You can win a war by procrastinating
Augustin Chéron (1760-1811) played Fabius on the stage
What: pa/Heritage Images/Jean Simon Berthelemy
In the greatest military crisis Rome has ever endured, one politician and general saved the nation. Not through boldness, but through well-considered procrastination. His countrymen celebrated him for it. Can Fabius, called “Cunctator” be a role model for Olaf Scholz?
Dhe beautiful German words hesitation and hesitate read a lot this week. Usually in the capitalized form of a noun verb. It was always about assessing the behavior of Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the tank issue. The MDR commented, for example: “Scholz’s hesitation has its price.” The “Wirtschaftswoche” said: “With his hesitation, Scholz has weakened Germany’s role in the EU.”
If at some point the history of the Ukraine war is written, Scholz may go into its pages with the nickname “the procrastinator”. And it’s probably not meant to be praised. Very different from Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. Although his name is as long as that of a typical double-named SPD woman from the provinces, he was an old white Roman who lived around 2,300 years ago. Posterity honored him as the “Cunctator”, which can be translated as “procrastinator” or “hesitant”.
Fabius Maximus, scion of the old patrician family of Fabii, earned this posthumous fame with his strategy in the Second Punic War, which was life-threatening for Rome, against Carthage and its brilliant general Hannibal. Unlike his fellow dictators and fellow consulates, who had themselves and tens of thousands of legionnaires slaughtered in the battles of Cannae and Lake Trasimeno, Fabius preferred to avoid the Punians, attacking at most small contingents looking for provisions and horse fodder and leaving reckons that a vast force in a hostile country far from home would be slowly but surely weakened by desertions, disease, and shortages of supplies.
As the frustrated Carthaginians retreated further and further into southern Italy and finally disappeared across the Mediterranean Sea back to North Africa, Rome went on the offensive, ending in the total defeat of the Punics. Others were then responsible for the offensive, above all Publius Cornelius Scipio. Fabius himself was only able to record one major offensive success: the capture of Taranto, the last city on the Italian peninsula allied with Hannibal.
Long live “Fabianism”
The life and work of the procrastinating Fabius has been handed down by the historians Livius and Plutarch. The poet Ennius praised him: “A man has restored the state to us by his hesitation.” The most reliable source, however, is Polybius, who wrote his universal history of Rome relatively shortly after the war, almost a century later. He had sources that were no longer available to others. And all later Fabius celebrations copied from him.
In addition to Machiavelli and Molière, these included the “Fabian Society” founded in England in 1884, whose “Fabianism” consisted in the fact that they wanted to implement socialism through reforms rather than revolution. It shaped the British Labor Party and also parts of the European Social Democratic parties around 1900. The extent to which the procrastination of the SPD man Scholz was inspired by this is purely speculative.