The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford

product of popular feeling during the Hannibalic War was the emergence of a charismatic leader who for the moment avoided any overt challenge to the collective rule of the oligarchy, but whose example had nonetheless the most sinister implications for the future, P. Cornelius Scipio. Carried by popular fervour to the command in Spain, he there found himself hailed as king by some native Spanish troops; he turned the embarrassing compliment by creating the title imperator for them to use. The title was initially monopolized by members of his family and then competed for in the escalating political struggles of the late Republic. The victory over Carthage at Zama then gave Scipio the title of Africanus and a degree of eminence over his peers never before achieved. He even claimed a special relationship with Jupiter. Also symptomatic of the degree of eminence which an individual could achieve in this period is the cult offered to Marcellus, the captor of Syracuse, by that city (we do not know whether in his lifetime or posthumously). For the moment, however, senatorial control was unchallenged; the astonishing thing is not that the assembly in 200 refused initially to vote for another war, with Philip V of Macedon, but that it was persuaded so readily to change its mind. Such was the grip of the oligarchy on the Roman state.

1. Records of temple foundations appear to have been preserved independently of the main historical tradition (see here).

2. It is also interesting that at some time the Romans acquired the word macellum, market, from a Phoenician source.

3. It is unreasonable to suppose with some scholars that the law was motivated by the desire of men of business to eliminate competition from senators.

       VI The Conquest of the East

      ROMAN POLITICAL involvement east of the Adriatic began with the First Illyrian War in 229, an event as crucial to our understanding of Roman expansion as to that of Polybius, with his Hellenocentric view of the ‘world’ conquered by the Romans. According to Polybius, the Illyrians (Map 3), long in the habit of molesting ships sailing from Italy, did so even more when in the course of the reign of Queen Teuta of Illyria they seized control of Phoenice; a Roman protest led to the murder of L. Coruncanius, one of the Roman ambassadors, on his way home and war was declared. Roman distaste for a queen who could not or would not control her subjects’ piracy is intelligible enough and one can compare the Roman punishment of their troops who seized Rhegium in 280; but the strategic threat posed by Illyria with its capital at Rhizon on the bay of Kotor should not be underestimated. ‘Whoever holds Kotor, I hold him to be master of the Adriatic and to have it within his power to make a descent on Italy and thereby surround it by land and sea’ remarked Saint-Gouard in 1572. Of the power of Illyria after the seizure of Phoenice Rome had tangible evidence in the shape of the pleas of those who suffered.