Rome, with the end of the third Punic war, 146 B. C., had completely conquered the last of the “civilized” world. The best authority for this period of her history is Polybius. He was born in Arcadia, in 204 B. C., and died in 122 B. C. Polybius was an officer of the Achaean League, which sought by federating the Peloponnesus to make it strong enough to keep its independence against the Romans, but Rome was already too strong to be resisted, and arresting a thousand of the most influential members, sent them to Italy to await trial for conspiracy. Polybius had the good fortune, during seventeen years exile, to be allowed to live with the Scipios. He was present at the destructions of Carthage and Corinth, in 146 B.C.E., and did more than anyone else to get the Greeks to accept the inevitable Roman rule. Polybius tends to be the most reliable of ancient historians.
Click on the link for the document and answer these questions in a 300-500 word essay. Make sure you put these in context using the textbook. Use the document as your examples.
Pay attention to the relative power of the consuls, the Senate, and the people. What is the most important function of the Roman government according to Polybius? Given what you have read about this particular period, i.e. the imperialism and the problems arising from it, what would be the potential problems or sources of instability in such a constitution?
From the chapter
The classical period, roughly the centuries between 600 BCE and 600 CE, was a formative era that saw a flourishing of societies and networks in nearly every inhabited part of the globe. In the second century BCE a Greek histo-rian, Polybius, recognized the expanding horizons of his time and concluded that “the world’s history has been a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. The affairs of Europe and Africa are connected with those of Asia and all events bear a relationship and con-tribute to a single end.”1 In his perception of increasing connections across cultures, Polybius identified a crucial tran-sition. The era’s art, literature, politics, and religion have had a lasting significance. Today’s popular images of the classical Era—the Buddha meditating under a leafy tree, Greek and Chinese philosophers pondering the meaning of existence, Roman gladiators battling in the Colosseum, Mayan pyramids in Central American jungles, Polynesian mariners exploring the vast Pacific Ocean—testify to the ongoing prominence this era has held in our thought.We live in a connected world, but twenty-five hundred years ago most people would have been unaware of much of the world outside their own community. Five hundred years later many people would have had some knowledge of a much wider world. During the classical period a vast exchange of ideas, cultures, and products grew in the Afro-Eurasian zone, while creative philosophies estab-lished new value systems or reinforced existing ones in the Mediterranean world and Asia. The Chinese sent missions into western Asia, where they met Persians and Greeks. The commercial exchanges that were carried out along the trade routes represented the first glimmerings of a world economy centered on Asia. Greek merchants traveled as far as south India. Goods from Persia and Rome reached Southeast Asia, while Romans craved Chinese silk, Arabian incense, and Indian spices. Between 350 BCE and 200 CE the Afro-Eurasian world was also transformed by large regional empires. In the wake of these empires, universal religions such as Buddhism and Christianity crossed cultural boundar-ies, becoming permanent fixtures of world history. Economic and social patterns changed as each society, while having its own dynamics, was also altered by contact with others. The social, economic, political, and religious or philosophical pat-terns of the Classical Era, some alien and some familiar to modern people, suggest both how much and how little the world has changed since that time.
