THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter VII - The Subjugation of the West

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The Roman aristocracy had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task-- the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale of the state. It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy or monarchy--for the two coincide--to have correctly apprehended and vigorously realized this its highest destination.

What the irresistible force of circumstances had paved the way for, through the senate establishing against its will the foundations of the future Roman dominion in the west as in the east; what thereafter the Roman emigration to the provinces--which came as a public calamity, no doubt, but also in the western regions at any rate as a pioneer of a higher culture--pursued as matter of instinct; the creator of the Roman democracy, Gaius Gracchus, grasped and began to carry out with statesmanlike clearness and decision.

The two fundamental ideas of the new policy--to reunite the territories under the power of Rome, so far as they were Greek, and to colonize them, so far as they were not Greek--had already in the Gracchan age been practically recognized by the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus and by the Transalpine conquests of Flaccus: but the prevailing reaction once more arrested their application.

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