Winners Take All

...They revolt at what they consider Realism’s unrealistic pessimism and its one-sizefi ts-all scorn for exceptions...

...If so many examples of courage did not move you, nothing ever will...

...But for that reason, says he, Roman militarism makes little difference to history because all the powers in the Mediterranean were much the same...

...Nevertheless, wouldbe scientists rule our departments of international relations, and the name they give to their pseudoscience is Realism...

...Most 20th-century historians believed the Romans had expanded to defend themselves, drawn into ever more distant entanglements by their defensive alliances...

...The realities of the international system nudged all in the same direction...

...But in fact, the world Rome faced did not consist mostly of city-states with citizen armies: Rome’s great foes consisted of the sprawling Hellenistic kingdoms, leagues of Greek city states, and imperial city states—preeminently Carthage—that had worked around their demographic limits by levying tributes of money upon their subjects and employing armies of mercenaries...

...Here Eckstein is clearly right, and his digging of this jewel from the oily sand of Realism shows how well a clever man can use even a perverse theory...

...LENDON Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome by Arthur M. Eckstein California, 389 pp., $49.95 In the universities—America’s retirement homes for bad ideas— there clings to life the notion that relations between nations can be rendered into a science...

...How could Rome’s demographic advantages be the decisive factor against enemies such as these...

...Realism, fi nally, predicts that all states should be aggressive— and Eckstein has taken that prediction to heart—but also that all states should adapt themselves similarly to the grim business of nearly constant war...

...Nor, if the ability to incorporate others was indeed decisive, does that explain Rome’s victories over non-city-state peoples like the Celts, who were arguably as well able as the Romans to increase their fi ghting population as they expanded...

...The answer, of course, is that they had different cultures, and that culture endures even in the face of cataclysm...

...But if their ways at home were so powerfully unalike, and remained unalike, to the same degree it becomes harder to believe (with the Realists) that all Mediterranean states turned the same face to the world...

...But more important, perhaps, was the willingness of that population to die—the Roman will to continue wars in adversity...

...Now fi nally comes Arthur Eckstein, historian of Rome turned Realist: He has no quarrel with Harris’s picture of Roman militarism, for a Realist expects all peoples to be militarists...

...Yet the merit of Realism is to drag the historian out of the brothels (or archives) of the country he studies, slap him a couple of times, and make him look bleary-eyed at the other peoples around...

...Harris swept away what had gone before, and for 25 years his thesis stood unchallenged, historians accepting his harsh vision of the Romans and, according to their humors, either clucking or drooling over Rome’s love of war...

...And there is another quality of Roman fi ghting that set them apart, at least from the Greek world of city-states, kingdoms, and leagues, and also from the Carthaginians: their refusal, even in the face of stark necessity following terrible losses in battle, to ransom their own prisoners of war to refi ll their thinned ranks...

...When it can be claimed that one nation behaves differently from others, the Realist constrains us to check whether it is really thus...

...To explain Rome’s victories over the kings and leagues, Eckstein points also to the political advantages of Rome’s republican city-state constitution...

...First to make this claim was the Greek historian Polybius, who attributed to the Romans an evil Pinky-and-the-Brain-style plan to conquer the Mediterranean world...

...All were weasels, because they had to be ready to defend themselves against other weasels...

...It is as if Victor Davis Hanson’s “western way of war,” that strange willingness to stake everything on a climactic battle, applied to Rome’s enemies, who obediently surrendered after a great defeat, but not to Rome...

...They dread the deadening jargon with which Realism seeks respectability: “unipolarity,” “unlimited revisionist state,” “unit attribute theory...

...If we are looking for a singularity of the Romans to explain their victories, here it lies: not so much in their generous love of valor—for that, as Eckstein would remind us, was shared by all ancient peoples—but in their stone contempt for cowardice...

...Realism asserts that the international arena is, at all times and places, inherently dangerous and anarchic, and that the international system goads all states willy-nilly towards belligerence...

...When the Roman captives Hannibal took at Cannae begged Rome to redeem them, Rome discarded them as trash: “Fifty thousand citizens and allies lay fallen around you on that day...

...Rome, for all its aggressiveness, does not stand out, except that its aggression was more successful...

...This is a useful contrast to the crippling demographic limitations of the classical Mediterranean city-state— Sparta, say—stingy about making new citizens and therefore curbed in its dominion...

...At the end of the second war, the Carthaginians surrendered after losing a great land battle (Zama) on their home soil...

...And the more discreet sort of social scientist will add that conclusions about human affairs are only scientifi c when thousands of human actions can be studied in the aggregate, like the hungry surging of bacteria...

...They know that Realism applies poorly even to recent history, for in the 20th century it was mad and bad men and states, rather than the logic of the international system, that tended to cause wars...

...And they see through the mannerism that Realists share with Marxists, what one might call the language of pretended brass tacks, a lingo of unsentimental hard-mindedness—in Realism the international situation is always “grim,” “stern,” or “brutal”—that works in secret to persuade readers that the Realist sees beneath pretexts and offers a hidden, unvarnished, truth: Real science should not need the greasy lubrication of rhetoric...

...But why did the Romans win...

...To this eccentric doctrine historians have wisely paid no great attention...

...Much the same is true of Roman wars in the East when, time after time, Rome’s opponents would yield after setbacks which, although serious, were not nearly as serious as those the Romans had overcome in the Carthaginian Wars...

...What made the Romans different was not their willingness to get into wars, but their success at winning more of them than they lost...

...Yet the Roman alliance had previously lost some 500 ships and 200,000 men in defeats and storms, and Rome fought on...

...Here Eckstein appeals to the great 19thcentury German historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen: What set the Romans apart was their ability to incorporate non-Romans into their state, their generosity in granting citizenship...

...Rome’s large population was, of course, part of her ability to win...

...But in 1979 William Harris returned to Polybius and cried out in his War and Imperialism in Republican Rome that Roman expansion had “dark and irrational roots” and Roman warmaking “a pathological character...

...For the Romans, such a check is essential, because the Roman conquest of their empire has often been attributed to their being so singular a folk...

...Lendon, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity...

...Why didn’t Rome’s enemies adapt and become more like Rome...

...But what of great Carthage, which had a constitution of the same type...

...The Romans expanded because they were worse than those around them, the rabid weasel in the rabbit warren...

...The diplomat will scoff: States do not act enough alike, he will say, and character is all...

...The result was a large—and with their conquests ever larger—population, and that gave them the manpower to win their wars...

...But 15 years before, Rome had lost a greater battle in Italy (Cannae) on top of two previous disasters (Trebia and Trasimene)—and Rome fought on, although her situation after Cannae was worse than Carthage’s after Zama...

...So if the Romans were different in their arrangements for war, and more effective in war, as they clearly were, Eckstein’s Realism requires us to ask why this difference endured so long...

...At the end of Rome’s fi rst war with Carthage, the Carthaginians begged for peace after a grave naval defeat...

...At the point when a normal Mediterranean state, as bellicose as they all were, sued for peace, at that point the Romans hardened themselves for another battle...