Rome of the kings claimed a jurisdiction extending as yet but a few
miles from the city. And from the time of their expulsion, Rome,
though she was rising in power, was rising slowly, and through such
difficulties that the reader of history, did he not know the future,
would think from time to time that the day of her destruction had come
upon her. Not when Brennus was at Rome with his Gauls, a hundred and
twenty-five years after the expulsion of the kings, could Rome be said
to have been great; nor when, fifty or sixty years afterward, the
Roman army--the only army which Rome then possessed--had to lay down
its arms in the Caudine Forks and pass under the Samnite yoke.
Then, when the Samnite wars were ended, and Rome was mistress in
Italy--mistress, after all, of no more than Southern Italy--the Punic
wars began. It could hardly have been during that long contest with
Carthage, which was carried on for nearly fifty years, that the palmy
days of Rome were at their best. Hannibal seems always to be the
master. Trebia, Thrasymene and Canne, year after year, threaten
complete destruction to the State. Then comes the great Scipio; and no
doubt, if we must mark an era of Roman greatness, it would be that of
the battle of Zama and the submission of Carthage, 201 years before
Christ. But with Scipio there springs up the idea of personal
ambition; and in the Macedonian and Greek wars that follow, though the
arm of Rome is becoming stronger every day, and her shoulders broader,
there is already the glamour of her decline in virtue. Her dealings
with Antiochus, with Pyrrhus, and with the Achaeans, though
successful, were hardly glorious. Then came the two Gracchi, and
the reader begins to doubt whether the glory of the Republic is not
already over. They demanded impossible reforms, by means as illegal as
they were impossible, and were both killed in popular riots. The
war with Jugurtha followed, in which the Romans were for years
unsuccessful, and during which German hordes from the north rushed