In Ancient Rome, War Was the Norm. Then Peace Broke Out. | Big Think

Rome is an extremely highly militarized society in a way that is, I think, inconceivable to us. There, the level of military activity is something that sort of approaches what we were familiar with in the First and Second World Wars, but kind of the long stretches of time. I think one of the things that you should always remember about Rome is that it was a culture in which it wasn't war that broke out; it was peace that broke out. The standard kind of position that Roman society was in was one that was at war.

That said, we do have to realize that Rome probably wasn't much different in its military ambitions from other cultures. We tend to think of the Romans as unusually devoted to warfare: conquest—not pretty, brutal, and bloody conquest. They certainly were devoted to that, but so was everybody in the ancient world. There was no culture in Mediterranean antiquity—in Greece, Rome, anyway Italy—where people were nice, or a pacific sort of society, or they'd much rather get on with doing their knitting than going out and thrashing their neighbors. This was a world in which disputes were fought out; you know, it wasn't much a bit, but not much diplomacy. It was the rule of warfare, and that in a way affects almost every way in which Roman society saw itself.

If you think of the top, the upper echelons of Roman culture, and you say, "Would a rich young boy in a powerful family, what would he be? What would be his greatest ambition in life?" Well, those ambitions I think would include getting rich, richer, getting elected to office, you know, a nice villa on the coast, whatever. But the crowning glory for a young Roman, as he looked at his future, his dream would have been to celebrate a triumphal procession. That was something that was granted only to Roman generals who were superbly successful. If you went and you thrashed loads of the enemy, in other words, you could come back to Rome, you could process through the streets, you know, fantastically elaborate chariot. You would have your soldiers behind you kind of cheering you on, and you would have your prisoners on all the loot that you've got in front, process through the streets to the admiring crowds.

We think of little kids dreaming of being president or, in the UK, dreaming of being Prime Minister. Little kids in Rome would have dreamt about military glory—a triumphal procession—as the acme of their ambitions. But it is always more complicated than that, though, because there are two things which strike me as quite odd given that intense militarism. One is that soldiers were not allowed in the city of Rome itself. If you had come to visit Rome, you would, I think in many cases, have been struck by how it was a demilitarized zone. The only occasion that soldiers were allowed into the city was actually on the occasion of triumph when they cheered their general on; otherwise, they were kept out.

You've got a very strong sense of the center of the Roman Empire being entirely, most entirely, soldier-free. Young presidentially, you got a few Praetorian guard to be effectively bodyguards, but you don't get legions. A Roman legion doesn't come into the city. As the Roman Empire goes on, as it ceases to be actively doing very much conquest in terms of expanding into new territory, but becomes much more a sort of low-level occupying policing force, then you find these army barracks being much more family-friendly than the most army barracks that we're used to.

There have been some very interesting excavations recently, little thought very near Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain, a place called Vindolanda. One of the units that was essentially manning Hadrian's Wall—that got a big defensive wall that ran along the north of Britain. What's been discovered at Vindolanda has shown quite how mixed and rather domestic community it was. Not only do you find loads and loads of little shoes, which show there must have been quite a few children running around this apparently rather bloated army camp, but a whole range of personal letters on racks, tablets, or on what remains of the wood of wax tablets have been found where you can see that their wives are up there and are having perfectly ordinary lives right in the middle of an army camp.

So in due course, I think—and I don't imagine that this is the case when the Romans are really actively pushing out the boundaries of the empire—but in due course, this militarism becomes quite domesticated in its way. It's kind of quite a family sort of enterprise, even though soldiers technically weren't allowed to marry; it's clear that they effectively did.