A Short History of the World (5 page)

Hannibal and the Punic Wars (264–146 BC)

In 221 BC, the leadership of the Carthaginian forces in Iberia passed to a 25-year-old named Hannibal, who had succeeded his father. In the autumn of 218 BC he invaded Italy from the north, crossing the Alps in winter with a number of elephants and tens of thousands of men. Arriving in Italy, he repeatedly smashed the Roman armies he came across, conquering most of the north within two months and causing several of the Republic’s cities to rebel.

The Romans eventually retaliated by attacking Iberia and making much of the area submit to their rule before crossing into Africa and taking the war back to Carthage itself. The city sued for peace and Hannibal was driven into exile where he eventually killed himself. Carthage was turned into a dependent state, only to be razed to the ground by the Romans 50 years later following an attempt to reassert itself.
 

Rome now controlled the whole of the western Mediterranean, including northern Africa, and had grown from a minor regional power into an international empire. Its dominance was secure to such an extent that the Mediterranean became known to the Romans as ‘Mare Nostrum’ or ‘Our Sea’. Another result of the Punic Wars was the occupation of the kingdom of Macedon by the Romans in 168 BC as punishment for the support that the Macedonian king, Philip V, had given the Carthaginians. After this, the mighty Greeks of history became mere citizens of a Roman province.
 

Julius Caesar (100–44 BC)

Fast-forward a century to 80 BC, and Julius Caesar’s exceptional oratory skills had come to the attention of many. Politically adept, Caesar formed an alliance known as ‘the First Triumvirate’, with Gnaeus Pompey, who was Rome’s greatest general at the time, and Marcus Crassus, Rome’s richest man. With little opposition they were able to split the empire into three separate power bases; Crassus receiving Syria, Pompey receiving Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula) and Caesar receiving northern Italy and south-east Europe, with southern Gaul later added.
 

Caesar grew famous through his successful campaigns in Gaul (roughly equal to modern-day France) between 58 BC and 50 BC, which brought the local population under Roman control through a campaign that was brutal even by Roman standards. The Gauls united under Vercingetorix – recognised today as the first national hero of France – with the aim of ejecting the Romans, but failed. By the time the war ended, according to the Greek historian Plutarch, up to a million Gauls lay dead and another million of them were enslaved. Caesar also launched a minor invasion of the British Isles but Britain had to wait another hundred years before it felt the full force of the Roman Empire under Emperor Claudius.
 

Caesar’s achievements upset the balance of power and threatened to eclipse those of Pompey. The balance of power was further upset by the death of Crassus, who had been killed – along with 30,000 of his men – while attempting to invade neighbouring Parthia. The Parthians were a Persian tribe that had risen to fill the power vacuum left by the weakening Seleucid Empire, and they became a major problem for the Romans.

With Caesar as a potential threat, Pompey persuaded the Senate to order him back to Rome. Caesar did return, but not as a loyal soldier, deciding instead to wage war on an ungrateful Rome. Caesar marched from Gaul to Italy with his legions and crossed into Roman territory at the river Rubicon in northern Italy, a river that served as the boundary between Rome and the provinces. If any general crossed it uninvited with an army, it was a sign that he entered Italy as an enemy. Since then the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’ has survived to refer to any individual committing himself to a risky course of action.
 

Caesar’s action sparked a civil war from which he emerged as the unrivalled leader of the Roman world. In response to Caesar’s invasion, Pompey was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Roman army with instructions to defeat Caesar, only to be assassinated by the Egyptians in Egypt, where he had fled with Caesar in hot pursuit. Before returning to Rome, Caesar was seduced by Cleopatra – a descendant of Alexander’s general, Ptolemy – and had a child with her, whom he named Caesarion. He also helped Cleopatra defeat her brother, the Pharaoh, whom she had been forced to marry, installing her as ruler in his place.

Upon his return to Rome, Caesar’s victories were celebrated; he was appointed dictator for ten years and the Senate bestowed further honours on him, including a decree that the month of July be named after him
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and that his image be stamped on coins – a traditional symbol of monarchy, and an action that did not go unnoticed among the notoriously anti-monarchical Romans.
 

Caesar was popular with the people as a reformer, but he was equally if not more unpopular with a number of senators who were keen to maintain the status quo and afraid of losing their wealth and power. It was these senators who conspired to murder Caesar under the pretext that they feared he was trying to become king, an institution that Rome had abolished back in 509 BC. They succeeded in doing so on 15th March 44 BC, otherwise known as the Ides of March, thrusting a dagger into Caesar’s heart and plunging Rome into a succession of civil wars that would end with the collapse of the Roman Republic and lead to the establishment of the Roman Empire.

Octavian, Mark Antony and Cleopatra

Before Caesar was murdered he had appointed his grandnephew Gaius Octavius, known as Octavian, as heir to all his possessions, including his name. After much antagonism between Octavian and Mark Antony – Caesar’s former right hand man and an experienced soldier in his own right – the two joined forces to bring Caesar’s murderers to justice.
 

However, the mutual distrust soon resurfaced between them. Antony’s infatuation with the East and with Cleopatra, with whom he had three children, led to his final undoing and his vilification in Rome. Rumours circulated that he was celebrating victories in Alexandria as opposed to Rome, that he wanted to be buried there, and that he was bequeathing parts of the Roman Empire to Cleopatra and her children – including Caesarion, a bequest that effectively challenged Octavian’s place as heir to Caesar.
 

Portraying Antony as an Egyptian pawn, Octavian declared war on Cleopatra and, by implication, on Antony. The two forces met at Actium in north-west Greece in AD 31, where Octavian won a decisive naval battle. The following year both Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, and Antony took their own lives and Egypt, like Greece before it, became a Roman province.

The Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 476/1453)

The Roman Empire, as opposed to the Roman Republic, was founded in 27 BC when the Roman Senate bequeathed to Octavian the name Augustus, meaning the exalted or holy one. As a matter of course, Octavian also became Princeps Senatus or leading man of the state. This later became the official title of the Roman emperors and gave us the word ‘prince’. One of his many titles, Imperator, initially awarded only to victorious generals, became associated with the ruler and was henceforth linked to leaders of empires (emperor, empereur, etc.).

Emperor Augustus Caesar ruled with absolute power. Any concerns about this held by diehard Republicans were offset by the political and social stability that Augustus managed to introduce after decades of civil war. In fact, with the exception of a few minor interruptions and wars, and helped by the fact that Rome’s largest potential enemy, Parthia in the east, was also beset by political turmoil, the Roman Empire was to know two centuries of relative peace, referred to as the ‘Pax Romana’. Trade was brisk. In addition to imports of wheat from Africa, wine from Gaul, and oil from Iberia, spices and textiles were imported from Arabia, India and China via Asian caravans along the Silk Road.

A huge territory with up to 50 million people, the empire was difficult to administer and expensive to run, requiring regular new sources of tax to fund its running costs. Augustus was fortunate that the state treasury received an influx of wealth and tax revenue from the newly occupied territory of Egypt, which became the new breadbasket of the Roman Empire. A major economic revival resulting from a period of peace and increased trade also boosted tax revenues. In fact, there was enough money in the Roman coffers to allow Augustus to embark on a major public building programme and boast ‘I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.’
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The tax base may have increased but it still needed to be collected. One of the ways of ensuring tax revenue was to perform a census that would confirm how many people lived in the empire and which of these could pay tax. According to the Christian New Testament, it was to register for such a census that Joseph and his wife Mary came to Bethlehem, a town in Judea in present-day Israel, where Mary gave birth to their son, Jesus.

Jesus: The Birth of Christianity

Jesus was born sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC. Very little is known about the man until he began his ministry some 30 years after his birth. At this time Jesus began spreading a message of love and peace in a period during which Judea was under the domination of a Roman occupying army. He challenged and angered the established Pharisee leaders, who successfully called for the Roman occupiers to crucify him for blasphemy. According to the Bible, he angered them specifically by his claims that he could forgive sins, which they believed only God could do.
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Jesus gained a group of Jewish followers, partly through his teachings but also because many of them believed he was the Messiah – the great leader whose return was foretold in the Torah and who would liberate his people and usher in a time of peace. His crucifixion in circa AD 28-29 was a catastrophe for his devotees. Shortly after his death, however, a large number of them claimed he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them. His resurrection became the basis of Christian belief from then on.

At the time of his crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were nothing more than members of a small Jewish sect, occasionally persecuted by the Romans. By AD 380, Christianity had become the state religion of Rome. Today, Christianity is one of the major world religions and has influenced legal and political systems around the world, as well as our calendar, which is based around the birth of Christ.
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Some Roman Emperors, Good and Bad…

The Roman Empire was run by a series of emperors, some better than the others. Emperor Claudius launched a major invasion of England in AD 43 and managed to impose Roman rule in the south of the island that lasted some 350 years. Emperor Nero had his mother and wife murdered and blamed the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 on Christians, whom he had promptly thrown to the lions before he eventually committed suicide.
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Emperor Titus had to deal both with a terrible plague and with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, but nevertheless managed to open the Colosseum with 100 days of games.

After Titus’ death in AD 81, until the end of the 2nd century, emperors adopted their successors, as opposed to passing the crown down through family lines. This led to a succession of capable emperors, all of whom avoided civil war and contributed in some way to making Rome the dominant power in Europe. The appointment to emperor in AD 180 of Lucius Commodus, after the death of his father, Marcus Aurelius, was the first time a son had succeeded his father since AD 79. His reign was a disaster and after his murder in AD 192, Rome faced a century of turmoil and anarchy.
 

The Decline of Rome

During a period of 50 years in the middle of the 3rd century AD there were more than 20 emperors, with all but one either killed in battle or murdered by rival claimants to the throne. Torn apart by civil war between renegade armies and lacking strong leadership, Rome was brought to the point of collapse. When it stopped expanding, the flow of booty and slaves that had fuelled the empire for so long subsequently dried up and the army – hitherto an enforcer of Roman might – became an expensive problem. Externally, the civil war meant that many soldiers were moved from the frontiers in order to defend the empire against internal rebellion. This left the frontiers weakly defended and encouraged further attacks. Rome was also increasingly threatened by the rise of the Persian Sassanids, who sensed weakness in their neighbour.