ROME - FROM CITY TO EMPIRE

The city of Rome began life as a modest village in the region of ltaly known as Latium. Nobody could have predicted that this undistinguished settlement-merely one of several local centres gradually developing into cities during the 7th and 6th centuries BC-would eventually become mistress not only of all ltaly, but of the entire Mediterranean world.

Our knowledge of early Rome is based on two sources of evidence: the traditional histories written by Livy and others several centuries later; and the findings of archaeology. Legend held that the Romans traced their ancestry back to Aeneas, the hero who escaped from the sack of Troy carrying his father Anchises on his back. His subsequent travels took him to Carthage, where he met and fell in lave with Dido before forsaking her and settling in Latium. There his son founded the city of Alba Longa, and it was from the kings of Alba Longa that Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were directly descended.

Much of this is evident invention. Troy, we now know, was sacked in the 12th ar 13th century BC, whereas Carthage was only founded in the 8th ar 9th. The idea that Trojan refugees sought refuge in central Italy is probably also pure fiction . But the story of Romulus and Remus founding the city of Rome may incorpororate elements of truth. For it was in the 8th century that two existing settlements, one on the Palatine Hill, the other on the Quirinal, coalesced to form a single village. This corresponds in time approximately with the traditional foundation of Rome by Romulus in 753 BC. Early Rome has been given especially vivid form by the discovery early this century of oval hut foundations on the Palatine Hill, and by burials (both inhumations and cremations with "hut-urns") in the Forum valley and on the Esquiline Hill. Some of these burials date back as far as the 10th century BC, long before Romulus's supposed foundation.

The nascent settlement of Rome soon found itself at war with its powerful neighbours, the Sabines. According to tradition, Romulus enticed the Sabines to a feast, during which the Romans seized the Sabine women as their wives. This, again, is probably legend which incorporates a germ of truth, since Sabine influence was strong in early Rome and the eventual compromise, by which Rome was ruled alternately by Roman and Sabine kings, may reflect Rome's origin in the coalescence of two ethnically different communities.

From Village to City

The four earliest kings were shadowy characters, village leaders rather than powerful monarchs, and the settlement itselfwas small and undistinguished. Major change began to take place during the 7th century, when tiled roofs and stone foundations appear, culminating in the draining of the Forum area and its laying out as a public square: a formal city centre. Thís coíncided with the appearance ofnew rulers, the Etruscans.

Accordíng to legend the first Etruscan ruler Tarquínius Priscus, took control of Rome by peaceful means, gaining the acquiescence and support of the leading families. He may well have had much to offer the early Romans, since the Etruscans had a flourishing network of city-states in the region to the north of Rome, and Rome stood ata crucial bridging point on the Tíber which gave the Etruscans access to Latium and beyond. Rome never became an Etruscan city-state ín the strict sense of the term, but it took on many Etruscan trappings. It was especially important to the Etruscans since the latter had established a major zone of influence in Campania to the south, and the Tiber bridge was the strategic artery of communication between the homeland and these southern outposts.

The Etruscans gave Rome wríting (an alphabet they in turn had taken from the Greeks), public buildings (including the Temple of Jupiter on the Capital) and a new politicai, social and military organisation. The traditional symbols of power, the fasces (bundles of rods and axes, which have given their name to fascísm) were also Etruscan in origin. Under the Etruscan kings, Rome became the undisputed leader of a large section of Latium extending from the Alban Hills in the east to the Tiber mouth in the west. The Romans retaíned their own language, however, though Etruscan families took up residence in the city, and a number of Etruscan inscriptions have been found there. Yet it was not wíthout difficulty that the Romans eventually freed themselves from Etruscan overlordship.

The Birth of the Republic

The Etruscans ruled Rome for a little over a century; the traditional dates are 616 BC for the accession of the first Etruscan king; Tarquinius Priscus, and 510 BC for the expulsíon of the last, Tarquinius Superbus- "the proud" (Between them came a Latin king, Servius Tullius, son-in-law of Tarquinius Priscus.) Livy tells us it was the rape of Lucretia by Sextus, son of Tarquin the Proud, which incited rebellion by a group of Roman aristocrats led by Lucius Junius Brutus. The Tarquins were expelled from Rome, and a new constitution devised, whereby power rested in the hands of the senate (the assembly of leading citizens), who delegated executive action to a pair of consuls who were elected from among their number to serve for one year. Thus was born the Roman Republic.

In reality, the story was less simple, for the Etruscans did not so easily relinquish control of their crucial Tiber bridgehead. Tarquin the Proud sought help from Lars Porsenna, ruler of the Etruscan city of Clusium. According to Livy, the Romans beat off this attack, notably by Horatius's heroic stand at the Tiber bridge. Most likely, however, Porsenna did recapture Rome, but failed to hold it for long. The Latin cities banded together with Rome to throw off the Etruscan yoke, and won a major victory at Aricia in 506 BC. Henceforth, though Etruscan cultural influence remained strong, the Latin cities were politically independent.

The victory at Aricia did not mark an end to Rome's troubles, since the new constitution was not flawless and there remained powerful external enemies. Internally, one serious threat was the internecine feuding of the leading families, many of whom commanded the support of large numbers of clients and used them on occasion to subvert the power of the state.

Another was the struggle between the leading families (the patricians) as a whole and the rest of the population, especially the underprivileged groups (the plebeians). After some years of conflict the plebeians forced the senate to pass a written series of laws (the Twelve Tables) which reccognized certain rights and gave the plebeians their own representatives, the tribunes. It was only later, in the 4th century, that plebeians were given the right to stand for the consulship and other major offices of state.

Expansion in Italy

By the 5th century BC, Rome was an important city, but by no means a major regional power. The transition came about only through piecemeal expansion in a series of minor wars. Their earliest enemies were their immediate neighbours to east and south: the Aequi and Volsci. By the end of the 5th century these peoples had been defeated, and the Romans pushed forward their own frontiers, establishing colonies (settlements of Roman citizens) in strategic places. This practice, extensively followed in later years, enabled Rome to hold on to conquered territories and rewarded its citizens with fertile new farmland.

The first resounding Roman military success was to the north of the city, where in 396 BC after a ten-year siege they captured Veii. This was the southernmost of the Etruscan cities and a major metropolis, in every sense Rome's equal. Any feelings of elation must have been short-lived, however, since six years later Rome itself was sacked by a new and more distant enemy: the Celts (or Gauls).

Celtic peoples from Central Europe had been establishing themselves in northern Italy during the course of the 6th and 5th centuries, and in 391 BC a Celtic war-band launched a raid deep into Etruria. They returned the next year in even greater strength, defeated the Romans at the River Allia, and captured the city. The citadel on the Capitoline Hill held out for a few months but eventually capitulated. The Celts withdrew with their booty back to northern Italy, leaving the Romans to pick up the pieces, rebuild the city and restore their damaged prestige. One of their first acts was to provide Rome itself with better defences: the so-called Servian Wall, 6 miles (10 km) long, which was the only city wall that Rome possessed until the Emperor Aurelian built a new one over 500 years later But it was some years before the Romans were able to return to the offensive.

Whether the Romans entertained any long-term imperialist objectives or merely conquered in self-defence is open to question, but the results were impressive in either case. In 343 they came into conflict with the Samnites, a powerful tribal confederation who controlled the central backbone of southern Italy. This First Samnite War (343-41) was brief and inconclusive, but was followed by more significant Roman gains in the Second and Third Wars (327-304; 298-90 BC). During the same period Rome strengthened its hold over Latium and renewed operations against the Etruscans.

Victory in the Third Samnite War extended Roman territory across the Apennines to the Adriatic Sea. This made Rome a major regional power and attracted hostile attention from the Greek cities around the coast of southern Italy. They called in the help of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, an ambitious adventurer who arrived at Tarentum in 280 BC with a well-trained army which included war elephants, the first the Romans had encountered. Pyrrhus won battles at Heraclea and Ausculum, but with such heavy loss that they gave him little real advantage. He was eventually defeated in 275, and Tarentum fell to the Romans in 272.

Rome and the Mediterranean

Rome now controlled the whole of the Italian peninsula, either through alliance or direct conquest. The next wars were fought against a much more redoubtable opponent-the Carthaginians-and the prize this time was not merely Italy but the whole of the West and Central Mediterranean.

Rome's principal advantage lay in the enormous reserves of Italian manpower on which it could call. Carthage, on the other hand, was a maritime power with a redoubtable fleet.

The First Punic War (264-41 BC) was fought for control of Sicily. The Carthaginians had long held the western end of the island and had sought from time to time to conquer the Greek cities of eastern Sicily, such as Catana and Syracuse. The cause of the First Punic War, as of many great conflicts, was trivial in origin but revived old rivalries and alerted the Carthaginians to the growing threat from Rome. Despite their seafaring skill, the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans in a number of naval engagements and by the end of war Sicily was reduced to the status of a Roman province, becoming indeed Rome's first overseas possession.

The Carthaginians were slow to accept their reverse, and in 218 struck back in the Second Punic War, with an invasion of Italy itself, led by Hannibal. This time it was the Romans who were worsted in their chosen element, the land battle, but despite crushing victories at Cannae and Lake Trasimene Hannibal could not shake Rome's hold on the Italian peninsula, and was unable to attack the city itself. In the end the Romans turned the tables by invading Carthaginian territory. Hannibal crossed back to Africa to defend his homeland but was defeated in the final battle of the war, at Zama, by the Roman general Scipio "Africanus" in 202 BC.

The victory over Hannibal removed Carthage as a military threat, but did not bring the Romans any great measure of peace Instead, they found themselves embroiled in new wars which took them further and further afield. In the west, they became involved in a whole succession of wars in Spain, seeking to protect and expand the territory in the south of the country which they had taken from the Carthaginians. In Italy, close to home, they renewed the conquest of the Celtic lands in the north, which became the province of Gallia Cisalpina (Gaul-this-side-of-the-Alps). But the greatest wars of the 2nd century BC were fought in the Balkans and the East Mediterranean.

As the century began, the Romans declared war on Philip, king of Macedonia, and in 196 defeated the Macedonian army at Cynoscephalae. The Romans did not initially seek a lasting foothold in the Balkans, but merely wished to neutralize a military threat. A quarter of a century later they were back fighting a new Macedonian king, Perseus, and by 146 BC had come to realize they had no alternative to direct rule.

Greece and Macedonia together became the Roman province of Achaea. In the same year the Romans at last destroyed Carthage, their old enemy, in the Third Punic War; its territory became another new province, Africa. Shortly afterwards, in 133 BC, they gained yet another overseas territory when the last king of Pergamum left his kingdom to the Romans in his will.

Thus, almost by accident, Rome became the ruler of a great Mediterranean empire. The provinces brought wealth to Italy, and fortunes were made through the granting of valuable mineral concessions and enormous slave-run estates. Italian traders and craftsmen flourished on the proceeds of the new prosperity. Slaves were imported to Italy, too, however. and wealthy landowners soon began to buy up and displace the original peasant farmers.

By the late 2nd century this process had led to renewed conflict between rich and poor and demands from the latter for reform of the Roman constitution. The background of social unease and the inability of the traditional republican constitution to adapt to the needs of a powerful empire together led to the rise of a series of over-mighty generals, championing the cause of either aristocrats or the poor in the last century BC.

The Fall of the Republic

The beginning of the end of the Republic came when the brothers Gracchus challenged the traditional constitutional order in the l30s and l20s BC. Though members of the aristocracy themselves, they sought to pareel out public land to the dispossessed Italian peasant farmers. Other measures followed, but many senators came to view the Gracchi as public enemies, and both the brothers met violent deaths.

The next champion of the people was Gaius Marius, a brilliant military commander who reformed the Roman army and saved Italy from the invading Cimbri and Teutones in 102 and 101 BC. He departed from established practice by recruiting his soldiers not only from the landed citizens but from landless citizens, including the growing urban proletariat. These were people who, once the wars were over, looked to their commander for a more permanent reward in the shape of land of their own. Thus the situation developed where commanders and their armies banded together in pursuit of political objectives, the commanders seeking power and the soldiers rewards.

The temporary ascendancy achieved by Marius was eclipsed by that of Sulla in the 80s BC. Sulla made his name in two crucial wars: the first in Italy itself, the so-called Social War of 91-89 BC, where the Italian allies, though they lost the war, largely won their demand for full Roman citizenship; and the second the defeat of Mithridates, king of Pontus, who chose this moment of Roman weakness to overrun Asia Minor and Greece. Sulla was a staunch proponent of aristocratic privilege, and his short-lived monarchy saw the repeal of pro-popular legislation and the condemnation, usually without trial, of thousands of his enemies.

After Sulla's death the pendulum swung back somewhat in favour of the people under a successful new commander, Pompey the Great. He became immensely popular for clearing the seas of pirates and went on to impose a new political settlement on the warring kingdoms of the East Mediterranean, notably making Syria a Roman province. When he returned to Rome in 62 BC he found himself faced by two astute political opponents: the immensely wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus, and the young but promising Gaius Julius Caesar.

Rather than coming to blows, the three men reached a political accommodation now known as the First Triumvirate. Under the terms of this arrangement Caesar became consul in 59 BC and was then made governor of the two Gallic provinces, one-Cisalpina-south of the Alps, the other Transalpina- covering the southern part of modern France. He embarked on a campaign of conquest, the Gallic War, which resulted in a huge accession of new territory, and then used his battle-hardened army to overthrow Pompey and take supreme power for himself. Caesar's career was cut short by his assassination at Rome in 44 BC, but rule by one man was becoming an increasingly inevitable prospect. It was a prospect brought to fruition by Octavian, Caesar's adoptive son. He and Mark Antony, Caesar's friend and lieutenant, defeated Caesar's assassins at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC.

They then established the Second Triumvirate, joining forces with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus to divide power between them. The arrangement did not last, however, and eventually resolved itself into direct military conf1ict between Octavian and Mark Antony. Octavian's victory at the battle of Actium left him sole ruler and in 27 BC the Senate granted him the title Augustus, making him the first official emperor of Rome.

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The Origins of Rome

The early centuries saw Rome grow from a cluster of hilltop farms into a walled city with temples and a paved forum.

Tradition held that Rome was founded in 754 BC by twin boys, Romulus and Remus, who were abandoned by their parents but suckled by a she-wolf. Archaeology has revealed that the city actually began life in the 9th or 8th century BC as a series of small farmsteads on a group of hills overlooking the River Tiber. Between the hills were marshy valleys where the local people buried their dead in cemeteries of cremations or inhumations. Early houses, such as the so-called "Hut of Romulus", preserved as a pattern of postholes on the Palatine, would probably have had walls of wattle and daub, and thatched roofs. This early settlement may well have flourished, situated as it was overlooking a convenient crossing point on the Tiber and astride the important salt route running inland from the river mouth.

The crucial development came in the later 7th century BC, when an Etruscan dynasty, the Tarquins, took control of Rome and began its transformation from village into city. The Forum valley was drained by the canalization of the Cloaca Maxima, and was converted into a public square with a gravel paved surface. A wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, was thrown across the Tiber, and an Etruscan-style temple to Jupiter Capitolinus built on the Capitol. There may also have been an 'agger, or city wall, with a defensive ditch beyond it, though the oldest defence which survives today (the so-called Servian Wall) dates only from the 4th century BC .

Roman historians maintained that the Romans evicted their last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, in 510 BC, and became a republic governed by a pair of annually elected magistrates, the consuls. It was a momentous step, the first in a sequence which was to take Rome in less than five centuries from small Italian town to mistress of the Mediterranean.

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The Unification of ltaly

The Roman conquest of Italy was slow and hardfought, but by the middle of the 3rd century BC, they were masters of the peninsula.

From the early days of the Republic, Rome behaved as an expansionist power, fighting frequent wars to gain new territory and safeguard its security. The first major gain was the capture of Veii, the southernmost of the Etruscan cities, in 396 BC. Any elation was shortlived, however, as six years later a Celtic raiding party descended from northern Italy, defeated the Romans at the River Allia and captured and sacked Rome itself. This proved merely a temporary setback, and during the rest of the 4th century BC the Romans steadily expanded their politica! and military influence through central Italy. They did this by an astute mixture of warfare and diplomacy, fighting only where necessary. They also adopted a policy of founding Roman colonies at strategic places to consolidate their hold on newly conquered territory.

The Romans gained mastery of Latium in the Latin war of 340-38 BC, and then defeated their erstwhile allies the Samnites in the Second and Third Samnite Wars of 327-304 and 298-90 BC. This extended their power east to the Adriatic and southwards to the Bay of Naples. Their next major war was against a foreign invader, Pyrrhus, King of Epirus in northwest Greece. ln 280 he landed in southern ltaly with an army of 25,000 men and 20 elephants, the first the Romans had encountered. Despite severa! victories, Pyrrhus was unable to make significant headway and withdrew back to Epirus five years !ater. This left the Romans free to consolidate their hold on southern Italy, and cast their eyes across the straits to Sicily where, in 264, they came into direct conflict with the Carthaginians.

By Chris Scare in "The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Rome", Penguin Books, UK, 1995, excerpts pp. 12-23. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.