A History of the Roman World

753 to 146 BC

H. H. Scullard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138141926
• eBook ISBN: 9781136246357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

With a new foreword by Tim Cornell

'Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means and under what kind of polity almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and bought under the dominion of a single city of Rome?' – Polybius, Greek Historian

The city of Rome created the foundations of an empire that would come to challenge and conquer the great civilizations of Europe and the Near East. H.H. Scullard's definitive and highly acclaimed study reveals the peculiar genius of the Roman people, their predilection for law and order and their powers of organization and administration, all of which created a confederation the like of which the Greek World had never seen.

He explores the political, military, economic and social history of this incredible empire, showing how the Romans realized an ecumenical ideal and embraced Western Civilization within one political system. Celebrated for its political and military victories as well as its incredible feats of engineering, literature and art. Scullard charts the foundation of Rome, the establishment of the Republic, and its spectacular rise until the fall of Carthage. Scullard not only explores the accomplishments of the empire but vividly delves into the corruptive foreign influences which began to undermine the moral qualities of Rome, when lust for power superseded the desire for law and order.

A superb overview of this charged historical epoch, A History of the Roman World takes us inside the pivotal events and struggles which have heavily influenced modern western civilizations.

Part I
ROME AND ITALY

I
THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLES

1. THE LAND¹

The history of a people is determined in the long run by their moral and intellectual qualities, by their character and initiative, but geographical environment has a profound influence upon racial characteristics. History is governed, if not determined, by geography, and the physical formation of a country lies at the root of the history of its early settlement. As from before the dawn of history until the Norman Conquest the flat south and east coastlines of England tempted wave after wave of sea-going adventurers to fling themselves on the rich lowlands and to drive the older inhabitants ever further into the mountains of the north and west, so the early history of Italy is essentially that of ‘Italy and her invaders’: Illyrians from across the Adriatic claimed a foothold on her eastern shores, Greek colonists established thriving settlements around her southern and south-western coasts, her north-western seaboard fell to Etruscans who were probably invaders from the eastern Mediterranean, and waves of other peoples surmounted the icebound barrier of the Alps and poured down into the rich plains of Lombardy, forcing the dwellers there ever further southwards down into the peninsula.

The development of any nation is conditioned by one or both of two factors: its land and its access to the sea. It was Rome’s achievement to build up a mighty empire which rested on both land and sea power, but it was from Mother Earth that she received her early nourishment and training. And the rigour of that training was due not a little to the mountainous character of the land. The great northern plain between the Alps and Apennines was long regarded as part of Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina) and was not incorporated into the administrative system of Italy until the end of the Roman Republic. It is cut off from peninsular Italy by the barrier of the Apennines, which here run almost east and west to meet the western Alps. Turning southwards the Apennines then run down the length of Italy; in fact, they virtually are Italy, for at least three-quarters of the land is hill country. These mountains are not very inhospitable, but naturally they retarded the growth of unity among their inhabitants. In the northern sector they form a narrow and almost continuous chain, but after reaching the Adriatic they are broken up into a series of parallel ridges of rugged limestone, divided by narrow gorges and towering in places to nearly 10,000 feet. The southern highlands are less steep, and gradually marl and limestone give place to the granite of the wild forest-clad promontory of Bruttium. The main central chain lies nearer to the Adriatic coast than to the western shore; it approaches the sea so closely that in places there is scarcely room for a road until it expands into the windswept moorland plateau of Apulia. Apart from the cornland of the Aufidus valley the Adriatic coast has little fertile land and few harbours; it faces the wild shores of Dalmatia and Illyria, and is accessible by land only from the northern non-Italian plain of the Po: add to this, that the north and east winds render it draughty and cold, and it will be seen that Nature planned that Italy should turn her back on the eastern coast and face westwards. There the aspect is different. South of the irregular mountains of Etruria, which are marked off by the Arno and Tiber, the central highlands approach the western coast in the Volscian hills, but north and south they leave room for the two plains of Latium and Campania. Here the genial climate and the fertile land, enriched by volcanic ash, watered by generous streams, and fanned by the moist southwest winds, attracted many invaders. And it was in the Latin plain, to be described below (p. 33), in the centre of Italy that one city developed the sense of unity which created a nation.

Since the mountains dominate the land, and few parts of Italy lie more than seventy miles from the coast which stretches for two thousand miles, it might well be thought that the inhabitants would have developed into a seafaring people who aspired to rule the waves. But Italy lacked what Britain possessed: harbours and rivers to receive what the sea might bring. On the west coast the sea was shallow, and flat-bottomed vessels could be beached with ease, but there were few harbours. Tarentum and those in the bay of Naples were early seized by the Greeks. Many of the rivers were mountain torrents which in winter rushed headlong to the sea and in summer left their beds stony and dry. The larger rivers swept down such masses of silt that a port at their mouths would need constant attention: the Tiber, for instance, kept many an emperor employed in planning fresh harbour and dredging works at Ostia, the port of Rome. Such rivers did not favour shipping; Virgil tells how Father Tiber himself had to stay his course before Aeneas’ ship could sail up to the site of Rome. It was laborious to tow barges upstream and no help was received from tidal estuaries, for the Mediterranean is virtually tideless. Thus the attractions of foreign trade were less than those of the soil and the peoples of Italy remained for many centuries essentially agricultural and continental.

But though the nature of the coast and the fertility of the plains might turn the thoughts of the inhabitants landwards, they were soon to find that they were part of a larger world. The Mediterranean united as well as sundered. Its climate, common to the lands whose shores it washed, helped to produce a feeling of unity in social and political life. The trader from Tyre doubtless felt much more at home in the rich kingdom of Tartessus in Spain than when sailing through the mists and gales of the Atlantic to the Tin Islands of the north and ‘perfidious Albion’. In this Mediterranean world Italy occupied the central position. The Alps formed a protective shield when Rome began to look around the Mediterranean, since they were comparatively easy to defend; at the same time they were a sufficient barrier to force Italy to make contact with the Mediterranean rather than with northern Europe. Yet had they been an impassable barrier Italy would have fared ill, as only by attracting peoples and trade over the Alpine passes did she equip herself to become the peer, and later the ruler, of the other Mediterranean peoples. As she faced west and lay back-to-back with Greece, it was with Sicily, Carthage, and Spain that she first came into contact. When once she had been united by Rome, her very safety depended on controlling Sicily at her toe. This involved conflict with Carthage who dominated the western Mediterranean. With Carthage conquered, Italy cut the Mediterranean in half; the west at once fell into her hands and the east soon followed. It was largely to her dominant central position that she owed this rise to power, after which she could call the Mediterranean mare nostrum.

Nature had prepared the stage, but it was the peculiar genius of the Roman people that enabled Italy to play the role of a world power.

2. EARLY MAN²

Throughout the dim ages when early man was painfully struggling up the first steps of civilized life, the centre of interest in Europe constantly fluctuated with the appearance of new peoples and with man’s discovery of new metals or of fresh skill in handling them, until there gradually evolved two contrasting civilizations of the western and eastern Mediterranean. As the ice of the last great glacial period advanced, and mammoth and cave-bear wrested the lordship of creation from elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus, so the primitive hunters of the Old Stone Age appeared upon the stage which nature was setting for them in western Europe. But later a more revolutionary change came about. Palaeolithic man had taken the world much as he found it, but with climatic changes there appeared in the west new peoples who tried to alter the world to suit their needs. These newcomers of the Neolithic Age began to cultivate the earth, and to domesticate animals; they invented the sickle, millstone and hammer-axe, and they discovered the art of making pottery, hand-made with impressed decoration. These early farming communities continued for centuries. Man’s next great stride forward was when he discovered that by heating certain stones he obtained a substance which he could model or mould into a more efficient tool than stone. He thus initiated the Copper or Chalcolithic Age, which in turn was gradually merged into the Bronze Age when he found out that an admixture of tin with copper produced in bronze much harder and more serviceable tools. Metallurgy flourished much earlier in the east than in the west, and culminated there in the splendid Bronze Age civilization of Crete and the eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile the west had witnessed some remarkable developments. During the fourth millennium BC, if not earlier, Neolithic peoples had spread westwards from Anatolia to the Danube basin and to the lands along the northern shores of the Mediterranean as far as the Iberian peninsula. During the second half of this millennium skills and ideas from the more advanced civilizations of the Near East were radiating ever westwards, diffused by traders, settlers and individuals. The use of larger megalithic graves spread to Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and France, and thence to Brittany and England. Somewhat later in some of these graves in the west bell-shaped vases have been found. These were made by the so-called Bell Beaker folk, a warlike brachycephalic people who helped to spread metal implements (copper not bronze) and to open up trade routes in Europe. They comprised two main groups, one in central Europe, the other (by the late third millennium BC) in the Iberian peninsula, whose mineral wealth had already attracted prospectors and settlers from the Aegean world. Many authorities believe the peninsula to have been the original home of the Bell Beaker people. Around 2000 BC warriors from the Caspian area began to spread the use of the stone battle-axe in Europe (e.g. in Greece); they used the horse, and they decorated their pottery with horizontal cord-impressions; these Corded Ware people were probably speakers of an Indo-European tongue. They led the way to the full flowering of the European Bronze Age of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile another group of people in the middle Danube area, who also had contacts with the east, made extensive use of bronze, improved agricultural methods and cremated their dead, whose ashes they buried in urns in large cemeteries. This Urnfield culture spread widely north of the Alps from c. 1250 BC into the Rhineland, and eventually into southern France (before 700) and into part of Spain; it also affected Italy. At this time the east also was suffering great changes: the collapse of the Hittite empire in Asia Minor, the sack of Troy and the downfall of Mycenaean power in Greece, the attacks of the Peoples of the Sea on Egypt and the Philistine invasion of Palestine. The impulse for some of these upheavals may have stemmed ultimately from the movements of the Indo-European peoples of the Urnfield culture. The use of iron, which became common soon after 1000 BC, confirmed the superiority of the north, and the more westerly parts of Europe became a barbarian region, culturally less developed than the neighbouring classical civilization which, though having many ties with transalpine Europe, yet increasingly differed from it.

Thus the limelight, which reveals fascinating glimpses of man’s early progress, plays first on the lands of the western and eastern Mediterranean: Italy, the central peninsula, long remained obscure. Traces of the Palaeolithic Age (starting some 200,000 years ago) have been found in the cave-dwellings of Liguria, in the foothills of the Apennines, and in the neighbour-hood of Rome. Descendants of this age of hunters and food-gatherers may have survived, but they do not appear to have influenced the development of their successors in any significant way. The first important settlement in Italy was due to the appearance of men who practised the arts of polishing stone implements and making pottery (c. 5000 BC). These Neolithic folk were of Mediterranean stock and short in stature. They came from overseas and brought precious seed-corn with them. At first they may have lived in caves, but gradually many settled in villages. Some certainly came from across the Adriatic, since their remains are found in northern Apulia on the Tavoliere, a plain around Foggia. Here aerial photography first revealed extensive settlements: their villages were surrounded by ditches, within which huts were grouped in smaller compounds, each in turn enclosed within its own ditch; the largest village embraced an area of some 500 by 800 yards and included a hundred smaller compounds.

The inhabitants of such villages, although still given to hunting, were a pastoral people who cultivated their land and had domesticated the goat, sheep, pig, ox, ass and dog. They buried their dead in contracted positions. Their stone implements display a variety of styles, and they even obtained obsidian, a hard glass-like material, from the island of Lipari off the northern coast of Sicily. Their pottery, not yet the product of the potter’s wheel, was plain with simple impressed decoration, but it improved artistically with the passage of centuries. By inventing a needle with an eyelet they were able to sew clothes.

Although more settled than their nomadic predecessors, these Neolithic farmers might move on to other virgin areas if their population became too large or the soil around their villages became exhausted. Thus they spread out in southern and eastern Italy, while from about 3500 BC increasing desiccation of the Tavoliere led to expansion in the north and west, including a settlement at Sasso di Furbara north of Rome. Further north still, other groups had emerged from early Neolithic times, both in Liguria and in the northern Italian plain on either side of the eastern stretches of the Po. The latter group may have come partly from lands east of the Adriatic and partly from the south up the Italian coast of the Adriatic. Subsequently, external influences increased, deriving from the Neolithic cultures of western Europe in France, Spain and North Africa; thus the skills of spinning and weaving perhaps first reached Italy. A late Neolithic settlement at Lagozza di Besnate near Varese is typical of many villages built alongside the Italian Lakes of Maggiore and Garda, constructed on piles at the edges of the lakes (palafitte). At the same time others grew up by the swampy rivers of the Po valley.³

3. THE COPPER AND BRONZE AGES⁴

Under the impulse of ‘warrior’ immigrants from central Europe Italy began to move into the Copper Age. Three main centres are known. In the north a typical site is found at Remedello near Brescia, and later, as the Bronze Age advanced, a fairly uniform culture, called Polada from a village on Lake Garda, spread over much of north Italy (c. 1800–1450 BC). Further south remains from the Copper Age are found in two areas, at Rinaldone in Tuscany and at Gaudo near Paestum not far from Salerno. The older Neolithic population of course lived on in part, affected in varying degree by the fresh influences, while the new metal was too scarce to replace stone for most of the tools and implements of everyday life: flint daggers and stone battle-axes continued to be used, and supplies of obsidian were still needed from Lipari. In the north some Bell-Beaker influences are found (including burials as well as beakers), while in the Italian peninsula itself the discovery in 1971 of some beakers near Viterbo (at Fosso Conicchio) shows some degree of penetration.⁵ To what extent these central and more southerly settlements were affected by Aegean influences also remains somewhat uncertain.

With man’s ability to turn copper into bronze we reach Bronze Age Italy, which divides into two distinct cultural areas, one in the north, the other along the Apennines. In the north, as we have seen, a steady development occurred around the Lakes and in the Po valley from Neolithic times onwards, but in the middle or later Bronze Age a new phase developed with settlements which archaeologists have named Terremare from the ‘black earth’ (terra mara) which modern farmers have used as a fertilizer for its rich nitrogenous content. These settlements were thought to have been regular in type, with huts raised on wooden platforms on pile foundations and divided into regular blocks by parallel streets; outside lay cemeteries where the ashes of the dead were buried in urns, incineration being the distinctive mark of this culture. In fact the similarity of the supposed regular construction to the layout of later Roman camps and towns led some archaeologists to suppose that these people were both the architects of the Bronze Age in Italy and the ancestors of the Romans, some of them having migrated southwards through Etruria to the site of Ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF MAPS
• FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
• PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
• PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION
• PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I ROME AND ITALY
• PART II ROME AND CARTHAGE
• PART III ROME AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
• PART IV ROMAN LIFE AND CULTURE
• CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTES
• INDEX