So the abduction is important – but so is the peacemaking ability of the women. The men put down their weapons and made peace, Romulus agreeing to share his kingship of Rome with the Sabine leader, Titus Tatius. As the two sides lined up to fight the Sabine women intervened between them pleading for peace. This led to war but then to a notable event. Eventually he invited a group from a local tribe, the Sabines to a feast and, at an arranged signal, young Roman men started carrying the marriageable away. He approached local tribes for brides but was turned down. Plenty of young men were flocking to his new settlement, but Romulus needed women to breed. Timeline 8th century BCħ53 BC: The legendary founding date of Rome.ħ50?: Rape of the Sabine women. I can see why, for practical and editorial reasons she’s taken the latter route but still, Rome without the wars – numerous and confusing though they are – is a bit like Hamlet without the prince. Or doing what Beard does, which is write a kind of thematic social and political history of Rome (with lots of archaeology thrown in) which only dips into the wars briefly, fleetingly, when they help you to demonstrate a particular point about the evolution of Roman society and politics. Compared to the late republic and imperial era when successful generals held power, and carried out military strategy for years, this makes the wars of the Republic even more complicated to record and remember.Īs a historian I can see that you face a choice between going into each war in enough detail to make it strategically and militarily understandable – in which case you will have written an incredibly detailed and very long military history of Rome. This is one reason why, as a disapproving feminist, her account of the Republic is so patchy and episodic given that the Republic’s history is, on one level, a long list of wars and battles and setbacks and conquests.Īnother reason is that the men in charge in Rome changed on an annual basis as new consuls were elected and held power for just one year. I had to look up the detail of all of them online.Īgain and again it struck me as odd that Mary Beard has made it her life’s work to study a society whose values and history, whose militarism, violence, aggression, patriarchal sexism and toxic masculinity she is so obviously out of sympathy with. But she gives very superficial, if any, explanations of most of the wars with hardly anything about strategies and campaigns, and nothing at all about specific battles, even the most famous (Cannae, Carrhae, Pharsalus, Actium). The early legendary material is well covered in Mary Beard’s book and the main wars are at least mentioned. What this list – far from complete and omitting many battles – indicates is the unremittingly violent, warlike environment Rome inhabited, and the relentlessness of its armies and leaders who, no matter how many times they lost battles – and they lost a lot more than you’d expect – always found new men and new resources and came back harder. The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year…( SPQR, pages 176 to 177) …the Roman tradition war as the structuring principle of history… Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life and Roman writers organised the history of this period…around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day. And when, by about 80 BC, they’d run out of people to conquer, they started fighting each other. This is a timeline of the Roman Republic, cobbled together from various sources with some details added from Mary Beard’s history of Rome, SPQR.Īs you can see, it consists almost entirely of wars because Rome was one of the most aggressive and relentlessly militaristic states in the ancient world, which is the basic reason for its eventual world domination.
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