I used to think that the old adage of "Rome wasn't built in a day" was painfully obvious and also distinctly uninsightful.
Because honestly at face value it kind of is. That phrase is winking at you so hard,
It's practically wearing an eyepatch.
but if instead of just Rome the city, we think about Rome the culture, Rome the
institution, Rome the sea conquering empire, that phrase starts to actually say something.
Rome, as I hope this video series will show, was really special.
There's honestly nothing like it and I think it's important to appreciate not just what Rome became, but how much slow careful
calculated effort was put into its creation, and as you'll see in a minute early Roman history is a
notoriously slow burn. Generation after generation
dedicated themselves to something they'd never see the end of and I just think that's really cool.
So, let's do some history. If we jump into our handy-dandy time machines and go all the way back to the beginning of Roman history,
We'll be looking at an actively on fire city, which happens to be Troy. Yep.
The plot twist is that the Romans are actually descendants of the Trojans.
According to Roman tradition, one specific Trojan named Aeneas who fled the burning city on the orders of his mother Venus to sail around the
Mediterranean in search of Italy. This story comes to us most clearly in Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid
Which you can see Red summarized over here after a run-in with Queen Dido of Carthage and a journey through scenic hell
Aeneas and crew arrived on the plain of Latium in central Italy. To make matters more
Italian the very first thing they do when they arrive is eat pizza. Wow we're not even two minutes in and we're already
Establishing over 3,000 years of stereotypes. I can't even be mad
That's just really efficient. Fast forward a few hundred years after Aeneas to
753 BC and the brothers Romulus and Remus
Who were raised by a wolf, got into a kerfuffle of sorts while building some walls around their village and
Romulus ended up murdering Remus
And what became the most etymologically significant fratricide in world history. That, kids, is why it's called Rome and not Reem.
Anyway, Romulus claimed kingship over his newly walled village and over the next two and a half centuries seven kings oversaw Rome's transformation from
backwater town to
Moderately cool city and even that wasn't a guarantee
most of the action in world history up to this point happened in Mesopotamia in the eastern Mediterranean
Rome was all the way on the west coast of Italy I don't think I can overstate how completely irrelevant Rome was in the broader
Mediterranean arena for the first 500 years of its history
Rome as we know ended up conquering most of the known classical world
but a majority of its early history was simply a
Spirited back and forth between its neighbors the Etruscans to the north the Samnites to the south and later on the Greek colonies of ina
Grecia to the way further south and by spirited
I do literally mean they were stabbing each other with Spears while all of this
neighborly murdery business was going on the city of Rome was building itself up both physically and
Institutionally with walls streets a sewer system stone temples and buildings a governmental system
reminiscent of the Greek polis system and a religious system reminiscent of the Greek pantheon
Man that Greek influence really got in there early all of this was going on all nice and well until in
509 BC the Romans thought that their king char Qin the proud aka Tarquinius Superbus
Aka tarkie, tarkie super bus was a total nob
and they were getting kind of tired of being ruled so they kicked him out swear never to have another King again and
officially created the Roman Republic
Institutionally speaking a lot of the mechanics of the Republic were already in place
Like the Senate the patrician nobility and the citizen assembly for instance the transition to a republic was really more of a reorganization
Of authority than a political revolution or anything like that
broadly speaking the whole idea was to take their government and
Publicize the power so the people could participate and the word Republic comes from the Latin Reis Publica
Which just means public thing structurally the government was controlled by two annually elected
consuls the praetors ran the justice system and the quaestors the silliest roman name ever
Managed state finances the aediles were responsible for the state of the city, so they handled food games
Infrastructure and all that jazz the Senate though
It didn't directly
Legislate anything published opinions on policy that were often very quickly put in place by the respective officers down the chain almost all of these
magistrates and Senators in the early republic were of the patrician nobility if you happens to be one of Rome's
many Plebeians you might have rightly felt a little left out of this supposed rice pública the plebeians
unsurprisingly wanted political and social rights
And they were determined to acquire them so on any given
Season of campaigning against Rome's bothersome neighbors the plebeians who composed the majority of the army simply went on strike
They just go sit on a hill and wait until the Senate granted them the right to marry patricians or to have their own government
Positions in special assembly or to elect their own members of that special assembly or to serve as consul
And then by 287 BC the plebeians and the patricians were equal in everything but name good for them
institutionally the Roman Republic
Simultaneously had elements of a monarchy and aristocracy and a democracy this mixed
Constitution and its flexibility in governance according to the historian Polybius was one of Rome's greatest strengths
And I'm inclined to agree Rome's institutions words backbone for over a thousand years, and that's darn impressive
okay enough of the politicy stuff back to the stadi stuff now like I said early Roman Republican history is a
notoriously slow burn the struggle for plebeians rights took over two centuries and conquering the italian peninsula was
Similarly slow going rome was intent on being careful taking small steps and taking its time
recall how in the aftermath of both the macedonian and mongol conquests when you go too far too fast things tend to
fracture rome spent most of the fourth and early third centuries fighting with various neighbors and working its way down to only the bay of
Naples that's a pretty short way to go in so long a time
They were being really careful key to Rome's military strategy was the doctrine of
Expanding defense essentially Rome would never be so brash as to go out and attack someone good heavens
No Rome had the good manners to only fight in self-defense
And they knew that their gods would only grant them victory if their war was a just and pious war but
If Rome suspected that someone was going to attack them Rome would absolutely shoot first defensively of course a pre-emptive
Retaliatory strike if you will and that is how you go on to conquer the entire world
Defensively by 280 Roma had successfully joined all of Sam Neum and proceeded to set its sights at Magna Grecia in southern Italy Magna
Grecia not being the big fans of the Romans and wishing to keep their land
Thank you very much. Sent for help from Greece proper, and they brought in the big guns specifically they imported the Hellenistic king of Epirus
Pyrrhus fought two battles against the Romans and even though he won both of them his losses were so
Devastating that he bailed on the campaign after a detour through Sicily
He fought the Romans again
Lost and went home for good
Pyrrhus his abilities to win battles coupled with his inability to not burn through a third of his army in the process is what gives
Us the term Pyrrhic victory so uh?
Good on Pyrrhus for eternally tethering his names of the military equivalent of pulling five consecutive all-nighters to cram for a test, yeah
It's a win, but was it worth it? so with pretty much
No one left to protect Magna Grecia,
Rome proceeded to swoop in and colonize all over the place and
Unlike those who employ the "torch it and start over" method of conquest the Romans had a good track record of being kind to conquered peoples
except for this next example from a rather salty chapter in Roman history the Punic Wars against Carthage
Okay, so for the purposes of keeping this video under 20 minutes long
I'm actually going to breeze through it here
But check out this additional video for the full rundown
Basically Roman Carthage stumbled into the first war because of a mix-up in Sicily and proceeded to spend the following 23 years not
Actually fighting all that much in order to fight the seafaring Carthaginians the Romans needed to construct a fleet from scratch
So it was a fairly slow process after the Romans won the uneventful first war they annexed
Sicily Corsica and Sardinia and levied an indemnity on Carthage
understandably miffed Carthage swore revenge against Rome and in 218 the general Hannibal crossed the Alps with his army and
Proceeded to make a mess of Italy for 16 years things were looking pretty
dire for the Romans in 211 a campaign by the young Scipio drove the
Carthaginians out of Spain and he then proceeded to attack Carthage directly ultimately defeating Hannibal and winning the war finally half a century later
Rome returns to absolutely destroy
Carthage there was enough salt rubbed into that earth to season a Titan and to freely admit my historical bias
I will say that I absolutely
love carthaginian salt memes with Spain and North Africa now happily romanized focus shifted eastward and Rome proceeded to clean
up the squabbling and stagnating Hellenistic kingdoms from the aftermath of Alexander the Short- sighted's campaigns
the Macedonians had helped Carthage in the Punic Wars and Rome
Considered that sufficient grounds for bespearment and bespearment of course is a word that I made up for the act of getting stabbed with
a spear
anyway
in that conflict the saluted Greeks helped the
Macedonians so the Romans saw that to as provocation
Not wanting to go too far too fast and also because they didn't quite have a big enough army yet Rome stopped at Greece for
The better part of a century and simply took to kneecapping the armies of the eastern Mediterranean
So they didn't pose any direct threat this marks a much more aggressive Roman attitude towards conquest
It was super important that Italy be unified through kindness and generosity because that was Italy but all of these new places were explicitly considered
Provinces under Rome even though Rome was still a republic and didn't
yet have an emperor it absolutely
possessed an empire by this point
after the conquest of Greece and the acquisition of the kingdom of Pergamum through a will of all things Rome was
Clearly the dominant power in the Mediterranean
now despite Rome's best efforts
It was about to have some serious problems a few of which derived from the Roman patron client system in which a wealthy and well-connected
Roman provided for his clients who in turn supported him politically this worked fine on a small scale
But things got problematic when people effectively tried to buy public support in large quantities in the late second century
The Gracchi brothers attempted on several occasions to redistribute land to their supporters among several other reforms and when Tiberius
Gracchus tried to run for re-election as Tribune. He was assassinated a decade later Gaius Gracchus and his allies were also assassinated
Whoa?
Rome, buddy, hold up- you had no political violence for over 600 years. You got a really good thing going
Please don't screw this up. Oh.
Wow, yeah they really screw this one up. Don't they geez
Yikes, where do we start? Okay, so first there?
Are three mass slave revolts in Sicily in Italy then there's the social war where most of Italy revolted against Rome after?
Which all Italians were granted full citizenship
And let's also not forget the Catalan conspiracy to overthrow the consulship of Cicero all of those civil wars were reconciled
But still that's a lot of civil warring to happen in just the span of a half century
But by far the worst of the lot were the factional civil wars between the populist
populares and the aristocratic optimates otherwise known as the two civil wars between Marius and Sulla
Gaius Marius a seven-time consul in general who conquered parts of North Africa and settled the social war headed the populares
While the optimates were led by Lucius Sulla another successful general the optimates were the ones who?
Assassinated the Gracchi brothers and when Sulla came back from a campaign in Anatolia
He marched his army into Rome established himself as dictator and proceeded to massacre his rival populares
Twice he did all of that
Twice that's huge in
50 years we went from not a single Roman being killed over politics to armies marching on Rome and carrying out prescribed hit lists of
Political enemies things were really really bad in the first century
But we're not going to topple the Republic until the next video so stay tuned for now though
Let's recap Rome started as one tiny
irrelevant city and grew itself very gradually through calculated means first conquering Italy then the
islands then Spain and soon after Greece, North Africa and Anatolia
What astounds me is that a typical Roman would only ever see a small part of this
unfold the Romans were patient
And they knew that doing things properly and working towards something bigger than themselves would lead to
Accomplishments far greater and longer-lasting than the floundering conquests of a Greek kid on a horse