of captured treasure for themselves and distributed some to their soldiers, individuals stood to benefit economically from conquest. This notion of economic motivation makes sense of the First Punic War where Polybius claims the Romans only went to war when their generals “pointed out the great benefit in terms of plunder that each and everyone would receive from it.” In other words, personal greed may have led the Romans into war.
All of these answers are likely to have some element of truth to them. Indeed, each conquest brought with it new territory and thus a world that became increasingly complex, and Roman motives must surely have shifted over time.
The Roman conquest of Magna Graecia also brought them into contact with the island of Sicily, just off the toe of Italy. The western part of the island had also been settled by Greeks in the eighth century BCE, but the remainder was controlled by the city-state of Carthage (located in modern day Tunisia). Over the next century, Rome fought a series of three wars against Carthage, known as the Punic Wars, which made Rome the sole power in the western Mediterranean. The First Punic War (264–241 BCE) centered on control of Sicily and required Rome to develop a navy for the first time. The Second Punic War (218–202 BCE) represented undoubtedly the greatest threat to Rome’s survival. The Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army of 30,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry, and 38 elephants, and won three consecutive battles in Italy, killing over 100,000 men in the process. This casualty rate represents about one-third of the Roman adult male population at the time. While some of the soldiers killed came from allied towns in Italy, the losses were so severe that Hannibal was able to march his troops to the very gates of Rome without opposition. However, Hannibal was not equipped for siege warfare, and the Romans managed to rally enough allies to resist. They then employed guerrilla warfare to avoid another massive defeat in battle, and by weakening Hannibal’s supply lines, the Romans were able to force him to return to Africa. In 202 BCE, Scipio Africanus (236–183 BCE) led Roman troops to a victory at the battle of Zama (202 BCE) and brought the war to a successful conclusion for the Romans. The war gave Rome control of coastal Spain and so catapulted the Romans to the world stage as a major power. But the Romans maintained a constant, possibly irrational fear, of a Carthaginian revival. Forty years later, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE) took to ending every speech in the Senate with the words “Carthago delenda est!” (Carthage must be destroyed!). Eventually the Romans listened and launched the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE). After a short siege they captured Carthage, destroyed the city completely and, according to legend, sowed salt in the ground as a sign that the land would never again be inhabited.
Political Issues: Are We Rome?
Blog posts and newspaper columns love to dangle the comparison of current politics to Rome. There is almost always a parallel one can find, but these almost always say more about the witty point the writer wants to make about our own problems than they do about Rome.
Comparisons to the end of the Republic have always provided one of the most popular versions of this exercise. The thinking is that if we could understand why the republican system of government gave way to a system of one-man rule, we might better understand how to avoid a similar problem in the future.
Some modern historians argue that the personal ambitions of individual Romans brought about the civil wars that ended the Republic. Certainly some Romans looking back on the era saw it in these terms: the poet Lucan (39–65 CE) wrote that “Caesar could bear no superior, Pompey could bear no equal” and this conflict drove them to battle. From Sulla all the way through to Octavian/Augustus we have plenty of examples of individual Romans placing their own good above that of the state, and these have provided ample fodder for modern scolding.
Another group of scholars has focused on the intransigence of the Roman aristocracy. Beginning in the second century BCE they opposed efforts to address the growing wealth inequality within Roman society, highlighted by the opposition to Tiberius Gracchus. In the first century the conservatives continually opposed proposals benefitting the populace of Rome. They worked to drive a wedge between Caesar and Pompey and fought against any compromise, precipitating a civil war that may have been avoidable. The clearest sign that the aristocracy had come to serve their own interests rather than the state comes in 44 BCE when they led the assassination of Caesar: the lower classes of Rome did not approve of this action and the surprise of the Roman elite at the lack of support betrays how out of touch they were. Modern commentators who want to rail against the dangers of wealth inequality can again look to the Roman experience.
Rather than assigning individual blame, a third group of scholars focuses on the larger forces at play in the last hundred years of the Republic. The Roman system of government developed in order to govern a small city-state in central Italy; it was not designed to govern a far-flung empire where it took a month to travel from one end to the other. The Romans simply failed to adapt republican institutions to the changing world, until Octavian/Augustus changed the system entirely. Many institutions of the United States developed in the eighteenth century can seem out of place in the twenty-first century, and those who want to critique them can also use Rome as their historical example.
“Rome” thus means many things to many people. Perhaps the question is not “are we Rome?” but “what does it mean to be Rome?” What are we praising or condemning when we compare ourselves to Rome? It may be true that those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it, but the end of the Roman Republic suggests that everyone sees those lessons differently.
Just as the war against Pyrrhus brought Rome into conflict with Carthage, the Punic Wars brought Rome into conflict with the Greek kingdoms of the Hellenistic world: Macedonia, Asia, and Egypt (Figure 2.4). The Romans had actually fought an indecisive war against King Philip V of Macedon simultaneously with the Second Punic War, and immediately upon the conclusion of the war with Carthage they turned their attention back to Philip. Using the slogan “freedom of the Greeks”, they defeated Philip in 197 BCE and then defeated his son and successor Perseus more decisively in 167 BCE. These wars in turn brought them into contact with the Seleucid kingdom in Asia Minor and the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, and Rome soon launched attacks on these areas as well that brought them under Roman control. Roman domination is symbolized best by an episode at Eleusis in Egypt in 168 BCE, told by both Livy (45.12) and Polybius (29.27). The Syrian king Antiochus was marching on Alexandria when the Roman ambassador Popilius Laenas caught up with him. Popilius offered the king a choice: withdraw from Egypt immediately and remain a friend of Rome, or continue and become an enemy. Antiochus asked for time to think and Popilius agreed: he drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus and told him to decide before he stepped outside it. Antiochus, recognizing the power of Rome, chose to withdraw his forces.
Figure 2.4 Map of the Mediterranean basin.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the Romans adopted some of the same principles they had used during their subjugation of Italy: they generally chose not to govern these areas directly, but signed treaties spelling out the obligations of the defeated kingdom and proclaimed that they were giving them freedom, even allowing the defeated ruler to remain in power on occasion. “Freedom” turned out to mean freedom to act in ways that Rome approved, as Antiochus found on the outskirts of Egypt. This practice proved less successful in Greece and Syria than in Italy, since the greater distance encouraged the local kingdoms to attempt to assert their independence on several occasions. The Romans ended up having to return to these areas for further fighting, and eventually in 146 BCE, the same year in which Rome eradicated Carthage, the Romans completely destroyed Corinth, the most prosperous city in Greece. From this time forward, Rome was the undisputed master of the Mediterranean basin.
The Growth of Political Discord
The overseas wars of the third and second centuries and the Roman conquests of additional territory began to stress the political system that had