Rome in 146 BC · Imperium Romanum

The Roman state in 146 BC, after the simultaneous destructions of Carthage and Corinth, was the unchallenged hegemon of the Mediterranean basin. The strategic-political configuration that the half-century since the Peace of Phoenice had constructed had no peer power, no equal competitor, no significant alternative civilizational center capable of contesting Roman supremacy at the level of major-state engagement. The transformation effected by the wars of the present volume — across fifty-four years from 200 BC to 146 BC — exceeded in strategic-political consequence the transformations of any comparable period in the political history of any previous Mediterranean state, and is comparable in long-term significance only to the transformations effected by Alexander's conquests across the previous century and a half or by the Augustan settlement that would proceed across the following one. The Mediterranean basin as a single political-strategic theater under unified supervisory hegemony, which had not existed at any previous moment in the political history of the ancient world, was the institutional accomplishment of the wars described in the present volume.

The strategic-territorial dimensions of the transformation can be summarized. Rome at the volume's opening had controlled, in some form of direct or supervisory relationship, the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, the Spanish provinces (organized in 197 BC), and a strategic foothold in Illyria. Rome at the volume's close controlled, in addition to the original territories, the province of Macedonia (formally organized 146 BC), the supervisory hegemony over the Greek mainland (formally codified in the post-Achaean-War settlement), substantial diplomatic-political supervision over the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean (Pergamum, Rhodes, the constrained Seleucid kingdom, the further-reduced Ptolemaic Egypt), and the new province of Africa (formally organized 146 BC, replacing the destroyed Carthaginian state). The Mediterranean coast — from the Atlantic boundary of Spain through the African coast to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor — was, by the close of 146 BC, either Roman provincial territory or territory under direct Roman supervisory hegemony. The strategic-territorial transformation was, in operational terms, the conversion of the Mediterranean from a region of competing civilizational-political systems into a region of unified political-strategic supervision under a single hegemonic power.

The institutional-constitutional dimensions of the transformation were less immediately visible but more profound in their long-term implications. The Roman political class of 146 BC had inherited from the previous half-century a system of strategic-political-military arrangements that the conventional Republican constitution had developed to manage but had not been institutionally designed to sustain: the provincial system (now four provinces — Sicily, Sardinia-Corsica, Citerior Spain, Ulterior Spain, with Macedonia and Africa being added in the present year), the supervisory framework over Hellenistic states, the extended individual commands granted to figures like Scipio Africanus, Lucius Scipio, Aemilius Paullus, Scipio Aemilianus, the institutional complexities of multi-theater strategic management, the cumulative political-strategic prestige that successful generals accumulated and that the Republican system had no institutional procedure for managing. The constitutional adjustments that had been required to accommodate these strategic-political realities — the suspension of the lex Villia annalis, the granting of extraordinary commands beyond consular convention, the constitutional manipulation of the assembly system for political-strategic purposes — had been undertaken across the period as institutional necessities rather than as institutional reforms, and the cumulative effect had been the progressive accumulation of constitutional precedents whose institutional implications had not yet been comprehensively recognized. The path from the Republican constitution of 200 BC to the political crisis of the late Republic — Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar — would run through the cumulative institutional precedents that the present volume's wars had established.

The political-cultural dimensions of the transformation were the subject of the most articulate contemporary commentary by Polybius himself, who recognized in the events he had personally witnessed across the previous half-century the historical-philosophical significance of the institutional process that had brought a single Mediterranean political-cultural system into existence. Polybius's Histories — composed across the period from approximately 167 BC (the beginning of his Roman residence) through the early 130s BC, with the principal compositional work conducted at Rome in the household of the Scipionic Circle — was designed, by his own explicit statement in his methodological preface (1.1), to explain to Greek readers how the Roman state had achieved Mediterranean hegemony in such a short historical period (he calculated it at fifty-three years, from 220 BC to 167 BC; the present volume's calculation of fifty-four years to 146 BC is consistent with Polybius's reckoning extended to the volume's terminal date). The Polybian explanation was institutional rather than personal: the Roman political-constitutional system, in its specific combination of senatorial-aristocratic deliberation, consular-magisterial execution, and popular-assembly ratification, had produced an institutional capacity for sustained strategic-military operation that no contemporary Hellenistic monarchy could match. The Polybian analysis — sophisticated, comparative, philosophically informed — would shape the subsequent Hellenistic and Roman understanding of the political-historical process across the following two centuries and would constitute one of the principal intellectual achievements of the post-Pydna generation.

The political-cultural integration between the Roman and Greek traditions, however, would proceed across the subsequent decades on terms substantially different from those that Polybius's institutional analysis suggested. The cultural-aesthetic transfer that the destruction of Corinth had effected, combined with the parallel transfers from the Antigonid Macedonian library that Aemilius Paullus had brought to Rome and from the various earlier eastern campaigns, would produce across the post-146 generation a Roman aristocratic-cultural environment whose Hellenistic-cultural dimensions exceeded the merely political-institutional content of the supervisory hegemony. The Roman aristocratic class of the late second and early first centuries BC — figures like Scipio Aemilianus's intellectual circle, the developing Roman literary tradition under the influence of Ennius and the Hellenistic literary models, the philosophical engagement with Greek Stoic and Academic-skeptical traditions that figures like Panaetius and Carneades would bring to Rome — would develop a cultural-aesthetic-philosophical synthesis that the Augustan principate would eventually codify as the foundation of the imperial-period cultural civilization. The institutional-cultural transformation initiated by the wars of the present volume would, in this long historical perspective, prove more enduring than the strategic-political transformation that had been the wars' immediate strategic objective; the Roman Mediterranean empire would be constructed across the subsequent two centuries as much by cultural-aesthetic integration as by strategic-political subjugation.

The strategic-political configuration of the Mediterranean in 146 BC was, however, not yet stable. The institutional precedents that the wars had established, the constitutional adjustments that the strategic-political realities had required, the cumulative individual prestige that the successful generals had accumulated, the political-fiscal opportunities that the provincial system had created, the political-cultural-personal connections that the post-war supervisory framework had developed — all the institutional features that would produce the political crises of the late Republic were present in the political-strategic configuration that the wars of the present volume had constructed. The transformation that the late Republican period would shortly impose on the political-institutional foundations of Republican Rome would be the institutional process by which the strategic-political achievements of the wars of Mediterranean hegemony would be reorganized into the institutional configuration appropriate to the Mediterranean empire whose strategic-territorial framework had now been established. The political crises of the next century — from the Gracchi in 133 BC (the very year that Scipio Aemilianus would conclude the Numantine campaign and that the Mediterranean political-strategic configuration of the present volume's close would begin to be tested by the institutional pressures it had generated) through the civil wars of the first century BC — would be the institutional process by which the inherited Republican constitution would be reorganized into the imperial system that Augustus would shortly codify.

The cumulative individual cognomens that the volume's principal Roman figures had accumulated — Africanus, Asiagenes, Hispallus, Macedonicus, Numantinus, Africanus Numantinus, Achaicus, and the others — captured in the institutional shorthand of personal nomenclature the strategic-political progression that the volume has described. Scipio Aemilianus's accumulated cognomens, in particular, would by his death in 129 BC include Africanus (from Carthage), Numantinus (from Numantia), and the implicit-cultural distinction associated with his political-cultural patronage of the Scipionic Circle; his political-strategic position at the close of the present volume — having destroyed Carthage in 146, having destroyed Numantia (technically post-volume, in 133), having served as the principal Roman political-cultural patron of the post-Pydna generation, having accumulated personal-political prestige unprecedented in any individual Roman senatorial figure of the previous half-century — captured the institutional pattern that the late Republican period would shortly intensify. The path from Scipio Aemilianus to Pompey the Great a generation later, and from Pompey to Caesar a generation after that, would proceed through the cumulative institutional logic that the present volume's wars had established.

For the present volume, let us conclude as we began the Imperium Romanum series — with the recognition that the Roman achievement is best understood not as a sequence of brilliant individuals or decisive battles, but as the institutional construction of unusual coherence and unusual capacity for the management of expanding strategic-political responsibility. The wars of the second century BC tested that institutional construction to a degree that the Hannibalic generation could not have foreseen, and the construction, on balance, sustained the test — but the institutional reorganization that the strategic-political success would require had not yet been undertaken at the volume's close, and the political crises that would shortly proceed across the late-Republican period would constitute the institutional process by which the necessary reorganization would be effected. The Mediterranean empire that the wars of the present volume had constructed at the strategic-territorial level required, for its institutional sustainment, the political-constitutional transformation that the volume's terminal generation had not yet begun to undertake. The story of that subsequent transformation — the long Republican crisis of the late second and first centuries BC, from the Gracchan reforms through the Augustan settlement — belongs to Book V, which will treat the political crises of the late Republic, the civil wars between the great individual generals whose careers the institutional pattern of the present volume's wars had foreshadowed, and the constitutional transformation by which the inherited Republican framework was reorganized into the imperial system that would dominate the Mediterranean for the subsequent half-millennium.

It is on this note of qualified institutional accomplishment, with the strategic-territorial Mediterranean empire in place but with its institutional-political foundations awaiting the transformation that the late Republican period would shortly impose, that the present volume closes. The political crises of the Gracchi, of Marius and Sulla, of Pompey and Caesar, await Book V.

End of Book IV.

Book V — The Crisis of the Republic: From the Gracchi to the Civil Wars (133–31 BC) — will treat the constitutional crises and civil wars of the late Republic, the careers of the great individual imperatores whose accumulated political-strategic prestige would prove beyond the institutional capacity of the inherited Republican framework, the social and economic transformations that the post-146 Mediterranean empire imposed on the Italian heartland, and the slow institutional process by which the Republican constitution was reorganized into the imperial system that Augustus would codify at Actium in 31 BC.