The transformation of Rome and Italy during the Middle Republic

Question 1

Citizenship and politics in the middle republic

Answer 1

• Romans organized their citizenry in a way that permitted expansion.
• Politics during the period was largely a matter of senatorial families competing for high office and the ensuing lucrative commands.
• While the 2nd century was a time of heated competition among senators, it was generally a period of quiescence of the plebs and their magistrates, the tribunes.
• Since the Hortensian law of 287, the plebs had the constitutional power to pass laws binding on the entire state without senatorial approval.

Question 2

Culture and religion

Answer 2

• Expansion brought Rome into contact with many diverse cultures. The most important of these was the Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean with its highly refined literature and learning.
• As Roman aristocrats encountered Greeks in southern Italy and in the East in the 3rd century, they learned to speak and write in Greek.
• Because Greek was the lingua franca of the East, Romans had to use Greek if they wished to reach a wider audience.
• The hostility toward philosophy was one aspect of a wider Roman sense of unease about changing mores.
• Whereas the influence of Greek high culture was felt principally in a small circle of elite Romans who had the wealth to acquire Greek art and slaves and the leisure and education to read Greek authors, the influence of religions from the eastern Mediterranean was perceived as potentially subversive to a far wider audience
• in earlier centuries Rome’s innate religious conservatism was, however, counterbalanced by an openness to foreign gods and cults

Question 3

Demographic and economic developments

Answer 3

• until its fall, the Roman Empire retained agriculture as the basis of its economy, with probably four-fifths of the population tilling the soil.
• Economic change came as a result of massive population shifts and the social reorganization of labour rather than technological improvement.
• Slavery was well established as a form of agricultural labour before the Punic Wars
• The influx of slaves was accompanied by changes in patterns of landownership, as more Italian land came to be concentrated in fewer hands.
• Building projects were the largest enterprises in Rome and offered freeborn immigrants jobs as day labourers.

Question 4

Social changes

Answer 4

• Relations between rich and poor in Rome had traditionally been structured by the bond existing between patron and client
• Slaves came to permeate the fabric of family life and altered relationships within the household

Question 5

Rome and Italy

Answer 5

• Romans built a network of roads that facilitated communication across Italy (first great road was the Via Appia)
• internal migration—Italians moving to Rome and Romans being sent to Latin colonies throughout Italy—promoted social and cultural homogeneity
• although Rome did not seek to govern Italy through a regular administration, it influenced local affairs through formal bonds of personal friendship (amicitia) and hospitality (hospitium) between the Roman elite and their local counterparts
• regular military campaigns brought together Romans and Italians of all classes under the command of Roman magistrates
• Rome occasionally deployed its troops in Italy to maintain social order