Century 2 of 13 · 509 – 146 BC
Italy subdued, then Greece and the East.
27 entries · 244 hours · 22 with a written verdict
Rome lost, repeatedly, and that is the part worth your attention. The Gauls sacked the city around 390 BC and had to be paid to leave. The Samnites made an entire consular army walk under a yoke at the Caudine Forks. Pyrrhus of Epirus beat them twice and gave the language a word for winning like that.
What Rome had was a system for absorbing defeat: allied manpower, a citizenship it could extend to the people it had beaten, and an aristocracy that treated a lost army as a scheduling problem. That machinery is what this century builds, and it is why the Punic Wars go the way they do.
Inside the walls, the other story. Plebeians walked out of the city altogether, the tribunate was invented to protect them, and the Twelve Tables went up in the Forum around 451 BC so the law stopped being whatever a patrician said it was. It takes until 287 BC for plebeian assemblies to bind everyone, and what came out of it was a wider aristocracy. By 264 BC Rome held Italy; within a century it held the Mediterranean, still running on the machinery of a city-state.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
The Republic year by year from the foundation, argued out of the sources by two academics who mark Livy on a scale of their own invention. The most detailed treatment of early Rome in audio, and much funnier than that makes it sound.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Mark McCaffery
How the early Republic's army was actually organised and paid, which is the answer to why Rome could lose repeatedly and keep fielding armies.
Part of The Ancients
Seventy-nine minutes on the counterfactual: Alexander lives past Babylon and turns west on a Republic that has only just taken Italy. Livy put the same question in book nine and answered it patriotically.
With Louis Rawlings
The king who beat Rome twice and gave the language a word for it. A good hour on why winning battles and winning wars are different problems.
Part of Cost of Glory
Sixty-four minutes on the elephants and the victories that cost him his army. The phrase Pyrrhic victory is coined in these battles and the episode shows why it stuck.
Sixty-three minutes on the empire that ran from Thrace to the Indus, the largest of Alexander's successor states, and on how Rome cut it down at Magnesia and then by treaty.
Sixty-three minutes on the king smuggled out of his palace at two and raised in exile, before he ever met a Roman army. The background that makes the Italian campaign make sense.
With Steele Brand
Steele Brand on the citizen-farmer army: Pyrrhus lands at Tarentum in 280 BC expecting a walkover and spends six years learning otherwise. Fifty-nine minutes.
With Jeremy Armstrong
The awkward question of whether Rome was deliberately imperialist or kept acquiring an empire by accident. Historians have been arguing about this since the 1970s and the episode says so.
With Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott on the clashes between phalanx and legion, from Pyrrhus to Cynoscephalae and Pydna. Fifty-three minutes on what happened when the two systems actually met.
Part of Tides of History
The Samnites came closer to stopping Rome than anyone before Hannibal, and this episode treats them as a civilisation with aims of its own.
Forty-two minutes on the fourth century BC, when Rome went from one town in Latium to the master of Italy. The terms offered to the defeated do more of the work here than the battles.
Forty minutes on 281 BC, when a Hellenistic king crossed the Adriatic with elephants and a professional army and discovered that beating Rome twice was not the same as winning.
Forty minutes on how the costliest kind of victory got its name, and on the Roman habit of simply raising another army that would decide the next two centuries.
Thirty-eight minutes on Rome's actual entrance into Mediterranean power politics, a decade before the Punic Wars that everyone starts with.
Part of The Ancient World
Thirty-eight minutes on the end of the Seleucid line and on Tigranes II of Armenia, invited in to rule Antioch and taking all of Syria with him.
With Kathryn Lomas
Kathryn Lomas on the last of the three Samnite wars and what beating the mountain confederation did to Rome itself. Thirty-four minutes, the second of two.
Thirty-three minutes on the Republic as an economy: what an expanding market felt like from inside a workshop, and where the proceeds of conquest actually landed.
A composite life assembled from scattered evidence, following one enslaved man through the institution around 200 BC. Thirty minutes, and the method is declared out loud because no single such life survives whole.
Twenty-eight minutes with Kathryn Lomas on who the Samnites were before Rome fought them: a Campanian confederation that took three wars and half a century to break.
Twelve minutes on the question of when it stopped being winnable for anyone else, across three centuries of Italian warfare. Murray Dahm picks a point and defends it.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Eight minutes on the Samnites, the mountain confederation that sent a Roman army under the yoke at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC and took three wars to subdue.
Everything else, in order
Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
