ThE naTurE of roman rulE
43
Roman commanders, and the absence of any coherent plan for
pacification, as to the qualities or temperament of the natives.
16
Roman treatment of opposition was violent and destructive, with
massacres, mass enslavement and the destruction of settlements –
regardless of their beauty or historical significance, as in the sack
of Corinth in 146 BCE or of Athens in 86 BCE (although in the
latter case, the Roman commander, Sulla, prohibited the burning
of the city). Rome’s subjects had a clear idea of the consequences of
rebellion and, nevertheless, some resented Roman rule sufficiently
to ally themselves with powers like Macedonia or Mithridates of
Pontus. In the west, the deterrent effect of the Roman treatment
of defeated rebels was perhaps reduced by the fact that they could
behave like that even when peace had been negotiated. On two
different occasions in Spain, Roman commanders promised to
resettle a tribe on fertile land and then took the opportunity when
they gathered together to massacre a significant number and sell the
rest into slavery.
17
On the first occasion, in 150 BCE, this triggered a
widespread revolt that lasted over ten years until the Romans bribed
some native envoys, sent to discuss peace terms, to assassinate their
leader; on the second, it passed almost without comment.
Provinces were beaten into submission over decades, through
the relentless and at times unpredictable application of military
force, the gradual establishment of an infrastructure of camps and
roads (built not for any peaceful purpose, but to facilitate troop
movements in case of trouble) and the fear of subject communities
that anything other than complete submission and cooperation
might incur violent retribution. That is not to say that all Roman
governors were treacherous war-mongerers looking for any
opportunity to launch a punitive campaign, but a sufficiently large
number of them were – and the Roman system encouraged rather
than controlled this tendency – for it to be a permanent anxiety in
all but the most peaceful of provinces. Even in Sicily, where the only
military action after the Second Punic War had been the suppression
of two large-scale slave revolts and where the governor relied on
local levies rather than Roman troops, the threat of violent punitive
action, examples of which continued to arrive from more distant
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