Sulla lands in Greece, besieges Athens.
86
Fall of Athens. Pontic army evacuates Greece after two defeats.
Marius, Consul VII, dies.
Cinna sends army to Asia (taken over by Sulla in 84).
85
Sulla negotiates peace treaty with Mithridates at Dardanus, near Troy.
84
New Italian citizens distributed among all the tribes.
Cinna murdered by mutineers.
83
Sulla lands in Italy.
Second Mithridatic War (to 82).
82
Civil war in Italy. Sulla wins battle of the Colline Gate.
Proscriptions start.
81
Sulla appointed dictator, reforms the constitution and the criminal law.
80
Sulla Consul II.
79
Sulla resigns as dictator.
78
Sulla dies.
75 (or 74)
King Nicomedes bequeaths Bithynia to Rome.
74
Mithridates invades Bithynia. Lucullus given command against him.
73–71
Slave revolt in Italy, led by Spartacus.
68
After successful campaigning against Mithridates, Lucullus’s troops become restless.
67
Pompey given command against pirates, whom he clears from the Mediterranean.
66
Pompey given command against Mithridates.
63
Mithridates commits suicide.
Cicero elected consul.
62
Pompey’s eastern settlement; he returns to Italy.
61
Senate refuses to confirm Pompey’s settlement and land allocations for his soldiers.
60
Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus agree alliance, known as the First Triumvirate.
59
Caesar elected consul.
58–50
Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
49–45
Civil war.
48
Battle of Pharsalus.
44
Caesar assassinated.
43–33
Octavian, Mark Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus establish Second Triumvirate.
Proscription. Cicero put to death.
32–31
Civil war.
31
Antony and Cleopatra defeated at the Battle of Actium.
30
Antony and Cleopatra commit suicide.
27
Octavian/Augustus establishes new constitutional settlement.
43
Invasion of Britannia.
Dedication
In memory of
the poet
José-Maria de Heredia,
my forebear
and
another student of Rome
LA TREBBIA
J-M H
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My faithful twin props in England have been my agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, and the London Library. My exemplary editor on the far side of the Atlantic, Will Murphy, ably supported by assistant editor Katie Donelan, has tolerated broken deadlines and been a fountain of wise advice. As with my previous books, Professor Robert Cape of Austin College, Texas, has kindly read a draft and offered valuable comments and suggestions.
I am indebted to the dentist Shahin Nozohoor for advice on the state of Pyrrhus’s teeth.
I am grateful to Penguin Books for permission to quote extensively from its translations of Livy and Polybius.
SOURCES
The main evidence for our knowledge of the history of the Roman Republic is books, mostly written from the first century B.C. to the period of the high empire in the third century A.D. Monkish summarizers and authors of miscellanies of various kinds stretch into the Byzantine era. Most offer narrative accounts, but those which address Rome’s beginnings do not succeed in distinguishing fact from legend and, where there are gaps in the records, tend to fill them in with what was thought to be appropriate rather than with what actually happened. Events from the Republic’s declining years are allowed to reshape early stories. Sometimes an incident that took place in one era is copied and inserted into a previous one.
Livy (59 B.C.–A.D. 17), a northern Italian and an almost exact contemporary of the emperor Augustus, wrote a vast history from Rome’s foundation to his own day. When complete, it comprised 142 “books” (that is, long chapters). However, much ancient literature failed to survive the fall of empire and the judgments of Christian monks. Today, we have only thirty-five of Livy’s books. He was a literary artist of a high order, and some of his set pieces are gripping to read, but he added moral color and drama to his canvas; this needs to be cleaned off before the bare essentials of a partial truth can be discerned.
By contrast, the Greek Polybius (about 200–118), who spent much of his life as an exile in Rome, where he mixed in leading circles, wrote of the (for him) recent past. He investigated the period between 264 and 146, when Rome emerged as a leading Mediterranean power. No great stylist, he was a stickler for accuracy. He spoke to survivors of the events he described, examined documents (for example, treaties), paid attention to geography (often visiting sites in person) and was present at some occasions himself. “The mere statement of a fact may interest us,” he remarked. “But it is when the reason is added that the study of history becomes fruitful.” His general attitude resembles that of Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century. Of the original forty volumes of his History, only the first five are extant in their entirety; much of the work has come down to us in collections of excerpts that were kept in libraries in Byzantium.
Another talented Greek was Plutarch, whose life straddled the turn of the first century A.D. He had the off-the-wall idea of writing “parallel” lives of famous Greeks and Romans—for example, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. These comparisons threw little new light on Plutarch’s subjects, but each biography is a fascinating stand-alone text. The author profitably plundered every source he could lay his hands on, although he did not always sufficiently assess their reliability. He made no claim to be a historian and was, rather, a moralist who explored the impact of character on men’s destinies. He had a sharp eye for the telling anecdote. Plutarch was also a copious essayist, and his works bring together a wide range of useful information on the Greek and Roman world.