Author: William Emerton Heitland

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-14

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 9781330293089

Excerpt from The Roman Republic, Vol. 1 of 3 Is there for another political study of the Roman Republic? To find defects in well-known works on the subject is easy to provide a fairer version of the story is, from the nature of the evidence, supremely difficult. No wonder that writers nowadays concern themselves chiefly with the Empire or the Decline of the Republic. Yet the political interest of Roman history becomes faint, once the Roman world has passed under the control of a single master and his subordinates, and the tale of the Decline taken by itself, is but a lame story. The great period of Roman imperial growth, say from the conquest of Italy to the battle of Pydna, is not only a striking phenomenon in itself In it the decay of the republican system is already visible, and without the sequel loses most of its meaning. Therefore I have tried to trace the whole course of the Republic, from the dim legendary days of the Kingdom and the early Free Commonwealth down to the foundation of the Empire; from the single imperium, through the republican magistracies and the supremacy of the Senate. down to that concentrated extract of official powers known as the Principate A large part of this range may fairly be called a historical period, but the alternations of light and darkness make it very difficult to keep any reasonable proportion in the narrative. Of Rome's two most desperate struggles, the second Punic war was so full of recorded incidents, that no omission of doubtful matter, no economy of description, avails to reduce the story within moderate limits, if it is to be told at all. With battle tactics as such I have little to do; indeed the state of the evidence is usually such as to forbid it. Strategy in the large is another matter. It often raises questions not purely military, and reveals the state-psychology of rival powers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.