A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

No one could accuse the Romans of being unable to make up their minds. When they made a
decision, they stuck to it. And while Rome was fighting for its life against Etruscans and Gauls, this
quality gave them greatness. The Etruscans were also philosophers; they had a touch of the eastern
temperament; they vanished from history. Rome, with the magnificent simplicity of a healthy
peasant, went on cutting down its enemies with the short sword. The riches of Carthage made the
Romans greedy; and, like the Persians before them, they began to pay too much attention to the
pleasures of the bed and the table. In this new situation of ‘conspicuous consumption’, the lack of
imagination that had made them great now made them brutish and short sighted - neither of them
qualities that conduce to survival. At the point when the Romans could afford to be influenced by
the Greeks and think about larger questions, they were incapable of thinking beyond the needs of
the present moment. So in spite of emperors like Augustus, Claudius, Hadrian and Marcus
Aurelius, the decline of Rome was irreversible.
The rest of the story of Rome is mainly one of criminal violence. It began immediately after the
death of Sulla in 78 B.C. The roads of Italy, and even of Rome itself, were overrun with robbers
and murder became commonplace. The sea was suddenly full of pirates - Mommsen calls it ‘the
golden age of buccaneers’. It became so bad that only about a third of the corn Rome imported
from Africa and Egypt actually reached Roman ports. Pirate vessels were usually light craft with
shallow draught and a formidable turn of speed. They could follow a merchantman at a distance,
too low in the water to be seen, and attack by night - sometimes even following the merchantman
into port, killing the man on watch and slipping out again before dawn loaded with plunder. Men
and women were prized as much as other booty, for they could be sold as slaves. The Greek island
of Delos became virtually a slave market, with tens of thousands changing hands every day. The
pirates were soon strong enough and rich enough to demand ‘protection’ money from ports and to
use them when they needed repairs. The province of Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey,
became a pirate stronghold. Rome was largely responsible for all these outlaws, for the destruction
of cities like Corinth and Carthage had left large numbers of people with no other means of
livelihood.
Five years after the death of Sulla, a gladiator named Spartacus - a deserter from the Roman army
who had been caught and enslaved - escaped from the gladiator school at Capua and hid on Mount
Vesuvius, together with a small band of slaves. As other slaves heard about the group, they came
and joined them. Then, because they knew they would be tortured to death if they were recaptured,
they fought like demons against the armies sent out against them and achieved a remarkable series
of victories. The Romans were stunned - they had come to believe that their armies were invincible.
Worse still, they had no competent general to send against the rebels - their best man, Pompey, was
away in Spain fighting another rebel. Eventually, the Romans decided to appoint a millionaire
called Crassus - an opportunist who had made his fortune buying up the land of proscribed senators
and by setting up Rome’s first fire brigade.
Crassus was lucky. Their string of victories had turned the slaves into a murderous rabble whose
only interests were murder and rape. On a small scale, Spartacus’s slaves were repeating the history
of Rome: effort and determination leading to success, and success leading to degeneration and
viciousness. Drunk with revenge and plunder, the slaves refused Spartacus’s pleas to leave Italy;
they were enjoying themselves too much. Against Spartacus’s better judgement, they charged into
battle against the well-trained Roman army, which hacked them to pieces. Spartacus was killed in
battle and six thousand of his followers were crucified along the road to Rome.