Conquest of Italy

    The first target of expansion were the Etruscans. Allying themselves with other Latins and with the Greeks, the Romans quickly drove the Etruscans from the Italian peninsula. Etruscan civilization came to a brutal end. Rome steadily conquered all the Etruscan territory throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

    The Romans, however, were dramatically checked in their conquest of Italy by invasions of another Indo-European people from across the Alps: the Gauls. The Gauls were a Celtic people who were nomadic and war-like. In 387 BC, they roared across the Alps into Italy, soundly defeated the Roman army, and then capturing and burning Rome to the ground. The Gauls, however, did not wish to settle in Italy; they were interested only in amassing wealth. They looted Rome and then demnaded a tribute; after they had collected their ransom, they returned home to central Europe. Rome was now vulnerable to all the peoples it had conquered, and various Italian states tried to attack Rome. By 350 BC, however, Rome was sufficiently powerful enough to begin asserting dominance over the region again.

    The Romans had been part of a Latin alliance, but exerted tremendous hegemony over that alliance. Despite being defeated by the Gauls in 387 BC, the Romans successfully fought back Gaulish raiding parties throughout the middle of the fourth century BC. Roman allies, however, began to bitterly resent the Roman hegemony over the league and demanded their independence. Rome turned them down flat, and the Latin cities rose up against Rome for their independence in 340 BC. Rome, however, only took two years to defeat the Latins in this uprising; in 338 BC, Rome dismantled the Latin League and took control of all of Latium.

    In 295 BC, Rome began a war with a tough Latin people living in the Appenine mountains, the Samnites, who were joined by the remaining Etruscan cities, by Gaulish tribes, and some rebellious Italian cities. The result of this war, in 280 BC, was total Roman control over all of central Italy. Rome then turned its eyes south to the Greek cities and quickly overpowered them. By the middle of the third century BC, Rome controlled all of the Italian peninsula.

    Ancient history shows abundantly that it is enormously difficult to hang onto conquered territories; the Romans, however, seemed to have figured out how to peacefully hold onto conquered territory with both liberal and militaristic policies. First, Rome didn't destroy conquered cities, but granted them certain rights. Some cities were allowed full Roman citizenship, particularly those near to Rome. Others were allowed certain Roman rights. Some were allowed complete autonomy. Some were allowed to become allies. All, however, were required to send Rome taxes and troops. In addition, Rome settled soldiers on the captured lands as payment for their service. Some of these land grants were especially lucrative. The soldiers got land wealth, and the Romans got permanent military settlers in the conquered lands. In this way, Rome was able to maintain a permanent military settlement in every conquered land. In order to reinforce these settlements, the Romans began an ambitious road-building project. Their roads were of the highest quality and went in straight lines—right straight over mountains in fact—so that soldiers and supplies could be quickly moved into rebellious territories. The response to revolt was swift and harsh. So the combination of granting conquered territories rights and citizenship (or the promise of future rights and citizenship) and the surety of a swift, harsh response to rebellion produced a lasting, peaceful empire on the Italian peninsula.

First Punic War

    The First Punic War broke out in 264 BC; it was concentrated entirely on the island of Sicily. Rome beseiged many of the Carthaginian cities on Sicily, and when Carthage attempted to raise the seige with its navy, the Romans utterly destroyed that navy. For the first time since the rise of the Carthaginian empire, they had lost power over the sea-ways.

   The war ended with no particular side winning over the other. In 241 BC, the Carthaginians and Romans signed a treaty in which Carthage had to give up Sicily, which it didn't miss, and to pay an indemnity to pay for the war, which it could well afford. But Carthage soon faced rebellion among its mercenary troops and Rome, in 238 BC, took advantage of the confusion by seizing the island of Corsica. The Romans greatly feared the Carthaginians and wanted build as large a buffer zone as possible between them and the Carthaginians. By gaining Sicily, the Romans had expelled the Carthaginians from their back yard; they now wanted them out of their front yard, that is, the islands of Corsica and Sardinia west of the Italian peninsula.

   The Carthaginians were furious at this action; even Roman historians believed it was a rash and unethical act. The Carthaginians began to shore up their presence in Europe. They sent first the general Hamilcar and then his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, to Spain to build colonies and an army. Both Hamilcar and Hasdrubal made allies among the native Iberians, and their armies, recruited from Iberians, grew ominous as Carthaginian power and influence crept up the Iberian peninsula.

Second Punic War

        By 218 BC, Carthage had built a mighty empire in Spain and grown wealthy and powerful as a result. Growing increasingly anxious, the Romans had imposed a treaty on Carthage not to expand their empire past the Ebro river in Spain. However, when a small city in Spain, Saguntum, approached Rome asking for Roman friendship and alliance, the Romans couldn't resist having a friendly ally right in the heart of the Carthaginian Iberian empire.

   A few years later, however, in 421 BC, a young man, only twenty-five years old, assumed command over Carthaginian Spain: Hannibal. At first, Hannibal gave the Saguntines wide berth wishing to avoid coming into conflict with Rome. But the Saguntines were flush with confidence in their new alliance, and began playing politics with other Spanish cities. Hannibal, despite direct threats from Rome, attacked Saguntum and conquered it.

   The Romans attempted to solve the problem with diplomacy, demanding that Carthage dismiss Hannibal and send him to Rome. When Carthage refused, the second Punic War began in 218 BC. Rome, however, was facing a formidable opponent; in the years following the first Punic War, Carthage had created a powerful empire in Spain with a terrifyingly large army. Hannibal marched that army across Europe and, in September of 218, he crossed the Alps with his army and entered Italy on a war of invasion. Although his army was tired, he literally smashed the Roman armies he encountered in northern Italy. These spectacular victories brough a horde of Gauls from the north to help him, fifty thousand or more; his victory over Rome, as he saw it, would be guaranteed by convincing Roman allies and subject cities to join Carthage.

   The Romans knew that they couldn't beat Hannibal in open warfare. Desperate, they asked Quintus Fabius Maximus to become absolute dictator of Rome. Fabius determined to avoid open warfare at any cost and simply harass the Carthaginian army until they were weak enought to be engaged with openly. But when Hannibal marched into Cannae and started decimating the countryside in 216 BC, Fabius sent an army of eighty thousand soldiers against him. This army was completely wiped out, the largest defeat Rome ever suffered. Roman allies in the south of Italy literally ran to Hannibal's side; the whole of Sicily allied itself with the Carthaginians. In addition, the king of Macedon, Philip V, who controlled most of the mainland of Greece, allied himself with Hannibal and began his own war against Roman possessions in 215 BC.

   The situation was nearly hopeless for the Romans. Fabius had been chastened by his defeat and absolutely refused to go against Hannibal, whose army moved around the Italian countryside absolutely unopposed. Hannibal, however, was weak in numbers and in equipment. He didn't have enough soldiers to lay seige to cities such as Rome, and he didn't have either the men or equipment to storm those cities by force. All he could do was roam the countryside and lay waste to it.

   The Romans, however, decided to fight the war through the back door. They knew that Hannibal was dependent on Spain for future supplies and men, so they appointed a young, strategically brilliant man as proconsul and handed him the imperium over Spain. This move was unconstituional, for this young man had never served as consul. His name: Publius Cornelius Scipio (237-183 BC). Scipio, who would later be called Scipio Africanus for his victory over Carthage (in Africa), soon conquered all of Spain. Hannibal was now left high and dry in Italy.

    Scipio then crossed into Africa in 204 BC and took the war to the walls of Carthage itself. This forced the Carthaginians to sue for peace with Rome; part of the treaty demanded that Hannibal leave the Italian peninsula. Hannibal was one of the great strategic generals in history; all during his war with Rome he never once lost a battle. Now, however, he was forced to retreat; he had, despite winning every battle, lost the war. When he returned to Carthage, the Carthaginians took heart and rose up against Rome in one last gambit in 202 BC. At Zama in northern Africa, Hannibal, fighting against Scipio and his army, met his first defeat. Rome reduced Carthage to a dependent state; Rome now controlled the whole of the western Mediterranean including northern Africa.

Third Punic War

   In the years intervening, Rome undertook the conquest of the Hellenic empires to the east. In the west, Rome brutally subjugated the Iberian people who had been so vital to Roman success in the second Punic War. However, they were especially angry at the Carthaginians who had almost destroyed them. The great statesman of Rome, Cato, is reported by the historians as ending all his speeches, no matter what their subject, with the statement, "I also think that Carthage should be destroyed." Carthage had, through the first half of the second century BC, recovered much of its prosperity through its commercial activities, although it had not gained back much power. The Romans, deeply suspicious of a reviving Carthage, demanded that the Carthaginians abandon their city and move inland into North Africa. The Carthaginians, who were a commercial people that depended on sea trade, refused. The Roman Senate declared war, and Rome attacked the city itself. After a seige, the Romans stormed the town and the army went from house to house slaughtering the inhabitants in what is perhaps the greatest systematic execution of non-combatants before World War II. Carthaginians who weren't killed were sold into slavery. The harbor and the city was demolished, and all the surrounding countryside was sown with salt in order to render it uninhabitable.

Conquest of the Hellenic World

    While Rome was engaged in internal politics and the conquest of Italy, the Macedonian Greeks first conquered the Greek mainland and peninsula, and then, literally, the whole of the world. By 324 BC, when Rome still didn't control much of Italy and the city was still struggling with friction between the patricians and the plebeians, the entire world east of Rome, everything, was under the control of a single man, Alexander the Great. While there were numerous Greek cities on the Italian peninsula and while Rome was heavily influenced by Greek culture and thought, the Romans didn't seem to pay this ground-shaking development with much concern. Although the Hellenistic world fractured in pieces, nonetheless the end of the fourth century saw three great empires controlling the world east of Rome. The Romans, however, didn't seem overly concerned, occupied with problems of their own; the Romans, you see, were not particularly interested in world domination, but rather on their own immediate security. And the Hellenistic empires were not viewed as a threat.

    The Second Punic War, however, changed all that. Rome had almost been destroyed by Carthage and the Macedonian kingdom under Philip V 221-179 BC) had allied themselves with Carthage; the Hellenistic world had appeared on the Roman radar in the only way that foreign countries ever appeared on the Roman radar: as a potential threat. Philip V of Macedon was an empire builder; he eagerly sought to extend Macedonian control over more territory. Unfortunately for him, Antiochus III (223-187 BC), the king of the Seleucid empire, the second of the great Hellenistic empires, also was an empire builder. Only one hundred years after the death of Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic empires entered a new era of expansion. Antiochus III began seizing territories in Palestine, wresting control from the Ptolemies in Egypt (this included Judah). Philip V began seizing territories in the Aegean Sea and Asia Minor. Philip and Antiochus decided it would be best to move in concert, so they began contemplating the conquest of Egypt; they would then split the territory among themselves.

  Rome, after its bitter experience with Carthage, was deeply suspicious of any empire-building at all. They had fought against Philip during the Second Punic War (this first Roman war with Philip was called the First Macedonian War), and demanded that he cease seizing Greek territory. When Philip refused, Rome fielded an army against him under the generalship of Flaminius in 200 BC; thus began the Second Macedonian War. Flaminius defeated Philip in Thessaly only three years later and in the next year, 196 BC, declared all the Greek cities to be free.

   The Romans, however, were deeply suspicious of Antiochus as well. Seeing an opportunity, Antiochus landed an army on the Greek mainland in order to "free" them from the Romans, but he was soon driven from Greece and his army decimated at the battle of Magnesia in Asia Minor in 189 BC. As with the earlier war, the Romans seized no territory whatsoever, although they did demand a heavy penalty from Antiochus. By and large, the Romans regarded the Greek cities as free cities that posed no threat to them; they also felt that they were the "protectors" of Greece, a role that would prevent the rise of any centralized power that might threaten the security of Rome.

   However, when Philip V died in 179 BC, he was succeeded by Perseus, who then roused up democratic and revolutionary passions in Greece. So Rome invaded Greece again, in the Third Macedonian War (172-168 BC); the results, however, were dramatically different. While the Romans did not seize territory, they did impose very stern control over the native control of that territory. The Romans embarked on hegemonic rule of allies and subject states as well in order to prevent any kind of revolutionary fervor. They had learned from their control of Italy that states were more likely to remain subject to Rome if reprisal was sure, swift, and harsh.

   At this point, Roman empire-building had been accomplished piece-meal. The Romans responded to threats as they appeared on the horizon; the result was, you might say, an accidental empire. This situation changed, however, after the Third Macedonian War. The defeat of Perseus involved massive looting of the conquered cities; in addition, the penalties imposed on the defeated states literally flooded the Roman treasury with wealth. In the west, entrepreneurial governors, called publicani had been extracting harsh taxes from the subject peoples and greatly increasing both their own and Roman wealth. By the middle of the second century BC, it had become apparent to Romans that the empire was a vast money-making machine and empire-building a fabulously lucrative affair. The accidental Roman Empire suddenly shifted into high gear. However, the massive wealth that was created for Rome awoke old tensions between the classes, and the Republic would live in a state of crisis for over a hundred years—a crisis that, at its conclusion, would precipitate the demise of the Republic in favor of a dictatorship

The End of the Republic.

   The First Triumvirate, consisting of Julius Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey, came to power in 59 BC when Caesar was elected consul. The Triumvirate reform program was enacted and Caesar got himself appointed governor of Illycrium and Gaul. The way to power in Rome was through military conquest; this gave the general a loyal army, wealth (from the conquered), and popularity and prestige at home. So the governorship of Illycrium and Gaul allowed Caesar to become the general and conqueror he so desperately desired to become.

   Now the Romans really had no reason to conquer northern and central Europe; the people who lived there, the Germans and the Celts, were a tribal, semi-nomadic people. The province of Illycrium provided enough of a territorial buffer to defuse any threat from these people. But Julius embarked on a spectacular war of conquest anyway. In a series of fairly brilliant campaigns, Julius added a considerable amount of territory to the Roman Empire in northern France, Belgium, and even southern Great Britain, subjugating the Celts in all these territories. When he had finished his conquests, however, the Triumvirate had dissolved. Crassus had died in a war against the Parrhians in the Middle East, and Pompey had turned against Julius and had roused the Senate against him. The Senate declared Julius an enemy of the state and demanded that he hand over his generalship and province. Julius, however, decided on a different course of action. His troops were fiercely loyal to him; so in 49 BC, Caesar ordered his troops to cross the Rubicon River, which separated his province from Italy, thus committing a grave crime against the state. The Civil War started the minute the first of his legions had finished crossing the Rubicon.

   The war was fought between these two great generals, Pompey and Caesar, but in 48 BC, Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in Greece. Shortly thereafter Pompey was assassinated by the Egyptians among whom he had sought refuge. Caesar then turned his forces towards Asia Minor in a conquest that was so swift that Caesar described it in three words: "Veni, vidi, vici" ("I came, I saw, I conquered").

   Caesar returned to Rome in 46 BC and had the Senate appoint him dictator for ten years; he was given imperium over the Roman Empire and was, for all practical purposes, above the law and the constitution. Two years later he was appointed dictator for life, and he quickly assumed all the important offices in the government. He reformed the government in many ways, but these reforms were functionally meaningless considering his absolute power. Caesar's absolute power, imperium for life (which made him imperator , or Emperor, of Rome), looked suspiciously like a monarchy, which, for all practical purposes, it was. The Romans, proud of their Republican tradition, deeply resented his power, and in 44 BC, on the Ides of March (March 15), a group of conspirators, led by Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus, assassinated Caesar as he entered the Senate in his usual manner: with no bodyguards or protection.

Last Edited On: 08/15/99

Copyright © 1999 by Paul Logasa Bogen II, Bobbie Keane, and Jeff Ryan Martinez. All Rights Reserved.

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