Rome Notes

Here are more Roman notes we took today:

that's a Roman legion, clear as day

• 5000 soldiers, not in it for pay (not yet)
• the Roman army's elite heavy infantry
• recruited exclusively from Roman citizens
• group of eighty's a century
• on horseback is the cavalry
• shield, sword, dagger, and armor and tunic

 fightin' 'gainst Carthage in Wars that are Punic

• the Punic War (264-146 BCE)
• Rome vs Carthage
• three wars

two empires fighting for control

• First Punic War (264-241 BCE)
• naval battles for control of the strategically located island of Sicily
• Rome wins this one

The (Carthaginian) Empire Strikes Back

• Second Punic War (218-201 BCE)
• 29 year-old Carthaginian general Hannibal almost took Rome
• attacks Rome from the NORTH after crossing Iberia (Spain) and the Alps
• lays seige to much of the peninsula for 15 years, but he never can get to Rome
• Rome 2, Carthage 0

Third (and final) Punic War

• 149-146 BCE
• Rome wanted to fully remove the threat of Carthage
• Scipio, Tiberius Gracchus, and others mercilessly attacked the city
• Carthage was burned for 17 days; the city's walls and buildings were utterly destroyed
• when the war ended the last 50,000 people in the city were sold to slavery
• the rest of Carthage's territories were annexed, and made into the Roman province of Africa.

economic change, social upheaval

• slaves poured into Italy (50,000 Carthaginians, 150,000 Greek POWs, etc.)
• by the end of the second century BCE there were over a million slaves in Italy
• small farmers lost their land to aristocrats (for little or no money) if they couldn’t pay their debts, sometimes because the men of the farm were fighting battles
• slaves did the work on the farms for the rich
• the big farms became massive estates called latifundia