Rome is founded as a monarchy. According to later legend, an old woman comes to its final ruler, King Tarquin, offering to sell him nine books of prophecy. After he twice refuses her price, she burns six of the books and sells him the remaining three for the original sum. These books, recognized as the work of the ancient Sibyl, become Rome’s most secret and prized oracle, consulted only in times of extreme crisis.

In 509 BCE, following a palace coup, both Tarquin and the monarchy are overthrown. The subsequent Republic is founded on a profound aversion to kingship. Royal power is divided between two annually elected consuls, ensuring that no single individual can dominate the state. Yet the new Republic maintains continuity with its past, preserving ancient religious rituals and royal symbols; consuls, for example, wear togas bordered in purple. The Romans’ consultation of the Sibyl’s scrolls is emblematic of their overall attitude; they hope to ward off disasters to maintain the status quo.

Republican Roman identity is defined by public life—res publica. A citizen’s worth is measured by his reputation among his peers, a system that channels fierce individual competition into service of the community. However, this competitive drive, restrained at home by social obligations, operates without limit abroad. Roman warfare is characterized by methodical brutality designed to “inspire terror.” By the 260s BCE, Rome controls all of Italy. The subsequent wars with Carthage, a naval power in North Africa, test the Republic to its breaking point. After Hannibal’s catastrophic victory at Cannae, Rome consults the Sibylline Books and performs a human sacrifice—burying two Gauls and two Greeks alive—in what they perceive as defense of their “freedom.” The Republic slowly recovers and defeats Hannibal. As a result of the Punic Wars, Rome acquires its first overseas province, Sicily. Having become the Mediterranean’s sole superpower, Rome adopts a policy of “preemptive strikes” against potential rivals. Expansion into the Greek East thus follows Carthage’s defeat, with Macedonia reduced to a province by 148 BCE. The speed of Rome’s rise troubles some at home, who worry that foreign wealth and influence are corrupting traditional virtues.

The city of Rome itself embodies its contradictions. Sprawling across seven hills, it is a metropolis without planning, where magnificent aqueducts coexist with squalid tenements. The urban poor live crammed into rickety high-rise apartment blocks lacking water and sanitation, their bodies disposed of in mass graves beyond the city walls. Yet communities form around neighborhood shrines and trade associations, preserving bonds of fellowship amid the anonymity of urban life. The city’s geography reflects its founding myth: Romulus stood on the Palatine Hill, associated with triumph, while the twin he would go on to kill, Remus, stood on the Aventine, associated with defeat. Between the two hills lies the Circus Maximus, where all classes gather and a citizen’s reputation is made or destroyed.

The Republic’s history is marked by the long struggle between the patrician aristocracy and the commoner plebeians. Through a series of strikes and protests centered on the Aventine, plebeians gradually win political concessions. In 367 BCE, plebeians gain the right to hold high office, creating a new, blended nobility. The Republic becomes a savage meritocracy, though only the wealthy can afford political careers.

The office of tribune, created to protect the plebeians, becomes a vehicle for ambitious aristocrats—though only those with plebian ancestry—courting popular support. Between 133 and 121 BCE, the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus use the office to attempt radical reforms to aid the poor. Fearing the Gracchi aim at tyranny, the senatorial aristocracy orchestrate their murders—the first political bloodshed since the end of the monarchy. Gaius’s corpse is decapitated, lead poured into his skull, and thousands of his followers executed without trial.

The fate of the Gracchi proves that seeking fundamental reform will be interpreted as a bid for power. The result is political stasis that prevents solutions to Rome’s growing social problems. Yet despite internal tensions, the Romans remain attached to their contradictory system, which has so far served them well.

Around 140 BCE, prophecies circulating in the Greek East foretell Rome’s self-destruction through decadence and civil strife—a vision born of “desperation” before Roman power. In 146 BCE, Rome demonstrates that power with shocking finality. After a three-year siege led by Scipio Aemilianus, Carthage is utterly destroyed, its ruins burn for 17 days, and it is cursed to prevent rebuilding. That same year, Rome crushes a Greek revolt and obliterates Corinth, enslaving its women and looting its treasures. These events inspire some unease and guilt: Scipio reputedly weeps at Carthage’s fall, seeing it as a portent of Rome’s eventual doom.

In 133 BCE, the last king of Pergamum, a Greek city in Western Turkey, bequeaths his wealthy kingdom to Rome. The Senate, wary of perceived eastern corruption and administrative burdens, initially resists; the senators find Tiberius Gracchus’s proposal that the wealth be used for his reforms particularly alarming. However, the power void left in Pergamum undermines regional stability, so Rome finally intervenes. In 123 BCE, Gaius Gracchus imposes organized taxation on what becomes the province of Asia. The system relies on private corporations of tax-farmers—the publicani—who buy contracts to collect tribute and ruthlessly exploit provincials for maximum profit. Provincial governors, meant to ensure justice, are frequently bribed, creating systemic corruption. A “military-fiscal complex” emerges, blurring state pursuit of glory with private pursuit of wealth. Meanwhile, western territories are exploited for their natural resources. The resulting extraction boom is most spectacular in the Spanish silver mines, where tens of thousands of enslaved laborers work in hellish conditions: “Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes” (41).

Some officials resist, though largely futilely. In 92 BCE, Rutilius Rufus, who protected his subjects from tax collectors, is convicted of extortion by a corrupt court and exiled to Asia, the province he was accused of looting. In 89 BCE, the Roman commissioner in Asia, Manius Aquillius, provokes war with Mithridates, the ambitious king of Pontus on the coast of the Black Sea. Aquillius hopes to expand Rome’s reach, but Mithridates, a brilliant propagandist who claims to have cultivated an immunity to poison in response to childhood assassination attempts, repels the attack and invades Roman Asia, where he is welcomed as a liberator. In the summer of 88 BCE, he enlists the region’s Greek population in massacring 80,000 Romans and Italians across the province, reputedly in a single night. Aquillius is captured and executed by having molten gold poured down his throat—a symbolic punishment for Roman greed.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the luxurious region of Campania on the Bay of Naples becomes the “playground of the rich” as entrepreneurs like Sergius Orata invent heated swimming pools (47). In contrast, the mountainous region of Samnium remained austere and poor. In late 91 BCE, the Samnites and other Italian allies, resentful of being denied full citizenship, launch the Social War. The rebels capture cities across Campania and establish a rival state called Italia with its capital at Corfinium, with institutions modeled on Rome’s. Rome is caught unprepared, but generals including the celebrated Gaius Marius gradually regain control. The general Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo wins a key victory at Asculum. In late 90 BCE, Rome offers a political solution: citizenship for loyal allies and rebels who surrender. Most of Italy accepts by 89 BCE, though fighting continues in Samnium, a longstanding hotbed of resistance to Rome.

As the Social War ends, news of Mithridates’s invasion reaches Rome, causing an economic crisis. The Roman aristocracy, however, eagerly anticipates a lucrative eastern war. Marius considers the command his by right; his ally Aquillius provoked Mithridates, possibly deliberately to create this opportunity. However, competition for this command will further destabilize Rome’s fractured politics. In 89 BCE, Rome is on edge and troubled by apparent omens, including booming from the skies. Augurs interpret the omen to mean that a “great convulsion in the order of things was approaching. One age would pass away, another would dawn, in a revolution fated to consume the world” (58).