![]() 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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