Proem

The volume now in the reader's hand treats the half-century across which Rome, having survived the Hannibalic War and emerged as the dominant power of the western Mediterranean, extended her strategic supremacy eastward across the Greek and Hellenistic world and southward across the African coast, eliminating one by one the major successor states of Alexander's empire, suppressing the residual resistance of the Iberian peninsula, and bringing the Mediterranean basin under a single political-strategic authority for the first time in its history. The terminus a quo is the formal declaration of war upon Philip V of Macedon in 200 BC; the terminus ad quem is the double catastrophe of 146 BC, in which the Roman state destroyed the city of Carthage on the African coast and the city of Corinth in central Greece within the same campaigning season, ending in a coordinated act of strategic consolidation the institutional independence of the two civilizations — Punic and Hellenic — that had constituted the principal Mediterranean alternatives to Roman power. The fifty-four years between these termini saw four major wars against the Hellenistic kingdoms, two prolonged campaigns of pacification in the Iberian peninsula, the third and final war against Carthage, and the brief but decisive Achaean War in central Greece. The Roman state at the period's opening was the master of Italy, Sicily, Spain, and a constellation of dependent allies along the African coast; at the period's close, the Roman state was the unchallenged Mediterranean hegemon, with no peer power and no equal competitor on the political map of the world her armies had constructed.

The transformation effected by these wars was institutional rather than merely territorial, and the institutional consequences were, in the long run of Roman political history, more consequential than the territorial gains they accompanied. The Roman political class that emerged from the Hannibalic War in 201 BC had inherited a constitutional framework — the manipular legion, the consular magistracies, the senatorial advisory role, the popular assemblies — that had been adequate to the strategic requirements of an Italian and western Mediterranean power. The strategic requirements of a Mediterranean empire, however, would prove progressively beyond the institutional capacity of the inherited framework, and the constitutional adaptations that the second-century wars required would establish the institutional precedents from which the late Republican crises and the eventual Augustan principate would emerge. The extraordinary commands granted to Flamininus in Greece, to Lucius Scipio in Syria, to Aemilius Paullus in Macedonia, and most consequentially to Scipio Aemilianus in his repeated assignments — commands that exceeded the conventional consular framework in duration, in geographic scope, and in personal authority — were the institutional precursors of the late Republican imperatores whose accumulated prestige would, by the time of Marius and Sulla and Pompey and Caesar, exceed the institutional capacity of the Republican system to contain. The path from the institutional Republic of the third century to the personal principate of the first century BC runs, through the wars of this volume, with a directness that the contemporary Roman political class did not perceive but that subsequent historians from Polybius onward have recognized as the central institutional fact of the period.

The principal figures of the volume are, accordingly, individuals whose careers exceeded the conventional Republican framework rather than figures who exemplified it. Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who conducted the Second Macedonian War and pronounced the famous "Declaration of the Isthmus" that proclaimed the freedom of the Greek cities in 196 BC, was a man of substantial Hellenic cultural sympathies whose strategic conception extended beyond the immediate military objectives of his command to a vision of Greco-Roman political integration that the conventional senatorial tradition regarded with some unease. Lucius Cornelius Scipio (the consul of 190 BC, brother of Africanus) conducted the Syrian War with his more famous brother as principal advisor and won at Magnesia the engagement that ended Seleucid pretensions to Mediterranean hegemony, but his subsequent prosecution at Rome on charges related to the disposition of Syrian indemnity funds revealed the political fragility of the personal authority that the eastern command had constructed. Lucius Aemilius Paullus, victor at Pydna in 168 BC and conqueror of Macedonia, was the father of Scipio Aemilianus by adoption and the principal Roman cultural patron of the post-war generation; his triumph after Pydna featured the spoils of the Antigonid kingdom and the deposed king Perseus among the displayed prisoners, in a procession that the Roman tradition regarded as the most magnificent triumphal celebration of the entire Republican period. Cato the Elder, whose long political career spanned almost the entire volume's period from his consulship in 195 BC through his death in 149 BC, was the principal voice of the senatorial conservative faction's opposition to the Hellenistic-cultural transformation that the eastern wars produced; his famous repeated declaration that Carthago delenda est — Carthage must be destroyed — was the rhetorical foundation of the political consensus that produced the Third Punic War. And the figure who would dominate the volume's closing chapters is Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus, the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus and natural son of Aemilius Paullus, who would destroy Carthage in 146 BC, would conduct the suppression of the Spanish resistance at Numantia in 133 BC (an event that lies just beyond the present volume's terminal date but that the chapter on the Spanish wars will treat in summary), and who would serve as the patron of the Greek historian Polybius — the principal source for the Hannibalic War on which the present compendium has so substantially drawn, and a witness to several of the events that the present volume will describe.

A word about the principal Greek source for the volume, since the relationship between Polybius and the events he describes becomes, in the period covered by Book IV, more direct than at any previous point in the Imperium Romanum compendium. Polybius of Megalopolis was born approximately in 200 BC, the year that this volume opens, and grew to maturity in the Achaean League of the Peloponnese during the years of the Macedonian, Syrian, and Third Macedonian Wars. He served as a senior officer of the Achaean League in the late 170s and 160s BC, was brought to Rome in 167 BC as one of the thousand Achaean hostages required by the post-Pydna political settlement, and lived at Rome for sixteen years as a member of the household of Aemilius Paullus and as the principal tutor and intellectual companion of the young Scipio Aemilianus. He accompanied Scipio Aemilianus to the Third Punic War, was present at the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, was present (after his return to the Peloponnese in 150 BC and his subsequent service as Roman political mediator) at the closing operations of the Achaean War, and observed personally many of the events that his Histories would describe. The historical methodology that Polybius developed for the treatment of the Hannibalic War — the systematic use of contemporary documents, the interrogation of surviving participants, the explicit construction of a historical narrative as analytical rather than merely chronological — was applied with even more direct evidentiary basis to the events of Book IV's period. Polybius's Histories originally covered the years 264 BC through 146 BC in forty books, of which only Books 1 through 5 survive complete and Books 6 through 39 survive only in fragments preserved in later anthologies (principally the Excerpta of the tenth-century Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus). The fragmentary state of the Polybian narrative for the period after Zama is the principal source-state challenge of the present volume and will be noted in the chapter-level Editor's Notes where specific source-quality issues arise.

The Latin tradition for the period is dominated by Livy. Livy's Books 31 through 45 — covering the years 201 through 167 BC, from the Peace of Phoenice through the immediate aftermath of Pydna — survive in substantially complete form and constitute the most extensive continuous Latin narrative of any period of the middle Republic. The Livian narrative is built upon careful reading of Polybius (for the Greek and Hellenistic dimensions) supplemented by Latin annalistic sources (Fabius Pictor, Calpurnius Piso Frugi, Coelius Antipater, the elder Valerius Antias) and by Livy's characteristic dramatic-literary elaboration. The Livian books covering 167 through 9 BC are lost, and for the events of the Third Punic War, the Spanish campaigns of the 150s and 140s, the Achaean War, and Numantia we depend upon the late-imperial Periochae (a brief summary of the lost books, of value as an indication of what Livy treated but not as a primary source), the partially-preserved books of Appian (whose Macedonica, Syriaca, Iberica, Libyca, and Mithridatica cover the relevant geographic theaters), Plutarch's Lives of the principal figures (Flamininus, Aemilius Paullus, Cato Maior), and the fragments of Cassius Dio and Diodorus. The source-state of the volume's closing chapters is therefore substantially weaker than that of its opening chapters, and the reader is advised to expect the attestation grading to decline correspondingly as the narrative approaches 146 BC.

The geographic scope of the volume is the entire Mediterranean basin. The opening chapters treat events in mainland Greece, Macedonia, and the Aegean; the middle chapters extend to Asia Minor, the Levantine coast, and the Iberian interior; the closing chapters return to the African coast at Carthage and to the central Greek isthmus at Corinth. The strategic geography of the Mediterranean as a single political-military theater, which had not previously existed in the consciousness of any Mediterranean state, was constructed across this period by Roman strategic practice. The institutional Roman recognition of the Mediterranean as a single theater would eventually be expressed in the late-Republican phrase mare nostrum — "our sea" — but the strategic reality preceded the linguistic recognition by approximately a century. The wars of Book IV are the wars that constructed mare nostrum in practice, even though the political consciousness of what they had constructed would emerge only across the following generation.

Let us begin, then, in the autumn of 201 BC, with the Roman political class contemplating the strategic position they had won at Zama and the new problems that the post-war Mediterranean configuration was about to present.