Right now, there is a question on Quora that reads: “Who was the greatest conqueror in history?” So far, nearly every person who has answered this question has attempted to provide an argument that some historical conqueror was the “greatest” because they conquered the most land, they were the bravest, or they were the most strategically brilliant.
I’m going to offer a different perspective: There is no such thing as a “great conqueror.” Using the phrase “great conqueror” is like using the phrase “great murderer,” the phrase “great oppressor,” or the phrase “great committer of genocide.” Anyone who uses the phrase “great conqueror” unironically in a sense that implies that conquest is something good is either monstrously sadistic or hopelessly ignorant of the word “conquest” actually means.
The conception of conquest
Conquest has been valorized in many different cultures throughout history, but most people who adore conquest today uphold a specific conception of conquest that is rooted in European history. This conception is influenced to some degree by stories of ancient eastern conquerors like Kūruš II of the Achaemenid Empire (i.e., the man we know in English as “Cyrus the Great”) and Alexandros III of Makedonia (i.e., the man we know in English as “Alexander the Great”), who have been valorized and idealized throughout much of European history.
This conception of “conquest” is, however, much more extensively influenced by the ideas of the ancient Romans of the Republic and early Principate, who made conquest absolutely central to their national identity, portraying themselves as brave, manly, rigorously disciplined, and superior to the peoples they fought against, whom them portrayed as cowardly, undisciplined, and weak.
Julius Caesar wrote a book about his conquests in Gaul titled De Bello Gallico, in which he goes to great lengths to emphasize the notion of the Romans as conquering through rigorous discipline and superiority. Later Roman authors and political leaders followed closely in Caesar’s footsteps, consistently emphasizing these ideas of discipline and superior military tactics.
ABOVE: Photograph from Flickr of a Roman marble sculpture showing the emperor Claudius in the form of a nude warrior, brutally subjugating the female personification of Britannia
The classical Roman conception of conquest through superior discipline and strength was embraced by many groups of Latin Christians in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. For instance, the Frankish writer William of Poitiers (lived c. 1020 – 1090 CE) gives an account of the Battle of Hastings in his Gesta Guillelmi in which he follows very much the same script as Julius Caesar, portraying the Normans as brave, energetic, and disciplined and the English as cowardly, slow, and undisciplined.
All of this is propaganda that seeks to distract from what conquerors have actually done by shifting the focus to make it about how they (supposedly) managed to do it. The fact is, even if you really are very brave and well-organized when you’re killing people, you’re still killing people. We shouldn’t let talk of martial courage and analysis of tactics get in the way of recognizing that conquest itself inherently involves doing things that are morally heinous.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric of conquest through superior organization and courage has persisted all the way up to the present day. Many people today—especially men—still have intensely positive feelings associated with the idea of “conquest.” This clearly manifests in how most ancient history enthusiasts on the internet portray conquest—even when they don’t use words to describe it.
For instance, on YouTube, there are videos illustrating the territorial expansion of the empire of Alexandros III and the Roman Empire through animated maps set to triumphalist epic music. Thus, without even using words, these videos convey the message: “Conquest is glorious.”
ABOVE: Scene from the Bayeaux Tapestry depicting the death of King Harold of England in the Battle of Hasting 1066 CE
This positive conceptualization of conquest can lead people down some seriously dark paths. Notably, over the past few years, white supremacist organizations have been engaging in extremely aggressive recruitment tactics on college campuses in the United States, hoping to recruit young bigoted white men into their organizations. In particular, the white supremacist Neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front has been leaving recruitment posters on college campuses with a map of the forty-eight contiguous states with the declaration “NOT STOLEN, CONQUERED.”
Clearly, Patriot Front is trying to appeal to young men who believe that conquest is something glorious that should be celebrated. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of young men who believe this.
In light of this, I think that ancient history enthusiasts on the internet should perhaps reconsider the ways in which they portray imperial expansion. What if, instead of focusing on abstract maps and soaring epic music and debating who was “the greatest conqueror in history,” we talked more about what imperial expansion actually looks like on the ground (i.e., generally speaking, thousands of men killed in battle, thousands of civilians slaughtered, and women and children brutally enslaved)?
ABOVE: Photograph of one of Patriot Front’s posters with the slogan “NOT STOLEN, CONQUERED”
The dark side of conquest
It would take forever for me to talk about all the horrendous atrocities that conquerors throughout history have committed, so, for the purposes of this article, I will focus on a few famous examples of atrocities that the Roman Empire committed. These are, however, illustrative of the sorts of things that all conquerors throughout history have done.
People often talk about the Roman Empire as though it was a wonderful thing that was built by wonderful people using wonderful methods. For instance, the conservative Christian philosopher and apologist G. K. Chesterton writes in his 1908 book Orthodoxy (on page 123): “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
But this is absolute poppycock. The Roman Empire wasn’t built through the power of “love”; it was built through centuries of brutal warfare, genocide, enslavement, and oppression of non-Roman peoples throughout the Mediterranean world on a horrifying scale that no one in that region of the world had ever accomplished before.
ABOVE: Photograph of the philosopher G. K. Chesterton, who was a huge fan of Roman imperialism
Again, I can’t talk about all the awful things the Roman Empire did, but I hope I can illustrate using a few examples: In 146 BCE, the Romans defeated the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War. They determined that the entire city of Carthage, along with the entire nation associated with it, needed to be utterly destroyed.
For six days, the Roman soldiers systematically worked their way through the city, mercilessly and indiscriminately killing every single person they encountered—including old men, women, and children. They burned every single building they came upon to the ground. Roman soldiers almost certainly raped and tortured civilians for their own sadistic enjoyment before killing them, since these atrocities were a normal part of sacking a city in the ancient world.
Finally, on the last day, the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus agreed to let his forces take prisoners. They took a total of somewhere around 50,000 civilians from the city of Carthage and the surrounding regions captive. They subsequently sold all these people into slavery. Once the city had been emptied, the Roman Senate established a commission to destroy anything they could find that was left. They declared that the land on which the city had been built would remain abandoned forever and placed a curse on anyone who might attempt to resettle it.
In that exact same year, the Roman army utterly destroyed Corinth, one of the largest and most important cities in the Greek world. Before the Romans destroyed it, Corinth may have had a population of as many as 90,000 people. Naturally, the Romans slaughtered the entire adult male population of Corinth without mercy, burned the entire city to the ground, and sold all the women and children into slavery.
Thus, in the span of a single year, the Romans completely wiped two of the most culturally, politically, and economically important cities in the entire Mediterranean world off the map, reducing them both to ashes.
ABOVE: The Last Day of Corinth, painted in 1870 by the French painter Tony Robert-Fleury, showing what he imagined the Roman destruction of the Greek city of Corinth in 146 BCE might have looked like
Conquest and enslavement
Nearly all those whom the Romans enslaved went on to suffer years of brutal subjugation and torture at the hands of their new masters. It was considered completely acceptable and normal for Roman slaveowners to sadistically torture, abuse, and rape the people whom they enslaved. We can get a glimpse of the level of sadistic cruelty that many enslaved people in the Roman world must have been subjected to on a daily basis from the Greek physician Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 210 CE), who writes in his treatise On Passions and Errors of the Soul, as translated by Paul W. Harkins:
“When I was a young man I imposed upon myself an injunction which I have observed through my whole life, namely, never to strike any slave of my household with my hand. My father practiced this same restraint. Many were the friends he reproved when they had bruised a tendon while striking their slaves in the teeth; he told them that they deserved to have a stroke and die in the fit of passion which had come upon them. They could have waited a little while, he said, and used a rod or whip to inflict as many blows as they wished and to accomplish the act with reflection.”
“Other men, however, not only (strike) with their fists but kick and gouge out the eyes and stab with a stylus when they happen to have one in their hands. I saw a man, in his anger, strike a slave in the eye with a reed pen. The Emperor Hadrian, they say, struck one of his slaves in the eye with a stylus; and when he learned that the man had lost his eye because of this wound, he summoned the slave and allowed him to ask for a gift which would be equal to his pain and loss. When the slave who had suffered the loss remained silent, Hadrian again asked him to speak up and ask for whatever he might wish. But he asked for nothing else but another eye. For what gift could match in value the eye which had been destroyed?”
This passage is especially illustrative because Galenos not only describes the horribly abusive practices that many contemporary slave owners engaged in, but also reveals that his own practices were really not much better.
Galenos is complaining about the behavior of contemporary slave owners not because he is concerned about the wellbeing of the enslaved people themselves, but rather because he is concerned about the wellbeing of the slave owners. This is the reason why he tells them not to beat their slaves with their hands, but rather to use a rod or whip; it’s because he’s concerned that they might injure their own hands. This callous attitude is probably typical of how slave owners in the Roman world thought about enslaved people.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble relief carving from the Greek city of Smyrna in Asia Minor dating to c. 200 CE, showing a Roman soldier leading two captives who are likely destined for enslavement
The First Jewish-Roman War
The Romans didn’t just use atrocities to build their empire; they also used them to maintain their empire. In 66 CE, the province of Judaea rebelled against Roman rule and the Romans fought a bloody war to force the province back into submission. This culminated in a prolonged siege of the city of Jerusalem, which lasted from 14 April to 8 September 70 CE.
During this siege, the Roman general Titus ruthlessly crucified literally thousands of Jewish civilians. The Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE), who was an eyewitness to the siege, records that Titus crucified so many people that they couldn’t even find space for all the crosses. He writes in The Jewish War 5.11.1, as translated by H. J. Thackeray:
“Meanwhile the earthworks of Titus were progressing, notwithstanding the galling fire from the ramparts to which his men were exposed. The general, moreover, sent a detachment of horse with orders to lie in wait for any who issued from the town into the ravines in quest of food.”
“These included some of the combatants, no longer satisfied with their plunder, but the majority were citizens of the poorer class, who were deterred from deserting by fear for their families; for they could neither hope to elude the rebels if they attempted to escape with their wives and children, nor endure to leave them to be butchered by the brigands on their behalf.”
“Famine, however, emboldened them to undertake these excursions, and it but remained for them if they escaped unobserved from the town to be taken prisoners by the enemy. When caught, they were driven to resist, and after a conflict it seemed too late to sue for mercy. They were accordingly scourged and subjected to torture of every description, before being killed, and then crucified opposite the walls.”
“Titus indeed commiserated their fate, five hundred or sometimes more being captured daily; on the other hand, he recognized the risk of dismissing prisoners of war, and that the custody of such numbers would amount to the imprisonment of their custodians; but his main reason for not stopping the crucifixions was the hope that the spectacle might perhaps induce the Jews to surrender, for fear that continued resistance would involve them in a similar fate. The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses nor crosses for the bodies.”
When the siege finally ended, the Romans utterly destroyed Jerusalem. They slaughtered tens of thousands of Jewish people and took tens of thousands more as captives to sell into slavery. They demolished the Temple of YHWH, which had been the central focus of the religion of Judaism, and carried off the most holy Jewish religious objects from the Temple as loot.
Josephus laments that the entire region around Jerusalem was reduced to a desert. He writes in The Jewish War 6.1.1, as translated by Thackeray:
“Pitiful too was the aspect of the country, sites formerly beautified with trees and parks now reduced to an utter desert and stripped bare of timber; and no stranger who had seen the old Judaea and the entrancingly beautiful suburbs of her capital, and now beheld her present desolation, could have refrained from tears or suppressed a sigh at the greatness of the change. For the war had ruined all the marks of beauty, and no one who knew it of old, coming suddenly upon it, would have recognized the place, but, though beside it, he would have looked for the city.”
Again, we shouldn’t imagine that this level of destruction and cruelty is simply an ancient Roman phenomenon; it is an inevitable part of building and maintaining an empire—whether in the ancient world or in the present day. Modern empires have been every bit as brutal as the Roman Empire was. (This is something that, unfortunately, popular authors like Stephen Pinker don’t seem to entirely grasp.)
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a relief carving from the Arch of Titus in Rome
Conclusion
The shocking examples I have discussed here are only an extremely minute fraction of all the examples I could discuss. The truth is that there is nothing “glorious” whatsoever about conquest, nor is there anything about conquest that anyone in their right mind should celebrate. Conquest is a monstrous and evil thing. The only reason why anyone thinks otherwise is because they have unwisely bought into the propaganda of the conquerors.
It’s true that people who are conquerors may sometimes do things that are admirable. Roman people living in the Roman Empire did, after all, produce a great deal of literature, art, architecture, and so forth and those are all very fine things. This whole notion that conquest in itself is a good thing, though, needs to go die under a bridge somewhere.
ABOVE: The Apotheosis of War, painted in 1871 by the Russian painter Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin
Well at least we have ideas like “human rights” and “war crimes” today. From what I understand (and please correct me if I’m wrong) the Romans and others in the classical world didn’t have any ideas like that. I just hope that some day we’ll expand these ideas and give non-human animals basic rights too.
Hi Spencer,
another good piece of work…!
A few points :
– the very first conqueror on Earth is nicely depicted in the first part of that Stanley Kubrick epic “2001 A Space Odyssey” when our ancestor raises the assault tool/bone to strike another, over water rights or maybe ensuring his genes would be reproduced by the females of the species present in the contested area… 😛 🤣
– Your namesake, or should I say eponym, the Great Alexander III, did not really ever have an empire neither did he ever become emperor of anyplace… he died too early as is well known and the land he had conquered was divided up among his generals (the Diadochoi) into the Hellenistic kingdoms… So though he did conquer it is the kingdoms after him that should be credited for achievements such as e.g. raising the greek language to lingua franca status…
– Conquests are not only carried out by some great leader but also by assorted rif-raf and social/religious rejects of one place, e.g. Europe, going over with their diseases etc and taking some other place, North America and Australia being but two examples.
– In the chapter of cruelty to the enslaved humans, one should also mention the activities of certain “companies” that were as bad if not worse that government entities e.g. The Honorable East India Company, the Dutch East India company, the ABIR Congo Company etc. back in the times of nascent unbridled capitalism…
I do understand that you are knowledgeable in the Classics, but on certain important issues one should have a wider perspective… it is very easy otherwise to be seen as revising the past through contemporary criteria.
Greetings fron your intellectual and spiritual home… 😀
I haven’t actually read De Bello Gallico (except for certain passages) so I could be completely wrong about this but from what I understand about the book Caesar often just blatantly admits in it to committing and ordering horrific atrocities as if he was ordering his men to go cut down some trees or something. If that’s the case I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that his book is focusing more on the bravery, discipline, tactics, and superiority of the Romans to distract readers from the rape, murder, genocide, and enslavement he was doing. I think he was focusing on those other things because he found them more interesting and it made his Roman audience feel proud of their army’s (and Caesar’s) bravery not because he was trying to hide and paper over the atrocities. Because if he was trying to hide his brutality why does he often just casually admit to doing horrifically monstrous things? But from what I understand of the book Gesta Guillelmi though (which I’ve only read summaries of) your statement is correct since from what I understand William of Poitiers doesn’t mention any of the brutality the Normans inflicted on the English. In fact, he presents William the Conqueror as merciful and trying to limit the slaughter of the English. This of course means that William of Poitiers is trying to cover up or at least distract readers from Norman brutality.
So if what I’ve said above is correct (big if) then doesn’t that mean something in Latin society changed between the time of Julius Caesar and the time of William of Poitiers? It seems to me that at some point between the lives of those two men people started to become ashamed of the brutality of conquest which is why propagandists started to try and cover it up when writing about conquests. And conquerors still do that today, when the governments of countries like the United States or Russia commit atrocities today usually their first reaction is to try and cover it up. If I’m correct about this isn’t that at least somewhat of an improvement from ancient Roman society? I’m not studying history though and I’m basing my whole argument on just two literary examples so I could easily be completely wrong.
I remember learning about Alexander the Great, and the teacher (a kind woman, mother of a class mate, certainly no friend of such atrocities-she’s even Jewish) simply glossed over the atrocities basically. She admitted Alexander destroyed Thebes, but said he felt really guilty in later life about it. I don’t know whether that’s true but still… that qualifies as a genocide. Not to mention he destroyed some other entire cities too, so how guilty could he really feel about doing that? I find it bizarre when people like Chesterton will romanticize individuals or peoples guilty of these things, even if their own suffered under them or similar atrocities. The early Christians, for instance, were among victims of Roman atrocities. What is going on in their minds? It seems we may just have such a rosy image of these cultures that mental gymnastics come automatically. Not that they had no better sides, and like you I love learning about them, but when someone lionizes ancient Greece or Rome it’s just baffling to me.
Dear Mr. McDaniel,
having had 9 years of Greek and Latin at school (here in Germany), having read De Bello Gallico etc. I am v e r y impressed by your presentation.
My teachers were survivors of Stalingrad and told us of the utter horrors of war and pointed out what Caesar cum suis were doing, but not talking about.
You are the first American author I know of that is addressing these horrors.
Thank you very much!
sincerely
your
GW Oberman
First and foremost, great read as always Spencer! It’s commendable that you put the effort in to challenge the dominating narratives about ancient societies.
Normally I find your reading of the sources flawless, but I was a bit struck by how you interpret Galenos of Pergamon in this article. I’m not convinced that Galenos here is unconscerned with the welfare of the slaves being abused. It’s obvious that he condones punishing/disciplining slaves physically, but the story about Hadrian (which I appreciate, as Hadrian is often celebrated as a somewhat more “peaceful/good” emperor) is peculiar to me, as I get the notion that Galones views kicking and stabbing as excessive force in these instances. Pointing out that not even an emperor can grant a gift as valuable as an eye surely relates to the value of the eye for the slave and not the owner (who probably had lot’s of other slaves with two working eyes).
I just wanted to point this out, as I see here two aspects of a slaveowner such as Galenos. He both condones physical punishment and disapproves of owners stabbing their slaves, which he sees as being excessive and unnecessary.
Stimulating as always! Thank you for dispelling the romanticizing mists that cover the past and refreshing its relevance for us today.
Is there a deep human need to fight and win? If so, can it be successfully diverted to fiction, sports and video games? At least that’s better than vicariously enjoying and lionizing the conquests of the past at the cost of accurate history.
Or should we focus on mitigating or even uprooting our need for competition and dominance?
Civilization was born on the backs of slaves. This is simply because the hard labor of agriculture did not appeal to hunter-gatherers in the main. Slavery was not unknown before the advent of large-scale agriculture but the labor demands of large-scale agriculture demanded large scale slave raids. (I saw a statistic that in the year 1800, half of all humans existed in some form of slavery (chattel, serfdom, peasant tied to the land, etc.)
In this country, we are shamed by our past. One manifestation of it is the “whitewashing” of slavery (It weren’t so bad!) and the other is referring to the conquerors of the rest of the country as “settlers.” We still teach our children that those who invaded Native American lands and killed off the former owners were “settlers” when the land was well settled all along.
I think Jared Diamond made the point that widespread of adoption of slavery, thousands of years ago, was actually an advantage to the conquered. Before that, they were just killed! Hunter-gathers couldn’t maintain too many slaves or serfs. So, from a evolutionary genetic standpoint, better to be alive.
I’m not “ashamed” of the past, I think that’s a kind of self-flagellating position that comes from the same thing that gives us Catholic Guilt. Avoid it, it doesn’t help anything. 100 billion humans have been alive, trust me, there’s been cruelty we can’t even imagine in the deep past.
Do we have any reliable numbers on how many Gauls were killed by Caesar? I’ve heard one million, but I’ve also been told that is just a guess.
By the way, I’d enjoy hearing you address the “cycles of history” theory. The idea that civilizations naturally go through periods of growth, maturity, decadence and then collapse. I don’t see much evidence for it. But it’s repeated as gospel on the internet.
Civilizations do come and go, but there seems to be other factors at work, not “cycles”.
I don’t recall estimates of numbers killed in this take on the Roman conquest of Gaul, but it is well worth hearing, along with everything else Dan Carlin has done.
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-60-the-celtic-holocaust/
Re: Cycles of history.
Arnold Toynbee has one of the better versions of that, but he still has to really twist the data to make it fit his hypothesis.
But every social species engages war over territory.
It’s hard to imagine human evolution over the last million years without conquest. It often served a purpose for the genes of those who prevailed. We can’t be sentimental about this stuff.
And when the Yamnaya people roared out of the Russian steppes 5,000 years ago, their mass slaughter and continental rape of Europe was pretty good for their genes.
However, it’s also true that we’ve had a lot of needless wars. We have an instinct that gets carried away.
What do you mean by social species?, i’m pretty sure that groups of buffalos don’t go around murdering other groups of buffalos for land, same with zebras, bisons, emus, elephants, crows, rays, sheep etc. The only example i can think of animals that go in groups murdering others of the same specie for territory are chimpanzees, meerkats, and eusocial species, like ants, thats it.
Hello Spencer:
Thank you for a stimulating and erudite article regarding conquest. I agree that our western culture has tended to romanticize conquest as overall a good thing. We study, or at least used to study, the ancient Roman and Greek cultures as the beginning of Western Civilization. In previous centuries, being able to read the classics in Latin and Greek were the mark of an educated and civilized gentleman. And what did the classics emphasize? At least in part, the attributes required to be a conqueror; courage, temperance, prudence, and justice. These cardinal virtues are of course, not bad things, but as you allude to in your commentary, the emphasis on the virtues of ancient Rome in classical literature tended to cover up the dark side of Roman conquests.
I have always felt that if one wants to understand what ancient Roman conquest was like, all they had to do was observe the Nazi party in contemporary times. Hitler admired the ancient Roman empire. The Nazi salute mimicked the ancient Roman salute. The eagle on the armor of the Romans was copied onto the banners and uniforms of the Nazis. Hitler constructed the autobahn to emulate Roman road building. Images of army units as predatory wolves can be found in both Nazi Germany and ancient Rome. Both the ancient Roman empire and Nazi Germany viewed themselves as a superior people relative to those they conquered. As such, the inferior peoples could be killed, enslaved, and raped. This is what the Nazis did when they invaded Eastern Europe. The images of destroyed villages, dead bodies, and horrorstricken people in the aftermath of Nazi occupation are burned into our collective consciousnesses. But this is certainly no different than what the Romans did two thousand years ago.
Which leads to G. K. Chesterton. You seem to have a dim view of Chesterton. Chesterton, as we all are, was a product of his environment. He was an educated man who knew both Latin and Greek and was steeped in the classics. He saw the ancient cultures in a positive light with the ancient virtues as the cornerstone on which Western Civilization was built. Chesterton was also a Christian apologist. He understood that what separates contemporary culture from previous empires (ancient Greece, Persia, Egyptian, Incas, the Aztecs, come to mind) was Christianity. Christianity taught a concept that was alien to most ancient cultures, love of neighbor. Hitler of course, hated the Jews, a culture that also taught love of neighbor. But Hitler also despised Christianity. Without the constraints of love of one’s neighbor, Hitler could easily teach his subjects to regard themselves as a superior race and go out and conquer their inferiors. In his writings, Chesterton melded the virtues of the ancient Roman and Greek cultures with the virtues of Christianity. All in all, not a bad thing.
I am sitting at home in Great Britain right now enjoying a lot of things that ultimately happened here because Rome once conquered Great Britain. It was brutal, and people like Caratacus and Boudicea are still celebrated for resisting them. But would it really have turned out for the better if Rome had been turned away? The same can be said for many of the countries that were part of modern European empires – not the Belgian certainly, but the British, yes.
*War* is hell, sure – but I don’t think it’s as simple as conquest is a bad thing?
From my scant knowledge of ancient history, I don’t know of a civilization, and particularly a major civilization that was written about in classic literature, that wasn’t build on the backs of conquest. We are in a position to condemn conquest now, being more aware of the evils of war and at least more cautious to engage in it, but our modern times seem especially remote from ancient civilizations, as well as their personal and historical contexts. I would be happy to be corrected in this regard, however.
Now, having been an admirer of some of Chesterton’s writings, and crediting my present understanding of English literature to his short stories and essays, I admit I did initially take that reference to Chesterton somewhat personally. Attempting to set that aside as best as I can, and being familiar with some basic facts about his background, I found it curious that if he was a “huge fan of Roman imperialism”, that he wasn’t a fan of the British imperialism he grew up in (notably having opposed the Boer War, among his criticisms of both the political left and right of his time, at one point simultaneously in Eugenics and Other Evils). By contrast, Winston Churchill, who was born the same year as Chesterton, and who we rightly praise in large part for his leadership in WWII (among other praiseworthy actions), was a British Imperialist (and, if his admiration of Edward Gibbon is any indication, also an admirer of Roman imperialism). This admiration for Rome, which you rightly point out should not stand up to scrutiny, is at least an understandable error if Piers Brendon’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire gives context to the times they lived in: the Decline and Fall “became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome.” (c.f. Wikipedia)
There are certainly valid criticisms of Chesterton; his Wikipedia page has a partial collection, and the late Christopher Hitchens wrote against Chesterton in his last years (I don’t know how many of his criticisms are valid; some people have noted that Chesterton responded to similar criticism made by his contemporary opponents). Calling Chesterton “a huge fan of Roman imperialism” exaggerates the degree this mistake plays in his other works (as well as within Orthodoxy) and misses the mark on valid criticisms that tie more directly to his quote in question. Directly relevant is Chesterton’s passionate support of patriotism as an ideal (distinct from nationalism and especially race-based nationalism), and I’ve personally found his illustrations of patriotism troubling where they allude to sports such as basketball or football. (Basketball and football don’t have nearly the body count attributed to patriotism, though that metric alone presents a skewed view of patriotism in all the forms it can take, including setting off firecrackers on the 4th of July or waving the American flag. On the other hand, Chesterton’s more nuanced views on patriotism did inspire Mahatma Gandhi to seek out a solution to Indian independence that was less like Britain and more like India.) Given these contexts, I would think Chesterton held a rosy view of the Romans into which he read back his views on patriotism.
Perhaps more pertinent to the larger content of this post is that Chesterton actually had illustrated Rome’s conflict with Carthage (or at least part of it), painting a psychological and social picture in The Everlasting Man, Ch. 7, in which he contextualizes Rome’s decision to destroy Carthage in Hannibal’s prior invasion which almost destroyed Rome and Carthage’s alien, mercantile, and contemporaneously more prosperous civilization, among other such factors. Wikipedia leads me to believe that some of his illustrations are inaccurate, but I defer to your expertise in determining the further accuracy of this illustration.