From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 Read Online Free PDF Page A

an overseas Empire, then stresses and tensions might overstrain the stability of the body politic and the days of the Roman Republic would be numbered. 1
    First, therefore, we must see very briefly how Rome reached this perilous position and glance at the various sections of Rome and her Empire in an attempt to envisage their needs and responsibilities in light of the changes that they were undergoing. Then we come to the two chief themes of this book: first the century in which the Republic failed to meet the challenge and in consequence crashed to its ruin amid civil war and military dictatorship,and then the following century when the war-weary world was given peace and a stable government though at the cost of seeing the Republic restored only in name by a First Citizen whose authority did not differ widely from that of a constitutional monarch and whose successors became increasingly autocratic.
    2.  THE GROWTH OF ROME’S EMPIRE
    Since many of the problems which faced Rome in 133 B.C. arose from her acquisition of an empire overseas, we must first see briefly how she had come to possess it. In the course of the preceding four hundred years Rome had developed from a small city-state on the banks of the Tiber into the dominant power throughout the Mediterranean. After the expulsion of the Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus, at the end of the Regal Period (510 B.C.), the Romans had established a Republic which gradually came to control all Italy. This process was not achieved by military conquest alone, and in fact Roman religious law (the
ius fetiale
) did not countenance wars of aggression designed to gain new territory. But in alliance with neighbouring Latin cities Rome did not hesitate to hit back when the hill tribes of central Italy began to press down against the more fertile plain of Latium. Very slowly, partly by accident and partly by design, Roman interests extended throughout central Italy and ultimately throughout the peninsula, so that by 264 B.C. she had become the dominant political and military power. But more than that, she had united all Italy within the framework of a Confederacy. Unlike many peoples of the ancient world, the Romans were most generous in sharing their own citizenship with others: thus they had incorporated a considerable part of Italy in their own State by granting all or some of the privileges of Roman citizenship to many of the cities and tribes with which they had come into contact. With the rest of Italy they had contracted alliances of varying conditions, the most favoured allies being the Latin cities. Thus the early period of fighting was ended, Italy was to a large extent united through the central power of Rome, while law and order were maintained the more easily because of the roads which Rome had constructed, and the colonies (both Roman and Latin) which had been established at strategic points. 2
    One of the chief consequences of the consolidation of Roman power in Italy was that she now stepped into the front rank of the Great Powers. The Greeks and the Hellenistic monarchs, who had carved kingdoms for themselves out of the empire of Alexander the Great, had hitherto regarded the inhabitants of central Italy as barbarians in so far as they had thought of them at all, but they received a sudden shock when news came that Pyrrhus king of Epirus, who had invaded Italy at the request of Tarentum, had been driven out of Italy by Roman arms in 275 B.C. Indeed two years later Ptolemy II kingof Egypt hastened to enter into a formal ‘friendship’ with the Roman Republic. Thereafter for the next half century Rome and the Greek world paid little attention to one another and were content to live and let live. This was also the policy which Rome had hitherto adopted towards the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. The main interest of Carthage was commerce, while the Romans were primarily an agricultural people who had no reason to wish to stop the Carthaginians