XXVII
THE TWO WESTERN REPUBLICS[1]
§ 1. The Beginnings of the Latins. § 2. A New Sort of State. § 3. The Carthaginian Republic of Rich Men. § 4. The First Punic War. § 5. Cato the Elder and the Spirit of Cato. § 6. The Second Punic War. § 7. The Third Punic War. § 8. How the Punic War Undermined Roman Liberty. § 9. Comparison of the Roman Republic with a Modern State.
§ 1
IT is now necessary to take up the history of the two great republics of the Western Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage, and to tell how Rome succeeded in maintaining for some centuries an empire even greater than that achieved by the conquests of Alexander. But this new empire was, as we shall try to make clear, a political structure differing very profoundly in its nature from any of the great Oriental empires that had preceded it. Great changes in the texture of human society and in the conditions of social interrelations had been going on for some centuries. The flexibility and transferability of money was becoming a power and, like all powers in inexpert hands, a danger in human affairs. It was altering the relations of rich men to the state and to their poorer fellow citizens. This new empire, the Roman empire, unlike all the preceding empires, was not the creation of a great conqueror. No Sargon, no Thothmes, no Nebuchadnezzar, no Cyrus nor Alexander nor Chandragupta, was its fountain head. It was made by a republic. It grew by a kind of necessity through new concentrating and unifying forces that were steadily gathering power in human affairs.
- ↑ A very convenient handbook for this and the next two chapters is Matheson's Skeleton Outline of Roman History.
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