The example of Scipio inspired many Roman nobiles in the years following his victory over Hannibal to also win fame, glory, and a crowning triumph. For that, the Greek world offered the most seductive theaters of war. King Philip V of Macedon had for a short time been the ally of Hannibal, and this justified in Roman eyes the war that ended with Philip’s defeat in 196 BC and Rome’s formal declaration to the Greek cities that henceforth they would be “free.” This declaration was both shrewd and idealistic. For on the one hand, the Roman senate was not prepared to annex new provinces but yet wanted to extend its political influence, and on the other hand some Roman aristocrats indeed favored a benign policy toward the Greeks, whose achievements in the arts, literature, and philosophy some members of the Roman aristocracy now began to appreciate. The impact of Rome, however, in practice restricted the playing field of other powers in Greece, such as the Aetolian League, while the granting of freedom was in Roman eyes a benefit to which the Greeks should react with due “gratitude” or obedience to Roman wishes. As explained earlier, this was not immediately understood by the Greeks. When in 192 BC the Aetolians invited Antiochus III to liberate the Greeks in his turn, Rome’s attitude toward the Greeks hardened. Not only did the Romans defeat Antiochus’ army twice and force a humiliating peace on him, they dismantled the Aetolian League as well. Suspicions grew on both the Roman and the Greek side. Rumors about the rearmament of Macedon incited the senate to issue another declaration of war (171 BC). After losing the battle of Pydna in 168 BC, the old kingdom was doomed. In 167 BC, it was formally divided into four republics, its king forced to walk as a captive in his victor’s triumph. So enormous was the booty
That the tributum, the tax on landed property that Roman citizens until then had to pay, could be abolished in Italy; since 167 BC, tributum would only be levied on property in the provinces, which gave it the connotation of a “tribute.”
An uprising of the Macedonians forced the Romans to abolish the four republics and to formally annex the territory as the provincia Macedonia in 148 BC. In 146 BC, the last resistance of the Greeks was broken, and most of Greece annexed to the province of Macedonia. In the same year, the end came for Carthage as well. After the peace of 201 BC, the city had made a quick recovery thanks to her commercial network, while the Romans nourished a paranoid fear of a resurgent Punic power. The politician Cato, paragon of Roman discipline and patriotism, used to end every speech in the senate with the remark that “he was further of the opinion that Carthage had to be destroyed.” In 148 BC, conflicts between the city and the by then independent Berber princes in Roman eyes offered enough legal grounds for declaring a “just” war. The Third Punic War (149-146 BC) was one long siege of the city, fanatically defended by its inhabitants, who in the end were no match for the Roman army. Carthage was left in ruins, and its territory after a while was organized as the Roman provincia Africa. The victorious commander was another Scipio, grandson by adoption of the victor of Hannibal, who went down into history as Scipio Aemilianus Africanus the Younger. He too became a man of enormous prestige, who in his lifetime had no equal among the nobles of the republic.
Roman society was militaristic through and through. In no other important state was the participation of the population in the army as high as it was in Rome in the 2nd century BC. In the first half of the century, the citizens who were liable for military service—a little more than 50% of the citizenry—on average served five years or even longer in the legions. This practice slowly started to take its toll. The campaigns in Spain that dragged on from year to year offered little booty and little glory but the risks of being killed were higher. They were extremely unpopular and created an “un-Roman” sort of war fatigue. Many a soldier discovered on his return to Italy after years of service that his piece of land was neglected, sometimes infringed upon or downright stolen, and that anyway there was not much sense in trying to make a living from it, since with its meager produce he had to face the competition of new landed estates, worked by slaves, that produced on a large scale for the market. It was the nobility that had invested their disproportionately large parts of the flow of war booty from the east in such estates, a new fashion taken over from the Sicilian Greeks and the Carthaginians. Many impoverished peasants and veteran soldiers moved to the towns and cities, to Rome most of all, thus adding to a large unemployed city proletariat. A certain feeling of malaise arose, the sense of a looming crisis. This was the background against which in 133 BC a sudden crisis broke out, which was to lead to a century of internal violence and fundamental changes.
World History
