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

gaining a complete trading monopoly in the western Mediterranean and closing this area to all foreign shipping. But the attention of Carthage was arrested when Rome came to control southern Italy, because at its toe lies Sicily, where both Carthage and Rome’s Greek allies in southern Italy had interests. This led to the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.) when after a long and bitter struggle the Romans drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily. This they achieved only because they ventured on the sea, built up a strong fleet and smashed the naval power of Carthage. For Rome the consequences were far-reaching: she had not only become a naval power, but she had acquired control of Sicily. She decided not to include the island in her Italian confederacy but to govern a considerable part of it directly as the overseas
provincia
of a magistrate whom she sent out annually as governor. She treated in the same way Sardinia and Corsica, which she also took from Carthage.
    Carthage, however, built up her influence in Spain, from which Hannibal later launched an attack on Italy (218 B.C.). For fifteen years Rome grappled with him in a life-and-death struggle in Italy until he was forced by Scipio’s landing in N. Africa to return to defend his country, but in vain. Carthage was beaten for a second time, and though Rome sought no territory in Africa she found that, having ejected the Carthaginians from Spain, she had the peninsula left on her hands. This she organized into two new provinces in the south and east, but for the next sixty years she had to spend much time and energy in crushing the wilder independent tribes of the interior: the process was not essentially completed until the Celtiberian capital of Numantia was destroyed in 133 B.C., nor was the yet wilder north-west corner finally pacified until the time of Augustus.
    Thus by 200 B.C. Rome had become the unchallenged mistress of the western Mediterranean. She next faced the Hellenistic East, where she intervened in response to appeals from Greek cities who were the victims of aggression by Antiochus of Syria and Philip of Macedon, the latter having in fact sided with Hannibal against Rome during the Second Punic War. After defeating Philip (Second Macedonian War, 200–196), Rome at first proclaimed a policy of ‘freedom for the Greeks’ and withdrew her armies from Greece, but she was soon drawn back in order to eject Antiochus who had entered Greece. After defeating him and pushing him back into his own kingdom, Rome again allowed the Greeks to manage their own internalaffairs, even after Philip’s son Perseus had involved them in another war in Greece (171–167). But Rome gradually and inevitably was becoming the dominant influence throughout the Hellenistic world and when the Greeks failed to live at peace with one another and a pretender attempted to seize the Macedonian throne, her patience at length gave way. She established peace by armed intervention, and then decided after more than fifty years of restraint that peace could only be maintained in the Balkans if she herself governed the area directly; she therefore created a new province, Macedonia, and sacked Cornith as an example to the rest of Greece (146).
    In this same year Rome also destroyed Carthage after a three-years’ siege. For half a century after the Hannibalic War Rome and Carthage had lived at peace. Roman interests in N. Africa had been watched by Masinissa, king of Numidia, which lay to the west of Carthaginian territory. He had consolidated and civilized his kingdom, but at length by his eastwards aggressions he had provoked Carthage to war. Rome intervened and decided this time to destroy her old rival completely. Carthaginian intransigence and courage merely postponed her fate for three years. Finally the city was razed to the ground and her territory was turned into a new Roman province named Africa (roughly equivalent to modern Tunisia).
    Between 241 and 200 Rome had thus gained four provinces