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Urbs direpta, or how the Romans sacked cities
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Author | Ziolkowski, Adam |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Description | Ancient sources do not have much to say on the manner in which the Romans sacked cities. The thing must have been too well known to warrant lengthy comment so that when our sources do come out with a more detailed account of a sack, it invariably refers to an event which was for some reason considered exceptional. Such is one of the two exhaustive accounts of a city's sack by the Romans that have come down to us: Tacitus' description of the fratricidal capture of Cremona in ad 69. In Livy, too, more detailed dwelling upon the Romans' conduct in conquered towns refers to events which he, at least, considered anomalous. The lot of the overwhelming majority of towns that met this fate is disposed of in a bare statement of the sack's occurrence, often reduced to one of the forms of the verb diripio. The generally accepted modern view of the Roman way of sacking cities is based on the second of our two detailed narratives, which by its very nature and the prestige of its author seems almost tailor-made to solve at one stroke all the questions relating to the subject indicated by this chapter's title: the quasi-Weberian ideal type of a city's sack à la romaine afforded by Polybius' account of the capture of New Carthage in $209.^{1}$ The aim of this chapter is to reassess the Polybian model by examining the semantic field of diripio in the context of the sacking of cities, and by confronting it with the information afforded by the numerous, albeit brief and 70fragmentary, descriptions of Roman sackings of cities in our other sources. Before proceeding with my argument I want to state in advance what is not included here, for reasons of space: the relationship between the sack's occurrence and the circumstances of the city's seizure by the Romans, and the ultimate fate of survivors of the sack. Book Name: War and Society in the Roman World |
| Related Links | https://content.taylorfrancis.com/books/download?dac=C2012-0-03138-2&isbn=9781003071341&doi=10.1201/9781003071341-4&format=pdf |
| Ending Page | 91 |
| Page Count | 23 |
| Starting Page | 69 |
| DOI | 10.1201/9781003071341-4 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2020-07-08 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: War and Society in the Roman World Classics Romans Sacked Cities |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
