The Roman Empire: A Rich History of Conquests and Cultures.

The history of the Roman Empire is so vast that it is almost a challenge covering it. Before the Roman conquest, Italy was shared by other countries and was a patchwork of diverse cultures. Some of these people included the Etruscans, Celts, the Umbrians, the Messapians, Italiotes, and Apulians (Polybius, 2005). The dominating the country was the Etruscans who ruled as kings until the Romans staged a revolt. Later, in the second century, specifically between 136BCE and 132BCE, power shifted whereby the Romans dominated large sections of the Mediterranean region making it a Roman society (Livius & Yardley, 2017). The rise of Rome was pegged on many factors including wars, trades including the slave trade, and politics. The rise, establishment and success of the kingdom of Rome were founded on particular grounds. This paper presents an argument that the kingdom of Rome built itself to success through trade, farming and wars in ancient times.

Through supremacy and control, Rome took over the whole peninsula by 264BCE after three phases of conquests and wars. Conflicts developed between Rome and its neighbours winning the war against Latin in 338 BCE. It also fought and subdued the Samnites, the Etruscans and later the Greeks who occupied Italy to the south. Others included the Jugurthine and the Catiline wars(Sallust & Handford, 1983, 35-114; Sallust et al., 2017 1-5). Julius Ceasar later led the Romans through the Gallic wars (Caesar & Brown, 1893 50-55). ). The victories in wars ensured that Rome had a lot of slaves who would later work in small-scale farms improving the economic muscle of the country towards the end of the second century (Cato, 2010). Despite these victories, the Romans faced constant slave revolts due to mistreatment of slaves by their Roman masters.

An example is the slave revolt in Sicily described by Diodorus Siculus. The Romans traded with India and China where Han's dynasty was gathering storm. Salt and iron were some of the commodities that were traded to boost the economic growth of Rome in the early centuries (Pollard, Rosenberg & Tignor, 2015, 189).

In conclusion, early Rome thrived majorly on wars with its neighbours, trade with China and India and slave labour which boosted its economic strength. Its military might resulted in dominion in the large Mediterranean. Constant slave revolts were a commonality in the early Roman empire between 300BCE and 350 BCE.

References

Cato, M. P. (2010). De agri cultura. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.

Caesar, J., & Brown, J. (1893). The Gallic war of C. Julius Caesar: Book 1. London: Blackie & Son

Livius, T., & Yardley, J. (2017). History of Rome-From the Foundation of the City (New ed.). London: Harvard University Press.

Pollard, E., Rosenberg, C. D., & Tignor, R. L. (2015). Worlds together, worlds apart: Volume 2.

Polybius, . (2005). The histories: 1. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press

Sallust, ., & Handford, S. A. (1983). The Jugurthine war: [and] The conspiracy of Catiline. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Sallust, ., Curtius, Q., Sallust, ., & Sallust, . (2017). The conspiracy of Catiline and The war with Jugurtha.