>>>>Over the last several lessons we've been exploring the rise of Rome. What we can call
the Roman miracle, the fact that this small town located on the hills next to the Tiber
River inland in Central Italy would come first to dominate the Italian peninsula and eventually
build an empire across the Mediterranean world, an empire the likes of which the world had
never before seen. The foundation of Rome is, at least in tradition, ascribed to the
year 753 BC, and the Romans lived under kings until 509 when they overthrew the last of
their seven kings and established the Republic. This period, the republican period of Rome,
was one of the most fertile periods in the history of constitutions. It produced a system
of mixed government that we'll continue to explore. Now we turn to the period that we
call the late Republic, the last two centuries during which the Romans lived under a republican
constitution. We'll examine the crises that this period saw, the crises of republican
governance that would eventually result in the overthrow of the Republican system and
the re-establishment of a monarchy in everything but name, under the rule of one all-powerful
emperor -- the beginning of what we call the Imperial period of Rome. To give ourselves
some chronological markers, the republican period begins in 509 when Brutus overthrew
the last of the kings and it lasts, we can say, down to the year 31 BC, when a great
figure who would become known as the first emperor, Augustus, overthrew his rival Marc
Anthony in a great naval battle at Actium. This is the republican period, but the last
two centuries or so of this period are demarcated out as a period in their own right within
the history of the Republic, the late Republic. It begins in we can say 201 BC, a monumental
year in the history of Rome when the Romans, under the leadership of their Republican system
of government, defeated their arch rivals the Carthaginians in a second epic war known
as the Second Punic War that ended in 201 and saw Rome become the unrivaled hegemon
in the Western Mediterranean. The Romans not only survived the Second Punic War, they destroyed
their rivals the Carthaginians, and it begins a period of Rome's rise to imperial dominance.
Now, realize that Rome, even at the time when it establishes itself as a republic in 509 BC
is still an unassuming town. You would never have guessed in 509 that this small
cow town would become a dominant world power. Rome was a small society, and the Republic
had its beginnings in a very small-scale, relatively primitive kind of society with
a very basic agricultural economy. This will all come to change over the course of republican
history, and the year 201 is a symbolic date when the Romans not only destroy the Carthaginians
but become an aggressive, outward-looking imperialist power. From that year the Romans
will quickly invade other parts of the Mediterranean, including the East Mediterranean, and come
to dominate the Mediterranean world. Polybius, as we've seen, is brought to Rome as a hostage,
as part of this process of expansion into the Greek world, into the Eastern Mediterranean.
And it's Polybius as a witness to this expansion of Rome who writes his "Histories" precisely
because he wants to answer the question: How did this people in the space of about 50 years
come to completely dominate the Mediterranean world? This rise to power though, had profound
consequences on Roman society. On the nature, on the structure of Roman society, and these
changes would ultimately destabilize the Republican system of governance that was born in a period
when Rome was a small, simple, agricultural town. The crisis of the late Republic had
its roots in the profound social and economic transformations that accompanied the rise
of Rome to enormous power. These processes go hand in hand. Rome rises to dominance in
the 2nd century BC and during this same period Rome, precisely because she came to dominate
the Mediterranean world, would see internal changes that would destabilize the Republic
with its traditional mixed constitution based on tradition, on precedent. Think when you
imagine this period, the 2nd century BC, of the profound social and economic transformations
in terms of a few very critical kinds of change. One of these is simply urbanization. The world
of the ancient Mediterranean is a world of very small towns and villages; almost all
of the population lives in the countryside. It's made up of peasants and farmers and tenants
and villagers. But the rise of Rome to power and wealth brought with it changes in the
2nd century that included the urban transformation of Italy. Now there were cities before, but
even the greatest of these cities were very limited in scale. Classical Athens may have
been no more than 100 to 200,000 people, and that was a large city. Rome at the time of
the Republic is no more than a few thousand people, but during the 2nd century BC the
city of Rome will become the single largest city that humanity had ever seen up to that
point, and in fact by the 1st century BC as this process continues, the city of Rome will
reach a population that many historians estimate to have been in the range of one million inhabitants.
That makes it the largest city until London in almost 1800. That's a profound change,
the growth of this, what's really a megacity, right in the heart of the Roman Empire. And
it creates a kind of urban society, an urban environment that simply had never existed
before, and as we'll see this urban atmosphere becomes a new kind of challenge to the republican
system of government. The second kind of critical transformation that occurs in this period
is the rise of the Roman slave system. Now slavery is common across human history, and
it had certainly existed for centuries at Rome, but it was a small-scale kind of patriarchal
slavery in which most slaves live with the family in its house. But the rise of Rome
in the 2nd century saw the development of a truly new kind of slave system, the likes
of which the world had truly never seen before: large-scale plantation slavery that's based
on a commercial economy. The rise of Rome to imperial dominance meant the rise of Rome
to commercial dominance, and it meant that there was money to be made by exporting commodities
into the markets across the Mediterranean. And in the 2nd century BC in particular, we
see the rise of great slave-based villas, plantations, where commodities--especially
wine, is produced en masse as a cash crop and exported all over the Mediterranean world.
This means a new kind of farming, a new kind of commercialization, but also a new kind
of labor system, plantation slavery. And we'll see that over the course of the 2nd and 1st
centuries BC the rise of this new slave system would also be a destabilizing element in the
politics of the period, most notably in the form of great slave revolts. Truly some of
the largest slave revolts in all of the ancient world happen in the Roman world in the 2nd
century and 1st century BC, culminating most famously in the revolt of Spartacus, a historical
event that occurs in the first half of the 1st century BC. The third critical transformation
in this period is a change in the nature and composition of the Roman army. When the Romans
thought of their republican army, they imagined a citizens' army. An army of citizen soldiers
who were farmers during most of the year, but who served their country in arms as necessary.
In the 2nd century, this ideal of the citizen soldier who was also a farmer, was increasingly
undermined, simply by the scale of the Roman Empire, by the ambitions of generals to conquer
new territories and by the length of campaigns, which made it more and more difficult for
ordinary farmers to serve part-time as soldiers. And over the course of the 2nd century BC
we see a gradual but distinct transformation in the kind of soldier that serves in the
Roman Army, increasing professionalization as campaigns became more distant, as terms
of service became longer, the Romans eventually turned to the use of professional troops.
That is, soldiers who would serve long terms of service and couldn't keep their family
farms, but would become increasingly long-term, real, professional soldiers. And this progressively
undermines the old ideal of the citizen farmer serving in the army. All of these transformations:
the growth of enormous cities, the rise of slave based plantations, and the changes in
the nature of the Roman army would come to a head in one simple problem -- the undermining
of the small farmer. All of these changes made it difficult for the small farmer to
survive in the way that they had in the early Republic, and certainly these changes would
contribute to a new kind of politics and a new kind of political problem that would fundamentally
destabilize the Republic.