Tag: Rome

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On the Italian mainland the Syracusan ascendancy melted away on the death of Dionysius. The great tyrant had made use of the Lucanians and other Italians to bring the Greek colonies under his sway. When he died the Italians combined and formed the Bruttian League against the divided Greeks, pressing...

In 74 BC Marcus Antonius, father of the famous Mark Antony, had been given special powers to suppress the large-scale piracy in the Mediterranean. But his attempts had ended in dismal failure. After Antonius' death, the consul Quintus Metellus was set upon the same task in 69 BC. Matters indeed did ...

The Latin words res publica which mean 'commonwealth' or 'state' is the source of today's term 'republic'.Rome was never a democracy as we would understand it today, nor as the Greeks understood it. For Roman society and the power within it was firmly divided by class.Most obviously, there was a div...

Tiberius and his brother Gaius Gracchus were to be two men who should become famous, if not infamous, for their struggle for the lower classes of Rome.They themselves though originated from Rome's very elite. Their father was a consul and military commander and their mother was from the distinguishe...

The Carthaginians had not lost everything, though they had been driven out of waters where they had collided with Greeks and increasingly with Italian traders also. There were two paths still open to them. their original exploitation of Africa, both the mountainous north and the oases and caravan r...

by Plutarch Marcus Crassus, whose father had borne the office of a censor, andreceived the honor of a triumph, was educated in a little housetogether with his two brothers, who both married in their parents'lifetime; they kept but one table amongst them; all which,perhaps, was not the least reason o ...

Betting has long been part of human civilization, tracing lower back to historic cultures and texts, consisting of the Bible. While the cutting-edge idea of having a bet, as represented by means of platforms like 20 bet, has developed considerably, its roots may be located in some of the earliest kn...

Plutarch's Lives: Caius Gracchus Caius Gracchus, at first, either for fear of his brother's enemies,or designing to render them more odious to the people, absentedhimself from the public assemblies, and lived quietly in his ownhouse, as if he were not only reduced for the present to liveunambitiousl...

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...

The Second Samnite War lasted twenty years and was not a defensive venture for Rome. At first the Roman arms were so successful that in 321 BC the Samnites sued for peace. But the terms offered were so stringent that they were rejected and the war went on. In the same year the two consuls, leading a...

In 74 BC king Nicomedes of Bithynia died without heirs. Following the example of Attalus of Pergamum he left his kingdom to the Roman people. But with Sulla dead, king Mithridates of Pontus clearly felt his most fearsome enemy had vanished from the scene and revived his dreams of creating his own em...