The roman world war, p.1
The Roman World War, page 1
THE ROMAN WORLD WAR
The Roman World War
FROM THE IDES OF MARCH TO CLEOPATRA’S SUICIDE
GIUSTO TRAINA
TRANSLATED BY MALCOLM DEBEVOISE
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD
English translation copyright © 2026 by Princeton University Press
First published in France under the title La guerre mondiale des Romains, by Giusto Traina, copyright © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2022
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CONTENTS
List of Figures and Maps vii
Preface: The End of the Roman Republic: Civil War or World War? ix
Introduction: Caesar’s Last Campaign 1
PART I. THE WORLD AFTER THE IDES OF MARCH
1 Apollo vs. Dionysus 21
2 Western Warlords 37
3 The Wars of the Tyrannicides 52
4 Avenging Caesar 68
PART II. JOYS AND SORROWS OF THE TRIUMVIRS
5 Between Concord and Discord 83
6 The Advent of a Golden Age 100
7 The Imperium Strikes Back 114
8 Mare Nostrum 125
PART III. THE END OF A REPUBLIC
9 Antony’s Eastern Campaign 139
10 End of the Young Pompey, Wars of the Young Caesar 153
11 The Inimitable Life of Alexandria 167
12 The Oath of All Italy 177
Translator’s Note 189
Notes 191
Select Bibliography 209
Index 221
FIGURES AND MAPS
Figures
2.1. Aureus of Sextus Pompey
3.1. Fragment of the base of the statue of Brutus
4.1. Denarius struck in honor of I. Mussidius Longus
5.1. Denarius struck in honor of Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus Imperator
5.2. Depiction of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XV Caesar
7.1. Silver drachma of Artawazd II
7.2. Silver denarius bearing the image of Quintus Labienus
8.1. Depiction of Antiochus of Commagene and Vahagn
9.1. Coin struck in honor of Antony and Cleopatra, 34 BCE
9.2. Drachma bearing the image of Phraates IV
Maps
1. Caesar’s civil wars
2. Roman Syria
3. The Philippi Campaign
4. The Mediterranean during the Triumviral Period
5. The Parthian Empire
6. The campaign against Sextus Pompey
7. Octavian’s Illyrian War
8. The Donations of Alexandria
9. The Battle of Actium
10. The Roman world under Augustus
PREFACE
The End of the Roman Republic: Civil War or World War?
IN ROMAN memory, the last years of the Republic occupied the better part of a century marked by civil wars: Sulla versus Marius, Caesar versus Pompey, Octavian versus Antony—all of them long and bloody. An obscure schoolmaster named Lucius Ampelius, in a summary of these wars composed for the benefit of his young student Macrinus (whom some scholars have identified as the future praetorian prefect, then emperor [217–18 CE]), described the last one as having been conducted by “Caesar Augustus against several generals”: in the first place Caesar’s murderers, Brutus and Cassius, but also Sextus Pompey and Mark Antony.1 Plainly this was no ordinary conflict. It was a great war that lasted fourteen years, from the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE until the definitive defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian in 30—a short but very intense period that we might call, paraphrasing the title of John Reed’s book on the Russian Revolution, “Fourteen Years That Shook the World.”2
Looking at the matter in this way, as schoolboys under the Principate were taught to do, the wars of the late Republic appeared to be so many settlings of accounts among Romans, factional conflict interrupted from time to time by the need to fight against barbarians and rebels. The final victory of Octavian, who in 27 took the name Augustus and brought forth the Principate from the Republic, put an end to the civil wars.3 Yet the situation was much more complicated than people in Ampelius’s time were accustomed to suppose. The events of the late Republic cannot properly be characterized as a concatenation of civil wars, because their implications were worldwide. To speak of them in this manner may seem anachronistic, for the term “world war” was not used before the nineteenth century; the ancients, however, had no trouble telling the difference between ordinary and extraordinary wars.4 Appian, for example, an Alexandrian Greek active in the second century CE who was acutely sensitive to the situation of non-Roman peoples, clearly showed that the Roman civil wars set in motion a sequence of events amounting to nothing less than a global conflict.
The Romans themselves were keenly aware, at least from the middle of the first century before our era, that their internecine conflicts had acquired an international dimension, from Spain in the west to the Parthian Empire in the east. The historian Florus—a native of Roman Africa and therefore personally acquainted with the far-reaching extent of Roman dominion—describes the combat between Caesar and Pompey as one that could not “justly be called merely a civil war, nor a war between allies, nor yet a foreign war; it was rather a war with all these characteristics and something worse than a war.”5 Nor can the events of the late Republic be properly interpreted without taking into account its most important military campaign: the great expedition to the Balkans, and thence to the East, initially undertaken by Caesar and interrupted by his assassination. Octavian and Mark Antony were unable to fully realize Caesar’s ambition in the years that followed.
In the traditional historical perspective, centered on Rome and Italy, neighboring peoples had a more or less close view of the Roman civil wars, but only as bystanders. North Africans, Hispanics, Celts, Greeks, Thracians, and Armenians looked on from the front rows of this vast theater, the nearest spectators of a tragic drama on which their fate depended. In distant Mesopotamia, seated in the back rows, the Parthians likewise observed the vicissitudes of their rivals, who from time to time suspended hostilities to conclude or renew more or less durable alliances that occasionally allowed them to eliminate the weakest friendly rulers seeking to increase their power at the expense of Rome.
Modern scholarship has not departed very far from this perspective. The argument developed by Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution (1939), one of the finest books on ancient history ever written, focusing on Roman power and considering non-Roman peoples as little more than incidental casualties of internal warfare, remains influential still today.6 Commenting on the Parthian victories of 40 BCE, Syme seeks to reassure his readers, saying that “the domination of the nomads was transient.”7 And although he is rather sympathetic to Antony, he cannot help but conclude that Antony and Cleopatra “were a pretext in the strife for power … merely pawns in the game of destiny.”8
It goes without saying that Symes, a proud New Zealander and British citizen, could hardly have been expected to take a postcolonial view of the matter. As we enter the second quarter-century of the new millennium, however, the dominant view of ancient history is still the one elaborated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The study of non-Greeks and non-Romans in particular has changed dramatically since the 1980s, it is true, in large part owing to the writings of Edward Said.9 Even so, only a few maverick scholars are trying to change the way in which Greeks and Romans and their interaction with other peoples are conceived; the history of Rome is still mostly treated as a history of the Romans, in which their foreign subjects and enemies remain in the background, no matter how foreign, how “barba rian” they were.10 A more inclusive history of antiquity is badly needed. No matter how glorious its past, the study of ancient history cannot avoid contemplating novel geopolitical perspectives and historiographical methods.
Nevertheless there are encouraging signs of a growing openness to new ideas. Kristina Sessa has called for a truly global approach to Late Antiquity aimed at “keeping Late Antiquity weird.”11 This is rather easier for scholars in her branch of the field: The written evidence that has come down to us from the last century of the Republic is less multilingual. The events of this period are nonetheless sufficiently well attested, in some cases by extra-classical sources, that we can begin to imagine making the age of the civil wars seem weirder than it is now widely believed to have been.12
The idea for the present work came to me some years ago as the result of a conversation with Anthony Rowley, the history editor at Éditions Fayard in Paris, who had enjoyed my “one-year book,” 428 A.D.13 Rowley suggested that it might be fruitful to apply to ancient history the methodology of “connected histories” introduced by Sanjay Subrahmanyam in a seminal article published in 1997.14 Doing this took me some time, but I was able to persevere in the wake of Rowley’s untimely death with the encouragement of his successor, Sophie Hogg, who patiently put up with my delays and then, even more patiently, helped me see my way through to the end of the final draft, facilitated by the lockdown that forced me to stay home and write.
A further step was taken with the appearance of the Italian edition, which came out almost a year later, in 2023. In addition to my very capable editors Giovanni Carletti and Caterina Coriani, I owe thanks to Imma Eramo, who translated the book from the French while taking care to verify its factual accuracy on many points. Most of the additions and corrections made to the Italian edition have been incorporated here.
At Princeton I am grateful to Ben Tate, the acquiring editor, for his unstinting support, and to Malcolm DeBevoise for his fine translation and his painstaking review of all the citations in the notes. I also thank the press’s anonymous referees for their helpful comments. It would be impossible to mention all the friends, colleagues, and students who helped me to improve the text, correct errors, and locate bibliographical and iconographical references. I would like at least to acknowledge the kind assistance of Pierangelo Buongiorno, Luciano Canfora, Franco Cardini, Francesco Carriere, Omar Coloru, Roberto Cristofoli, Michèle Coltelloni-Trannoy, Paolo Liverani, Samuele Rocca, Daniele Salvoldi, Federico Santangelo, and Anne Vial-Logeay.
The end of the Roman republic is one of the best documented periods of Antiquity. Without claiming to have written a genuinely comprehensive history, since most of our sources reflect more the Roman point of view than that of other peoples, I have nonetheless tried to strike a new balance, elevating these peoples above the secondary role to which they have been consigned until now and highlighting, alongside the main interpreters of this world tragedy, the role of several minor Roman characters and, above all, a cast of non-Romans less well known than Cleopatra, yet no less involved in the Great Game between Rome, Parthia, and the nations in between, as well as the civil conflicts in other parts of the imperium Romanum, foremost among them the Moor Bogud, the Dacian Burebista, the Thracian Sadalas, the Cilician Tarcondimotus, and the Armenian Artawazd II. Yes, Artawazd, not “Artavasdes”—let’s refer to him as his own subjects did. A small detail, perhaps, but a step in the right direction.
THE ROMAN WORLD WAR
INTRODUCTION
Caesar’s Last Campaign
THE VIOLENT death of Julius Caesar abruptly cancelled all his plans, beginning with the eastern campaign. The dictator was to have left Rome on 18 March 44 to rejoin his legions, which had already crossed the Adriatic. Three days earlier—the Ides of March, according to the Roman calendar—he was fatally stabbed by a group of conspirators. The historian Nicolaus of Damascus noted the striking contrast between Caesar’s inert remains and the grandeur of his campaigns, real or imagined: “The corpse was still lying where Caesar fell, covered ignominiously in the blood of the man who had marched as far west as Britain and the Ocean and who was planning to march east against the realms of the Parthians and the Indians so that, when they were subjugated, sovereignty over all land and sea would be combined into one empire—this man’s corpse was lying there, then, no one having had the courage to stay and carry it off.”1
Nicolaus’s Life of Augustus, written shortly after the death of the princeps in 14 CE, is the earliest account that has come down to us of Caesar’s determination to march eastward for the purpose of resuming hostilities against the Parthian Empire, which extended from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. In 54–53, the Parthians had repulsed the attempted invasion of Mesopotamia by a great army led by the ambitious Marcus Licinius Crassus; some forty thousand men, legionaries and auxiliaries were annihilated by cavalry and allied forces on 9 June 53, on the plain of Carrhae (modern Harran, in Turkey, near the Syrian border). Crassus had foreseen neither the enemy’s reaction nor its tactical superiority. A few days after the massacre of his men he died, rather stupidly, in a skirmish. It is said that his head was brought to the king at the end of a banquet, a macabre scene described by Plutarch.2 Several surviving legionaries were captured. The Parthians had taken possession of the military standards of seven legions as well, a mortal blow to the prestige of Rome in the East and the height of its humiliation there.
In the aftermath of Carrhae, the Parthians and their Arab allies repeatedly raided the Roman province of Syria and, in 51, arrived at the gates of Antioch, confident that the quality of their forces and the restlessness of the local population under Roman domination would enable them to prevail.3 The civil war between Pompey and Caesar delayed the Roman response. Legionary soldiers stationed in Syria, commanded by Gaius Cassius Longinus (later one of Caesar’s assassins), finally managed to contain the invasion, but defensive capabilities needed nonetheless to be reinforced if Roman authority were to be restored. In 50, when Caesar was still in Gaul, the Senate ordered him to commit two of his legions to the war against the Parthians. Pompey, now preparing for war, took advantage of this turn of events to undermine his rival by making sure that Caesar’s troops remained in Italy, at his own service.4 In sparing the Parthians the costs of a new war, Pompey assured himself of the support of the Parthian king, Orodes II. Indeed, when Caesar attacked, “the Parthians took the Pompeian side both because of their accord with Pompey in the Mithridatic War and also because of the killing of Crassus, whose son [Marcus Licinius Crassus Junior, a veteran of the Gallic campaigns like his brother Publius, who died at Carrhae] they had heard had sided with Caesar, and they had no doubt that he would avenge his father if Caesar prevailed.”5
In the campaign that was to culminate in a decisive battle against Caesar at Pharsalus on 9 August 48, Pompey tried to enlist the active participation of the Parthians, but to no avail; Orodes, it was said, demanded Syria in exchange.6 After his defeat, Pompey allegedly hesitated to take refuge with the king, notwithstanding that Orodes appeared for the moment to be the best placed to receive Pompey and the remnants of his army and to protect them in their weakened condition, so that they might regroup and set off again in larger numbers.7 According to Cassius Dio, no doubt relying on a source favorable to Pompey, this was a baseless rumor: The Parthians could not be trusted, because they had imprisoned Pompey’s ambassador, and Pompey was forced to decide whether to take refuge in Egypt or in Africa.8 However this may be, Pompey was killed in Egypt a few months after his defeat at Pharsalus.
Nothing any longer stood in the way of war against the Parthians, though Caesar’s legionaries were exhausted from long years of fighting at home and abroad. In the summer of 47 he went to Syria and then to Cilicia, for the purpose of restoring order in those parts of the East under Roman control. A good number of Pompey’s former allies asked for forgiveness. The dictator’s shrewdness in granting clemency, on payment of a tribute, won their allegiance.9 In Syria Caesar received the kings, sovereigns, and rulers whose states bordered Syria and Cilicia and the other Roman provinces, more or less powerful allies who were then incorporated into the imperium Romanum.10 In the less urbanized regions of Anatolia, the Romans did not exercise direct control but practiced what might be called an imperialist form of hegemony dedicated to establishing a balance among competing political interests and to collecting taxes. The title of king was respected in the East; even the least formidable monarchs possessed a religious charisma that guaranteed the loyalty of their subjects and the obedience of nobles. It was altogether in Rome’s interest to respect these traditions while at the same time supporting local rulers, even if from time to time it was convenient to impose ones of its own choosing. Furthermore, Caesar could count on the support of Antioch, a major city, and on that of the Jews, thanks to his excellent relations with John Hyrcanus II, high priest of the Temple of Jerusalem.
