Chapter 1

The Rise of Rome

1. Rome through eastern eyes

In these days of world super powers, it is not easy to envisage how a single city could have acquired an adequate power base to extend its authority over a wide area and establish a large empire. Yet in world history many cities have in their day become imperial states. There were several at various times in the Euphrates-Tigris valley. The best known of these was Babylon, which in the eighteenth centuryb.c. achieved this kind of power under the great Hammurabi and later, in the sixth centuryb.c., dominated not only its Mesopotamian neighbors but the lands to the west as far as the Mediterranean and the Egyptian frontier. The Mediterranean Sea itself has witnessed the rise and fall of a succession of imperial cities. In the fifth centuryb.c. the Athenian Empire held sway not only over the Aegean Sea but over a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean and as far west as Sicily, while for three centuries Carthage — itself a colony of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre — controlled the Western Mediterranean until her rival, Rome, compelled her to relinquish all her overseas dominions after defeating her in the Second Punic War at the end of the third centuryb.c. During the Christian era the city of Venice was able to “hold the gorgeous East in fee” from Crusading times until the seventeenth century.

But of all the cities which have dominated the Mediterranean lands none has exercised such an abiding influence on them, and on others far removed from the Mediterranean, as Rome. Rome’s swift rise to power made a deep impression on men’s minds in antiquity. A Greek politician named Polybius, who was taken to Rome as a hostage in 167b.c. and had the good fortune to win the friendship of Scipio Aemilianus, the leading Roman general of his day, wrote a historical work (still of exceptional value, in so far as it survives) in order to trace the steps by which the city of Rome, in a period of fifty-three years (221-168b.c.), became mistress of the Mediterranean world — a thing unique in history.9 Less accurate, but informative because of its vivid reflection of the idealized image of Rome current in the Near East towards 100b.c., is the picture given in 1 Maccabees 8:1-16, where we are told how Judas Maccabaeus, seeking what support he could find in his struggle against the Seleucids, sent an embassy to Rome:

Now Judas heard of the fame of the Romans, that they were . . . well-disposed toward all who made an alliance with them, and that they were very strong. Men told him of their wars and of the brave deeds which they were doing among the Gauls, how they had defeated them and forced them to pay tribute, and what they had done in the land of Spain to get control o