Читать книгу A Social and Cultural History of Republican Rome - Группа авторов - Страница 27

Following the Gallic sack, the Romans picked up right where they left off, bringing Italy south of the Po River under their control by the early third century BCE. Two key milestones in the conquest of Italy are worth noting.

In 338 BCE, Rome imposed a settlement on a group of former allies in central Italy who had broken treaty obligations with Rome and banded together to fight the growing power in their midst. In the aftermath of the Latin Revolt, as it is known, different cities received different treatments: some were destroyed or depopulated, some were given Roman citizenship, and some were given civitas sine suffragio, “citizenship without the right to vote.” As citizens, these people had access to the Roman legal system, which enabled them to marry and trade with Roman citizens, but they were not allowed to vote in Rome. This structure became the blueprint for future conquests, with two important consequences: (1) each community, and especially the elites within them, was given incentives for cooperating with Rome, in the hopes that they might earn better privileges in the future and therefore (2) Rome thus did not have to garrison or provide bureaucratic oversight, but left the control of the local population to local elites. These communities were tied directly to Rome with obligations to provide manpower in times of war, and this continual supply of manpower served as one of the strengths of the Roman army through the subsequent years of expansion.

The second milestone came as a result of the first war that Rome fought against an overseas foe. In 280 BCE, King Pyrrhus of Epirus (western Greece), invaded Italy and defeated the Romans in several battles, though in one battle he lost so many soldiers that he remarked: “if we are victorious again, we shall be utterly ruined” (the origin of the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”). Eventually the Romans did defeat Pyrrhus, which gave them control of southern Italy and completed their conquest of the peninsula of Italy. The conquest of southern Italy is significant because the area had previously been settled by colonists from Greece, so many that it was known as Magna Graecia (“Great Greece”) (Figure 2.3). While elements of Greek culture can be found in Rome as far back as c. 500 BCE, this sequence of battles increased the amount of exchange with Greek culture, and also began to acquaint the Romans with the Greek kingdoms that ruled the eastern Mediterranean following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.

Figure 2.3 Map of southern Italy, including Magna Graecia and Sicily.