2

8
Fear, greed and glory:
the causes of Roman war-making
in the middle Republic

John Rich

The modern debate

Down to the middle of the fourth century Rome was a power of

merely local significance. The Romans had fought a great many wars
against their neighbours, but for most of their history they had been
merely one of the more prominent of the cities in the plain of Latium.
Quite suddenly, from about 343,1 all this changed, and in a period of
just over seventy years the Romans fought their way to a position of
mastery over the whole of Italy south of the Po valley. This success
was followed by great wars, first against Carthage, and then against
various Hellenistic kings. From all of these the Romans emerged
victorious, and by the middle of the second century, contemporaries
like Polybius recognized them as the undisputed masters of the
Mediterranean world. They now ruled a number of overseas territories
directly, as provinces, and elsewhere they exercised an informal
hegemony. Over the next two centuries, down to the reign of
Augustus, the first emperor, the Romans continued on the same path
of warfare and expansion. In the late Republic, the drive to expansion

1
All dates are BC.