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Page 5 of 9 Article Outline Introduction; Early History; Life in Early Rome; The Roman Republic ; The Legacy of the Roman Republic
Carthage humbly accepted Roman demands, but the conservative Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato (known as Cato the Elder) was so obsessed with a fear of Carthage that for decades he ended every speech with the statement: “And Carthage must be destroyed.” Rome finally seized on a minor offense to wage another war against Carthage. After a difficult three-year siege, the city fell to a Roman army commanded by Scipio Aemilianus, the grandson of the victor of Zama, who was called Scipio Africanus the Younger.
During the 50 years after Hannibal’s defeat in the Second Punic War, Rome’s involvement in the eastern Mediterranean grew substantially. In the decade following 220 bc, Rome established a protectorate along the coast of Illyria (present-day Albania). This action greatly annoyed King Philip V of Macedonia, who was the dominant power in Greece. In retaliation, he made a treaty with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, but provided the Carthaginian army with little assistance. After Hannibal’s defeat at Zama, Philip’s enemies invited Rome to liberate the Greek cities under Macedonian domination. The Romans invaded Greece in 197 bc and their legions were victorious at Cynoscephalae in the region of Thessaly (Thessalia). Two years later the Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus granted freedom to all Greek cities and placed them under Roman protection. Support of the Greek cities soon drew Rome into conflict with the region’s most powerful king, Antiochus III, whose empire stretched from Asia Minor across Mesopotamia and Iran to India. When Roman ambassadors asked Antiochus to assure the freedom of Greek cities of the Asian coast, he ironically asked about the “freedom” of the cities of Italy under Roman control. Antiochus chose to invade Greece and drew Rome into a war that resulted in his defeat in 189 bc. The Romans forced Antiochus to pay the largest fine recorded from the ancient world—15,000 talents. Antiochus also had to relinquish most of his ships and his war elephants and withdraw his troops from Asia Minor to his capital at Antioch in Syria. After these victories, Roman commanders became increasingly arrogant and ruthless in their dealings with the Greek world. They intervened in domestic political struggles, almost invariably on the side of the aristocrats, who were usually wealthy landowners. When the Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeated Macedonia and its Greek allies at Pydna in 168 bc, he took 1,000 noble Greek youths to Rome as hostages and enslaved 150,000 men, women, and children in northwest Greece. Any pretense of Roman concern for Greek freedom was now dead. The Greeks and Macedonians tried to rebel against Roman rule, but after a hard-fought battle, they failed. In 146 bc, the Roman armies razed the ancient city of Corinth, took its treasures to Rome, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. In a single year Rome had destroyed both Carthage and Corinth. The brutal choice for other territories under Roman rule was clear: obedience or annihilation. At least one king learned the lesson: Attalus III of Pergamum chose to spare his subjects unnecessary pain by bequeathing his entire kingdom to the Roman people when he died in 133 bc. Rome’s victories over Carthage brought Sicily (in 241 bc), Sardinia (237 bc), Spain (201 bc), and North Africa (146 bc) under its control. As a result of wars in the eastern Mediterranean, Rome also took direct control of Greece (146 bc), Macedonia (146 bc), and western Asia Minor (129 bc). The Romans looked on the Mediterranean as mare nostrum (our sea) since they controlled nearly its entire perimeter after incorporating the coastal area between Italy and Spain as Transalpine Gaul in 121 bc. Some peoples continued to resist domination by Rome, but in peaceful areas like southern Gaul, Roman culture penetrated deeply. Numerous Roman monuments that still survive in the French region of Provence, for example, illustrate this influence. During the 1st century bc, the remainder of the eastern Mediterranean coastline, including Libya, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, fell into Roman hands as did all of Gaul and the Balkans south of the Danube River. Rome came and conquered, but also learned to administer its conquests effectively. This lesson did not come easily or quickly. The Roman state had virtually no bureaucracy, and the Romans initially preferred not to expand their administrative apparatus. Rome usually established “alliances” with foreign states and cities, but also annexed some areas as provinces when the local political organization was inadequate, as in Spain, or untrustworthy, as in Macedonia. The Roman Senate gave each conquered province an individual charter, and the Roman governor held all of the province’s civil and military authority. The governors were Roman senators who had held the consulship or praetorship, and in peacetime they were usually appointed for one year. Military activity often led to longer terms. Their absolute power led many governors to overlook extortion by tax collectors and to line their own pockets through bribery.
Rome failed to prosecute corrupt bureaucrats effectively since the courts showed a strong bias towards the senatorial class. Attempts at reform were unsuccessful, and the Roman statesman Cato the Elder’s sour prediction that foreign conquest would corrupt Rome itself proved all too true. The historian Sallust, writing during the civil wars of the 1st century bc, dated Rome’s corruption to the destruction of Carthage in 146 bc and the absence of any foreign threat.
Rome’s military triumphs brought increased prestige to its leading families and to the Senate. In theory, the Senate remained an advisory body, but no one challenged its control of state finances, war, and foreign relations. Roman generals and ambassadors were all senators, and they came into frequent contact with eastern kings. The attitudes of these all-powerful rulers influenced some of the Romans to adopt an arrogance that conservative statesmen like Cato deplored. Scipio Africanus the Elder, for example, wore Greek clothes when he was in Sicily, while the proconsul Titus Flamininus was worshiped as a god in Greece. No matter how often the Romans publicly scorned such attitudes and ideas, senators were frequently affected by them. Immense wealth also streamed into the hands of senators whose military commands gave them vast booty. The Romans had traditionally deplored excessive luxury and ostentation, and had generally restricted aristocratic competition to service in war or in public life. In 275 bc the Senate actually expelled a former consul for possessing ten pounds of silver tableware. A century later, however, such rigid behavior had become outdated, and wealthy Romans began to imitate the Greeks. They built magnificent homes and imported art as decoration. Romans competed with each other to erect lavish temples and public buildings, as well as to offer sumptuous banquets prepared by Greek chefs. Scipio Africanus the Younger even surrounded himself with an entourage of poets and Greek intellectuals. The influx of wealth transformed both the men and women of the Roman nobility. Just as eastern kings had influenced Roman senators, so did the cultured and wealthy Greek princesses of the Hellenistic Age influence Roman women. In an attempt to imitate the lavish lifestyles of the Greek nobility, many Roman matrons used legacies from fathers and husbands who had died in battle to obtain items for personal adornment. Some of their purchases were so extravagant that a law was eventually passed limiting finery and confiscating excessive gold jewelry. Conflict developed between the concept of the cosmopolitan woman presiding over a salon served by dozens of slaves and the ideal of the Roman matron weaving at the family loom. Scipio Africanus the Elder’s wife, Aemilia, decorated her chariot with gold and silver, while her daughter Cornelia wore no adornments and proclaimed that her children were her jewels. In a society that respected women’s intellectual accomplishments, Cornelia also published her correspondence.
A similar antagonism existed between the lifestyles of urban and rural populations of the Roman Republic. The 15 years that Hannibal’s armies had roamed the Italian countryside left a permanent mark on the agriculture of the peninsula. Hannibal’s soldiers took livestock and destroyed farm buildings, while Roman farmers neglected their fields to fight the war. The Romans also used most of the peninsula’s timber to outfit their navy, and the deforestation of the mountains caused increasing problems of erosion. Italian soil had never been enormously fertile, so when cheap grain began to flow into the country from Sicily and other overseas conquests, the Romans turned to herding, and the cultivation of grapevines for wine and olive trees for oil. But herds, trees, and vines all required substantial long-term investments, which many soldiers returning to abandoned fields could not afford. The wealthy bought property from these impoverished farmers and also occupied huge tracts of public land that the government had seized from conquered Italian cities. These fields were farmed by hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war brought into Italy as slaves. Over time, the Roman landlords became greedy. That greed led to the brutal treatment of the slaves, who responded by launching a series of terrifying revolts. These slave uprisings began in 135 bc with 200,000 slaves under arms in Sicily, and culminated with the rebellion of Spartacus in 73 bc. The influx of slaves drove many peasants from the countryside to the cities and swelled the size of the urban proletariat, or laboring classes, during the 2nd century bc. Many soldiers had seen the luxuries of Greek cities and willingly gave up their harsh rural lifestyles to work in an urban setting. The spoils of war provided funds for a great deal of construction, so initially jobs were plentiful. Senators commissioned private palaces and public memorials, while the state built roads, aqueducts, and temples. Craftworkers and laborers could easily find work and enjoy the subsidized amusements of Rome and other Italian cities. However, they also became dependent on an expanding urban economy and the generosity of politicians. Since Rome spent all of its income each year, the urban population was vulnerable to an economic downturn and a potentially explosive situation existed in the capital itself. Although the lure of tribute money and other spoils of war sharpened the taste for military conquest, the army faced severe recruitment problems. Property ownership was a requirement for military service, since soldiers had to provide their own arms, but the growing numbers of landless poor could no longer satisfy these basic qualifications. Even those men who were eligible hesitated to serve long tours of duty overseas when the prospects for rich booty had declined and their lands might be at risk during their absence. Armies of occupation were necessary for an imperial power, but neither Roman citizens nor the increasingly resentful Italians found enrollment attractive.
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