History of the World Chapter 10: The Western Republics (Patreon)

In days after Alexander, when the Greeks could maintain the most illusions about them being the center of the world and history in general, they would be surpassed and conquered by an unknown people to the west of them that they would never have given a second thought to earlier. The central axis of the Mediterranean would move from the bays of the Aegean to shores of the Levant to the west.

An Empire of Trade

We’ve already spoken of the Phoenician colonies in the west. How they founded trading settlements along the coast and over the centuries these would become powerful cities in their own right and dominate the region. The epitome of this is Carthage, in modern day Tunisia. It was founded in 810 BC, legendarily by Queen Dido. The story goes that the local Numidian population was willing to sell her as much land as she could cover with an ox hide. She instead cut the off hide into thin strips and encircled the region around Carthage. Carthage’s numbers expanded from there to become the largest city in the region.

Carthage itself superseded the Phoenician homeland, continuing after its fall under the Assyrians and taking in many of the refugees from the fall of Sidon and Tyre. Carthage in turn created it’s own colonies, in Western Sicily, the Balearics, Sardinia and Corsica, the rest of the North African coast and the Mediterranean shores of Spain. These colonies hugged the shore and were united by the powerful Carthaginian navy, which was the most powerful in the Western Mediterranean. The Carthaginian empire was unlike the later Roman one. The Carthaginians dominated through trade, not conquest. These trading centers only rarely had hinterlands that they could pull men and resources from. Instead they dominated the trade of a region that supplied profits. Their dominance of trade resulted in them forming powerful connections and alliances among the local tribes. These in turn supplied troops to the Carthaginian military. Like the Italian city states of the Renaissance, the Carthaginians themselves did very little warfare. Instead they hired mercenary armies of their allied peoples. Horsemen from the Numidians of North Africa, Slingers from the Balearics, elephants from the Atlas mountains and Spanish swordsmen all formed their parts of the Carthaginian military.

This trading empire made Carthage incredibly wealthy. Like the 17th century Netherlands, Carthage was a major trade entrepôt that was known for its amazing architecture and wide open wealthy boulevards. The surrounding countryside was some of the wealthiest and most fertile in the Mediterranean. The worship of the old Levantine god Baal was the main religion with sadly sacrifice of human babies sadly common. The city, also like the 17th century Netherlands was a burgher democracy, democracy in the loosest of terms. A board of wealthy citizens were the government. The wealthy merchants dominated the politics and the direction of the nation. This resulted in a highly economic foreign and military policy. Carthage did not do expensive conquests without an economic benefit to them.

The Carthaginian hegemony over the Western Mediterranean did not come easily. They were in endless competition with the Greeks especially. The fertile and wealthy island of Sicily was a constant battleground between the Greek city states of Magna Graeca, led by Syracuse in the East and the Carthaginians based out of Lilybeaum in the West. Neither side was able to triumph and so they divided the island between the two of them. There was also conflict with the Greek colonies in modern day France and Spain. A major and near fought naval struggle was fought between the Carthaginians versus an alliance of the Greeks of France and the Etruscans of Italy. The Carthaginians narrowly won, thus maintaining their trade empire in the region.

From Village to Empire

Meanwhile another very different kind of empire was developing in Central Italy. Ever since the Indo-European invasions the Italian peninsula had been inhabited by semi-advanced tribal peoples. The Villanova culture in the center of the peninsula existed around 1,000 BC. The Greeks settled along the southern coasts of the peninsula in spots like Tarentum and Capua. This injected the peninsula with a civilized influence and gave the peoples a Hellenic tilt. The Etruscans founded a civilization in the center of Italy as well around 800 BC. No one is entirely sure where it came from, but their architecture as well as genetics point to an origin in Anatolia. Maybe this gives some credence to the Aeneid story, which says that the original founders of Rome came from Troy in Anatolia. They developed a script that is dissimilar to one anywhere else. They also developed quite an advanced level of architecture. They gave a great influence to later Roman civilization, which is partially their descendent.

On the southern end of the Etruscan lands the city of Rome was founded. It lay on the banks of the Tiber River, a little bit upstream from its swamps and between 7 hills. Supposedly in 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, boys who mythologically suckled from a wolf as children. This is very likely a mythologized account, but the start of all history is in mythology. The mythology tells a series of fanciful accounts of the founding such as the stealing and rape of the local Sabine women due to their own lack of women or the how Romulus killed Remus for disrespecting his jurisdictions for the city. The town grew briefly and was able to gain a hegemony over the local towns. At this point they were conquered by an Etruscan dynasty. The Etruscans ruled Rome for 200 years until they were driven out in a rebellion by the native aristocracy and murder of the kings. The Romans then had to fight a war against the surrounding Latin city states, which it won, thus gaining control over the Tiber Valley.

The Romans decided to replace the monarchy with a republic. Each class would be allocated a certain number of votes, with the propertied classes completely over represented. The classes who could afford armor and thus go to war were those who were allowed to vote. As the Republic would continue this would be redressed and the franchise would be expanded downwards to include more of the lower classes. The nobility of Rome however held great power politically, socially and militarily for the entire Republic. They provided the leadership and backing for nearly all causes. Rome was an aristocratic republic in a large part, like that Britain had in our last few centuries. Political power was vested in two tribunes who were voted in by the citizens of Rome yearly. The religion of Rome was based around the old Italian gods alongside the Etruscan ones. They were remarkably similar to the Greek ones due to the common Indo-European heritage. In Ancient Rome, religion and politics were inextricably linked. A major function of the state was considered to be the pleasing of the often turbulent gods. Respecting the traditional state gods was seen as a duty of the average good Roman, whether or not they chose to worship other gods alongside them did not matter. As Rome became Hellenized the Romans purposely made their gods closer to the Greek ones to emulate the higher civilization.

In its infancy the Romans had to deal with an invasion from the North. The Celts poured into Northern Italy from Gaul and turned the Po Valley into an extension of Celtic North Europe. The Celts, likely the most powerful military force in Europe at the time stormed down the Italian peninsula led by their chieftain Brennus. The Roman armies were crushed in the field and the city was besieged. The lower levels were sacked while the fortress acropolis continued to hold out. Strangely the sacred geese kept the city safe by clucking ferociously whenever the Gauls would storm the city, thus alerting the defenders. Eventually the Gausl, not the most methodical of opponents grew tired and settled for tribute. The Romans delivered on this and when the Gauls purposely used false measuring scales, the Gauls replied to the Roman lamentations with the equivalent of “go ahead try and stop us”. However, Rome was able to survive.

After this setback, the Romans continued their expansion across the Italian peninsula. The Samnite peoples in Southern central Italy formed tough competition. They were a wealthy and civilized tribal people, perhaps even more than Rome at the time. However they fought a fabulous guerrilla campaign against the Romans that took Rome many decades to put down and conquer them. In the regions of Central Italy they conquered the Romans tried to incorporate the native peoples and make them nearly Roman. Colonies of Romans were placed about the Italian peninsula to further the process of assimilation and expend excess population. However, the native city states were allowed their self government and respected in exchange for their supplying of troops to the greater Roman franchise. This is vaguely similar to the United State’s process of world domination in recent years with the NATO and Pacific alliances. This resulted in a great deal of loyalty to the Roman state in the allied states, who often died in the fields for the central Roman mission, whatever that was.

Several other things gave the Romans an advantage. The Romans lay on dangerous fence between barbarism and civilization, only recently having moved outwards from the peasant stage. Some historians have compared the early Romans to a barbarian people like the Macedonians, Persians or Vikings. Roman writers of later days love to write of how the men of early Rome were Stoic and manly and although this may ring of nostalgia, their conquests clearly don’t disprove it. The society scorned cowardice and unmanly decadent fripperies. The Romans originally used a phalanx formation like the Greeks, which clearly have their advantages, but frankly were getting overused and old by this point. The Romans instead took the Macedonian model of mobility even further, with easily mobile swordsman forming the main block while supported by pikemen and archers. The Romans organized their forces into smaller formations that were more easily mobile in combat. This gave the Romans a maneuverability and strength that would be useful against both the charges of the Celtic barbarians and the spear bristling Greek front line.

The Roman state came into conflict with the wealthy city states of Southern Italy, especially Tarentum, on the spur on the Italian boot. The Tarentines appealed to the king of Epirus in Greece, Pyrrhus, a descendent of Alexander and famous general of the age. Pyrrhus sailed to Italy and fought the Romans for Southern Italy. He won a few battles, but his losses were so horrific in them that it gave the name to the Pyrrhic victory. The Romans simply had so men to die due their alliance structure and fought so bravely that Pyrrhus gave up and returned to Greece, winning the battles, but not the war. This practically gave the Italian peninsula to the Romans. This conquest was finally completed by the conquest of Etruria in North-Central Italy. With the Roman empire forming a large force next to Carthage, the two were destined to come into struggle. It was allayed for a time by a treaty by which the Carthaginians would take the seas and islands while Rome would control the Italian peninsula, a most reasonable treaty considering both’s strengths, but it was not to last.

Carthage vs Rome: Round 1

The conflict started accidentally. A band of Mamertine Italian mercenaries attacked a Greek city in Sicily and it spiraled into a war against the city state of Syracuse. This in turn spiraled into a war between the Carthaginians and Romans, with the Romans supporting the local Greek states and the Carthagians, the Mamertines. This resulted in Roman involvement in the isle of Sicily, adding a third force to the century old conflict between Greek and Punic. The Romans quickly conquered Sicily from the Carthaginians, gaining the entire island except Syracuse in the South-East. The specter of the Carthaginian navy then loomed large. The Romans had never been a naval people, not even having a navy at the start of the war. The Carthaginians had been the dominant naval power for centuries, with likely the best navy on earth at the time. Considering Italy is a peninsula surrounded on all sides by sea, this turned out to an issue of sorts. The Romans, being a people of great energy set about making their own navy to beat the Carthaginians.

The Romans were so new to the naval art that they actually did much of their rowing and naval drill on land initially. However, the Romans knew where their advantage lay. They knew that had superior melee infantry and that if they could bring this to bear on the high seas they had a chance of beating the Carthaginians. Thus the Romans invented the corvus, a drawbridge like contraption that would lower itself onto the enemy decks, thus opening them up to the Roman infantry. This worked beautifully and the Romans smashed the Carthaginian fleet in it’s totality, gaining domination over the Western Mediterranean. This resulted in the the island portions of the Carthaginian empire, like Sardinia and Corsica being conquered by the Romans. Hamilcar, a Carthaginian general re-attacked Sicily and fought a brilliant guerrilla campaign against the Roman occupiers late into the war. His bitterness at other Carthaginians losing the war while he fought on would create Carthage’s greatest leader in the next war against Rome. With naval superiority the Romans landed in North Africa and threatened Carthage itself, this resulted in Carthage suing for peace. The following treaty was humiliating, resulting in the secession of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia to the Romans and the permanent dismantling of the Carthaginian fleet.

The Interregnum

After the loss of the war the bankrupt Carthage was unable to pay for its mercenaries and so they broke out into revolt. After a nasty campaign this revolt was put down, this time by Carthage’s hero, Hamilar Barca. The Carthaginians did not forget or forgive the insult given to them by the Romans. Out of their meagre colonial empire, they still had the Southern and Eastern coast of Spain. The Romans had been too far away to seize these possessions and Hamilcar realized that they were the route if Carthage wished to become a great power once again. Thus, he departed Carthage for New Carthage in Spain, now Valencia. He took his son Hannibal, still a child, with him. He made Hannibal swear upon Baal that he would take vengeance upon the Romans when he grew older, a task his father had failed at.

The Barca dynasty ruled Spain practically as their own fief and well. They were able to drive Carthaginian control from the coasts deep into the interior and seized wealthy silver mines that bankrolled their endeavors. Carthaginian politics became split between the wealthy patricians of the city of Carthage and the powerful aristocratic Barcas in Spain. They gained loyalty among many of the native Celtic peoples and thus had a good force to pull mercenaries from. This Carthaginian growth did not grow unremarked upon by the Romans, who grew worried by the re-emergence of their old enemy. The Romans had meanwhile been expanding their influence northwards, conquering the fertile Po Valley of Northern Italy as well as placing the Greek city states of Southern France and Northern Spain under their protection. Hannibal Barca was at war with the Greek city state of Tarraco in North-Eastern Spain, near modern day Barcelona. The Romans suddenly placed Tarraco under their “protection” and said that if Hannibal continued any further in his campaign against it that it would be war with Rome. Hannibal, knowing that if Carthage was to be a great power once more, war with Rome was necessary, bit the bullet and besieged the city.

Carthage vs Rome: Round 2

Hannibal knew that since the Carthaginian navy was destroyed, a conventional war against Rome would be impossible. Carthage itself could be threatened by the Roman control of the Mediterranean. Thus Hannibal developed a new plan to take the fight to the Romans without having to use the Carthaginian navy. Rome was expecting a Carthaginian attack in the South and so instead he planned on marching across the South of France and the Alps into the North of Italy. Hannibal did the unimaginable, he marched an a Carthaginian army, including elephants, over the Alps in the winter. The Romans guarded all the main passes, thus to catch the Romans off guard, he marched through hidden mountain passes known only to the native Gallic population. A large portion of his army was wiped out in these treacherous heights, but his army was swelled by recruits from the local Gallic population, who hated the Romans nearly as much as the Carthaginians.

When spring came and he marched into the fertile fields of Northern Italy, the Roman state was unprepared. He butchered Roman armies many times his size at the battle of Lake Tresamine, using the fog to hide his army and launch a crippling ambush. Hannibal wandered down the Italian peninsula, further destroying another massive Roman army at Trebia. Hundreds of thousands of Roman troops were killed in these battles total and the flower of Roman leadership was continually cut down. Hannibal was one of the greatest military geniuses in history, constantly using his wits to defeat much larger forces.

He knew that Rome built its regime off unequal alliances with other Italian states and so Hannibal tried to exploit these to its advantage. He hoped that he could turn the Italian states against Rome and for Carthage. He did not succeed very well, only Capua, which was culturally part of Greece, turned to the Carthaginian side with most of the Italian states fighting with great courage and loyalty. However, the Carthaginians succeeded marvelously at getting the wealth Greek city state of Syracuse in Sicily to rebel against the Romans alongside getting the Macedonian Empire to declare war on the Romans. At this point, it appeared that the Roman Republic was doomed and cornered on all sides.

The Roman consul Fabian developed a tactic to help fight off the Carthaginian forces. He knew that Hannibal was a tactical genius and that engaging him in direct combat was foolish, however, Hannibal was trying to survive in a hostile land as an invading force. Thus, by maintaining a guerrilla campaign he could starve the Carthaginian force and defeat them slowly. These Fabian tactics worked well, but the Roman people could not stand the dishonor of not fighting the Carthaginians and so when Fabian left, so did his policies and so yet another round of armies were created to defeat Hannibal.

A massive Roman army of 70,000 men converged upon Hannibal’s 40,000 in Southern Italy, but at the battle of Cannae Hannibal again cornered and surrounded them like sheep, butchering them. The battle was bloodier than even that of Gettysburg in the American civil war by 20,000. The Roman military and leading classes were disproportionately cut down. The citizens of Rome responded with panic, worrying that Hannibal would march upon their city and finally win the war. All available men were pressed into military service and even slaves were freed in hopes that they might be decisive in the final conflict. However, Hannibal knew that his advantage lay in his ability to continually move and knew that if he forced himself into a single position to besiege Rome that he would inevitably fail. Instead he wandered the south of Italy, ravaging the countryside, waiting for something in the situation to change. Rome’s advantage lay in its massive population. The Romans could lose countless armies while the Carthaginians could only lose one. A similar comparison would be with the Axis and Allies in the Second World War, in which the Nazis had the advantage in tactics in training but the Allies could pull upon the endless population and industry of America and Russia. The will of the Roman people was iron strong and did not bend after countless defeats. The Allied peoples fought loyally, spilling much blood for the ruling city.

After a few years the Carthaginians tried to reinforce their position in Italy. Marching from Spain, Hasdurabal, Hannibal’s brother, made the same Alpine crossing to reinforce Hannibal with a large military force to finally defeat. The Romans were however able to corner their military force in Southern Italy at Metaurus, preventing them from unifying with Hannibal’s forces. At Metaurus, Hannibal’s last hopes of reinforcement were dashed. This much more than any other battle of the war, even the famous ones like Tresamine and Cannae was decisive to world history. Had the Carthaginian armies been able to unite, the genius Hannibal would have been able to destroy Rome and without the force there was no way Hannibal could defeat Rome’s hordes.

While Hannibal lingered in Southern Italy, the Romans, led by Scipio Africanus, came to the conclusion that the defeat of Carthage lay outside Italy. He invaded Carthaginian Spain, conquering it and securing the wealthy silver mines that funded much of the Carthaginian cause. He then invaded the Tunisian heartland of Carthage. With the homeland threatened, after more than 20 years in Italy, Hannibal returned to lead the Carthaginian forces. However, with Roman dominance of the seas, he could bring his Italian army with him, thus resulting in its defeat. The African army was a motley crew of badly trained soldiers, gathered quickly for defense of the homeland with the only pride filling element being the elephant corps. Hannibal was defeated at Zama as Scipio was able to confuse the elephants of the Carthaginian army and turn them on the Carthaginians, destroying their ranks. Carthage surrendered and Hannibal fled east to Macedon.

The siege lasted two years and when the Romans finally assaulted the city’s walls it was a bloody fight that nearly defeated the Romans. The Romans humiliated Carthage with the defeat, forcing it to demolish its wall, removing all its colonies, and shrinking its military to a ridiculous size with no ability to wage war. Rome even controlled Carthage’s foreign policy.

The years afterwards were fraught for Carthage. The Roman senator Cato ended every speech he ever spoke, no matter the topic, with “Carthage must be destroyed”. Carthage’s economic power and place in the world shrunk remarkably, becoming a minor fearful place. Its end finally came when the native Numidian peoples of what is today Algeria attacked them. The Numidians were Roman allies and so Rome used Carthage’s self defense as an excuse to declare war on and destroy Carthage. The Carthaginians formed one last heroic defense and held out for a two year siege. The defense was so stiff that the Romans only barely won. The Romans in they victory, as revenge for Cannae and millions of deaths burned the city to the ground, killing the entire population. They even salted the surrounding fields so that the land would be uninhabitable for several generations and so Carthage would not be able to rise again. After centuries of being a proud world civilization, Carthage was no more and would never be again.

The subjugation of Greece

Macedon sided with Carthage during the Punic Wars. The Roman Republic had finally grown large enough to start to worry the wealthy and antique Hellenistic states of the east. Nothing much came their involvement in the war, with some minor naval clashes to the East of Italy. However, it started a conflict with Rome that Macedon would not survive.

The Romans technically came to protect the rights of the states of Southern Greece, such as Athens that Macedonians had subjugated. The Romans marched across the mountains of Central Greece, defeating the Macedonian army at the battle of Cynoscephalae. The mobility of the Roman formations allowed them to outmaneuver the inflexible Greek phalanxes. The phalanx after 400 years of supremacy had finally been defeated. Macedon was evicted from its southern Greek client states. Greece was organized into an independent series of weak states called the Achaean league. Athens by this point was a mere university town and Sparta had declined to practical depopulation. The Greek states, ridden by class conflict and internal squabbling were hardly deserving of independence and completely wasted it when they did receive it. In fact, the upper classes of most Greek cities supported Roman conquest for fear of socialist revolt inside their own nations. Too many grudges, held down by external pressure, erupted into violence.

Meanwhile, the Seleucids were once again on the offensive, driving from their heartland in the Fertile Crescent, they moved into Anatolia, seizing the Southern section all the way into the Aegean. They then went about trying to conquer Greece, or “liberate” it. The Romans crushed the Seleucids at the second battle of Themoplyae, driving them out of Greece. This was followed by a Roman invasion of Ionia, crushing the Seleucid forces at the battle of Magnesia, starting the decline of that empire. The Seleucid empire to collapse into a weak rump state after this.

Meanwhile, Macedonia kept rebelling. After another two failed revolts, Macedonia was divided into multiple Roman provinces and directly administered. The cities of older Greece also tried to reassert their independence and failed once again. The Romans, once so worshipful of the civilization of their Greek predecessors, giving them practical independence, grew tired of their virtues and annexed Greece fully. Rome now completely dominated the Mediterranean. The only other country that could combat it was Ptolemaic Egypt that had since collapsed into internal weakness. Nothing could destroy Rome and its power lay undefeated on the battlefield.

Rome conquers the World and thus defeats itself

The Italy that finally defeated Macedonia and seized the wealthy cities of the Hellenistic East was a completely different society and even civilization from that that had fought off Hannibal. Rapid social changes had taken place that completely transformed Rome into something unrecognizable.

Hannibal’s invasion of Italy itself was a massive disruption. For over 20 years, Carthaginian armies wandered the Roman heartland, burning farms, disrupting families and stealing. The flower of Roman youth and aristocracy were butchered in the hundreds of thousands against Hannibal’s military genius. Millions of Romans in general died in the war. When the war was over, it left Italy denuded and shambled.

Many nations, however, have recovered and even superseded their pre-war existence under worse circumstances. Western Europe recovered from the Second World War in a matter of decades and the Viking raids had an invigorating effect on Europe, not a dilapidating one. However, the Roman response to the world conquests left much to be wanted. The conquests brought in massive numbers of slaves. The city of Rome became a melting pot of people with ancestral Italians becoming incredibly outnumbered to massive groups of foreigners. The gold of foreign cities was also seized, thus resulting in huge amounts of foreign silver pouring into the Roman treasuries. Both of these came mainly into the hands of the great generals who took on these conquests and thus on a greater level, the powerful families that these leaders sprung from. We saw a ridiculous dis-balance in the concentration of wealth, with truly massive amounts falling into the hands of a very small few.These two dis-balances caused a great weakening in Roman society.

The massive amounts of slave labor and wealth concentrated in the hands of a few allowed the concentration of the Italian countryside. The small scale Italian farmer, who was still recovering from the wars with Hannibal and the soldier who’s 25 year career took him away from the farm simply could not compete against the massive interests. The Italian countryside was divided between massive plantations or latifundia, that were stocked by poorly treated slaves. Cattle ranching was by far the most profitable of all forms of agriculture and thus the previous Italian peasant class was replaced for the most part by herds of cattle. This resulted in a depopulation of much of Italy, with the Southern regions, or Magna Graecia, losing truly massive parts of its population. Meanwhile, the old Roman yeomanry left for the cities and became an urban proletariat. Chronically under-employed, they lived on the dole, or the institutional Roman bread supply and living in terribly constructed apartments. Writers spoke of the “good days before the Punic Wars” before crushing inequality descended upon the empire.

While one part of the population slid into dissolute poverty, a small minority became fabulously wealthy. This resulted in the famous decadence of the Roman Empire. Italy ran a massive trade deficit with the rest of the empire, stealing gold from the provinces in order to buy the produced goods of the provinces. Celebrations became massive and estates enormous. The opulence of some of the events were truly unimaginable, with some participants vomiting so that they could consume more food. The gladiatorial competitions became massive opportunities to show off the wealth and expanse of the empire, lasting many days with countless deaths of slaves and exotic animals. The North African elephant, bear and lion were all driven to extinction to satiate the audience’s desire for blood. Millions likely died in the arenas over the centuries of Roman rule.

The slaves came primarily from Greece and changed the character of Roman civilization. The Romans, previously a relatively unimaginative and unartistic people, suddenly produced a nearly industrial scale of artistic manufactures created by Greek slaves who would be producing the same pieces of art back home. Greek culture made a massive imprint upon Roman civilization, with philosophy, art and writing suddenly inundating Italy.

The Romans of the age complained that the Greek culture destroyed what made Rome powerful, its manly vigor. The Romans viewed the Greeks as a weak and effete civilization, one that preferred sensual pleasure and literary skill to manly endeavors like war and exercise. Young Roman men supposedly no longer spent their time training military but instead dealt with elaborate fashions and attended expensive parties. Roman women, who's traiditonal role was to homemaker and mother saw an expansion and we saw the emancipation of women. Women were in high positions of power and wealthy women were quite common. Like in most examples in history, this was accompanied by a lower birth rate. Roman authors disliked this and complained that that liberation of women resulted in the weakening of society and the lessening of the number of the Roman people. We saw the Hellenization of Roman culture with the previous Italian peasant culture becoming a worldly Hellenized one. The Roman aristocracy took very well to Stoicism, which fit well with their militaristic and aggressive world view. Greek became the language of civilized society. One was not an educated gentlemen if he could not speak and read Greek and thus the Classics that Roman civilization was based upon. A Roman gentleman was expected to be fully versed in Greek philosophy and literature. Even the Old Italian and Roman gods, such as Jupiter and Saturn became increasingly Hellenized, even if they did not spread out very differently from their previous Indo-European branch. Today, the Roman and Greek gods are considered homogenous. Rome may have conquered Greece with armies but Greece conquered Rome with words.

If we view the Romans as a barbarian tribe that conquered an advanced civilization and then became effete and civilized, then this narrative makes complete sense. Like the Vikings, Mongols or Afghans, they assimilated into the preexisting more attractive culture of the more ancient culture they conquered. Like the Mongols who preferred comfort and harems to fighting, so did the Romans.

The destabilization of Roman society started to have profound effects of the Roman political. Originally built on a parochial system in a small city run by a near tribal elite with a landowning peasant class beneath them, Rome had transformed into a massive urban empire that dominated the Mediterranean. The Roman political system was unable to catch up and thus fell apart into confusion and bloody chaos. Assassinations and civil wars were about to become quite common in Roman politics as a new equilibrium on being Roman would be discovered. Rome would survive but it would change forever. Rome the young city state would die forever, replaced by the Roman global civilization.