In our last segment, the centuries-long "Conflict of the Orders" between Roman patricians and plebeians had just ended, which didn't really solve the struggle between rich and poor so much as reshuffle the board. However, this would only become evident decades later, and in the meantime, Rome had a host of outside threats to unite the classes. 

Italy of 300 B.C. was a mosaic of quarrelsome regions and city-states jockeying incessantly with one another for power. Entangling and regularly-shifting alliances made the mix even more volatile. Rome lived uneasily with all of them, and its experiences at the hands of the Etruscans and the Senone Gauls (who had sacked the city in 390 B.C.) kept it constantly on the defensive. The Romans had already fought two wars with the Samnites in central Italy, but the Third Samnite War in 298 touched off something bigger: it started Rome down the road toward its eventual conquest of the entire Mediterranean. 

​Why was this war different? Because even though it began in the usual way, in a border dispute between Rome and Samnium, it eventually dragged all of Italy into the fight. The Samnites, their final straw broken, joined an enormous coalition of Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls - basically, all of Rome's enemies - to wipe them off the face of the earth.  Through a strong alliance of its own and a deft campaign of divide-and-conquer (the consul Quintus Fabius could have taught Napoleon a thing or two), the Romans routed the Gauls, bedeviled the Etruscans and Umbrians and utterly crushed the Samnites, ultimately absorbing their territory in 290 and becoming the dominant power in Italy. Rome went on to destroy the Senone kingdom and bring the Etruscans to heel in the 280s. 

Unfortunately, these resounding victories immediately drew Rome into its next conflict, and its first war with a foreign power. The Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy, alarmed at Rome's rapid expansion in their direction, pre-emptively attacked a Roman navy off its coast and then appealed to Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus (now split between Greece and Albania) for help. Pyrrhus, who was eager to establish an empire for himself in southern Italy and Sicily, was more than tickled by the request, and invaded with a large force in 280 B.C. Supported by elephants, Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in two major battles, but suffered such horrendous casualties that he could not press his advantage (inspiring the term "Pyrrhic victory," naturally). The alliances Rome had established (including one with Carthage!) allowed it to replenish its numbers far more easily than Pyrrhus's expedition could. He floundered across Italy and Sicily for several years, achieving no concrete gains and turning most of his Greek and Italian allies against him, before being soundly defeated at Beneventum in 275 B.C. and running for home. Rome was then able to pick off the exhausted Greek cities of Italy one by one, completing its conquest of the peninsula in 270 B.C.

 "Conquest by defense" is a strange concept, but it was a strategy that was paying off in spades for the Romans. Forced repeatedly into defensive conflicts, the Romans were able to toughen and refine their war machine to triumph against daunting odds and expand their holdings as a result. The next stage of this pattern commenced just six years after their consolidation of Italy, with the beginning of the First Punic War in 264 B.C. ("Punic" = Phoenician = Carthaginian.) The Sicilian city of Messana called upon the Romans to defend them from their hostile neighbor Syracuse, but - oopsie! - they had also asked the Carthaginians to do the same thing. This plunged Carthage and Rome into a major conflict to control the island of Sicily, and a longer fight for control of the western Mediterranean that extended into a Second and Third Punic War over a total period of 118 years.

​Whether you are a classics fiend or not, you probably know that these were the wars that made Rome. Collectively, they were the largest conflict the ancient world had seen since Alexander the Great invaded Persia, and they sucked in almost all of the major kingdoms of the Mediterranean, mostly in opposition to Rome. In addition to Carthage, Rome found itself at war with the Numidians, the Gauls, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Macedonians and the Seleucid Empire in the Middle East. One by one, Rome trounced them all, although it flirted heavily with disaster when Hannibal invaded Italy (with his own set of elephants), destroying army after Roman army in the field. Fortunately, disaster wasn't in the mood to flirt, Rome was able to raise more armies, and all of Hannibal's efforts came to nothing. Rome destroyed Carthage's empire at the Battle of Zama in 202, crushed Macedon at Cynoscephalae and Pydna in 197 and 168, respectively, and sent the Seleucids packing at Magnesia in 190. Between the beginning and the end of the Punic Wars, Spain, Sicily, southern Gaul, western Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece became provinces of Rome. After Rome destroyed the city of Carthage in 146, its territory in North Africa was annexed as well. In the course of a century, Rome went from a strong regional power to the undisputed master of the Mediterranean world. 

So at this point, you may be asking:

• How exactly could the Romans be seen as "victims" of this success? "Success via victimization" seems more appropriate.
• Isn't this post losing the thread somewhat in this (incredibly cursory) overview of Rome's early conquests?

To address the latter point, yes, this is very cursory, and I recommend checking out some of the original historians of this time: Polybius is a great eye-witness source of this period, and Livy is good as well, if a bit more of a propagandist. 

To address both points: this provides the background to the next segment, showing the effect all of this rapid expansion and growth had on Rome as a society. While these wars turned Rome into a superpower and established its reputation as an unbeatable force of nature, other results of the wars were enacting enormous changes on Roman class structure and economic stratification, as well as putting an incredible strain on the Senate as a governing body. Untold wealth was flowing into Rome from all directions, yet into relatively few pockets. Rome was governing far-flung foreign peoples, yet the governing body was the same city council from the plebeian - patrician conflicts that was still largely unwilling to widen its narrow scope of interest. With peace at last breaking out, the Romans had the opportunity once again to turn their focus inward, and the cracks in Roman society that had been papered over during the wars now began to split open once more.

For more information on Amiculus doings, you can check out my newsletter. Now, we proceed to the first segment of this Roman Debauchery Fun Fact Series: 

The basic conflict of the Roman Republic, much like the basic conflict of any government, was the haves against the have-nots. In this case, it was the wealthy, hereditary elite patrician class against the commoners, or plebeians.

The conflict began almost as soon as the last Roman king was kicked out in 509 B.C. The patricians controlled the Senate, and the plebeians served as soldiers in Rome's armies. During wartime, plebeian farms had no one to run them, and patricians would provide loans to pleb families to keep them running. However, these loans often came with usurous interest, and if a family could not repay, it was within the patricians' rights to seize the farm, and carry the family away into slavery.  Many plebs were impoverished, beaten, enslaved and even murdered by their wealthy creditors.

In 494 B.C., Under these conditions, the plebs revolted, and refused to fight Rome's wars. The patricians ultimately allowed the plebs into the Senate as tribunes, offices created to protect the interests of the plebs, and order was restored. 

For about five minutes, actually. This did nothing to address the debt situation, or the fact that wealthy Romans could enslave poor Romans for not paying their bills. Patricians and plebeians continued their "Conflict of the Orders" for the next two hundred years, the former to maintain or claw back their dominance, the latter to achieve political parity.

Each time there was a conflict, the plebeians mutinied or threatened to do so until the Senate acquiesced. This resulted in significant changes to Roman law, such as the Lex Licinia Sextia in 367 B.C.,  which opened all state and senatorial offices to the plebs. (It still didn't abolish enslavement for debt, though - that didn't happen for another 40 years.)

The Conflict of the Orders finally ended in 287 B.C. with the Lex Hortensia, removing the last patrician check on plebeian power and giving them full political equality.

However, in all this time that the plebs and the patricians were fighting, a funny thing was happening to the Senate. The plebs were getting increased representation, this much was true. However, this did nothing to change the fact that it was still controlled entirely by the rich. The pleb families in the Senate had become nobility themselves over the centuries, growing wealthy through their office and through intermarriage with the patrician class. The enormous wealth senators enjoyed kept campaigns for the Senate prohibitively expensive, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for poorer plebeian families to compete with incumbents for office. Increasingly insulated from the plight of their class, the Senatorial plebs became less and less interested in representing their interests and more interested in maintaining their hold on power. Thus, even though the patricians were defeated, this victory disguised a new hybrid patrician-plebeian aristocracy more entrenched than the first, and that the financial situation of Rome's common people had barely budged.