book is only loosely chronological.
The suggestions for further reading concentrate naturally on recent work in English.
All the indices are intended to function as tools of reference and therefore provide information, not easily incorporated in the text, on sources, persons, places and technical terms.
Tim Cornell, Oswyn Murray, John North, Helen Whitehouse and Peter Wiseman have all read the manuscript and have helped to eliminate a variety of aberrations. They of course bear no responsibility for the defects of the final version. The maps and figures are largely the work of Bill Thompson, of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge; I am gateful to British Archaeological Reports, the British School at Rome and Filippo Coarelli for illustrations. To him, Peter Brunt, Emilio Gabba, Keith Hopkins, Claude Nicolet and those already mentioned I owe thanks for many enjoyable discussions of Republican history. But my greatest debt, and with it the dedication of this book, is to my immediate colleagues in the period when it was taking shape, Jack Plumb, Simon Schama and Quentin Skinner.
In preparing a second edition, I have slightly expanded the text and altered it in places to accommodate changes of mind and some recent discoveries. I have learnt a great deal from the careful suggestions of Kai Brodersen, who oversaw the German translation of the first edition. There is now a much fuller Date Chart to provide a certain chronological framework for those who are unfamiliar with the Roman Republic. And the Further Reading is related to the Date Chart in a way which I hope will be helpful. I hope that in this as in other cases I have learnt from the kind comments of reviewers, though I have found myself unable to accept suggestions which involved wanton changes to the original texts which underly my translations. Nor do I have any regrets about the space devoted to social and economic, as well as political and institutional, factors. I continue to believe that the principal reason for the destruction of Republican government at Rome was the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes, just as I continue to believe that a socialist framework offers the only eventual hope for the survival of our own world. That the Roman Republic remains for me as live and fascinating a complex of problems as it has ever been owes much to the friendship and sparkle of my fellow Republican historians at University College London, Tim Cornell and John North; I should like to associate them in the dedication of this book.
Between the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC and the middle of the second century BC, a part-time army of Roman peasants, under the leadership of the ruling oligarchy, conquered first Italy and then the Mediterranean; the loyalty of the Roman population to its leaders was assured by a share in the rewards of victory. As the empire expanded, it became harder for the lower orders to gain access to these rewards, while at the same time competition within the oligarchy became more intense. The peasant armies of Rome were drawn into the conflicts born of this competition and the Republic dissolved in anarchy.
Some parts of this story may perhaps seem unduly dramatic; I can only say that a century like that between 133 BC and 31 BC, which killed perhaps 200,000 men in 91–82 and perhaps 100,000 men in 49–42, and which destroyed a system of government after 450 years was a cataclysm.
Three other themes also figure largely. In the first place, it seems to me important that the prevailing ideology of the Roman governing class was one which facilitated change, including in the end the abolition of Republican government itself; for it permitted and even encouraged the justification in traditional terms of actions which were in fact revolutionary.
The Roman state was one in which libertas, freedom, was early identified with civitas, citizenship, that is to say, political rights and duties; libertas was therefore universally accepted as desirable and trouble only arose when the question was raised of whose libertas was to be defended. At the same time, great services to the state brought a man dignitas, standing, and auctoritas, influence; and naturally both were sought after by all men of great ability or noble descent.
In the history of the Republic, appeal was made to the concepts of libertas and dignitas both by those who sought to introduce radical change, notably by appealing to popular opinion against aristocratic consensus and by attempting to increase the material privileges of the people, and by those who sought to preserve the status quo, both in terms of political power and in terms of the distribution of resources.
The struggles between politicians during the Republic were given free rein by the failure to develop communal institutions for the maintenance of order; thus even legal procedure often involved the use of an element of self-help, as in bringing a defendant to court. Such a state of affairs perhaps did not matter greatly in a small rural community, and the struggle of the Orders, between patricians and plebeians, was in the end resolved in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. But when men turned to force in the late Republic to resolve political differences, the result was catastrophic, with armies composed of many legions rapidly involved.
Secondly, I should like to stress the innovativeness of the governing class of the Republic in a wide variety of fields, cultural as well as political. If one looks at the two centuries between the Second Punic War and the age of Cicero, the impression is of an enthusiastic borrowing of Greek artistic and intellectual skills, slowly leading to the emergence of a developed Latin culture; the central period of Hellenization of the Roman oligarchy was precisely the period when it was locked in escalating internal competition which finally destroyed the system.
Finally, I have attempted to illustrate how the sources for a particular event often adopt, consciously or unconsciously, a polemical approach and how the development of this polemic is itself part of Republican history. The sources for the history of the Republic, indeed, leave much to be desired; the works of Roman and Greek historians contemporary with the events which they chronicled have largely perished; so too have most official records; even the works of later historians who reproduced and reshaped the material in earlier historians and in official records are rarely complete. But our inadequate knowledge of what happened is partly compensated for by the possibility of observing something of how the Romans saw their past and how that vision affected their conduct.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL the end of the third century BC that any interest in the writing of history manifested itself at Rome; this interest was the result of an awareness that Rome was or was becoming part of the civilized world, that is the Greek world, surrounded by states of great antiquity and with a long and glorious history. A similar pedigree was a vital necessity for Rome. Within a few years of each other, Q. Fabius Pictor, a member of the Roman nobility, set out to write in Greek a history of Rome; Cn. Naevius, a poet from Campania, composed in Latin an epic poem on the First Punic War which included a great deal of material on early Roman history; and the family of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died about 280 BC, inscribed on his sarcophagus an account of his career in nearly four lines instead of a simple line-and-a-bit giving his names and titles (See Pl.1).
From this point onwards there is a rich Roman historical tradition, albeit now very imperfectly preserved. Beside this tradition there is another, that of Greek historians observing Rome from the outside. The Roman tradition has certain unifying characteristics; Pictor removed history from the hands of the official priests who had been responsible for most of such records as had been kept, but since the official priests of Rome were drawn from its aristocracy and were more officials than priests he did not change its essential nature. History at Rome was almost always written at least unconsciously from an aristocratic viewpoint and was often consciously apologetic. It shows a strong tendency to simplify the dilemmas of the past; and particularly in the late Republic it tends to see the antecedents of the revolution in purely moral terms, with evil men subverting the efforts of the heroic defenders of the res publica.
The Greek tradition is perhaps more complex. With Rome’s confrontation with and defeat of King Pyrrhus of Epirus