In September 326, the Macedonian forces returned from their campaign in the eastern Punjab to Nicaea and Bucephala on the Hydaspes. The new settlements had been ravaged by the monsoon, but the fleet building program begun in the month after Alexander’s victory over Porus was in full swing. In addition to the ships that had been prepared in his absence, Alexander built others, until the grand total of vessels – warships, troop and horse transports, supply ships, and native craft – had swollen to nearly 2,000. Reinforcements, equipment, and medical supplies from the west raised the morale of the troops, and the expedition was launched with great fanfare and supplication of the gods. Thus began a systematic conquest of the Indus region, as the armada moved impressively downstream, flanked on either side by the heavy infantry and elephants. The path to the Ocean would take them past the confluences of the great tributaries of the Indus and through the lands of Porus’ traditional enemies, the Sudracae. These peoples had paid tribute to the Achaemenid kings through the satrap of Arachosia. To the south lay the Sibi, Aggalasseis, and Adrestae; and even these were linked by remote traditions – at least as far as the Greeks understood them – with Heracles. Beyond was the land of Sindh (Hinduš) and the delta region of Patalene. The army marched, divided by the river, for logistical reasons, for maximum military effect, and to keep apart commanders who had now turned to feuding.

Alexander’s two most trusted officers and friends, Hephaestion and Craterus, had come to blows in the days that followed the Hydaspes battle, and their personal rivalry had spread to their respective troops. Such friction between officers is common enough in armies, but Hephaestion had a special talent for making enemies. He was abrasive and quarrelsome, no doubt because his friendship with Alexander allowed him to offend with impunity. But many of the hetairoi attributed his promotion to higher offices to Alexander’s personal favor rather than merit. The king did nothing to dispel such notions by publicly calling Hephaestion “a fool and a madman, if he did not realize that without Alexander he was nothing.” Nevertheless, in any dispute, Hephaestion had the advantage of being able to plead his case with Alexander in private, and although Craterus had the respect of the soldiers and officers alike, his opponent had the king’s ear. From this point on, we see the decline of Craterus’ authority. The forces were divided as follows: Alexander, with the hypaspists, Agrianes, archers, and the agema of the cavalry, sailed with the fleet; Craterus, with a share of the infantry and cavalry, marched along the western bank of the river; Hephaestion, with the larger and more powerful contingent, as well as some 200 elephants, descended along the eastern bank. Before the army reached the Indus Delta, Craterus would be sent westward through Drangiana with the heavy infantry, many of whom were scheduled to be demobilized.

Alexander had been wounded leading the troops who were scaling the walls, he found himself inside the Mallian stronghold with only a few personal guards. The king was carried to safety, but the sources disagree about who treated the wound: some said Critobulus (a physician who had once removed the arrow from Philip II’s eye at Methone); others claim that the task was given to Perdiccas, the man who was to play a major, but short-lived, role in the age of the Successors. As in virtually every case where Alexander was wounded by the enemy, the conquered paid a price in blood, as the Macedonians consoled themselves with wanton slaughter.

Some have suggested that the soldiers were war-weary and reluctant to engage in further battle and that they exposed their king to danger through their sluggishness. If this is true, the lapse was a very short one, and no recriminations were ever made – except by modern scholars. Certainly, later on, when the fleet continued its descent downriver, a rumor that Alexander had died, and the suspicion that their officers were withholding the truth from them, caused a near riot of the troops. The king was placed on the deck of the ship, where he could be seen by the men, who looked for any wave or nod as a sign of life and approval.

The remainder of the Indus campaign seemed, by comparison with the conquest of the Punjab and the Mallians, little more than a formality. Local dynasts surrendered at the news of Alexander’s approach, though some, like Musicanus, oscillated in their loyalty to the conqueror and paid the extreme penalty; the Brahmins, who incited his defection, were slaughtered in great numbers. Likewise, Oxicanus and Porticanus – if they were, in fact, different individuals – rebelled, only to be arrested by contingents sent out by Alexander. One other dynast, Sambus, a neighbor and rival of Musicanus, first fled and then surrendered. From Musicanus’ kingdom, Alexander controlled the route leading from Alor to Kandahar (Alexandria-in-Arachosia), along which he sent Craterus and the bulk of the heavy infantry, those unfit for military service, and the elephants westward to mop up resistance in Drangiana. The king himself advanced to Patala and sailed down both arms of the Indus to the Ocean. Peithon son of Agenor was left behind as satrap of Sindh, but it must have been clear to Alexander that the administration of the satrapy would prove difficult at best.

The mysteries of seas and oceans intrigued ancient humans, even as they tried to penetrate the vastness of the earth’s waters and conquer their intuitive fear of what lay hidden beneath the “wine dark sea.” The Hebrews believed that God formed the waters of the deep stocked with sea creatures and monsters during the first three days of creation. Noah became the first shipbuilder and navigator when called upon by God to build an ark—one of fantastic dimensions to withstand the forty days and nights of rain that resulted in the inundation of the earth and the death of all animals and humans except those on the ark. Gilgamesh found the key to ageless youth on the ocean floor after visiting the Sumerian Noah, Upnashitim. Homer placed Hades in the river Ocean west of the Pillars of Heracles, the Strait of Gibraltar. Odysseus was driven by the angry god of the sea, Poseidon, all around the mysterious Mediterranean. The sea came closest to defeating the most resourceful man in Homer’s poems. The Greeks were so certain that the ocean was a place of mystery—like the dark forests and the high mountains—that they populated it with countless Nereides, maidens of the sea, as well as varied sea monsters—such as Charybdis, the whirlpool that engulfed many of Odysseus’s men, and the clashing rocks that met Jason’s Argo.

The modern student looks mostly in vain for the beginnings of oceanography in the ancient world. The mysteries of the ocean remained mostly mysteries, the stuff of fantasy and legend. Among the Greeks there were a few thinkers who tried to move from fantasy to fact regarding the ocean. Thales thought that water was the basic element of all things. His student Anaximander went further, declaring that humans evolved from the sea. The third-century CE Roman writer Censorinus declared that Anaximander thought that humans derived from fish. Plutarch wrote that some Greeks revered Poseidon because they believed that humans originally came from the sea. Xenophanes argued that the oceans produced meteorological events such as the wind and rain. He recognized fossils of sea creatures for what they were and speculated on the inundation of the earth that had occurred in the past and would occur again to destroy humankind.

The science of navigation was primitive in the ancient world. Even the best Phoenician and Greek navigators hugged the coasts, venturing out into the open sea only on starlit nights and clear days when they could use Polaris, the Pleiades, Sirius, and constellations or the position of the sun to indicate latitude.

By and large, ancient marine science was focused on navigation and shipbuilding. The earliest boats were primitive rafts and canoes made of reeds, wood, and skin. Early Mesopotamians fashioned coracles from skin stretched over wooden frames. Canoes were made of dugout trunks and buoyant bark. The Polynesians rigged canoes with sails to explore the South Pacific. Ancient Incas of South America, according to Thor Heyerdahl, built balsa rafts that allowed them to sail west to Easter Island, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

Larger ships were made from the acacia tree and papyrus reeds. The Ark, according to the book of Genesis, was made of these materials, as were Egyptian boats. Herodotus described boats of the Nile as made of acacia wood cut into planks for the hull and decking. No ribs were used, which made the boats useful only for river navigation. The Egyptians used the papyrus plant to caulk the ships and to make sails. Rather than building the ship first by laying the keel and joining ribs to it, Mesopotamian and Egyptian shipbuilders fashioned the hull of the ship to the keel without ribs, using mortise-and-tenon joints to join planks to keel. Papyrus rope bound through mortises helped provide stability otherwise provided by the ribs of the ship. Because of this shell mode of construction, such ships were hardly seaworthy, and ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian shipbuilders devised a method of constructing seaworthy ships from papyrus reeds. Thor Heyerdahl, the foremost archaeologist and historian of the ancient reed ship, has described (1980) the strong possibility of ancient reed ships being able to navigate the Mediterranean, Red, and Arabian seas, and perhaps others as well. Shipbuilders set two massive bundles of reeds side by side, then roped them together, using papyrus rope as well to make a crescent design by hoisting the bow and stern, fore and aft. A single wooden mast with a papyrus sail propelled the ship. Heyerdahl discovered that papyrus bundles swell in seawater, becoming incredibly buoyant and airtight.

Phoenician and Greek shipbuilders advanced merchant and warship construction by basing the construction of the ship on a keel and rib design. Apollonius of Rhodes, who described the Argo, claimed that the shipbuilders bound a strong rope about the sides to provide additional holding power to the planks to withstand being battered by the swells of the sea. The single mast was secured in a mast-box and pulled taut by ropes secured fore and aft. Greek and Phoenician ships relied heavily on rowers—the Phoenicians developed the two-row system of oars, the bireme; the Greeks added a third row, the trireme. According to Herodotus, Phoenician ships were sufficiently seaworthy to circumnavigate Africa, negotiating the strong winds and currents off the Cape of Good Hope and the Horn of Africa. Roman merchant vessels were even more seaworthy. Roman shipbuilders constructed their boats with deeper drafts, though they still were heavily reliant on oars to complement the single mast and sail.

References Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo.Translated by E.V. Rieu. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971. Barnes, Jonathan, trans. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Bass, George F. “Sea and River Craft in the Ancient Near East.”Vol. 3, in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. 4 vols., ed. Jack Sasson et al. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995. Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Herodotus. The Histories.Translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. Heyerdahl, Thor. Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginning of Navigation and Seaborne Civilizations. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. “Ship.” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 20 (1962).

The heavy infantry contest which we understand best is the asymmetric duel between legion and phalanx, because here the battle accounts are supplemented by Polybius’ detailed tactical analysis (18.28–32). The first stage was for the leading pikes to thud into the foremost Roman shields, and for the Greeks to use their superior depth to start shoving the legions back. Romans who tried to hack their way through the intact pike hedge, as at Asculum, often came to grief from the mass of blades (Plut. Pyrrh. 21). A defensive phalanx with secure flanks could hold out almost indefinitely (as at Atrax and Thermopylae), whereas an attacking phalanx would gradually push the Romans back (as at Cynoscephalae and Pydna). However, the combination of Roman determination and the flexibility of the manipular system meant that it was almost impossible for the phalanx alone to put the enemy to flight. This being the case, it was often only a matter of time before some combination of Roman javelin fire, the disruptive impact of rough terrain or an attack in flank or rear broke up the pike hedge and allowed the legionaries to begin a one-sided slaughter of the hapless phalangites.

BY J. E. LENDON

An unusual general like Scipio Africanus could regularly prevail in this conflict over how wars and battles should be fought. His personal heroism at the battle of Ticinus, where he was said to have saved his father’s life, and in the wake of Cannae, where he rallied a party of survivors when they threatened to surrender or flee from Italy, gave him at least partial protection against charges of personal cowardice. But even Scipio was severely criticized at Rome for lack of aggression, for moving too slowly, and for spoiling his soldiers. And he was sometimes obliged to trick his troops into obeying him by pretending that his plans were suggested to him by the gods. A less charismatic figure like Fabius Maximus, by contrast, could exert only an intermittent sway over his army in the face of the Romans’ aggressive culture, despite the supreme constitutional power the awe-evoking office of dictator supposedly conferred.

Many Roman generals shared the common Roman distaste for strategy and tactics; others were impatient of slow strategy but not of tactics which did not delay the battle: the aggressive Varro deepened the Roman manipular array at Cannae. Still others, politicians in a city where politics and reputation were so wound up with war, will have been unwilling or unable to resist the impatient expectations of their soldiers and officers, whatever their private views: as long as the general and the soldier both followed the banner of virtus, the conflict between virtus and disciplina, for the most part, slept. But to make sophisticated plans—to fight like a Greek—might require that disciplina be set against virtus, and so produce the baying of angry voters, that sound so dreaded by the politically ambitious. Frequently, therefore, in the Roman army, as Livy had Paullus complain, “the soldiers do the thinking, and the commander is led around by the gossip of the rankers.” Roman command gyrated between tactical ingenuity and tactical simplicity.

It is the conflict between the ancestral Roman value of virtus—and the impatient aggressiveness which grew from it—and the opposed tradition of cerebral generalship, which disciplina made possible, which explains the Romans’ facing the Macedonian phalanx head-on upon the plain of Pydna. On the day before the battle, Paullus had had to trick his own soldiers to prevent an engagement: a bald order to go into camp would not, it appears, have been obeyed. And soldiers’ entering battle against the orders of a commander was hardly uncommon in the Roman army. On the day of the battle both Paullus’s long sacrifices and his council of war were denounced as yet more delay. As long as possible Paullus lingered upon the rough ground: perhaps Perseus would advance and fight where the Romans had an advantage. But finally Paullus’s power to restrain his soldiers was at an end, and the Romans fought on ground of Perseus’s choosing. Ferociously denounced by both his officers and men, Paullus finally could resist no longer the virtus of his army. Before the Macedonians and Romans fought at Pydna the Roman ethics of virtus and disciplina fought their own battle, and in that battle virtus won.

Having finally got the battle they yearned for, the young aristocrats of Paullus’s army took to the contest with a will. Having lost his sword in the fighting and so fearing disgrace, the son of Cato the Elder (who was also Aemilius’s son-in-law) ran along the ranks summoning his friends to help him recover it. This mob of noble youths attacked on their own the section of the Macedonian phalanx where the sword had been lost, pushed it back, and recovered the lost weapon amidst the carnage; then they attacked the Macedonians again, singing in their triumph.

Despite Roman bravery, ground and equipment favored the Macedonians, and they steadily pushed the Romans back. Finally the Macedonians’ very success was their undoing. Their advance met more or less resistance at different points, and so some parts of the phalanx pressed forward and some held back. Their progress also took them onto higher and less regular ground which interrupted the exact dressing of their ranks. Aemilius was able to rally enough troops to attack vulnerable points in the phalanx as it lost its order. Once the flanks of individual members of the phalanx were exposed, they were vulnerable to Roman swords. The elephants in the Roman service helped to disrupt the Macedonian left, and it was there that the rout began. And so, barely, desperately, the Romans began to win the battle. As the phalanx came apart the Roman advantage turned into a slaughter. More than twenty thousand Macedonians were slain and only a handful of Romans. When the next day the Romans crossed over the river Leucus, its waters were still tinged with blood. Some Macedonians fled all the way to the sea and waded in, hoping to surrender to the Roman fleet that was standing by. But the Romans sent boats to kill them in the water. They fled back to land only to be trampled in the shallows by the Roman elephants.

After the battle one of Aemilius Paullus’s sons, a teenager, was found missing and searched for; hours later he returned safe with a few comrades, drenched in blood, having slain many when carried away in the killing joy of the pursuit. This young man was Scipio Aemilianus, later the destroyer of Carthage and Numantia, and almost twenty years later a singlecombat victor in early middle age. Scipio Nasica’s killing of the Thracian, Cato’s son and his friends’ recovering his sword, and Paullus’s son’s bloodmad pursuit of the enemy are tokens of how strong the heroic, competitive culture of Roman virtus still was among young Roman aristocrats in 168 bc.

King Perseus fled the stricken field. Within two days nearly all of Macedonia surrendered to the Romans, who were to divide it into four feeble republics to ensure it would never make trouble again. Perseus abandoned his kingdom to seek asylum on the sacred isle of Samothrace, his only escort his Cretan mercenaries. Abandoned finally by all, the king surrendered himself to the Romans. Brought before the consul’s council, the king was peppered with questions by Paullus, but he stood in silence and wept and then flung himself upon the ground as a suppliant for his life. Paullus lost his Roman temper. Didn’t Perseus understand that by cringing in public he was detracting from the reputation of his conqueror? But then he remembered his Greek culture and lectured his young officers in Latin on the mutability of fate, offering Perseus as an object lesson— a very Greek moment, despite the language. Such was the end of the kingdom that had bred Alexander the Great.

Before Paullus could lead his victorious army back to Rome, his soldiers’ greed had to be satisfied. The cities of Epirus that had defected to Perseus were granted by the Senate to the army to plunder. But how to sack them without having to besiege each one? One last time Paullus’s guile was called upon. He told the men of Epirus that they would have to pay a fine, but in exchange they would have their freedom. Ten men from each city were summoned and told to collect all the gold and silver in each town. Then Roman units were sent out at different times so that they would arrive at cities near and far on the same day. At dawn of the day appointed the Romans received in each town all the treasure that had been collected; then, at the fourth hour, the troops were unleashed to sack. One hundred and fifty thousand were taken as slaves and seventy cities were destroyed. It was a suitably horrible end to a singularly cynical Roman war.

Still, the soldiers were unhappy at the sums they received: the gold of Macedon was headed for the public treasury; they were permitted merely to squeeze the stone of Epirus. And so when an enemy of Paullus, one of his own handpicked military tribunes, tried to defeat the proposal granting Paullus a triumph, the soldiers paid him eager heed. Besides, they had resented the strictness of his discipline; it was time to teach commanders a lesson. In the end Aemilius Paullus got his triumph—the voting was suspended and the great Marcus Servilius, victor in twenty-three single combats, harangued the crowd, and finally the triumph was voted. But it is satisfying that the Pydna campaign should have ended as it was carried on—in angry conflict between the general and his army.

Roman warfare of the mid-Republic was a product of fierce division over how war should be fought. The vision of generalship that Aemilius Paullus embodied, that is, the Hellenistic conception of the general as the master of trickery, tactics, flanking maneuvers, and applied scientific knowledge, was conceived as illegitimate on its face by a large proportion of his army and his officers, at least if it delayed their getting to grips with the enemy. To them the duty of the general was to lead his army straight at the foe and to fight as soon as possible. The willful virtus of the soldiers and officers pounded like a siege ram against disciplina, the ethic the general relied upon to command the obedience of his soldiers and to put his plans into action. Yet this very conflict underlies the success of the army of the middle Republic, for despite the disasters it sometimes produced, the result of the conflict was a balance between qualities essential to Roman victory: on the one hand, the bravery and aggressiveness of Roman soldiers of all ranks, and on the other the ability of commanders to use that bravery and aggressiveness. The Roman army was disobedient because it was brave: a less brave army might have been more obedient but would have won fewer wars, while an army whose bravery broke entirely through the bonds of disciplina would have been uncontrollable and so would have won fewer wars as well. In a world where their enemies often represented extremes—brave but ungovernable Gauls, drilled but sometimes timid Greeks—the secret of Roman superiority was that the Roman army, although often inferior in respects in which their enemies excelled, was adequate in respects in which their enemies were not.

Tactical generalship was old at Rome, and native, but Roman generals’ eagerness to maneuver and trick was multiplied by Roman contact with Greek habits of command, just one aspect of the far greater transformation of Roman society that world power and Roman plundering of the world’s treasures brought in its train. Greek generalship was new and foreign, but the conflict it exacerbated was old and Roman: the conflict between virtus and disciplina that the Romans explored in their stories about their early heroic duelists, the conflict that had created the manipular legion.

Roman success in war would eventually destroy the constitutional Republic that created and nourished that success. A state that could manage wars so well could not in the end manage either the wealth and pride of conquest or the discontent and misery. Rule by Senate and people gave way to rule by solitary emperors. What effect did the whirlwind of change that we call the Late Republic have on the odd, delicate, fertile balance between discipline and bravery, and between soldier and general, the singular moral alloy that had allowed the Romans to conquer their world?

A reconstruction of the battle of Pydna demonstrating how the broken ground disrupted the Macedonian phalanx, allowing the Romans to close with the phalangites and use their superior swordsmanship to good effect.

Section of frieze decorating the monument to Aemilius Paullus’ victory at Pydna, 168 BC – this general was the son of the Lucius Aemilius Paullus killed at Cannae. From left to right: legionary fighting a Macedonian cavalryman, a legionary in a mail shirt, and a socii cavalryman also in a mail shirt. It is believed that the frieze depicts the skirmish between opposing watering parties that led to the battle

BY J. E. LENDON

We do not know why the battle of Pydna finally began. In one tradition Aemilius Paullus sat in his tent waiting for the sun to decline into the west, so that it would shine in the eyes of the Macedonians. When the time was right he brought on the battle with the ruse of having the Romans pursue a runaway horse toward the Macedonian lines. In another version, Paullus did not wish to fight at all that day because he was waiting for his foragers to return, and the battle began accidentally as the result of a skirmish between drawers of water. But this we know: the Roman army deployed in the conventional manipular formation and fought Perseus’s phalanx nose to nose on the plain. And, predictably, the Romans began to lose. When the Romans met the Macedonian phalanx the spears of the Macedonians pushed them steadily back: “At the onset, Aemilius arrived and discovered that the Macedonian units had already planted the tips of their sarissas in the shields of the Romans, who could therefore not get forward and reach them with their swords. And when he saw the rest of the Macedonians drawing their shields around front of their shoulders [in preparation for combat], and that the sarissas leveled at a single signal were withstanding his shield-armed soldiers, and when he saw the strength of the locked-shield formation and the harshness of the attack, astonishment and terror seized him, because he had never seen a sight more fearful. And later he often used to recall his emotion and what he saw.” The Romans were driven to extremities to break the Macedonian formation and stop the relentless pressure. The commander of a contingent of Rome’s Pelignian allies cast his soldiers’ standard into the midst of the phalanx, and the Pelignians tried heroically to thrust the Macedonian spears aside—with swords, shields, even their bare hands —to recover it. But to no avail. The Romans were soon in full retreat. Aemilius Paullus rent his garments in despair.

Why Aemilius Paullus was willing to fight a frontal battle with Perseus’s phalanx is a mystery. Plutarch attributes to Paullus awareness of the special dangers presented by fighting the Macedonian phalanx: and well might he have been. The Romans had been fighting the Macedonian phalanx for more than a century. Pyrrhus defeated the Romans with it in the early third century, the Carthaginians in Africa in the middle of the century did as well, and Hannibal did the same later. In 197 bc the Romans had won a terrifying victory against Perseus’s father at Cynoscephalae, a battle that vividly illustrated the terrible power of the phalanx’s charge, even on unsuitable ground. In the year before Cynoscephalae, the Roman siege of Atrax had failed when a Macedonian phalanx drawn up in a breach in the wall had proved quite impervious to Roman attack. Polybius’s judgment that “when the phalanx has its characteristic virtue and strength nothing can sustain its frontal attack or withstand the charge” will have been no news to Roman commanders. The phalanx’s fatal flaw, Polybius says, is that it requires flat terrain so that it can preserve its close order. Perseus’s father’s unwise decision to fight on broken ground allowed the Romans to defeat him at Cynoscephalae. But Aemilius Paullus consented to fight the Macedonian phalanx on a plain, ideally suited to it, on ground that Perseus had chosen for exactly that reason.

There was nothing in Aemilius Paullus’s record to suggest he was rash or inept: quite the opposite. When campaigning in Spain, he had chosen his battlefields with a careful eye toward advantage. Later he had defeated the Ligurians with a complicated stratagem, issuing forth from a besieged camp from all gates at once to catch the enemy by surprise, here carefully having the hastati of one legion lead the charge, there the principes of another. After his victory over Perseus men remarked on the careful preparations Paullus made for throwing dinners in Greece, and the Roman general joked that he took as much care over ordering dinners as he did in marshaling a line of battle: a remark that loses its force unless he was thought an especially careful tactician. “A really good general,” Paullus was apt to tell his own son, “does not commit to a pitched battle at all, except in cases of the greatest necessity or the greatest advantage.” Neither was the case at Pydna.

The outlook, past conduct, and behavior of Aemilius Paullus in the days before Pydna—his feints and ruses on the Elpeus—place him squarely in the Roman tradition of crafty, strategy- and tactics-minded generals, in the tradition of Fabius Maximus and the great Scipio Africanus. Rome was old in the use of tactics: there is no reason to suppose there was ever a generation of Roman fighting without tactics, any more than there was in Greece. Guile in war was as ancient as Roman legend: in the fabled duel of the brothers Horatii, the surviving brother overcame the Curatii by the trick of false flight. At the very first Roman land battle of which there is a reliable, detailed account, Bagradas River in 255 bc in the First Punic War, the Romans are already found varying the standard manipular deployment in the hope of gaining a tactical advantage. By the Second Punic War and the early second century, commanders like Scipio Africanus managed to adapt the many moving parts of the manipular legion to sophisticated tactical battle plans: varying the checkerboard disposition of the maniples, deepening the array, wheeling the array, using the lines of hastati, principes, and triarii independently, detaching maniples to flank the enemy, deploying a second line of legions as a reserve, and approaching the enemy in a battle-ready marching formation. Other sections too of the Roman army were creatively exploited by tactical Roman commanders. Cavalry made flank attacks, and the velites were detached from their legions and used as independent forces of light infantry. Such tactics played a crucial role in defeating Carthage and featured largely in the great victories of Scipio Africanus at Ilipa in Spain in 206 bc and Zama in North Africa in 202. Cato’s battle of Emporiae in Spain in 195 may display the most complicated Roman tactics of all in this period.

Although tactics were native at Rome, by the late third and second century bc there is clear evidence of Greek influence on Roman generalship and methods of fighting. Scipio, we are told, was a keen reader of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a work in which the Greek expert offered in Persian guise his proposals for Greek military reform. By Paullus’s day Roman cavalry equipment had been reformed on the Greek model. The Romans had also begun actively seeking out specialist Greek troops, like the archers from Crete, rather than merely using them when sent by their allies. Elephants too were part of an integrated Hellenistic army. A force of them had been brought from Africa at the beginning of the war against Perseus, and Aemilius used them at Pydna. Thirty years before, Flamininus had used elephants to fight Philip V at Cynoscephalae. The Romans may have learned more about elephants from fighting Carthaginians than from reading Greek manuals, but this was Greek doctrine at second hand: the army of Carthage was modeled on Greek armies, and Hannibal himself was a Hellenized commander. Now the Romans were using Greek stratagems; now the Romans knew Greek lore like the path around the back of the pass at Thermopylae. Now Romans could be imagined debating questions like, Who is the greatest general of all time?—questions that implied that some of them at least had come to share the Greek conception of generalship as a competition in technical expertise.

Greek influence on Roman command is hardly surprising: it is merely a small instance of the gigantic phenomenon of the Hellenization of the Roman aristocracy in the late third and second centuries bc. This cultural transformation affected nearly every aspect of upper-class Roman existence —from education and language to entertainment, decoration, clothing, and housewares. And many of Rome’s tactically minded commanders were leaders of the philhellenic movement, Scipio Africanus (Hannibal’s foe) and Aemilius Paullus among them. After his victory over Perseus, the Greek-speaking Paullus took a long tour of famous sites in Greece and offered Greek athletic games. He gave the Macedonian royal library to his sons. When Paullus made his grim way home after being appointed to fight the Macedonian king, he found his small daughter in tears. Her little dog Perseus had died. “Good fortune, my daughter! I accept the omen!” crowed the consul (how his weeping daughter greeted his glee is not recorded). But a dog named for a Greek hero is also a small yapping sign of how pervasive Greek influence on Rome had become. When we see Paullus not only employing military tricks and ruses, but also applying natural science to war—geology to dig wells, astronomy to reassure his men—we can be certain that he was up to date with the most advanced trends in Greek generalship.

Yet cerebral generalship was strongly resisted at Rome. Trickery and tactics, as the old senators had complained when the envoys reported the lies they had told to Perseus, could be viewed as opposed to virtus. “Among the Romans, a bit of a trace of the old philosophy of war is left,” wrote Polybius of the Romans of Aemilius Paullus’s day. “They declare war openly, rarely use ambushes, and fight their battles hand-to-hand at close quarters.” Many Romans preferred a battle, as Livy put it, “with standards set against standards, on a clean and open field, where without fear of ambush the affair could be settled by true virtus.” The general, in this view, was to lead the army directly at the enemy, to allow his soldiers to display their virtus, and to display his own. After a loss a Roman general might be prosecuted for personal cowardice, but not for tactical stupidity. Terentius Varro, the aggressive consul who committed the Roman army to the disaster at Cannae, was not punished for his bad planning but thanked when he returned to Rome for “not despairing of the Republic.” It was far more important to the Romans that their generals be plucky and adventuresome than that they be skillful strategists and tacticians.

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In 288 BCE, Campanian mercenaries hired by the Greeks seized the town of Messana on the straits separating Sicily from Italy. These mercenaries, who called themselves Mamertines (derived from the Oscan name for Mars, the god of war), used Messana as a base for raiding nearby towns. They, in turn, were attacked by Hiero of Syracuse. The Mamertines turned to Carthage for help against Syracuse and received a Carthaginian garrison. Other Mamertines thought this was a mistake and requested Roman assistance against the Carthaginians. Rome feared a Carthaginian foothold so close to its territory. The Romans eventually agreed to protect the Mamertines and went to war with Carthage in 264 BCE, beginning the First Punic War.

Malta hoped the fighting would be confined to Sicily like the previous war. The first engagements, however, were not encouraging. The Romans under the command of Appius Claudius Caudex were unstoppable. In the first year of the war, he drove both Carthage and Syracuse from Messana. These Roman successes made allies of the old enemies and in the following year the Roman army, under the command of Consul M. Valerius, turned from Carthage to Syracuse. The Romans were so successful that Hiero defected to the Roman side. The Romans then resumed their attacks on Carthaginian territory and in 261 BCE took Agrigentum, sacking the city and selling the population as slaves. Carthage was now limited to its coastal possessions in western Sicily and Malta.

After suffering repeated defeats on land, Carthage turned to its large fleet, which at the beginning of the war numbered 500 quinqueremes. This force, along with the fact that the Romans had no experience with naval combat, comforted Carthaginian Malta in the wake of the earlier defeats. Even if the remainder of Punic Sicily were to fall, the 60 miles separating the Maltese Islands from the invincible Roman army, without control of the seas, might as well be 600. The Roman realized this as well and built their first fleet, the design of which, according to Polybius, was based upon a beached Carthaginian vessel. In the initial small engagements, Carthaginian confidence was reaffirmed. Then the Romans developed for their ships the corvus, a bridge with a spike at the end that could be dropped onto Carthaginian ships, allowing the superior Roman troops to board and seize them. By shifting naval contests back into their forte of land combat, the Romans were able to then follow up their initial land victories with naval victories. In 260 BCE, the Romans under Gaius Duilius achieved their first naval victory at Mylae (143 Roman ships versus 130 Carthaginian), sinking fourteen ships and capturing thirty-one.

The protection afforded by the sea was now lost and the Maltese Islands were vulnerable. In 257 BCE, the Romans named Caius Atilius Regulus as one of its two consuls for that year. His object was the isolation of the Carthaginian forces remaining on Sicily. He began by sailing north of Sicily to the Lipari Islands, defeating the Carthaginian fleet at the Battle of Tyndaris and destroying seventeen ships. Regulus then moved south of Sicily and landed an army on Malta. The Romans then thoroughly devastated and plundered the islands.

The best source we have for the raid in 257 is the work of the Roman poet Gnaeus Naevius (264-195 BCE). Naevius had served in the First Punic War and commemorated it in the epic poem Bellum Punicum. Considered to be the first Latin epic, only fragments of this work remain. Fortunately, fragment 32, one of the few sizable pieces, describes the Roman attack on Malta: “The Roman force crossed Malta, burned the island which had been untouched before then, destroyed it, and laid waste to it, and made spoil of the enemies’ goods.” Regulus was rewarded for his victories with a triumph, and we can only imagine what prizes from Malta were displayed to the cheering Roman crowds.

The year following the Malta raid seemed to spell final defeat for Carthage. Another Regulus (Marcus Atilius Regulus) was consul and with his fellow consul L. Manlus Vulso achieved yet another naval victory at Ecnomus. The time seemed ripe for an invasion of Carthage itself. Again the Carthaginians were defeated and the year ended with the city besieged. In 255 BCE, thanks to the efforts of a Greek mercenary general, the Romans were routed and Regulus captured. There followed fourteen years of hard struggle, with hundreds of Roman ships and tens of thousands of men lost to combat and storms.

By 242 the Roman treasury was exhausted, and the senators themselves provided the money to build 200 quinqueremes. In 241 this fleet was placed under the command of Caius Lutatius Catulus to blockade the Carthaginian port of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala, Sicily). The Carthaginians sent a force of 250 ships under Hanno to relieve the city. The two forces met on March 10 at the Battle of the Aegates Islands. This last Roman fleet shattered the Carthaginian force, sinking fifty vessels and capturing seventy. The Roman admiral was hailed and Hanno crucified.

The defeat at the Battle of the Aegates Islands compelled Carthage to surrender. The treaties which brought the twenty-three-year war to a conclusion ceded to Rome all of Carthaginian Sicily and the Lipari Islands to the north of Sicily, and compelled Carthage to freely restore Roman captives while having to pay ransom for their own compatriots, refrain from attacking Syracuse and its allies, and give Rome 1,000 talents immediately and 2,200 more over ten years. As for the Maltese Islands, they were retained by Carthage. With Rome in control of Sicily and Carthage struggling to rebuild after the devastating war, Malta was now on the front line between the two powers.

The treaty did not bring a lasting peace but rather proved to be a truce as both sides prepared to resume the conflict. The Carthaginian general Hannibal’s defiance of Roman restrictions in Spain renewed hostilities in 218 BCE.

At the beginning of the war, Rome decided to campaign on two separate fronts, Spain and Africa. Lots were drawn by the two consuls Cornelius and Sempronius. Consul Cornelius was to make for Spain with a force of 22,000 infantry and 2,200 cavalry, along with sixty warships. He would be supported by a smaller force under the praetor Lucius Manlius, who was dispatched to Gaul with 18,000 infantry and 1,600 cavalry.

Consul Sempronius drew Africa and was given two legions, each consisting of 4,000 infantry and 300 cavalry, along with 16,000 infantry and 1,800 cavalry supplied by allied contingents, for a total army of 24,000 infantry and 2,400 cavalry. He was also assigned a fleet of 172 vessels, made up of 160 warships and 12 light galleys. Altogether, Rome was hurling a total of 70,200 troops and 232 warships against Carthage and expected a rapid victory, in stark contrast to the twenty-three years it took to win the first conflict.

Carthage also planned for a war on two fronts. While Hannibal marched overland from Spain to invade Italy, a Punic force of fifty-five quinqueremes was sent to recover Sicily and raid the Italian coast. A northern task force of twenty ships with 1,000 troops was to retake the Lipari Islands and a southern task force of thirty-five ships with 8,500 soldiers and sailors was to seize the old Carthaginian stronghold of Lilybaeum. In addition to gaining these positions, Carthage hoped successful landings in and around Sicily would provoke a revolt among their Phoenician compatriots. Meanwhile, a force of 2,000 troops under Hamilcar, son of Gisgo, had been positioned on Malta.

The offensive did not go well. The northern task force was dispersed by a storm and then set upon by Syracusan ships from Messana, where Hiero of Syracuse happened to be staying while waiting for Sempronius to arrive. Three ships were lost, and the prisoners were interrogated. The existence of the other force heading for Lilybaeum was ascertained and Hiero immediately communicated this information to Praetor M. Aemilius, the governor of Sicily, and recommended dispatching a strong garrison to Lilybaeum. Aemilius did so at once.

The southern task force planned on seizing the supposedly unsuspecting port of Lilybaeum by surprise in a predawn attack, taking advantage of a full moon. During the night the Carthaginians had purposely lessened the speed of their vessels, so that they might reach Lilybaeum before daylight. They approached with full sails, hoping to sail directly into the harbor before the Romans were aware what was happening, a trick that had worked for them before in the First Punic War. But the garrison at Lilybaeum had been reinforced and the Romans were waiting for them. With their full sails reflecting the moonlight, they were easy to spot and the lookouts sounded the alarm. Seeing that they had lost the element of surprise and could not sail into the harbor, the Carthaginian fleet veered off. They stood out from the harbor and waited until daylight, and spent the time in lowering their masts and preparing for the naval action to come.

The Roman fleet sailed from the port, eager to come to close quarters and make a hand-to-hand fight of it. According to Livy, however, the Carthaginians “sought to avoid this and to succeed by maneuvering and not by direct attack; they preferred to make it a battle of ships rather than of soldiers. For their fleet was amply provided with seamen, but only scantily manned by soldiers, and whenever a ship was laid alongside one of the enemy’s they were very unequally matched in fighting men.” The Carthaginians proved incapable of ramming the Romans without becoming vulnerable to boarding parties. In a short time, seven of their ships were captured and the remaining twenty-eight fled the battle. As for the Roman fleet, it had not lost a single ship and returned to port with only one vessel damaged by ramming. In the seven ships they had captured, the Romans had taken 1,700 prisoners, including three Carthaginian nobles.

Very soon after the fight at Lilybaeum, Consul Titus Sempronius Longus arrived at Messana. Hiero went to meet him at the entrance of the straits with his fleet fully equipped and manned, and boarded the consul’s vessel. The Syracusan leader described the situation on Sicily and the movements of the Carthaginians, and promised to assist the Romans now in his old age with the same readiness he had shown as a young man in the former war. Syracuse would provide the Roman forces with food and clothing gratis in the renewed struggle with their old enemy of Carthage. Hiero then warned him that Lilybaeum and the cities on the coast were still in great danger, that there were those anxious to effect a revolution against Roman rule. If the Romans were still concerned that Carthage might try to stir up revolt in Sicily, then its base in the Maltese islands would have to be dealt with.

Malta’s situation in 218 BCE was precarious. It was the closest Carthaginian possession to Roman territory. With the failure of the Carthaginian southern offensive and the defeat of its fleet, Malta was now isolated. With less than 2,000 men at his command, Hamilcar son of Gisco, the garrison commander, was vastly outnumbered, facing a Roman general with over 26,000 troops at his disposal. The Maltese knew this. They also remembered the devastating raid in 257 by Regulus. Neither they nor Hamilcar, however, would have much time to ponder these matters, for Sempronius moved quickly.

The only extant source for the 218 invasion of Malta is Livy, who wrote,

From Lilybaeum the consul dismissed King Hiero and his fleet, and leaving the praetor to protect the coast of Sicily, set sail for the island of Melita, which was held by the Carthaginians. On his arrival, Hamilcar, Gisgo’s son, the commandant of the garrison, surrendered himself and nearly two thousand soldiers, together with the town and island. From Melita Sempronius returned in a few days to Lilybaeum, and consul and praetor sold into slavery the prisoners they had made, with the exception of those who were distinguished by noble birth.

Livy does not specify the actions of the Maltese in this invasion. Some translators of Livy do not say that Hamilcar surrendered, but that rather he and the garrison were “delivered up,” which has led some to interpret the text as meaning that the Maltese turned the garrison over. Further evidence for this interpretation comes from later references to the Maltese by Cicero as having been Roman allies, though I believe that these references stem from another event in the Second Punic War and not the invasion in 218. In any case, whether it was the decision of Hamilcar or the Maltese, the Carthaginian garrison did not resist the invasion and the Maltese Islands were in the possession of the Roman Republic.

After the occupation of Malta, Sempronius began preparations for the invasion of the Carthaginian homeland. He dispatched a swift galley to locate a good landing place for the army on the African coast. As he was seeing to the defense of the Sicilian and Italian coasts during the anticipated invasion, Sempronius received a dispatch from the Senate informing him of Hannibal’s presence in Italy. The great Carthaginian general had gotten past Cornelius, and Sempronius was ordered to go to his colleague’s assistance at Trebbia as soon as possible. Sempronius abandoned his plans for an attack on Africa, distributed his fleet to protect Italy and Sicily from Carthaginian raids, and dispatched his army up the Adriatic to Ariminum. Titus Sempronius Longus, the conqueror of Malta, then took command of the Roman forces at Trebbia, only to be routed by Hannibal Barca, believed by some to be a native son of Malta. Seventeen years of war, mostly featuring Roman defeats at the hands of Hannibal, would follow before Rome turned its attention again to the African front.