The Roman Custom
- patricklewisbaker
- Aug 31, 2023
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 21
A classic debate among historians of Rome attempts to answer the question of how this city-state on the Tiber River succeeded in building an enormous empire, first in Italy and later across the entire Mediterranean world. Rome’s most significant early war was with the city of Veii, now a ruin you can visit by travelling an hour by bus from central Rome. By the first century A.D., Rome’s emperors were commanding armies from Spain to Persia. The debate goes back to the very first Roman history that survives, written in Greek in the late second century B.C. by Polybius. His preface reveals the astonishment of the Greeks, who had dominated the eastern Mediterranean since the time of Alexander the Great, at the sudden rise of Rome…