cicero, Fam. 15.4(=110 SB).10, trans. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified. He adds: "I considered i (...)
  • 60 Att. 5.20(=113 SB).5, trans Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified.
  • 61 Dauge 1981, p. 201, 428-429, 437 and 654-657.
  • 62 For a different perspective, see Riggsby 2006, p. 171-172 who argues that Cicero implicitly justif (...)
  • 63 See expecially Althusser 1971.

20Cicero’s accounts of his campaigns in Cilicia are a far cry from his exposition of the criteria for a just war in his De Officiis(1.34-8).55 Cicero evidently believed that his incursion into the highlands needed no explicit justification. Designating the population hostile sufficed. The shorter accounts that he wrote to Caelius Rufus and Atticus similarly limit their contextualisation of the incursion to labelling the people of the Amanus "eternal enemies" (hostes sempiterni).56 Some readers have assumed that the population of the Amanus had revolted in response to the opportunity presented by a likely Parthian invasion.57 But that is hard to reconcile with the claim that their hostility was unceasing (perpetuus, sempiternus). It is more plausible that the Amanus was one of many mountainous zones whose populations had not yet been forced to acknowledge Roman hegemony and pay tribute, and that it was their independence that made them "enemies".58 This emerges more clearly in Cicero’s accounts of his second campaign, against the Eleutherokilikes and the city of Pindenissum. He tells Cato that Pindenissum was "inhabited by men, who had never been subject, not even to kings".59 Their very name (the "Free Cilicians") advertised their historical success in resisting incorporation by larger states, including the Seleukids, the previous imperial power in the region. Cicero’s letter to Atticus adds a crucial additional dimension: Pindenissum "had been in arms as long as anyone can remember. The inhabitants were feral (feri), fierce folk, fully equipped to defend themselves".60 The adjective ferus is freighted with significance, feritas being a central term in the Roman discourse of barbarism.61 In practice, some decisions seem so obviously right that they do not need explicit justification.62 But the obvious is often an ideological effect.63 The obviousness of the need for the erasure of the Amanus was the product of a nexus of ideas about mountain landscapes and their inhabitants, barbarism and the threat it posed to civilised populations and resistance so stubborn that annihilation was the only means of managing it.

  • 64 Arrian, Peripl. M. Eux. 11.2, trans. Liddle (Bristol), modified.

21Two centuries later, the rationality of annihilation seemed equally obvious to another Roman consular, the Bithynian Flavius Arrianus who governed Cappadocia in the 130s. Among the Black Sea peoples that he enumerates in his Periplus Ponti Euxini are the Sannoi, who lived in the environs of the city of Trapezus: "[The Sannoi] are very warlike, even to this day, and are hostile to the Trapezuntines, live in fortified places and are a tribe without a king. They were also formerly liable for tribute to the Romans, although, being brigands, they are not anxious to pay their tribute. But nowadays, God willing, they will be, or we will eliminate them".64 The verb used is ἐξαιρέω ("remove", "eliminate", analogous to Latin tollo). Arrian contemplates the annihilation of these disobedient subjects with the same clear conscience as Cicero.

Genocide

  • 65 Arrian identifies the Sannoi with the Drillai described by Xenophon. Since Xenophon had attacked b (...)
  • 66 See further Isaac 2004, p. 217-218.
  • 67 Cicero, Prov. Cons. 31.
  • 68 Caesar, BGall. 2.28.1.
  • 69 On Caesar’s leniency in the De Bello Gallico and its limits, see Grillo 2012, p. 95-103 and Powell (...)
  • 70 Caesar, BGall. 6.34.8.
  • 71 Res Gestae 3.1-2, trans. Cooley (Cambridge), modified.
  • 72 See TLL s.v. excido, p. 1241.10-42 (arboriculture) and 1242.11-44 (medicine).

22Arrian’s passing remark envisions the destruction of an ethnos that, he suggests, had existed for more than five centuries.65 Rome’s capacity to annihilate whole peoples was a commonplace by the late Republic.66 In 56 BCE, Cicero celebrated Roman hegemony by claiming that "there is no people that has not been so eliminated (tollo again) that it barely exists, or so tamed that it keeps quiet, or made so peaceful that it rejoices in our victory and supremacy".67 Here annihilation is one of three possible ways of managing foreign peoples, reserved for those who do not identify with the Roman order and cannot be made to. The idea of certain peoples being so recalcitrant that the only option is to destroy them is a recurring topos. In his De Bello Gallico, Caesar twice envisages the utter annihilation of a Gallic or Germanic people such that not even their name would survive. In the first case, that of the Nervii during the second year of his campaigns, Caesar chose to refrain from destruction. When the people and name (gens ac nomen) of the Nervii had been brought almost to annihilation (internecio), they surrendered and appealed for mercy.68 Caesar judged that they had shown sufficient humility to deserve clemency and took care to preserve them. Despite the emphasis he placed on his clementia later in his career, however, he represents himself as decidedly calculated and circumspect in his deployment of leniency towards the Gauls and Germans.69 In the case of the rebellious Eburones five years later, he decided that "for such villainy, the race and name (stirps ac nomen) of the people should be eliminated (tollo again)".70 Augustus boasted of the leniency he had shown to both Romans and foreigners, with an important distinction between the two groups: "I have often conducted wars by land and sea, civil and foreign, across the whole world and as victor I was merciful to all citizens who asked for pardon. As for foreign peoples, those whom I could safely pardon, I preferred to preserve than to eradicate (excido)".71 The last sentence implies that there were circumstances in which destruction was necessary. The verb used by Augustus, excido, is another staple of the lexicon of achievement. The verb has connotations of rational, beneficent action that arise from its use in the technical vocabularies of medicine and arboriculture (which I seek to convey through the translation "eradicate").72

  • 73 Seneca, Clem. 1.1.2.
  • 74 Braund 2009, p. 53-57 and 159-160.
  • 75 Seneca, Clem. 1.26.5.

23For Augustus’ successors, the capacity to destroy whole peoples continued to be one measure of the emperor’s power. Seneca’s De Clementia, a treatise on clemency addressed to the young emperor Nero, opens with the emperor reflecting on the power he holds: "I have the power of life and death over peoples. […] It is my ruling that decides which tribes are utterly eradicated (excido again) and which relocated, which are granted freedom and which deprived of it, which kings become slaves and which are crowned with the royal honour, which cites fall and which rise".73 But this description of imperial power, with its neutral references to the annihilation of whole peoples as an instrument of rule, is gradually problematised as the didactic voice seeks to modify the emperor’s initial attitude by inculcating a more critical evaluation of the power to destroy.74 The first book ends by rejecting mass killing as the act of a tyrant: "From the slaughter of individuals, [the frenzy of tyrants] creeps to the destruction of peoples (exitia gentium) and it thinks that power consists in hurling fire on buildings and putting the plough to ancient cities. […] To save [life] on the scale of multitudes and peoples is a godlike power; but to kill en masse and indiscriminately is the power of an inferno or an avalanche".75

  • 76 Tacitus, Ann. 12.39.2.
  • 77 Book 2 of the De Clementia opens with Seneca saying that he was inspired to write by a particular (...)
  • 78 Tacitus, Ann. 2.21.2, discussed in the next section.

24Despite Seneca’s condemnation of mass-killing, Roman emperors continued to claim the power to annihilate populations. According to Tacitus, Nero famously demanded the destruction of the Silures, a rebellious British people. "[The Silures] were enflamed by the widely reported pronouncement (uulgata uox) of the Roman emperor that the name of the Silures was to be extinguished utterly (penitus exstinguendum), just as the Sugambri had once been eradicated (excido again) or transported into Gaul".76 This is perhaps an ironic allusion to another, more temperate uox of Nero, immortalised in the De Clementia, the implication being that Seneca’s treatise had little effect on its addressee.77 One might further suppose that Tacitus saw Nero’s call for genocide as inherently transgressive and contributing to his representation as a tyrant. But that would be hard to reconcile with the fact that Germanicus, who is represented as anything but a tyrant, had similarly called for the annihilation (internicio gentis) of the Germans.78

  • 79 Dio 67.4.6 [Zon.], trans Cary (Loeb).
  • 80 Discussed in the next paragraph. See further Isaac 2004, p. 222-223.
  • 81 Dionysius, Per. 208-10, trans. Lightfoot. See Lightfoot 2014 ad loc. on an echo of the Homeric Hym (...)

25Three different authors record that Domitian claimed to have annihilated the Nasamones, a Berber people on the fringes of the empire who revolted in 85 or 86 CE. According to Zonaras’ epitome of Cassius Dio, the Roman commander in Numidia caught the rebels unawares after an initial victory, "attacked them and annihilated them, even destroying all the non-combatants": Domitian was elated at this success and said to the senate: "I have forbidden the Nasamones to exist".79 Again one might be tempted to connect this anecdote to Domitian’s reception as a tyrant. But see how Dio attributes similar ambitions to Marcus Aurelius, an emperor whom he idealises.80 The Hadrianic poet Dionysius of Alexandria seems to allude to the same story, presenting the annihilation as entirely in accordance with the divine order: "Around that region you might see the homes, / Deserted (ἐρημωθέντα), of the perished (ἀποφθιμένων) Nasamons, / Whose disrespect to Zeus Rome’s spears chastised".81 The Greek rhetor Aelius Aristides offers a discrepant and overtly critical perspective in a letter which sought to persuade Marcus Aurelius and Commodus to use their resources to restore the city of Smyrna after an earthquake:

  • 82 Aristides, Or. 19.9 trans. Behr (Brill).

Whenever I think to myself that one of the old emperors, not of your house – heaven forfend! – nor would it be done by any of you – but that one of those former emperors in the middle of playing draughts, as it is told, said in passing that he did not wish the Nasamones to exist, and so the Nasamones perished, then I believe that I should reasonably expect in your case that if you purpose it and behave as you always do and only say and indicate that you wish Smyrna to exist, quickly you will show all of us what we desire.82

26Aristides’ condemnation of Domitian is perhaps directed at the casual manner in which the emperor made the decision as much as at the decision itself. In any case, his criticism is the exception among the three accounts of the destruction of the Nasamones.

  • 83 Arrian, Parth. 79.
  • 84 Dio 72(71).13.1 [Exc. De legationibus], trans. Cary (Loeb).
  • 85 Dio 72(71).16.1 [Exc. De legationibus], trans. Cary (Loeb).
  • 86 ILS 374, discussed above.

27A fragment of Arrian’s Parthica, his account of Trajan’s Parthian war, records without demurral that Trajan contemplated the annihilation (ἐξαιρέω again) of some ethnos.83 Even an emperor as supposedly enlightened as Marcus Aurelius apparently regarded annihilation as justified in certain circumstances. Two passages of Cassius Dio preserved verbatim in a Byzantine compilation report that Marcus hoped to annihilate the Sarmatian Iazyges. "Envoys were sent to Marcus by the Iazyges to request peace, but they did not obtain anything. For Marcus wished to annihilate them utterly (ἐπίπαν ἐξελεῖν, ἐξαιρέω again), both because he knew their race to be untrustworthy and because he had been deceived by the Quadi".84 In the end, the emperor was persuaded to make peace with them, though he "had wished to exterminate them utterly (παντάπασιν ἐκκόψαι)".85 Dio’s statement echoes the honorific inscription praising Marcus and Commodus for the destruction of tribes (gentibus deletis).86 The annihilation of whole peoples was evidently not transgressive in itself, as long as the circumstances were appropriate. All these cases involved peoples on the fringes of the empire that were regarded as barbarian and deemed rebellious or otherwise untrustworthy.

  • 87 Curthoys and Docker 2008, p. 10-13; Moses 2010.
  • 88 On the scope to adjust definitions of genocide to pre-modern contexts, see e.g. Bloxham – Moses 20 (...)
  • 89 Levene 2005, the most substantial recent effort to develop genocide as a category of historical an (...)

28The idea of annihilating an ethnos puts mass-killing in a particular ideological frame – the destruction of a human group qua group – that is recognisable as what we term genocide. The term was coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944 to denote a technique of occupation used by the Axis powers in Europe. The concept was given legal definition as a crime in international law by the 1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention’s definition of the populations that can be the object of genocide ("a national, ethnical, racial or religious group") and the five acts that constitute destruction of a group are clearly specific to modernity, but Lemkin himself believed that genocide had a long history and spent the last decade of his life working on a history of genocide, left unfinished at his death.87 Many historians have seen merit in adapting the definition for pre-modern contexts to make allowance for the fact that in collective identity was constructed differently (ancient ethne tend to be much smaller than contemporary "national, ethnical, racial or religious groups") and group destruction could operate differently (most notably through enslavement, which was understood as contributing no less thoroughly to the destruction of a community, through a logic best captured by Orlando Patterson’s description of slavery as ‘social death’).88 I am sympathetic to those historians and sociologists who have sought to reserve the term for particular forms of mass killing associated with modernity.89 But it is salutary for Roman historians to recognise that genocide in the looser sense – mass violence deployed with the intent to systematically destroy a human community – could be reconciled with, and even justified by, the lofty visions of the imperial project, albeit as a measure of last resort.

Women, children and the old

  • 90 Pliny, Pan. 12.1.
  • 91 See the texts cited by the scholarship in n. 3.

29The language I have discussed so far tends to occlude the savagery of the violence to which it refers. The vocabulary used is relatively abstract and some of it – notably the verb excido – is shared with technical discourses such as medicine which impart connotations of reasoned and ameliorative action. The familiarity that comes from repeated use in public discourse and genres such as historiography further compounds the distancing effect. The verb uasto, for example, collapses the slaughter and destruction wrought by a Roman army on campaign (shown so much more vividly on the Aurelian column) into a single word which functions as a technical term. It is not that explicit descriptions of mass-killing were problematic in Roman discourse. A passage from Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan illustrates what was acceptable. Praising Trajan for restoring Roman military dominance after years of weakness under Domitian, Pliny writes: "But now [our enemies] have been restored to a state of terror, fear and begging to obey our commands. They see a Roman commander, one of the old type, those who won the name of imperator for fields piled with corpses and seas stained by victory (contecti caedibus campi et infecta uictoriis maria)".90 Scenes of slaughter are widespread in battle narratives in Latin historiography.91 But these descriptions almost always focus on the killing of combatants. Explicit accounts of the killing of women, children and the old are very rare, but the few exceptions are revealing.

  • 92 Caesar, BGall. 7.28.2-5, trans. Edwards (Loeb).
  • 93 Riggsby 2006, p. 188. Carnutes not Bituriges: BGall. 7.3.1.
  • 94 See especially BGall. 1.12.3, 1.28.1, 1.53.3, 4.14.5-15.2.

30The earliest example is to be found in Caesar’s own account of his campaigns in Gaul. He gives an explicit report of the indiscriminate killing that followed the capture of Avaricum, the chief settlement of the Bituriges, during the great Gallic revolt of 52 BCE. Caesar captured the town by a surprise attack after a month-long siege: "They did not spare those weakened by age or women or children".92 It is perhaps significant that this is represented as the result of collective action by his troops, rather than any command by Caesar himself. Nevertheless, Caesar obviously thought that the narrative did not reflect badly on him. Presumably he thought that the killing was implicitly justified by the circumstances he mentions – the killing of Romans that initiated the revolt (though that was the work of the Carnutes, not the Bituriges) and the laborious siege works.93 This is the only explicit reference to the killing of non-combatants in his commentaries, though it is implicit in numerous other, more abstract references to mass-slaughter.94

31The nearest parallels are in Tacitus’ narratives of Roman campaigns on the frontiers in the Annales. Most of the handful of accounts of indiscriminate killing are concentrated in his account of the German campaigns of Germanicus in the first two books. Having quelled a mutiny that followed the death of Augustus, Germanicus led his troops across the Rhine to attack the Marsi unawares, in the aftermath of a festival:

  • 95 Tacitus, Ann. 1.51.1, trans. Woodman (Hackett), modified. The reference to the destruction of templ (...)

Caesar divided his hungry legions into four wedges, to enlarge their devastation (populatio); fifty miles was the area he devastated (peruastat) with fire and sword. Neither sex nor age aroused pity; things profane and sacred alike, including the temple most celebrated by those peoples (which they called Tanfana’s), were leveled to the ground. His soldiers were left without a wound, after slaying folk who were half-asleep, unarmed, or straying about.95

  • 96 Tacitus, Ann. 1.56.3, trans. Woodman (Hackett).
  • 97 Tacitus, Ann. 2.21.2, trans. Woodman (Hackett).
  • 98 Many sensitive readers of the Annales have read him as an idealised figure. He is "the radiant figu (...)
  • 99 "Roman conquest is exalted in the Annales. As depicted by Tacitus, Germanicus Caesar foreshadows in (...)

32Like the Aurelian column, the description is a reminder of the reality behind the almost technical language of uastatio. Later in the year, Germanicus leads another expedition against the Chatti. "So unforeseen was his arrival amongst the Chatti that those weak for reasons of their age or their sex were immediately captured or butchered (ut quod imbecillum aetate ac sexu statim captum aut trucidatum sit)".96 In a later massed battle against a coalition of German peoples, Germanicus orders his men to take no captives because "only the annihilation of the race (internicio gentis) would bring an end to the war".97 All three episodes are reported without explicit authorial comment, though that is not in itself proof of approval or even indifference in an author as prone to irony as Tacitus. More significant is the identity of the Roman commander. Germanicus is a central figure in the Tiberian books who appears to embody republican virtue, especially in the domain of war.98 Most readers have seen his German campaigns as representing a traditional martial ideal that illustrates by contrast the inertia of the cautious Julio-Claudian emperors.99

  • 100 I pass over the less explicit description of the slaughter of the inhabitants of the town of Uspe, (...)
  • 101 Tacitus, Ann. 14.37.1-2, trans. Woodman (Hackett).
  • 102 According to Polybius, when the Romans of his time sacked cities, they made a point of killing ever (...)

33The best parallel for the explicit accounts of Germanicus’ violence against German populations comes towards the end of the Annales, in Tacitus’ narrative of the Boudiccan revolt in Britain in 61 CE.100 The revolt is brought to an end by a Roman victory that culminates in mass slaughter: "And the soldiery did not refrain from the execution even of women (et miles ne mulierum quidem neci temperabat) and baggage-animals too, transfixed by weapons, had enlarged the heaps of bodies. Brilliant was the praise acquired that day, and the equal of ancient victories. There are those who transmit that a little less than eighty thousand Britons fell, with roughly four hundred [Roman] soldiers killed and not many more wounded".101 This time there is an explicit authorial comment, apparently favourable (though there is always scope for irony). The killing of the women is paralleled by the actions of Germanicus’ soldiers in Books 1 and 2, but the apparently gratuitous slaughter of pack animals is arresting for its novelty. It is unprecedented in surviving Latin historiography, though it has a visual counterpart in the representation of the carcasses of slaughtered livestock on Trajan’s column (fig. 2) and was probably grounded in Roman practice.102 These passages of Caesar and Tacitus show that such violence could be integrated into the symbolic economy of Latin historiography even if it was normally sanitised through the use of more abstract language. This should come as no surprise, given the graphic representation of Roman devastation in visual culture.

Conclusion

  • 103 There is not space in this paper for an adequate analysis of Calgacus’ famous sententia, though th (...)

34The significance of the images and texts discussed here is not the violence that the Roman armies sometimes inflicted on defeated populations (which should be no surprise), but the way that it is acknowledged and legitimated by the ruling elite. The devastation of human landscapes was not just a charge that might be levelled at the Roman empire by imagined critics (as in the case of ‘Calgacus’) or a metaphor that might express the experience of victims of empire (as in Josephus).103 It was also central to metropolitan conceptions of Roman power. The idea of razing human landscapes and annihilating populations was familiar from public discourse and visual culture. It was given meaning by being couched in language and symbols that placed it in a loftier context. Long after the period of rapid expansion in the late Republic, verbs like deleo, excido, tollo and uasto remained an essential part of the lexicon of aristocratic achievement and good government. Their connotations of ameliorative action euphemised the violence they described. In the visual sphere, images of Roman soldiers torching enemy settlements and barbarian families atomised through slaughter and enslavement were elevated into symbols of the enduring triumph of the imperial order against the enemies that threatened it.

35The imperial elite did not think that they engaged in mass destruction widely or indiscriminately. Annihilation was always regarded as a last resort. From the beginning of the textual tradition, Latin writers pride themselves on the fact that they were more willing to show clemency and co-opt former enemies than other imperial powers. Yet the texts and images discussed here show that the empire’s capacity to destroy was regularly evoked and celebrated. Mass destruction was authorised above all by the discourse of barbarism, especially the idea that some peoples were so recalcitrant or so untrustworthy that they were simply ungovernable. In such situations, annihilation seemed not only justifiable but necessary.

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Wolfram Thill 2011 = E. Wolfram Thill, Depicting barbarism on fire: Architectural destruction on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, in Journal of Roman Archaeology, 24, 2011, p. 283-312.

Woodman 1988 = A.J. Woodman, Rhetoric in classical historiography, London, 1988.

Woodman 2014 = A.J. Woodman (ed.), Tacitus: Agricola, Cambridge, 2014.

Zanker 1998 = P. Zanker, Die Barbaren, der Kaiser und die Arena. Bilder der Gewalt in der römischen Kunst, in R.P. Sieferle, H. Breuninger (ed.), Kulturen der Gewalt: Ritualisierung und Symbolisierung von Gewalt in der Geschichte, Frankfurt, 1998, p. 53-86.

Zanker 2000 = P. Zanker, Die Frauen und Kinder der Barbaren auf der Markussäule, in J. Scheid, V. Huet (ed.), Autour de la colonne Aurélienne, Turnhout, 2000, p. 163-174.

Ziolkowski 1993 = A. Ziolkowski, Urbs direpta, or how the Romans sacked cities, in J. Rich, G. Shipley (ed.), War and society in the Roman world, London, 1993, p. 69-91.

Notas

1 This paper benefitted greatly from robust discussion at the Regarding Roman Power conference in May 2017 at the EFR. Special thanks to my colleagues Jon Coulston and Beppe Pezzini for comments and assistance.

2 The imagery of devastation is comparable in its polyvalence to the imagery of slavery and mastery. Metaphors of enslavement are ubiquitous in the rhetoric of Calgacus and other imagined enemies of Rome, yet they also provided Roman writers their single most common metaphor for empire as a relationship of power. See Lavan 2013.

3 Brunt 1978, p. 183-184; Harris 1979, p. 50-53 and 263-264; Veyne 1993, p. 353-359; Ziolkowski 1993; Isaac 2004, p. 215-219. The textual evidence is being supplemented by an emerging archaeology of mass killing. See Quesada-Sanz 2015 on three sacked cities in Iberia and Roymans and Fernández-Götz 2015 on the evidence for depopulation of Northern Gaul during Caesar’s conquest. Whereas studies of textual accounts to mass-killing have tended to focus on reconstructing what Roman armies actually did, work on the images on Trajan’s Column and the Column of Marcus Aurelius have recently foregrounded questions of representation. See Pirson 1996; Ferris 2000, p. 61-118; Ferris 2009; Dillon 2006 and especially Zanker 1998 and Zanker 2000, which demonstrate that images of violence against barbarians and barbarian suffering were central to the political imagery of the Roman principate.

4 See e.g. Gell. NA. 6.3.52 on Cato the Elder’s speech on the Rhodians (nunc clementiae, nunc mansuetudinis maiorum […] commonefacit), Cic. Off. 1.35 (parta autem uictoria conseruandi i, qui non crudeles in bello, non inmanes fuerunt), Verg. Aen. 6.853 (parcere subiectis et debellare superbos), Livy 30.42.17 (plus paene parcendo uictis quam uincendo imperium auxisse) and 33.12.7 (uetustissimum morem uictis parcendi), Augustus Res Gestae 3.2 (externas gentes, quibus tuto ignosci potuit, conseruare quam excidere malui). See further Brunt 1978, p. 184-185.

5 Van Wees 2010.

6 Josephus uses ἐρημία two to three times more often than Thucydides, Xenophon and Arrian and around ten times more often than Herodotus, Polybius and Dio. See the Word Frequency Statistics report for ἐρημία on www.perseus.tufts.edu.

7 Josephus, B.J. 6.6-8 and 7.115.

8 Ibid. 1.355.

9 Ibid. 5.373.

10 Ibid. 6.288.

11 Ibid. 7.403.

12 Ibid. 7.139-146, trans. Thackeray (Loeb).

13 See Östenberg 2009, p. 189-261 for a survey.

14 Scenes are cited following the now standard system of Petersen, Domaszewski and Calderini 1896. At least fifteen of Petersens’ scenes show attacks on native villages. See Robert 2000, p. 178 n. 17.

15 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Robert 2000, p. 180.

16 Zanker 2000, p. 167.

17 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 304-307.

18 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Dillon 2006, p. 262.

19 On the trope in this and other contexts, see especially Kampen 1991, p. 235; Zanker 1998, p. 59; Dillon 2006, p. 262.

20 Zanker 2000, p. 164-170.

21 Zanker 2000, Dillon 2006.

22 See e.g. Scenes XX and XCVII (women dragged by hair) and XCVIII (woman stabbed in the chest) with Ferris 2009, p. 115-128.

23 Zanker 2000, p. 165; Ferris 2009, p. 115 and 120-121.

24 Smith 1987, p. 115-119. See also Emmanuelle Rosso Caponio’s paper in this volume.

25 Scenes are cited by the scene numbers assigned in Cichorius 1896.

26 On the composition of Scenes XXVI-XXX see Lepper – Frere 1988, p. 74.

27 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 289-290.

28 Fortification: Stefan 2015 ("un tour"). Settlement: Cichorius 1896, p. 141-142; Settis 1988, p. 221; Coarelli 2000, p. 73.

29 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 286-296. She argues that, juxtaposed with repeated images of Roman soldiers constructing stone buildings, the destruction of Dacian architecture symbolises the displacement of Dacian culture by Roman. See also Wolfram Thill 2010.

30 Slaughtered by Dacians: Cichorius 1896, p. 142. Slaughtered by Romans: Lepper – Frere 1988, p. 76. Most commentators avoid committing themselves.

31 Tacitus, Ann. 14.37.1, discussed later in this paper. Coarelli 2008, p. 229 and 260 identifies animals being killed in Scenes LVII and LXXIII of the Aurelian column, but Caprino is more persuasive in seeing Roman soldiers using their weapons to drive livestock away with them, as in numerous other scenes (Caprino et al. 1955, p. 101 and 103).

32 The women are separated and bid farewell: Cichorius 1896, p. 143-145; Settis 1988, p. 221. All are being led to the ship for removal: Lepper and Frere 1988, p. 76; Coarelli 2000, p. 73; Pirson 1996, p. 193; Dillon 2006, p. 246. Right hands raised in supplication: Dillon 2006, p. 254-257.

33 On the interpretive instability of the medium, see especially Beard 2000, a case study of Scene LXIX on the Aurelian column.

34 On the compositional unity of Scenes XXIX and XXX, see Settis 1988, p. 221 and Wolfram Thill 2010, p. 297 n. 33.

35 Pirson 1996, p. 173.

36 Wolfram Thill 2011, p. 309 and Beckmann 2011, p. 197 draw the same conclusion.

37 See Wolfram Thill 2011 on "barbarism on fire" and Kampen 1991, p. 235; Zanker 1998, p. 59; Dillon 2006, p. 262 on the symbolic dissolution of the barbarian family.

38 Zanker 1998 and Zanker 2000.

39 Romans (or their allies) are the agents in 7 of 10 (70%) instances of uasto in Caesar, BGall., 16 of 36 (44%) in Livy XXXI-XLIX and 10 of 14 (71%) in Tacitus, Ann. (including peruasto). Livy is the outlier here, but even in his narrative Roman forces are regularly the agents of uastatio.

40 Tacitus, Agr. 20.2.

41 Ibid. 22.1.

42 Tacitus, Ann., 1.56.4, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

43 Ibid. 1.60.3, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

44 See TLL s.v. deleo, 435.51-436.75.

45 Pliny, H.N. 15.74 and Florus 1.31.4. Cf. Diodorus Siculus 34/35.33.3, Velleius Paterculus 1.13.1, Plutarch, Cato 27.1.

46 ILS 20.

47 CIL vi 41705 with Birley 2005, p. 37-43.

48 ILS 264. On the inscription and its context, see Millar 2005, p. 119-122 and Caroline Barron in this volume.

49 ILS 374.

50 Unfortunately, we do not have the official letter that Cicero sent to be read to his peers in the senate (cf. Att. 6.1(=115 SB).9), though we do have two earlier examples (Fam. 15.1 = 104 SB and 15.2 = 105 SB). But Cicero seems to have repeated his official account at length in the personal letter to Cato, which is much longer than the accounts he wrote to Atticus (Att. 5.20 = 113) and Caelius Rufus (Fam. 2.10 = 86 SB), presumably as a token of his respect. See Hutchinson 1998, p. 86-100 for a broader analysis of Cicero’s narrative technique.

51 Cicero Fam. 15.4(=110 SB).8-9, trans. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified.

52 On Roman claims of peace-making and the semantics of the verb pacare, see Lavan 2017.

53 It is worth noting that Cicero sees killing and enslavement as contributing equally to the destruction of this population. Although enslavement is only briefly alluded to here (occisi captique), there is a more explicit reference to it in the account of his campaigns that hew wrote to Atticus: "The Saturnalia was certainly a merry time, for men as well as officers. I gave them the whole of the plunder excepting the captives, who are being sold off today, 19 December. As I write there is about HS 120,000 on the stand" (Att. 5.20 (=113 SB).5, trans. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb)).

54 Cicero evokes a similar image of a devastated landscape in the parallel narrative he sent to his friend Atticus: "there we stayed five days, pillaging and laying waste the Amanus (direpto et uastato Amano), and then left" (Att. 5.20 (=113 SB).3, trans. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb).

55 Cicero, Off. 1.34-8 with Brunt 1978, p. 175-183 and Riggsby 2006, p. 157-189.

56 To Caelius Rufus: "Meanwhile I harried the people of the Amanus, who are perpetually at war with us (hostis sempiternos), with my entire force. Many were killed or taken prisoner, the rest scattered. Their strongholds were taken by surprise assaults and burned" (Fam. 2.10(=86 SB).3, trans. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb). To Atticus: "I reached Tarsus on 5 October and pressed on to the Amanus which separates Syria from Cilicia at the watershed, a mountain range full of enemies of Rome from time immemorial (hostium plenus sempiternorum). Here on 13 October we made a great slaughter of the enemy, harrying and burning places of great strength. […] There we stayed five days, plundering and laying waste the Amanus, and then left" (Att 5.20(=113 SB).3, trans. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb).

57 See e.g. Riggsby 2006, p. 171.

58 So Millar 1984, p. 9-10.

59 Cicero, Fam. 15.4(=110 SB).10, trans. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified. He adds: "I considered it a matter of imperial prestige (existimatio imperii) to curb their presumption (audacia), whereby others not well affected to the rule of Rome would be more easily discouraged" (Ibid.). Cicero’s claim to be acting in defence of Roman prestige illustrates Susan Mattern’s argument that honour was often a key consideration in the use of force (Mattern 1999, p. 162-210).

60 Att. 5.20(=113 SB).5, trans Shackleton Bailey (Loeb), modified.

61 Dauge 1981, p. 201, 428-429, 437 and 654-657.

62 For a different perspective, see Riggsby 2006, p. 171-172 who argues that Cicero implicitly justifies his actions in terms of "the doctrines of self-defense, fides, and preemptive action". In my view the point of interest is rather the lack of explicit justification and the question to be answered is what contextual information made explicit justification seem redundant.

63 See expecially Althusser 1971.

64 Arrian, Peripl. M. Eux. 11.2, trans. Liddle (Bristol), modified.

65 Arrian identifies the Sannoi with the Drillai described by Xenophon. Since Xenophon had attacked but not annihilated the Drillae (Xen An. 5.2), Arrian is envisaging outdoing his model. See Bosworth 1993, p. 244-245.

66 See further Isaac 2004, p. 217-218.

67 Cicero, Prov. Cons. 31.

68 Caesar, BGall. 2.28.1.

69 On Caesar’s leniency in the De Bello Gallico and its limits, see Grillo 2012, p. 95-103 and Powell 1998, p. 129-132.

70 Caesar, BGall. 6.34.8.

71 Res Gestae 3.1-2, trans. Cooley (Cambridge), modified.

72 See TLL s.v. excido, p. 1241.10-42 (arboriculture) and 1242.11-44 (medicine).

73 Seneca, Clem. 1.1.2.

74 Braund 2009, p. 53-57 and 159-160.

75 Seneca, Clem. 1.26.5.

76 Tacitus, Ann. 12.39.2.

77 Book 2 of the De Clementia opens with Seneca saying that he was inspired to write by a particular utterance (also called a uox) of Nero. When asked to approve the execution of two bandits, Nero said "I wish I could not write!" Seneca praises the uox for the sentiment it expressed and wishes that it had been heard by the whole human race: "That was a fine remark! All the peoples of the world should have heard it – those who inhabit the Roman empire and those on its borders whose freedom is precarious and those peoples who resist us with their strength and spirit" (Clem. 2.1.3, trans. Braund, Oxford). In Tacitus, we encounter another uox that was published widely and indeed reached the ears of those who resist Rome. But its sentiment runs entirely contrary to Seneca’s advice.

78 Tacitus, Ann. 2.21.2, discussed in the next section.

79 Dio 67.4.6 [Zon.], trans Cary (Loeb).

80 Discussed in the next paragraph. See further Isaac 2004, p. 222-223.

81 Dionysius, Per. 208-10, trans. Lightfoot. See Lightfoot 2014 ad loc. on an echo of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo which conflates the Nasamones with the Phlegyes who attacked the temple at Delphi.

82 Aristides, Or. 19.9 trans. Behr (Brill).

83 Arrian, Parth. 79.

84 Dio 72(71).13.1 [Exc. De legationibus], trans. Cary (Loeb).

85 Dio 72(71).16.1 [Exc. De legationibus], trans. Cary (Loeb).

86 ILS 374, discussed above.

87 Curthoys and Docker 2008, p. 10-13; Moses 2010.

88 On the scope to adjust definitions of genocide to pre-modern contexts, see e.g. Bloxham – Moses 2010, p. 10-12 and both Van Wees 2010, p. 243-244 and Quesada-Sanz 2015, p. 18 (on cities and even villages as objects of genocide). "Social death": Patterson 1982.

89 Levene 2005, the most substantial recent effort to develop genocide as a category of historical analysis, distinguishes "genocide", a phenomenon of the early modern and modern world inextricably linked to the development of the system of nation states, from a wider phenomenon of "wars of people-extermination".

90 Pliny, Pan. 12.1.

91 See the texts cited by the scholarship in n. 3.

92 Caesar, BGall. 7.28.2-5, trans. Edwards (Loeb).

93 Riggsby 2006, p. 188. Carnutes not Bituriges: BGall. 7.3.1.

94 See especially BGall. 1.12.3, 1.28.1, 1.53.3, 4.14.5-15.2.

95 Tacitus, Ann. 1.51.1, trans. Woodman (Hackett), modified. The reference to the destruction of temples is unusual, but it is paralleled by Josephus’ description of ‘temples set on fire’ among the representations on the floats in the Flavian triumph (B.J. 7.144).

96 Tacitus, Ann. 1.56.3, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

97 Tacitus, Ann. 2.21.2, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

98 Many sensitive readers of the Annales have read him as an idealised figure. He is "the radiant figure compounded of all virtues and excellence to set against the dark soul of Tiberius" (Syme 1958, p. 254). "Tacitus has accepted the general verdict on Germanicus as the epitome of moral perfection" (Walker 1951, p. 118). Others have seen some degree of ambivalence. In the influential formulation of Pelling 1993, p. 77-78, Germanicus is "brilliant, yes, but brilliantly anachronistic". If Germanicus’ actions have a fault, it is anachronism – a failure to adapt to the complex and corrupt world of the principate – rather than cruelty. Cf Pelling 1993, p. 77 on Germanicus and Tiberius representing two different approaches to warfare. Germanicus represents traditional militarism, whereas Tiberius’ way is "diplomatic, modern, unglamorous, but highly effective".

99 "Roman conquest is exalted in the Annales. As depicted by Tacitus, Germanicus Caesar foreshadows in splendour and energy a martial emperor" (Syme 1958, p. 254). Woodman 1988, p. 185 and Levene 2009, p. 232-233 argue that Germanicus’ campaigns represent the traditional, engaging battle narrative the absence of material for which Tacitus laments in a famous digression at 4.32-33.

100 I pass over the less explicit description of the slaughter of the inhabitants of the town of Uspe, near the Bosporan kingdom, at 12.16.2.

101 Tacitus, Ann. 14.37.1-2, trans. Woodman (Hackett).

102 According to Polybius, when the Romans of his time sacked cities, they made a point of killing every living thing, even animals (10.15.4-5).

103 There is not space in this paper for an adequate analysis of Calgacus’ famous sententia, though the images and texts here provide the larger context in which it needs to be understood. The interpretation of Calgacus’ charge is complicated by the fact that the phrase solitudinem facere places Calgacus in a particular literary tradition that can be traced back to Livy’s speech of Camillus (8.13.15) and Caesar’s ethnography of the Germans (BGall 6.23.1; cf 4.3.1), via Pliny the Elder (HN 6.182) and Curtius Rufus (8.8.10 and 9.2.24). The complications are compounded by parallels that the Agricola constructs between the predicament of the Britanni under Rome and that of Roman senators under Domitian (Lavan 2011). The solitudo evoked by Calgacus is realised in the description of the aftermath of the Roman victory (cf Woodman 2014, p. 282 on uastum ubique silentium at 38.2); both echo Tacitus’ opening description of the decimation and silencing of the senate under Domitian (1-3). On my reading, any poignancy in these passages arises principally from the implicit analogy with the situation in Rome. Tacitus revisited the theme of solitudo and empire in the even more enigmatic episode of the Ampsivarii at Ann. 13.55 (contrast the readings of Walker 1951 and Städele 1985). Some of the complexities of this literary tradition are discussed by Laruccia 1980.

Índice de ilustraciones

Título Fig. 1 – Column of Marcus Aurelius, Scene CII (from Petersen et al. 1896).
URL http://books.openedition.org/efr/docannexe/image/4875/img-1.jpg
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Título Fig. 2 – Trajan’s Column. Scenes XXIX and XXX (photo: Jon Coulston).
URL http://books.openedition.org/efr/docannexe/image/4875/img-2.jpg
Archivo image/jpeg, 1,2M

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