This is beyond doubt an important book, which touches upon some of the most-discussed aspects of Roman republican history. By putting extreme forms of violence at the heart of her analysis, B. manages to shed new light on such diverse fields as military history, republican politics, intellectual discourse and, last but not least, modern debates on mass killings and genocide. The guiding questions of her study are: how did the Romans themselves perceive mass violence? Is there a link between the massacres in Rome's foreign wars and the internal violence in the final 100 years of the Republic, and what was the role of collective violence in Roman history?
B. sets out with a definition of the term ‘massacre’ (pp. 12–14), which she traces back to the French wars of religion. This is followed by some brief references to key works on violence in late republican Rome, in particular the contributions of P. Jal, A. Lintott, W. Nippel and F. Hinard (p. 15). The focus of these previous works was firmly set on internal crises and their constitutional and legal consequences since 133 bce. By contrast, it is B.’s avowed aim to present a joint study of military and political practices which goes back well into the third century bce and focuses on the cultural embeddedness of violence in republican Rome.
One potential issue of such an approach is the quality of the available sources. In the first part of her book B. does a very thorough job in disentangling different types of literary evidence and their changing agendas over time. Taking large-scale atrocities against whole communities as her starting point, she shows that the vast majority of such incidents are indeed set in urban contexts, which are modelled closely upon the sack of Troy (pp. 21–30). She emphasises that desperate actions such as mass suicides were not the norm but the noteworthy exception that could be put to good effect by ancient authors who wanted to entertain an audience well-versed in Homeric poetry. Interestingly, the most detailed of these accounts only appear under the empire, and in particular in Livy, Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio (pp. 47–63).
By contrasting Cassius Dio's accounts of various sieges, sacks and massacres of the civil wars of the 40s bce with other authors, for example Velleius Paterculus and Appian, B. is able to show different degrees of authorial restraint in the usage of specific literary motifs. One of the merits of such an inter- and contextual approach is that it helps to reveal the framework of common factual information, at the same time highlighting each author's individual attitude and aims, from Polybius well into the early third century ce (pp. 62–4). Importantly, B. concludes that, although all ancient authors were to some degree inspired by the Homeric epics and the sack of Troy, this literary topos was, over the centuries, enriched by other motifs that were genuine to the Roman way of war and thus by no means dissociated from common military practice and experience (p. 63).
B. then proceeds from the literary sources to an in-depth discussion of particular historical events, with a specific focus on notorious cases of mass killings such as Caesar's eradication of the Eburones and, in a second part, the proscriptions of the first century bce (pp. 64–100). She recognises how these unique constellations can help us to overcome the suspicion against rhetorical topoi that were so obviously used in the description of sacked cities. Through her careful treatment of the incidents surrounding Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, B. is able to demonstrate how exceptional situations could lead to new political and legal measures such as the senatus consultum ultimum. She is also certainly right in pointing out the essentially asymmetric constellations in 133 and 121 bce, both characterised by the relentless eradication of resistance, in 121 even by the use of organised forces (p. 121). One wonders whether the deliberate escalation of violence that set such a gruesome precedent for future conflicts would become even clearer by looking at the military experiences of both Scipio Nasica and Lucius Opimius (cf. D. Maschek, Die römischen Bürgerkriege. Archäologie und Geschichte einer Krisenzeit [2018], pp. 79, 95–6).
In the following section B. moves on to ‘the facts’ (‘Les Faits’), including some useful tables of attested cases of mass violence under asymmetric circumstances (‘massacres’) from 207 to 36 bce. Several pertinent cases are discussed in detail. It is commendable that B. also draws upon archaeological material, such as the destruction layers of Carthage and some recent excavations in Spain, to bolster her argument. In this context, it should be stressed that there is no good reason to doubt the excavators’ interpretation of the republican executions at Valencia: in the light of the stratigraphy it is clear that the mutilated bodies were directly covered by the burnt remains of the forum's portico, which means that they must have been deposited just before the final destruction of the building which, due to the small finds and associated pottery, can be linked to the sack of the town by Pompey's troops in 75 bce.
In the last section B. discusses ‘Les Jugements’ pertaining to acts of mass killings in the republican period, inserting the data presented in the preceding chapters into the wider context of Roman politics. In some cases commanders were condemned and sentenced for their excessive violence, for example when they acted against the fides established with particular peoples or tribes. However, in times of civil war, this became problematic: how should magistrates now be judged for violence against fellow Romans? B. provides a clear discussion of concepts like maiestas, perduellio and the hostis-declaration as well as the senatus consultum ultimum. She is also able to show that, according to long-established practice, once the deditio of an enemy was received, both sides engaged in fides, which prevented the former enemy from being abused or violated. Significantly, a comparable framework did not exist for inter-Roman conflicts, and therefore this sort of violence, despite some legal attempts to get it under control, raged widely unabated.
This, as B.’s shows convincingly (pp. 285–309), led to a moral discourse on excessive violence that developed over the course of the later second and then particularly in the first century bce, when feritas, immanitas, insania and furor became catchwords for a morally corrupt character. These concepts, as B. argues, owe a lot to Greek historians who ultimately drew on the paradigmatic texts of Homer and the characterisation of tyranny in Herodotus and Plato. Tellingly, these Greek texts were reflected exactly at the same time when Rome plunged into the darkest abyss of internal violence, i.e. from the late second century bce to the triumviral period (p. 309). In the light of this compelling evidence it seems to me quite pointless to try to distinguish neatly between different types of internal conflict in the late republican period, as has occasionally been proposed in recent scholarship. As B. admirably shows, the categories and terminology used in the ancient sources obviously do not reflect a clear-cut legal status of different types of civil war and inner conflict but were themselves subject to a wider and dynamic discourse that tried to classify – more often than not in highly charged ways, not with the attitude of modern political theorists – the events of the more or less distant past.
B.’s book is an important and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of mass violence during the late Roman Republic. In a more fundamental sense, it is also a powerful plea for a more nuanced and humane approach to historiography: in studies of mass killings the individual often fades against the overwhelming numbers; for antiquity, most of the time we only have the numbers, and mostly they are contentious in scholarship. It is therefore praiseworthy that B. tries to give credit to the individuals and their experience of brutality and violence in the last two centuries of the republican period. In the words of T. Snyder: ‘Each of the living bore a name … Each of the dead became a number … It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people’ (T. Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin [2010], pp. 379, 408)
