Terrorism in the Ancient Roman World
By Gregory G. Bolich

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In the summer of a.d. 82, three Roman warships were hijacked. The pilots of two were murdered; the third pilot decided to obey his captors. The hijackers sailed along the coast without interference, their crime undetected. They struck port cities unexpectedly and took what they wanted by force. However, local resistance and their own lack of skill eventually brought the hijackers to ruin.

They became so desperately hungry that they turned to cannibalism. They were hunted down, ending the terror they had inspired. Some, sold as slaves, gained notoriety for their incredible tale, recorded a generation later by the famed Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

In the late summer of 2001, another incredibly horrific tale of hijacking and terrorism caught the world’s attention. Unfortunately, history is replete with unsettling precedents. Terrorism is probably as old as human society. In the ancient Roman world there were no words for ‘terrorism or terrorists. However, the acts of terrorism inflicted in those days were not unlike those of modern times. Then, as now, there were people willing to employ a calculated use of force and terror to accomplish their ends. Though the ancients may have called them rebels or brigands or tyrants, the motives, the methods, and the outcomes are familiar to people of our era under the collective name of terrorism.

Studying ancient terrorism, though, is hampered by a dilemma that is still with us today: determining exactly what terrorism is. Who decides what constitutes terrorism and who the terrorists are? Is it merely a matter of perspective? Can one group’s terrorist be another group’s freedom fighter? Acts of war also terrify. What differentiates a legitimate act of war from a terrorist attack?

Broadly speaking, those who are terrified decide what qualifies as terrorism. If this is a matter of perspective, it is not just narrow opinion, because most people have a shared sense of what makes for a legitimate use of threats or force. Thus ancient and modern people alike realize that war brings horrific acts, even against civilian populations. Yet people of all eras have a keen sense that as barbaric as war can be, it remains different from mere barbarism.

It may well be that in the Roman world the acceptable limits of warfare were more liberally drawn than today, but even so people sometimes recoiled in shock and horror at acts clearly beyond the pale. War is terror within bounds; terrorism is terror beyond those bounds. Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives.

The Roman world certainly knew the kind of horror the FBI described as terrorism. On the one hand, Rome could terrify its own people, as well as foreigners. The use of terror by the state already had an ancient lineage by the time Rome rose to dominance. Aristotle reflected on the matter in his Politics, for example. On the other hand, others frequently targeted Romans, both at home and abroad, in terrible and terrifying acts. State terrorism and revolutionary terrorism often followed one another in a vicious reciprocal cycle: Terror begets terror. In other words, little has changed in the pattern of atrocities.

Ancient Rome, like the United States today, was the sole superpower of its world. Rome exercised immense influence even where it lacked outright control. Roman rulers possessed certain advantages over those who opposed them. In their use of power, they could claim to be the legitimate arm of the body politic. Thus Augustus could proudly note in the official record of his acts, I pacified the sea of pirates. He did not note his feat was accomplished against Sextus Pompeius Magnus, son of the renowned Pompey the Great and heir to the leadership of his father’s followers in a great civic struggle. By the time Augustus was finished with him, Pompeius was officially nothing more than a pirate — a terrorist of the seas.

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts, Military Technology

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