The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

by Mike Duncan

BY THE END of 89, the Social War was winding down, but the two years of conflict had devastated the population of Italy. Though ancient numbers are almost always inflated, allegedly three hundred thousand people died in the conflict, Romans and Italians being indistinguishable after funeral pyres turned their bodies to ash.62 Economically, the war was a disaster and crippled Italian productivity even more than the invasion of Hannibal. The lands of rich and poor alike were ruined by either plunder, neglect, or intentional destruction. Senators were cut off from their Italian estates—which would have been seized and ransacked by insurrectionary Italians. Every corner of Italy reported grain shortages and famine by the spring of 88, a famine compounded by the plebs urbana in Rome who, “like an insatiable stomach that consumes everything and yet remains always hungry… more wretched than all other cities that she was making wretched, left nothing untouched and yet had nothing.”63