I’ve finished reading Cleopatra: A Life
and am more confused than ever about one thing… How were the Romans able to defeat Cleopatra? She was the owner of the richest land in the ancient world and the only one that generated a surplus of food. Therefore tax revenues made her one of the richest people in the Roman world. It seems plausible that the Romans could conquer territories in which disunited tribes squabbled amongst themselves, but how could they win against someone with a central government and a stronger tax base? It can’t be that the Romans had military tactics unknown to Cleopatra; she was allied with Mark Antony, an experienced Roman general. Why couldn’t Cleopatra just maintain a big army and stay home in Egypt waiting for Romans to arrive in their small-by-modern-standards ships, then kill or capture each shipload of soldiers? Or, if the Romans were going to land in present-day Haifa, Israel and walk to Egypt, why not use the massive labor resources available to dig some trenches? Was there some huge advantage for offensive troops back then? In an age without aircraft or large ships it is hard to understand intuitively how Rome could project its power so far away and so effectively against another well-governed empire.
The short answer is that the legions were recruited at the time exclusively in Italy. Anthony had the richest provinces, but Octavian had Italy, and could field stronger and better trained armies.
The Romans advantage was that Italy was the first place that combined cities with a landmass and population the size of a European continental country. Similarly sized places had random tribes but no cities. The other Mediterranean civilizations did not have much of a hinterland where you could recruit large number of soldiers. Also, Egypt was ruled by a small elite of Greeks -Cleopatra was the first in her family to even try to speak Egyptian- and Anthony was too obviously an adventurer who didn’t stand for much more than Anthony, so they had problems getting people to flock to their side.
It was pretty much over once Octavian and Agrippa managed to defeat Sextus Pompey, which took a long time, though in the classical world there was always the chance of a lucky or unlucky battle reversing fundamental power dynamics.
I read both “Cleopatra: A Life”, and “Anthony and Cleopatra”, by Adrian Goldsworthy and I found the latter much more informative. Cleopatra was a member of the Ptolemy family, who ruled Egypt but were of Greek descent. The Greeks were a small minority in Egypt throughout the rule of the Ptolemies. Not only were the Ptolemies an ethnic minority in the land they ruled, they were prone to incessant civil war among themselves. As the superpower in that part of the world, Rome was often sought out by the different factions in support of their machinations against each other. Anthony participated in one such campaign involving Ptolemy Auletes, Cleopatra’s father, when Cleopatra was girl, and may have even met her then. Ptolemy Auletes paid a Roman military force to regain his throne, and after Anthony left, many Roman soldiers stayed on to help keep Auletes in power. Some time later Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt in the midst of his civil war with Pompey, while Cleopatra was jockeying for power with her brother after her father died. Caesar and Cleopatra ended up as allies and she prevailed in her conflict with her brother, using Roman military force. Caesar eventually won out over Pompey as well, but after he was murdered, Octavian and Marc Antony fought another civil war for control of Rome. Cleopatra was allied with Marc Antony and of course they lost.
So while Egypt was a very rich country, it wasn’t like Rome prevailed against another well-governed empire, at least in Goldsworthy’s telling.
The only serious rivals the Romans ever encountered were the Carthaginians and the Parthians (Iranians). All the Hellenistic empires descended from Alexander’s generals were shaky Greek-Macedonian military aristocracies overextended ruling a sullen to hostile populace. That’s how the Jews under Judas Maccabee and Jonathan were able to defeat the apparently much more powerful Seleucids.
There’s an underlying assumption that “amount of resources” alone is the determinant of combat effectiveness. This is demonstrably wrong. Within European history itself there are many examples of where tactics, technology and morale have made a difference. Napoleon won against much larger armies, for example.
The Egyptians may have had the resources, but it seems quite clear they wasted them. They could have invested in and trained a superior army, but did not. It may have taken the equivalent resources of three Egyptian soldiers to train and equip a single Roman soldier, say, but if the qualitative difference it makes allows that Roman soldier to kill ten, then unless the Egyptians could use the Zapf Brannigan tactic of drowning the enemy with your dead, they will lose.
To make a business analogy – “management matters”. If you’ve got a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who is e.g. more interested in the seating arrangements of his private jet than keeping an eye on changes in the market, you’re not too surprised if some smaller entrant with better management eventually takes over, are you? Same thing here.