fpb | The Roman Republic - an answer to dreamer_marie and bufo

bufo_viridis' suggestion that the Roman Republic must be seen as more aggressive than the Empire was not exactly what I meant either. So let me give you an overview of how I see early Roman history up to and including the Second Punic War; this, apart from anything else, will help to clear my own head with respect to subjects in which I am doing research, and provide a basis for future writings.

The first thing we have to remember is Mommsen's important discovery that practically everything that passes, on Roman testimony, for Roman history, until the fourth century, was in effect fabricated by Roman, probably patrician, writers, between 390BC and 275BC. Such is the fascination that Roman pseudo-history exerts on historians, that neither Mommsen himself, nor anyone - or almost anyone - since, has really drawn all the necessary conclusions from this shattering revelation; and to this day, we have historians seriously discussing the Etruscan and - even worse - Sabine presence in early monarchic Rome, although Dumezil has long since shown that the whole story of Etruscans and Sabines is not only a legend but a myth. All these things must, as a matter of sound method, be dumped; as must all the stirring stories of conflict between patricians and plebeians - all conveniently located before 275BC - and even, after Carandini's earth-shaking archaeological discoveries of the last twenty years, the famous story of the destructive Gaulish siege of 387BC.

Let us, instead, consider Italy as a whole. Rome, after all, only becomes important in Mediterranean and Western history when she becomes important in Italy. Now, Italy before Rome was not a unit. Several distinct peoples and cultures had their own traditional territories within it. It is impossible to arrive by way of historical research to a situation of balance and relative peace between these various groups, but, in order to underline what happened next, I think we might as well conceive an imaginary Italy, in 600BC or so, in which all these peoples have their definite territories and interfere minimally with each other. The point of this is to underline the way in which the activities of several tribes and states not only broke any such balance, but actually concerned the whole peninsula, even before there was anything like an Italian unit.

Going from north to south, we find that already by the archaic age, Celts were settled in the mountains of northern Italy, and perhaps further south. In the north-east there was the solid and distinct tribal group of the Veneti, related by language to Celts and East Italics (Latins). In various areas in the north-west, Ligurian aboriginals resisted the advance of Celts and Etruscans. The Etruscans had their native country between the Appennines and the Tiber river - much broader than modern Tuscany - and were growing hugely rich from trade with the Greeks, who were greedy for the metals that were then abundant in their country, and from whom they learned to maximize their military power by living in walled and defended cities. (Most mines are long since exhausted, but iron is still dug to this day in the Isle of Elba, and mercury in Mount Amiata.) South and West of the Etruscans, the people who entered history as the Latins extended from the fords of the Tiber at Rome to the fertile plains of Campania; their traditional royal centre was in the fortress of Fregellae, but their tribal culture was suffering a steady change because of the growth of proper towns at both ends of their territory, on the border with Etruria - where Rome had been established as a fortress to guard the fords - and in the Campanian plains, where Greek settlements grew both in power and influence. South of the Latins were the Italians proper, from whose name the Greeks eventually named the whole peninsula, settled in the modern regions of southern Campania, Basilicata and Calabria (the toe of Italy); and part of Sicily was inhabited by people of Italian stock called the Sicels. Latins, Italians and Sicels belonged to one language group called the East Italics. For cultural reasons, the East Italics welcomed the first Greek settlers, and the map shows that Greek settlements are most thick and important in East Italic territories, but nonexistent among the Etrurians (in spite of the fact that trade with Etruria was their most important goal) and very scarce among the Apulians, a highly individual group of tribes that lived east of the Italians in modern Puglia. In spite of the fact that Puglia (the spurs and heel of Italy) was the closest to Greece, the Greeks always had trouble settling there, and their strongest colony in the area, Tarentum, was under severe threat from beginning to end. This shows the importance of cultural factors in the history of the territory. North and east of Apuli and East Italics was another linguistic group, the West Italics, consisting of three large units: the Picentes in modern Marche, the Umbri and Volsci in the mountains east of Etruria, and the Samnites/Sabines (the two names are different renderings of their own ethnic name Safinim), in the dense mountains of the central and southern Italy, mostly corresponding to modern Abruzzo and Molise, but larger.

Now, whatever the prehistory of these territories may have been, I feel certain that we enter into recorded or credible history with a situation where the rise of political and military activities that embrace the whole peninsula and the surrounding areas place the very existence of the previous units into doubt. The Etruscans may have been the first to embark upon a conquering policy that embraced whole peoples; at any rate, betwen 750 and 480BC they conquered most of the Po Valley - the plains of northern Italy - and, as far as I can see, the whole Latin territory, including Rome, and down to Campania, where their power put the Greek cities there at severe risk. The Greeks reacted, and, in the course of a major war, drove the Etruscans out of the whole Latin territory. It seems certain that, as an obscure side result of this great victory, Rome was freed from Etruscan domination and became a republic on the Greek model.

This unsettlement worked in favour of the mountain tribes. In an undocumented episode, the Volsci broke out of their fastnesses and invaded the central areas of Latium, placing their head town in the harbour of Antium - which archaic Greek sources make one of the three or four Latin head cities - and reducing the Latins to two slivers of territory, Latium Vetus from Rome to the surrounding hills, and Campania between Naples and Capua. Later, but more forcefully, the Safinim smashed their way into Latium, where the Romans met them and eventually defeated them, annexating their whole territory to the Roman State in 291BC; into Campania, where Oscan (Samnite) leaderships were soon in charge of all the Latin and Greek cities; and into the territory of the ancient Italians, who vanish from history in the fourth and third century BC, to be replaced by Oscan-speaking Lucanians and Bruttii. At the same time, the Celts, having overrun the Etruscan cities in the Po Valley, started raiding at will throughout the peninsula.

But it was not only barbarians from the hills and the tribal north that are developing large ambitions. After all, the earliest sign of unsettlement I can see is the rise of urban civilization at both ends of the Latin territory, hollowing out the middle both culturally and politically. And in the middle of all this chaos, one Greek city rises to imperial power itself. Syracuse in Sicily, especially under the villainous but brilliant Dionysios I, develops an imperialist policy clearly intended to subdue or influence all the seas east of Carthage and the whole Italian peninsula. Syracusan fleets loot and establish outposts as far as Etruria and in the whole Adriatic Sea; indeed, if power had remained stable in Syracuse under Dionysios' son Dionysios II, whose incompetence led to civil war, there is no reason why Italy should not have been unified by Syracuse rather than Rome. But Syracuse fell apart, and by the time it had reconstructed its power, the strategic situation had changed.

It is in this period of strategic unsettlement that Rome becomes a player across the peninsula. Whatever we imagine the prehistory of Italy to have been like, it is clear that by the fifth century the old ethnic boundaries between Etruscans and Latins, Latins and Italians, Italians, and Apulians, Apulians and Samnites, were outdated. Acts of aggression and conquest were now able to involve the whole peninsula from sea to sea, so that one Greek city such as Syracuse could reach with its power as far as Venetia, and tribal confederacies such as the Samnites were able to overcome and assimilate the whole of other areas such as the early Italians. Crisis piles up on crisis, war joins with war, until, in one enormous whirl of weapons reaching from the Greek colony of Tarentum to the city states of Etruria and the Gaulish tribes of the north, what is improperly called the Third Samnite War forces the whole peninsula into unity under one great power. This was a development that had become increasingly likely for two centuries, and by the end, I would say, the only issue would be whether the peninsula would be unified by the Samnite confederation, by Syracuse, or by Rome.

At this point, Rome and Carthage, which had been allies for centuries - clearly against Etruscan and Greek power, and possibly even against Volscan piracy from Antium - inevitably fall out. Just because there is no such thing as a well-defined entity called "Italy" before the Romans unify the whole peninsula, so too there is no way to limit the effects of the gigantic shift in power in the peninsula to it. Roman wars against Celts and Ligurians involve them in strategic issues across the Alps; their conquest of the maritime Greek cities inevitably involve the anger and jealousy of both Syracuse and Carthage, which had both had major interests in these areas.

And to answer

bufo_viridis' question: no, I do not think Carthage ever stood a chance. The Greeks had managed to keep Carthage out, not only of Italy, but even of most of Sicily, for centuries; so that the home resources on which the great trading city could count were those, in practise, of modern Tunisia. The acquisition of such an enormous inland territory by a single city state - compare Tunisia to the home territories of Athens or Syracuse, the two largest Greek city states - was already quite a remarkable achievement, and showed the effect of centuries of Carthaginian power; but to achieve anything like the territorial solidity and resources controlled by Rome after the Third Samnite War, the Carthaginians ought at the very least to have unified North Africa, and the formidable kingdom of Numidia stood between them and any such hope - indeed, one suspects, it may well have arisen exactly as a native reaction to Carthaginian growth. So, in effect, the resources that Carthage had to offer to the first two Punic wars were those of Tunisia, plus a scatter of colonies from Sicily to Spain. (Let us forget the third, which was no more than an appalling Roman crime at a time when Rome, for some reason, hit depths of barbarity never reached before or since - the destruction of Corinth took place at the same time.) Comparison with the two recent World Wars will show that a widespread colonial empire is more a burden than a support to any country in war; Britain had to divert scarce resources to defend its colonies from Germany and (in WWII) from Japan, which weakened rather than reinforced her. And I would add that in the Second Punic War, the huge colony built as a private enterprise by the Barce family in Spain served more as a deceptive hope to Hannibal, making him feel that he now had the resources to take on Rome, than as a genuine asset. From beginning to end, Carthage was having to hold on to its colonial conquests in the face of native resistance and Roman encroachment, which greatly limited their ability to support Hannibal's war effort, and time and again Hannibal was unable to exploit great victories and advantageous positions because the Roman control of Italy. And he could not shake Roman power in the peninsula, because, even given the way that Romans had taken control of it, nevertheless they were, from Etruria to Magna Graecia, part of its weave, connected with other peninsular peoples and tribes, able to speak Etruscan, Greek and Oscan, whereas he, Hannibal, remained from beginning to end an alien. If anything ever was inevitable, it was the defeat of Carthage by Rome; and it was just the Carthaginian effort to raise more and more powers against their overwhelming enemies, colonizing Spain, involving Gaul, making allies in Greece and Asia Minor, that meant that at the end of the wars, Rome - like Russia in 1945 - had not only survived the Punic aggression, but had become the major power in areas from Spain to Asia where only half a century earlier it had not occurred to her to be involved.