Tag: Roman Empire

Prehistoric Europe 00003. Oval hut, Terra Amata (Nice), France, c. 400,000 BC. 00006. Caves, Lascaux, France, c. 15,000-13,000 BC. 00006a. Swimming deer (at Musée d'Aquitaine, France), photo 1990, K. Cohen, San Jose State U. 00010. Menhirs, Carnac, Brittany, France, c. 4250-3750 BC. 00010a. Alignmen ...

Though whilst Rome was busied with its Macedon and Syrian adventures in the east, it neither rested in the west. Within a decade after her victory in the Second Punic War, Rome had at last gained dominance over the quarrelsome Gauls in valley of the river Po and their equally hostile neighbours, the...

The Battle of Zama in the summer of 202 BC marked the end of the power of the great Hannibal Barca.With its greatest son, also Carthage should be at a virtual end. True, it should limp on for some time, but with its defeat at the end of the Second Punic War it no longer was a significant power.Zama ...

In the same year as Scipio's election to the consulship (134 BC), his colleague, Fulvius Flacchus, was called to deal with a terrifying rebellion of the slave population in Sicily. A huge slave population had been built up all across Italy as a direct result of Rome's vast military successes of the ...

While Macedon and Carthage were being defeated for good, the Spanish tribes remained stubbornly defiant. Hash blows were dealt them by the consuls Lucullus and Galba in 151 and 150 BC and yet they could not be broken. In the south the Lusitanians found a brilliant leader in Viriathus, who in 142 BC...

...

After the violent death of Tiberius Gracchus, the Gracchus family wasn't finished yet.Gaius Gracchus, a flamboyant and powerful public speaker, was to be a far more formidable political force than his brother. The legacy of Tiberius Gracchus, the agrarian law, was being applied in a manner which cre...

If Rome had suffered heavily in the war, Carthage was almost ruined. and the peace brought worse disasters still. First, the vast mercenary forces which had been levied, but not yet transported to Sicily, mutinied for not having been paid. And for three years the Carthaginians carried their lives in...

After her defeat of Pyrrhus Rome was recognized as a major power in the Mediterranean, nothing makes this clearer than the opening of a permanent embassy of amity by the Macedonian king of Egypt in Rome in 273 BC. In 272 BC, the year of Pyrrhus'' death, the powerful Greek city of Tarentum in the so...

Slaves were trained as gladiators, and in 73 BC such a slave, a Thracian named Spartacus, broke out of a gladiator training camp at Capua and took refuge in the hills. The number of his band swelled rapidly and he kept his men well in hand and under strict discipline and routed two commanders who we...

...

Meanwhile the party in Rome most hostile toward him was straining itself to the utmost to effect his ruin between the termination of his present appointment and his entry into a new post. Caesar would be secure from attack if he passed straight from his position of proconsul of Gaul and Illyricum i...