The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC

In 146 BC the armies of Rome destroyed Carthage and emerged as the decisive victors of the Third Punic War. The Carthaginian population was sold and its territory became the Roman province of Africa. In the same year and on the other side of the Mediterranean Roman troops sacked Corinth, the final blow in the defeat of the Achaean conspiracy: thereafter Greece was effectively administered by Rome. Rome was now supreme in Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, Sicily, and North Africa, and its power and influence were advancing in all directions. However, not all was well. The unchecked seizure of huge tracts of land in Italy and its farming by vast numbers of newly imported slaves allowed an elite of usually absentee landlords to amass enormous and conspicuous fortunes. Insecurity and resentment fed the gulf between rich and poor in Rome and erupted in a series of violent upheavals in the politics and institutions of the Republic. These were exacerbated by slave revolts and invasions from the east. The instigation of Rome's first professional army to resolve the crises soon made its generals - Sulla, then Pompey, then Caesar - all too powerful. Meanwhile Greek ideas and culture had invaded Rome, contributing to the subversion of the Roman ideal of the free citizen, farmer of his own land, duty-bound to fight in its defence. Catherine Steel tells history of this crucial and turbulent century, focussing on the issues of freedom, honour, power, greed and ambition, and the cherished but abused institutions of the Republic which were central to events then and which have preoccupied historians ever since.

Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001); Reading Cicero (London: Duckworth, 2005) and numerous articles and book chapters on Cicero, Roman oratory and Roman history. She is currently leading a five-year project funded by the European Research Council to edit the fragments of the Republican Roman orators.

Section I:146-91 BC; 1. The crises of the later second century BC; 1.1 The Wars in Spain; 1.2 The tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus; 1.3 Rome and the Eastern Mediterranean, 146-122; 1.4 The tribunates of Gaius Gracchus; 1.5 Foreign and domestic politics at the end of the second century BC; 1.6 The outbreak of the Social War; 2. Domestic politics: violence and its accommodation; 2.1 Elite competition; 2.2 Issues and ideology; 3. Imperial power: failure and control; 3.1 The parameters of Roman foreign policy; 3.2 War and imperial expansion; 3.3 The administration of peace; 3.4 Rome and the rest of Italy; Section II: 91-70 BC; 4. Social War, Civil War and the imposition of a new order; 4.1 The Social War; 4.2 Losing the peace: the transition to civil war; 4.3 Domestic politics and foreign affairs in the 80s BC; 4.4 The Sullan res publica; 4.5 The consulship of Pompeius and Crassus: a fresh start?; 5. The limits of autocracy; 5.1 Power and armed force; 5.2 Experiments in autocracy; 5.3 The Sullan res publica; 5.4 Rome, Italy and the Mediterranean; 5.5 Causes of change; Section III: 70-44 BC; 6. The end of the Republic, 70-44 BC; 6.1 The continuing problem of Mithridates; 6.2 Pompeius' campaigns 67-62 BC; 6.3 Italian crises; 6.4 Factionalism, the people, and the collapse of order; 6.5 Foreign Policy in the 50s; 6.6 The last years of the Republic; 6.7 The Civil War; 7. Imperial expansion: novelty and success; 7.1 Patterns of expansion; 7.2 Structures and methods of imperial conquest and government; 8. Elite competition, popular discontent and the failure of collective government; 8.1 Political culture at the end of the Republic; 8.2 The career of Pompeius; 8.3 Popular arbitration; 8.4 The implications of Caesar's dictatorship.