The Roman Republic

Romans named each year after two consuls, elected to share the top office for just twelve months.

From kings to a republic

Romans later dated the founding of their city to 753 BCE and told how the twins Romulus and Remus, raised by a she-wolf, built it on the Palatine hill. Archaeology shows villages on the hills above the Tiber well before that, which slowly merged into a town. According to Roman tradition seven kings ruled until 509 BCE, when the nobles drove out the last, Tarquin the Proud. They swore never to have a king again and set up a res publica, a "public thing": a state run by elected officials, a council of elders and assemblies of citizens. The Met’s essay on the Republic notes that over its last three centuries Rome grew from this city-state into the capital of a vast territory.

Consuls, Senate and tribunes

Power was split so that no one could become a king. Two consuls, elected every year, commanded the armies and could veto each other. The Senate, a council of former officials who usually served for life, had no formal power to make laws but gave advice that magistrates rarely ignored, and it controlled money and foreign policy. Assemblies of citizens elected officials and passed laws. In an emergency the consuls could name a dictator with full power for at most six months. Society was divided between a small group of old families, the patricians, and everyone else, the plebeians. In a long struggle the plebeians won their own officials, the tribunes, who could block any act that harmed a plebeian, and a written law code. The Twelve Tables, set up in the Forum around 450 BCE, were learned by heart by Roman schoolboys for centuries.

Rome against Carthage

By about 270 BCE Rome controlled most of the Italian peninsula. Its great rival was Carthage, a Phoenician city in what is now Tunisia, with a strong navy and trade across the western Mediterranean. Romans called Carthaginians Poeni, which gives us the name Punic Wars. The First Punic War, from 264 to 241 BCE, was fought over Sicily, and Rome won by building fleets almost from scratch. In the Second, from 218 to 201 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched from Spain over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy with an army that included war elephants. He destroyed Roman armies at Lake Trasimene in 217 BCE and at Cannae in 216 BCE, the worst defeat in Roman history. Yet Rome refused to make peace, and most of its Italian allies stayed loyal. Scipio, later called Africanus, carried the war to Africa and beat Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE. In the Third Punic War Rome destroyed Carthage completely in 146 BCE, the same year it sacked Corinth in Greece.

A republic falls apart

Conquest brought slaves and wealth that flowed mainly to the rich, while small farmers who served in the legions lost their land. In 133 BCE the tribune Tiberius Gracchus tried to give public land to the poor and was clubbed to death by senators; his brother Gaius met a similar end in 121 BCE. Generals began to command armies loyal to them personally. Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BCE. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and in January 49 BCE crossed the Rubicon, the stream marking the edge of his province, with his army, starting a civil war. He won and was made dictator for life, and on the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BCE, a group of senators stabbed him to death in a meeting of the Senate. More civil war followed, until Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE.