Good evening, and thank you for joining me for another Boring Books for Bedtime. I hope tonight's election provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep. Before we begin, I'd like to give a special shout out of thanks to some new members of our Patreon family. Lauren, Karen, Susan and Al. Thank you all so much for supporting this podcast.
By becoming members of Patreon, you help us remain 100% listener-supported and ad-free for everyone. And it's very much appreciated. If you are interested in supporting Boring Books for Bedtime and finding out more about the perks available to subscribers, including exclusive episodes, collections and some upcoming giveaways for the holidays. You'll find a link to Patreon in the show description.
You'll also find a link to buymeacoffee.com where you can support us with a one-time tip, no subscription required. I hope you'll take a moment to check them out. Now, let's read and relax. Find a comfortable spot. Adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly. Tonight, by multiple listener requests, let's continue with one of the most engaging books I've read on this podcast.
A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. First published in 1922 by the Macmillan & Company, New York. Let's pick up right where we left off at Chapter 32 and the Rise of Rome. Let's begin. Chapter 32 Rome and Carthage It was in 264 BC that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year, Ahsoka was beginning his reign in Bahar, and Shi Huangti was a little child.
The museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances. and probably the rest of mankind, heard only vague and remote rumors of the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half. in Spain, Italy, North Africa, and the Western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic power and Rome.
this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples. That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world. Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Arian and Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality in, and exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts and controversies of today.
The First Punic War began in 264 BC about the pirates of Messina. It developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily, except the dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was at first with the Carthaginians. They had great fighting ships of what was hitherto an unheard-of size. Quinqueremes, galleys with five banks of oars and a huge ram. At the Battle of Salamis two centuries before, the leading battleships had only been triremes with three banks.
But the Romans, with extraordinary energy, and in spite of the fact that they had little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild the Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with Greek seamen, and they invented grappling and boarding to make up for the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge grappling iron seized him, and the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him.
At Miley, 260 BC, and at Echnomis, 256 BC, the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They repulsed a Roman landing near Carthage, but were badly beaten at Palermo, losing 104 elephants there. to grace such a triumphal procession through the forum as Rome had never seen before. But after that came two Roman defeats, and then a Roman recovery. The last naval forces of Carthage were defeated by a last Roman effort at the Battle of the Agatian Isles, 241 BC, and Carthage sued for peace.
All Sicily, except the dominions of Hero, king of Syracuse, was ceded to the Romans. For 22 years, Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both had trouble enough at home. In Italy, the Gauls came south again, threatened Rome, which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices to the gods, and were routed at Telamon. Rome pushed forward to the Alps and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to Illyria.
Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts in Corsica and Sardinia and displayed far less recuperative power. Finally, an act of intolerable aggression, Rome seized and annexed the two revolting islands. Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river Ebro. To that boundary, the Romans restricted them. Any crossing of the Ebro by the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of war against the Romans.
At last, in 218 BC, the Carthaginians, provoked by new Roman aggressions, did cross this river under a young general named Hannibal, one of the most brilliant commanders in the whole of history. He marched his army from Spain over the Alps into Italy. raised the Gauls against the Romans, and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself for 15 years. He inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at Lake Trasimere and at Cannae.
and throughout all his Italian campaigns, no Roman army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army had landed at Marseille and cut his communications with Spain. He had no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally, the Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at home, were forced back upon the defense of their own city in Africa. A Roman army crossed into Africa.
and Hannibal experienced his first defeat under its walls at the Battle of Zama, 202 BC, at the hands of Scipio Africanus the Elder. The Battle of Sama ended the Second Punic War. Carthage capitulated. She surrendered Spain and her war fleet. She paid an enormous indemnity and agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance of the Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia, wherein later, being in danger of falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he took poison and died.
For 56 years, Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at peace. And meanwhile, Rome spread her empire over confused and divided Greece. invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch, at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still under the Ptolemies and Pergamum and most of the small states of Asia Minor, into allies. or as we should call them now, Protected State. Meanwhile, Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly regaining something of her former prosperity.
Her recovery revived the hate and suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the most shallow and artificial of quarrels. 149 BC She made an obstinate and bitter resistance, stood a long siege, and was stormed, 146 B.C. The street fighting, or massacre, lasted six days. It was extraordinarily bloody, and when the citadel capitulated, only about 50,000 of the Carthaginian population remained alive, out of a quarter of a million.
They were sold into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately destroyed. The blackened ruins were plowed and sewn as a sort of ceremonial effacement. So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and cities that had flourished in the world five centuries before, only one little country remained free under native rulers. This was Judea, which had liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under the rule of the native Maccabean princes.
By this time it had its Bible almost complete and was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish world as we know it now. It was natural that the Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and kindred peoples dispersed about the world should find a common link in their practically identical language. And in this literature of hope and courage, To a large extent, they were still the traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had been submerged rather than replaced.
Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the center of Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 BC. and after various vicissitudes of quasi-independence and revolt, was besieged by them in 70 AD, and captured after a stubborn struggle. The temple was destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 AD completed its destruction, and the Jerusalem we know today was rebuilt later under Roman auspices.
A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter Capitolinus, stood in the place of the temple, and Jews were forbidden to inhabit the city. Chapter 33 The Growth of the Roman Empire Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the Western world in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. was in several respects a different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilized world. It was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror.
It was not indeed the first of republican empires. Athens had dominated a group of allies and dependents in the time of Pericles. And Carthage, when she entered upon her fatal struggle with Rome, was mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh development.
The center of this new system lay far to the west of the more ancient centers of empire, which had hitherto been the river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position enabled Rome to bring into civilization quite fresh regions and peoples. The Roman power extended to Morocco and Spain. and was presently able to thrust northwestward over what is now France and Belgium to Britain, and northeastward into Hungary and South Russia.
But on the other hand, it was never able to maintain itself in Central Asia or Persia because they were too far from its administrative centers. It included therefore great masses of fresh Nordic Aryan-speaking peoples It presently incorporated nearly all the Greek people in the world, and its population was less strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any preceding empire.
For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the grooves of precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek, and all that time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and Persians became entirely Babylonized in a generation or so. They took over the tiara of the king of kings and the temples and priesthoods of his gods. Alexander and his successors followed in the same easy path of assimilation.
The Seleucid monarchs had much the same court and administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar. The Ptolemies became pharaohs and altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated, just as before them the Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians had been assimilated. But the Romans ruled in their own city, and for some centuries kept to the laws of their own nature. The only people who exercised any great mental influence upon them before the 2nd or 3rd century AD were the kindred and similar Greeks.
so that the Roman Empire was essentially a first attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Arian lines. It was so far a new pattern in history. It was an expanded Aryan republic. The old pattern of a personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that had grown up round the temple of a harvest god did not apply to it. The Romans had gods and temples, but like the gods of the Greeks, their gods were quasi-human immortals, divine patricians.
The Romans also had blood sacrifices, and even made human ones in times of stress, things they may have learned to do from their Etruscan teachers. But until Rome was long past its zenith, neither priest nor temple played a large part in Roman history. The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth. The Roman people found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast administrative experiment. It cannot be called a successful experiment. In the end, their empire collapsed altogether.
and it changed enormously in form and method from century to century. It changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or Egypt changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never attained to any fixity. In a sense, the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains unfinished. And Europe and America today are still working out the riddles of worldwide statescraft first confronted by the Roman people.
It is well for the student of history to bear in mind The very great changes, not only in political, but in social and moral matters that went on throughout the period of Roman dominion. There is much too strong a tendency in people's minds to think of the Roman rule as something finished and stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. SPQR. The Elder Cato. The Scipios. Julius Caesar. Diocletian. Constantine the Great.
Triumphs, orations, gladiatorial combats, and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different points from a process of change profounder than that which separates the London of William the Conqueror from the London of today. We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four stages.
The first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 390 BC and went on until the end of the First Punic War, 240 BC. We may call this stage the stage of the assimilative republic. It was perhaps the finest, most characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-long dissensions of Patrician and Plebeian were drawing to a close. The Etruscan threat had come to an end. No one was very rich yet, nor very poor, and most men were public-spirited.
It was a republic like the Republic of the South African Boers before 1900, or like the northern states of the American Union between 1800 and 1850. A free farmer's republic. At the outset of this stage, Rome was a little state, scarcely twenty miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about her, and sought not their destruction, but coalescence. Her centuries of civil dissension had trained her people in compromise and concessions.
Some of the defeated cities became altogether Roman, with a voting share in the government. Some became self-governing with the right to trade and marry in Rome. Garrisons full of citizens were set up at strategic points, and colonies of varied privileges founded among the freshly conquered people. Great roads were made. The rapid Latinization of all Italy was the inevitable consequence of such a policy. the free inhabitants of Italy became citizens of the city of Rome.
Formerly, the whole Roman Empire became at last an extended city. In 212 AD, every free man in the entire extent of the empire was given citizenship. the right, if he could get there, to vote in the town meeting in Rome. This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It reversed the old process of conquest and assimilation altogether. By the Roman method, the conquerors assimilated the conquered.
But after the First Punic War and the annexation of Sicily, though the old process of assimilation still went on, another process arose by its side. Sicily, for instance, was treated as a conquered prey. It was declared an estate of the Roman people. Its rich soil and industrious population was exploited to make Rome rich. The patricians and the more influential among the plebeians secured the major share of that wealth, and the war also brought in a large supply of slaves.
Before the First Punic War, the population of the Republic had been largely a population of citizen farmers. Military service was their privilege and liability. While they were on active service, their farms fell into debt, and a new, large-scale slave agriculture grew up. When they returned, they found their produce in competition with slave-grown produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home. Times had changed. The Republic had altered its character.
Not only was Sicily in the hands of Rome, the common man was in the hands of the rich creditor and the rich competitor. Rome had entered upon its second stage, the Republic of Adventurous Rich Men. For two hundred years, the Roman soldier farmers had struggled for freedom and a share in the government of their state. For a hundred years, they had enjoyed their privileges. The First Punic War wasted them and robbed them of all they had won.
The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated. The governing bodies of the Roman Republic were two in number. The first and more important was the Senate. This was a body originally of patricians, and then of prominent men of all sorts, who were summoned to it first by certain powerful officials, the consuls and censors. Like the British House of Lords, it became a gathering of great landowners, prominent politicians, big businessmen, and the like.
It was much more like the British House of Lords than it was like the American Senate. For three centuries from the Punic Wars onward, it was the center of Roman political thought and purpose. The second body was the popular assembly. This was supposed to be an assembly of all the citizens of Rome. When Rome was a little state, twenty miles square, this was a possible gathering. When the citizenship of Rome had spread beyond the confines in Italy, it was an altogether impossible one.
Its meetings, proclaimed by horn-blowing from the capital and the city walls, became more and more a gathering of political hacks and city riffraff. In the 4th century BC, the popular assembly was a considerable check upon the Senate, a competent representation of the claims and rights of the common man. By the end of the Punic Wars, it was an impotent relic of a vanquished popular control. No effectual legal check remained upon the big men.
Nothing of the nature of representative government was ever introduced into the Roman Republic. No one thought of electing delegates to represent the will of the citizens. This is a very important point for the student to grasp. The popular assembly never became the equivalent of the American House of Representatives or the British House of Commons. In theory, it was all the citizens. In practice, it ceased to be anything at all worth consideration.
The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in a very poor case after the Second Punic War. He was impoverished. He had often lost his farm. He was ousted from profitable production by slaves, and he had no political power left to him to remedy these things. The only methods of popular expression left to a people without any form of political expression are the strike and the revolt.
The story of the second and first centuries BC, so far as internal politics go, is a story of futile revolutionary upheaval. The scale of this history will not permit us to tell of the intricate struggles of that time, of the attempts to break up estates and restore the land to the free farmer. of proposals to abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt and civil war. In 73 BC, the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a great insurrection of the slaves under Spartacus.
The slaves of Italy revolted with some effect, for among them were the trained fighters of the gladiatorial shows. For two years, Spartacus held out in the crater of Vesuvius, which seemed at that time to be an extinct volcano. This insurrection was defeated at last and suppressed with frantic cruelty. 6,000 captured Spartacists were crucified along the Appian Way, the great highway that runs southward out of Rome, 71 BC.
The common man never made head against the forces that were subjugating and degrading him. But the big rich men who were overcoming him were even in his defeat preparing a new power in the Roman world over themselves and him. The power of the army. Before the Second Punic War, the army of Rome was a levy of free farmers, who according to their quality rode or marched afoot to battle.
This was a very good force for wars close at hand, but not the sort of army that will go abroad and bear long campaigns with patience. And moreover, as the slaves multiplied and the estates grew, the supply of free-spirited fighting farmers declined. It was a popular leader named Marius who introduced a new factor. North Africa, after the overthrow of the Carthaginian civilization, had become a semi-barbaric kingdom, the Kingdom of Numidia.
The Roman power fell into conflict with Jugurtha, king of this state, and experienced enormous difficulties in subduing him. Marius was made consul, in a phase of public indignation, to end this discreditable war. This he did by raising paid troops and drilling them hard. Jugurtha was brought in chains to Rome, 106 BC. And Marius, when his time of office had expired, held on to his consulship illegally with his newly created legions. There was no power in Rome to restrain him.
With Marius began the third phase in the development of the Roman power, the Republic of the Military Commanders. For now began a period in which the leaders of the paid legions fought for the mastery of the Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the aristocratic Sulla, who had served under him in Africa. Each, in turn, made a great massacre of his political opponents. Men were prescribed and executed by the thousand, and their estates were sold.
After the bloody rivalry of these two, and the horror of the revolt of Spartacus, came a phase in which Lucullus and Pompey the Great and Crassus and Julius Caesar were the masters of armies and dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus. Lucullus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia and retired with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting further invaded Persia and was defeated and slain by the Parthians.
After a long rivalry, Pompey was defeated by Julius Caesar, 48 BC, and murdered in Egypt. leaving Julius Caesar, sole master of the Roman world. The figure of Julius Caesar is one that has stirred the human imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance. He has become a legend and a symbol. For us, he is chiefly important as marking the transition from the phase of military adventurers to the beginning of the fourth stage in Roman expansion, the early empire.
For in spite of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in spite of civil war and social degeneration, Throughout all his time, the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep outward to their maximum about 100 A.D. There had been something like an ebb during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a manifest loss of vigor before the reconstruction of the army by Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked the third phase.
Julius Caesar made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul, which is now France and Belgium. The chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the same Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied North Italy for a time. and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and settled down as the Galatians. Caesar drew back a German invasion of Gaul and added all that country to the empire.
and he twice crossed the Straits of Dover into Britain, 55 and 54 BC, where, however, he made no permanent conquest. Meanwhile, Pompey the Great was consolidating Roman conquests that reached in the east to the Caspian Sea. At this time, the middle of the first century BC, the Roman Senate was still the nominal center of the Roman government. appointing consuls and other officials, granting powers and the like.
and a number of politicians, among whom Cicero was an outstanding figure, were struggling to preserve the great traditions of republican Rome. and to maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone from Italy, with the wasting away of the free farmers. It was a land now of slaves and impoverished men with neither the understanding nor the desire for freedom.
There was nothing whatever behind these Republican leaders in the Senate, while behind the great adventurers they feared and desired to control were the legions. Over the heads of the Senate, Crassus and Pompey and Caesar divided the rule of the empire between them, the first triumvirate. When presently Crassus was killed at distant Cari by the Parthians, Pompey and Caesar fell out.
Pompey took up the Republican side, and laws were passed to bring Caesar to trial for his breaches of law and his disobedience to the decrees of the Senate. It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the boundary of his command, and the boundary between Caesar's command and Italy was the Rubicon. In 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon, saying, The die is cast, and marched upon Pompey and Rome.
It had been the custom in Rome in the past, in periods of military extremity, to elect a dictator with practically unlimited powers to rule through the crisis. After his overthrow of Pompey, Caesar was made dictator first for ten years, and then, in 45 BC, for life. In effect, he was made monarch of the empire for life. There was talk of a king, a word abhorrent to Rome, since the expulsion of the Etruscans five centuries before. Caesar refused to be king, but adopted throne and scepter.
After his defeat of Pompey, Caesar had gone on into Egypt and had made love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very completely. He had brought back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god-king. His statue was set up in a temple with an inscription to the unconquerable god. The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest.
and Caesar was stabbed to death in the Senate at the foot of the statue of his murdered rival, Pompey the Great. Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities followed. There was a second triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony, and Octavian Caesar, the latter the nephew of Julius Caesar. Octavian, like his uncle, took the poorer, hardier western provinces, where the best legions were recruited.
In 31 BC, he defeated Mark Antony, his only serious rival, at the naval battle of Actium, and made himself sole master of the Roman world. But Octavian was a man of different quality altogether from Julius Caesar. He had no foolish craving to be god or king. He had no queen lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored freedom to the senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator. The grateful Senate in return gave him the reality instead of the forms of power.
He was to be called not king indeed, but princeps and augustus. He became Augustus Caesar, the first of the Roman emperors, 27 BC to 14 AD. He was followed by Tiberius Caesar, 14-37 AD. and he by others, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and so on up to Trajan, 98 AD. Cadrian, 117 AD, Antonius Pius, 138 AD, and Marcus Aurelius, 161-180 AD. All these emperors were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made them, and some the soldiers destroyed.
Gradually, the Senate fades out of Roman history, and the emperor and his administrative officials replace it. The boundaries of the empire crept forward now to their utmost limit. Most of Britain was added to the empire. Transylvania was brought in as a new province, Dacia. Trajan crossed the Euphrates. Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the other end of the old world.
Like Shi Huangti, he built walls against the northern barbarians, one across Britain, and a palisade between the Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan. The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end. And with that statement of finality, And an upcoming chapter that expands this story to China, I think will end this evening's reading from A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. He really gallops right through things, doesn't he? But I kind of love that.
If you'd like to read this work for yourself, as always, you'll find a link to a free ebook from Project Gutenberg in the show description. Suggest a boring book you'd like to hear read. Or request more from one we've already started. You can drop me an email via our website. www.BoringBooksPod.com It's always a pleasure to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining me for this evening's reading. Until our next boring book, goodnight.