https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i4h3y4/why_rome/
created by Hypattie on 18/01/2025 at 20:52 UTC
8 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
How come Rome succeed in conquering so much but not cities like Sparta, Athens, or the other ones in Italy?
When I read about the Greeks or the Etruscans, it always seems they had their home city and some colonies but that none of them really wanted to dominate everything, or at least to expand too much. They won a war, loot & destroy, but didn't expand.
If Rome had been like them, it would just have conquer a couple of extra cities and then stop...
I read that it was because they were always attacked, so each time they protect themself by destroying/assimilate their opponents... But that's true for everyone : the sabins, the volcis, the latins... they were in the same situation, but only Rome manage to expand this much. It's like the others wanted to remains in their geographical area.
And on the Greek side, the only one who succeed, Alexander, didn't have a strong superstructure to protect his empire, so everything split as soon as he died.
So why Rome was different? Is it because of the Senat? Or their religion? Or the way their society was organized? Randomness?
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Comment by Still_Yam9108 at 18/01/2025 at 22:03 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Your question rests on something of a false premise.
When I read about the Greeks or the Etruscans, it always seems they had their home city and some colonies but that none of them really wanted to dominate everything, or at least to expand too much. They won a war, loot & destroy, but didn't expand.
You take a look through something like Thucydides of Xenophon's Hellenica, and it's hard to shake the notion that Athens, Sparta, and Thebes definitely *wanted* to control all of Greece if they could, it's just that none of them could manage it. They certainly made efforts to put their foot on everyone else's neck. But they couldn't, for a fairly simple cultural reason. You had a notion of poleis (city-states), and each polis had its own governing structure. It might be more dominated by aristocratic or popular elements, and you might change it to be a government more amenable to you if you conquered a small city, but ultimately it would forever remain a separate city, and could therefore only ever be subjugated by your city, not integrated into some kind of larger metropole. That inevitably bred resentment, and what kept happening to things like the Delian League, or the Spartan and later Theban hegemonies, is that the second the overlord suffered a major loss, all of its subjugated cities would bolt and deprive it of money and manpower right when they needed them most, and the empire would collapse before it really got going.
I'm less well read on the other Italic communities; as far as I know, none of their source material survives and mostly what we get is how Rome interacted with them. Livy and such aren't really interested in how the Volscians treated conquered peoples, so it's hard to say what they were doing. But at least compared to the much more documented Greeks, Rome did have two huge advantages in the cultural framework.
One: You could become a Roman citizen. The mechanisms were complex and varied, but unlike a Greek polis, where citizens were only those legitimate children of two citizens (and sometimes even more restrictive, see Sparta), Rome allocated varying degrees of citizenship to other peoples relatively regularly.
Two: Rome treated its conquered people very differently. They looted the hell out of them and often burned down the city, but afterwards, they were made "allies". It was an alliance in name if not in fact, Rome led this coalition, but unlike the way the Greek city-states tended to treat their subjects, Roman socii soldiers were treated well, got paid on the same rates as Roman troops (which admittedly wasn't all that much) and got an equal share of all loot. They also were usually somewhere along the process of eventual romanization.
When Rome got into trouble, say during the Second Punic War with Hannibal at the gates, the Socii stick with Rome and get ready for a truly colossal mobilization, instead of defecting the way so many Greek states tended to do.
That in turn likely has to do with how the internal incentive structure of Roman politics incentivized this policy of dealing with conquered people, but this is already a kind of long post. But the TL:DR is that ancient states generally expanded to the limit of what they could hold; I can't think of any clear examples where a state in the ancient Mediterranean had the opportunity to conquer and did not do so. What set Rome apart was how they had a set of policies that better integrated conquered Italians, which ultimately gave them a much larger pool of manpower and wealth to mobilize from and outcompete other rivals, as well as blob up to a huge extent.