The Roman Empire

Southern Italy Series

-----The Empire-----

With Carthage gone and Hannibal little more than a memory, the Romans now looked eastwards toward Greece and further conquests. By 146 BC Greece was theirs and armies were freed up for campaigns across the Mediterranean. Then in 105 BC Roman General Gaius began making major reforms in the Roman Army to counter the Germanic invasions by the Cimbri and the Teutons [link] . Henceforth the Roman Army would no longer have land ownership requirements. This change made the army a political force to be reckoned with, its fate was now tied to that of the growing mob of landless, poor citizens in Rome.

Things came to a head in 88 BC when Gaius Marius and Lucius Sulla clashed in Rome’s first civil war [link] . As luck would have it Marius died in 87 BC. After defeating Pontus, Sulla returned to Rome in 82 BC and became Dictator for a year. But afterwards he stepped down and became a Consul, serving two terms before retiring to his villa near Capua. The Republic was restored.

But not for long, in 49 BC General Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and marched on Rome initiating another civil war [link] . His rival Pompey Magnus was defeated the next year [link] and Caesar would subsequently be proclaimed Dictator for life. During his brief reign he passed many reforms [link] before he was assassinated on March 15th 44 BC.

There now followed a series of civil wars, first against the assassins and then between the victors themselves for power. The war reached its climax at the Battle of Actium [link] where Marc Antony Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian, the nephew of Julius Caesar. In 27 BC Octavian became Augustus Caesar and took the title of Princeps (First Citizen), thus initiating the Roman Empire. The Empire continued to expand over the century, reaching its greatest extent under the Emperor Trajan in 115 AD.

But although the Empire was under Roman control and most of the conquered peoples were assimilating to Roman ways of life, certain cultural aspects remained. Though Syracuse had been within the Republic and later the Empire for several centuries, its people still continued to speak Greek more often than Latin. And this fact was true not only in Sicily, but all also across the eastern Mediterranean where Alexander the Great had conquered and spread Greek language and culture. These cultural institutions were reinforced by the Greek successor empires [link] of Ptolemy, Cassander, Lysimachus, Antigonus, and Seleucus. By contrast the western Mediterranean had never been united in any tongue save Latin. But the Latin-Greek language divide was not a major issue because Roman culture was partially Greek anyway (to the extent that historians refer to it as Greco-Roman [link] ) and the center of the Empire was safely in Rome where it had always been.

Southern Italy Series

500 BC [link] Origins
264 BC [link] The Punic Wars
115 AD The Roman Empire
405 [link] East and West
526 [link] Collapse of the West
565 [link] Reconquest
572 [link] Lombard Invasion
751 [link] Lombard Italy
814 [link] Charlemagne's Italy
1000 [link] Italy and the Holy Roman Empire
1095 [link] The Norman Conquest
1154 [link] The Kingdom of Sicily
1250 [link] Hohenstaufen Italy
1280 [link] Anjou Sicily
1300 [link] War of the Vespers
1400 [link] Black Death
1492 [link] Renaissance Italy
1559 [link] Italian Wars
1715 [link] Habsburg Italy
1780 [link] Bourbon Italy
1799 [link] Revolutionary Italy
1812 [link] Napoleonic Italy
1860 [link] United Italy

2/19/12 EDIT:
map base source [link]
map base created by Citypeek [link]