SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

And in 190 BCE, under the command of Scipio Asiaticus, they decisively defeated Antiochus ‘the Great’ of Syria. Not only was he busy modelling himself on Alexander the Great and extending his power base accordingly, but he had also given a home to Hannibal, now in exile from Carthage, who was reputed to be offering the king master classes in how to confront the Romans. Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life, and Roman writers organised the history of this period, as I have just done, around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day. When Sallust called his essay on Catiline’s plot The War against Catiline, or Bellum Catilinae, he was reflecting, and maybe slightly parodying, the Roman tradition of seeing war as the structuring principle of history. It was a tradition that went back a long way. There is a surviving snatch of Ennius’ epic poem on the history of Rome that refers explicitly to ‘the Second Punic War’, in which he had fought as a Roman ally; it was written even before the third had happened.