11 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
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.
Comment by Hypattie at 20/01/2025 at 09:55 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thanks for your detailed answer!
In fact I was asking this question while reading Fustel de Coulanges[1] and now I just finished the final chapter where he gives his theory about the rise of Rome!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ancient_City
He lists a couple of explanations for "why Rome and not another city":
1. From the start, Rome was a melting pot of Latins, Sabins, even some very old Greek cities, etc. So they didn't view themself as "pure Romans vs Others". When then needed alliance they could say to Sabins "hey, we have Sabins gods here too!", or with the Etruscan : "hey, we had Estruscans leaders here too!", etc. And doing so, Rome was much more open to expansion.
2. Maybe the more interesting theory: as the archaic religion was fading, people feel less patriotic and more attracted to political systems. It leads, all over Greece and Italy, for centuries, to turmoils between the aristocratic and the democratic class. If a city ruled by aristocrats was on the verge of being overthrown by the mob, the aristocrats wouldn't hesitate to ally (and even submit) themself to another aristocratic city if it allows them to remains in power. And the opposite was also true (tyran/king being with the mobs vs the aristocrats). Most famous example is democratic Athens vs aristocratic Sparta during the Peloponnese war.
In Rome, the Senat managed to keep power long enough to attract the foreign aristrocratic class. Fustel de Coulange theorizes that if the Etruscans cities didn't react when Rome capture Veiis, it was because Veiis was ruled by a democratic regim while the others were aristocratic. Same in Greece when Rome showed up: aristocratic cities team up with Rome while democratic/monarchy cities team up against Rome. For the same reason, many wealthy aristocratic families (he named them in his book) from the Sabins, Etruscans, Latins, etc… moved to Rome when they had political problems in their cities.