2. MÉTODO 53
2.4 Artículo: “Autonomy, Coping Strategies and Psychological Well-Being in Young
The Bellum Hispaniense is a troubled text, for not only are the manuscipts in a sorry state of preservation, but the author himself is possessed of a style that is difficult to follow and admits of frequent mistakes. Rice Holmes famously referred to the work as “the worst book in Latin literature”; the attempts to reconstruct the deplorable text by scholars such as Mommsen “worthy of a better cause.” 5 Interest in the text for the most part has revolved around reconstructing the sense of the fragmented Latin, in an attempt to make sense where little remains. In this area the heroic efforts of Böhm are the most recent,
and commentators have made valuable contributions, among them Klotz and Pascucci.6
Diouron’s edition of the text published in 1999 has brought together this scholarship in a
5 Holmes (1967), 298.
6 On Böhm’s suggested emendations to the Latin text, see Böhm 1988. Böhm has also published extensively on questions arising from the text. Klotz (1927); Pascucci (1965).
valuable resource which addresses the text sentence by sentence, including commentary, variants in the manuscripts, and comprehensive lists of suggested textual emendations.7 Some interest has been generated in the work for its use of colloquialisms and as a didactic example of “half-educated Latin.”8
In addition, the question of its authorship has drawn attention from the scholarly community, none of it more recent than Storch’s suggestion in 1977 that the unknown writer was a cavalry officer.9 A summary of the state of the question is to be found in Diouron’s introduction to the French edition.10 Suggestions have ranged from that of Adcock in the Cambridge Ancient History that the author was a simple soldier, to the suggestion of Van Hooff that he might have held the rank of legate, a man “like [Quintus] Pedius or Fabius Maximus… a politician whose career required some military service.”11 The author’s background is similarly difficult to discern. Van Hooff’s guess of a budding politician would make him senatorial or equestrian class. Similarly Storch’s guess of praefectus equitum would make the author at least of equestrian rank, but this enlightens us little as to his background; on the one hand, men of the caliber of Cicero’s consular colleague of 63 B.C., C. Antonius, held that position, on the other, we know that centurions were frequently in possession of equestrian status by the time they left the legion.12 In the early Principate, centurions could advance to the ranks of tribunus militum or praefectus equitum by promotion. As Syme suggests, this practice may pre-
7 Diouron (1999). The review of Marshall is also helpful; Marshall (2001), 49-51. 8
Thus Chilver in the First Edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. IX. (1970), 165. For similar, see Corbett (1962). The opinion of C.B.R. Pelling in the Third Edition is simply a more politely termed echo of the same sentiment, “His level of education was not high.” OCD3 (1996), 238.
9 Storch (1977), 201-4. 10 Diouron (1999), XV- XVII.
11 Adcock CAH1 Vol IX (1971), 703; Van Hooff (1974), 123-38; 125. 12 Damon and Mackay (1995), 37-55.
date our earliest recorded example in the early Principate.13 It is sufficient for the current study to note that the consensus of the scholarship has the author inhabiting a rank which was lower than those who were part of Caesar’s inner circle.14 It is, therefore, not unreasonable to treat his account as a “soldier’s eye view”.
As the work of a soldier, the text would be a unique document, but the scholarship which addresses the Bellum Hispaniense shows a marked reluctance to engage with it in terms of its significance to our broader understanding of historical questions. A notable exception is Van Hooff’s 1974 article, “The Caesar of the Bellum Hispaniense” which addresses the work’s “possible value as a source of information about Caesar’s
personality.”15 Van Hooff’s achievement is perhaps not so much his conclusion that the Caesar of these latter years is an embittered figure, but his insight that such a work can make a significant contribution to historical inquiry. It is upon this foundation that I wish to build in examining the Bellum Hispaniense as a valuable resource for approaching the question of the soldier’s experience and identity. The corpus Caesarianum as a whole is a set of works based within the experience of warfare; texts written by men while on campaign. Of the whole corpus, the Bellum Hispaniense is the closest reflection of the soldier’s experience of warfare that antiquity provides. Part of the reason that it has not received much attention as a historical document relates to the observation that it lacks precision in its account of the campaign.
13
Syme (1937), 128-9.
14 Storch deliberately estimates his rank as praefectus militum because it placed him in a position where he “would not have been an important member of Caesar’s staff”, 383. Van Hooff is alone in suggesting a rank as high as legate, and his reasoning about the level of military expertise that he expects to belong to a legate as opposed to a soldier or centurion is somewhat unclear.
Way, in his introduction to the Loeb edition of the Bellum Hispaniense, enumerated what he saw as the failings of the author:
As a military commentator, he lacks a sense of proportion; for while he describes –often at some length- all kinds of engagements, including quite minor skirmishes, as well as frequent atrocities, desertions and even apparent trivialities, yet he throws little light on problems of supply, finance, the number of troops engaged, and above all, the tactical reasons for the various maneuvers. His grasp of tactics seems, in fact, negligible.16
The assessment of the author of the Bellum Hispaniense is indicative of the questions that Way sought to ask of the text as military commentary. Way looked at the text as a military commentary, and he documented the places where he was perplexed about why the author had included something, or where he considered that the author lacked an understanding of tactics. We can take that essentially negative assessment and use it as a map for finding a positive interpretation of the text. The author’s attention was not always on the aspects of the campaign which contributed to the overall understanding of the war, and the times when his focus wanders are our biggest clue the real condition of the soldier on campaign. This reading of the text will show us that its author has a deep interest in recording information, and that this information seems scattered because it represents the information that the soldier knew. The account is thus primarily impressionistic, not analytical. In order to elucidate this argument I make some basic observations about the interests of the author, and in particular where the primary focus of his attention lies. I will then set these in dialogue with behavior of other soldiers in the
Caesarian corpus to demonstrate that the interests of the soldier as revealed in the Bellum Hispaniense reflect the interests of the soldiery more generally.
Way’s main observations on the author’s qualities as a military commentator were that the author had no over-arching perspective on the campaign and was ignorant of its technical functions (aspects like the grain supply), and that in place of these details he recorded minutiae with little bearing on the campaign. Way thought that the author simply lacked the ability to decide what was important, but a more reasonable
explanation is that he recorded events with no impact on the overall arc of the campaign because they were important to his own experience. The author’s failure to make his account accord with rules of narrative construction or endow it with a sense of historical progress is his greatest strength, “a voice that appears almost entirely uncontaminated by rhetoric.”17 The events recorded are the events he knew or the events which it struck him to record, without seeking to manipulate them into a narrative framework. The events which puzzled Way for their inclusion –their very lack of place in any sort of narrative- fall into major areas: one, recording events which were conspicuous, if not meaningful, including relatively insignificant engagements, and, two, recording quantifiable statistical information, such as death tolls and numbers of deserters, even when these which yielded no significant intelligence or advantage to either side.
In regard to this first category of information, which pertains to some conspicuous incident, it will become clear that the incidents mentioned, when considered from the perspective of the soldier on the ground, are in fact likely to have been interpreted as meaningful to the troops themselves. We will examine four of these events: a duel
between two soldiers (25), the execution of an enemy soldier (27), the appearance of the moon (27), and the entry into camp of a civilian deserter (19). None of these events changed the course of the war or contributed anything significant to the story of the campaign. The answer to the question of their inclusion is found in the accounts themselves, which show that the incidents were directly relevant to the experience of certain soldiers or groups of soldiers.
The inclusion of the account of the duel, unfortunately fragmentary, is perhaps the easiest of these incidents to explain. After all, single combat was a traditional topic of interest for historians.18 There is, however, evidence that the duel was particularly conspicuous to the soldiers as a whole. The duel was between the challenging Pompeian soldier, Antistius Turpio, and the responding Caesarian, Q. Pompeius Niger. It is the reaction of the audience, carefully recorded by the author, which gives us a clue as to why this event, and others, might be included in the text. The duel seized the attention of the whole army, and the defiance of the Pompeian Antistius caused “all minds to turn from work to the spectacle.”19 Duels were the stuff of history and legend, and the
author’s account shares certain key similarities with descriptions of duels in the annalistic tradition.20 It is hardly surprising that the author recorded these events: not only did the real live event fit a genre of historical discourse, but it was also exciting and important to the soldiers at the time.
The second example is the author’s story of the execution of an enemy soldier who had killed his own brother in camp. This tale appears abruptly at the end of chapter
18 Oakley (1985), 392-410.
19 B. Hisp. 25.5: Quoniam ferocitas Antistii omnium mentes converterat ab opere ad spectandum. 20 Diouron (1999), 105-6.
27, where it finds its place between two events. The first of these is the Pompeian forces’ burning of the town of Carruca in revenge for closing its gates to his army. The other is the movement of Caesar’s forces, which marched to the plain of Munda. In between the two events we find the sentence, “and a soldier who had murdered his own brother in camp was intercepted by our troops and clubbed to death.”21 Both of the remarks about the armies’ movements are obviously of some importance, but it seems odd that the author includes such a random incident between them. Diouron observes with some puzzlement that even despite the grammar of the sentence, which attempts to link with the previous reference to the burning of Carruca in commencing with the word milesque, that the incident bears no relationship with what came before.22 Why might the author include this information at all, and especially in such a strange place in the narrative? The answer is surely that this is more evidence of the impressionistic interpretations of our author.
The event mentioned is a punishment known as fustiarum, which Polybius describes as follows; “The tribune takes a cudgel and just touches the condemned man with it, after which all in the camp beat or stone him, in most cases dispatching him in the camp itself.”23 (emphasis mine) The event is doubtless recorded because it was
something conspicuous which involved if not all, at least a large number of the troops in the camp. In short, it was the type of event which would surely be news among the soldiers, no matter how little the event might have mattered in technical and analytical
21 B. Hisp. 27.6: milesque qui fratrem suum in castris iugulasset, interceptus est a nostris et fusti percussus. 22 Diouron (1999), 116 : “ce fait n’a aucun rapport logique avec le precedent”
23 Polyb 6.37.2-3: λαβὼν ξύλον ὁ χιλίαρχος τούτῳ του̂ κατακριθέντος οἱ̂ον ἥψατο μόνον, οὑ̂ γενομένου
πάντες οἱ του̂ στρατοπέδου τύπτοντες τοι̂ς ξύλοις καὶ τοι̂ς λίθοις τοὺς μὲν πλείστους ἐν αὐτῃ̂ τῃ̂ στρατοπεδείᾳ καταβάλλουσι.
terms. If this event happened while the Caesarian troops were camped near Carruca, it would chronologically rest in its proper place in the narrative between Pompey burning the town and the Caesarian troops moving on to Munda. The event if, not significant to the campaign as a whole, was certainly significant to the soldiers’ experience of that campaign.
Our other examples fit the same pattern. Chapter 27 explains that Pompey had moved his troops to an otherwise unknown locale given in the MSS as Spalis or Sparis.24 The author continues, “Before Caesar set out for the same place, the moon was observed at around the sixth hour.”25 The moon appearing in the middle of the day is recorded as a prodigy in Julius Obsequens, and thus probably earned its place in the narrative here for the same reason. 26 Caesar himself paid little heed to prodigies, and is said to have
ignored both omens pertaining to military endeavor and those predicting his own personal fortunes.27 Small wonder then that Caesar himself ignores them in his own works. For the soldiery as a whole, however, such an event was likely to cause if not alarm, at least conversation about the unusual occurrence. Livy records that in 168 B.C., the common soldiers in the army of Aemilius Paulus in Macedonia were warned of an eclipse by the astronomer and tribune of the soldiers, Gaius Sulpicius Galba, so that “no-one should regard it a bad omen.”28 Scipio, addressing his mutinous troops in 206, commented, “When there is a shower of stones, or buildings are struck by lightning, or animals
24
Various conjectures have been made as to the identity of this town, for the most recent survey of these suggestions see Diouron (1999), 111-2.
25 B. Hisp. 27.3: Caesar prius quam eodem est profectus, luna hora circiter visa est. 26 Julius Obsequens 103, observed by Diouron (1999), 116; Klotz (1927), 90.
27 Suet. Iul. 59, for Caesar disregarding omens pertaining to the military, 81 for his disregard of prodigies involving his own fortunes.
produce monstrous offspring, you consider these things as portents.” 29 This earlier source indicates that ordinary Roman citizens concerned themselves with portents and signs, and that they were sources of alarm.
In a similar vein, the author mentions the incident of a civilian woman who
leapt from the battlements of the besieged city of Ategua and came across to the Caesarian lines, and a message thrown from a citizen wishing a personal surrender was found under the wall (19). This appears to find its place in the narrative for no other reason than the troops were stationed in a position to observe the goings-on on the battlements, and these events were particularly conspicuous topics of gossip among the soldiery.
Some events of the author’s narrative thus find their place for their interest or peculiarity, but this is not the extent of his impressionistic style. When Way examined the incongruous information in the Bellum Hispaniense, he highlighted the extraneous information as “all kinds of engagements, including quite minor skirmishes, as well as frequent atrocities.” As examples he pointed to the skirmishes of chapters 13, 21, and 27, which he, anticipating a narrative arc, claimed had no place in the overall story of the campaign, or significance to the war. An examination of these moments in fact points to a very good reason for their inclusion. They are incidents in which men died. In one incident, it is three horsemen on outpost duty who are attacked by enemy cavalry, “they were driven from their post, and three of them were killed.”30 In chapter 21, forty of the enemy cavalry set upon a watering party, “killing some of its members and leading others
29 Livy 28.27: lapides pluere et fulmina iaci de caelo et insuetos fetus animalia edere uos portenta esse putatis.
off alive.”31 In chapter 27 it is the simple statement, “a number of our cavalry were killed while collecting wood in an olive grove.”32
While they are incidental to the campaign, each of these incidents would have had a visible presence on the ground and a real emotional effect on the soldiers. Over and above the fact that it was doubtless news in the camp, soldiers killed in war were cremated and then buried in mass graves.33 The smoke from the pyre alone would have been a highly visible sign of the day’s events, although, as we learn in chapter 18, in Pompey’s army attempts were made to hush up the fact that they had lost thirty-five men in a cavalry engagement, presumably for the demoralizing effect this had on the army as a whole. If Pompey bothered to hide this kind of information from his soldiers, it was because otherwise such news would spread rapidly among the troops.
The same criterion can be applied to the atrocities, which are all highly visible actions of violence; the couriers captured in the Caesarian camp whose hands were cut off (12), the Pompeian troops killing townspeople in the city of Ategua whom they suspected of siding with Caesar, and hurling their bodies from the battlements (15), a slave being burned alive, others crucified, and an enemy soldier beheaded (20), and seventy four men of Ubici being beheaded by Pompeian troops, and their bodies hurled from the battlements (21). These incidents are both dramatic, and it, seems, conspicuous: the couriers had their hands cut off in the camp itself, and throwing bodies from
battlements is an action surely designed to draw attention.
31 B. Hisp. 21.2: non nullos interfecerunt, item alios vivos abduxerunt. 32 B. Hisp. 27.1: equites in oliveto, dum lignantur, interfecti sunt aliquot. 33Hope (2003), 79-97; 87-8.
It is quite clear that if the author was concerned to give an account of the