14.3 Europe: 100 b.c. to 0

Europe

Back to Europe: 200 to 101 B.C.

Southern europe

Eastern mediterranean islands

This was the century when Rome gained control of most of the Mediterranean. Augustus took the Cyclades and conquered Crete in 68 - 67 B.C. and Cyprus in 58. Rhodes was already under Roman jurisdiction. (Ref. 38 )

Greece

Greece became a battle ground for several different campaigns including the First Mithridatic War when the Pontus king was stopped only after he had gotten well down into this peninsula. Athens, which had allied itself with Mithridates, had its prosperity come to an end when it was sacked by the troops of the Roman Sulla in 87 and 86 B.C.. After the sea battle of Actium of 31 B.C. in which Antony and Cleopatra lost to Octavian, Rome legally as well as effectively held the whole of Alexander's heritage in this land and Greece began a reign of peace as an integral part of the Roman Empire. The island of Delos had now become the center of the Athenian world and served as the greatest trading center for slaves in the civilized world.

Upper balkans

The basic population of this area remained Celtic and as a frontier of the Roman Empire it served as a battle ground for the Roman-Celtic conflicts, as well as part of the First Mithridatic War. The southern Illyrians were finally conquered by the Roman Augustus between 35 and 34 B.C. The Kingdom of Thrace remained intact and north of this the large Dacian Kingdom also kept its independence in the area of Romania. The Greeks called these people "Getas".

Italy

As the century opened there was still some indecision as to the actual scope and power of Rome over the remainder of the Italian peninsula. In 91 B.C. there was one final war between Rome and her neighbors over the idea of a united Italy and the scope of the rule of the Roman Senate. It ended by the practical surrender of the Senate to the concept of reform which allowed thereafter all Italians to become Roman citizens by decree. The classical Latin language emerged about 100 B.C. af ter some imprints from the languages of Asia Minor, the Balkans and Greece and this classical tongue then held sway for about 300 years.

On the government scene, while Sulla was in Asia Minor and the Balkans, the consuls Cinna and Marius had instituted a reign of terror, dissolved the Senate and ruled with "iron hands" until Marius' death. When Sulla returned he made himself a dictator and while restoring law and order and the Senate to power, he desolated large parts of Italy, executing over 5,000 people. He tried to establish a permanently aristocratic constitution but this was followed by all sorts of complications. Among these was the revolt of the slaves under Spartacus in 73 B.C., just after Sulla's death. The slaves held out in southern Italy, using Vesuvius' crater for a time as a fortress but when they were at last captured after two years by Crassus and Pompey some 6,000 were crucified along the Appian way. The two generals, former cronies of Sulla, had risen to power through separate and originally conflicting ways. Gnaeus Pompeius, after prevailing upon Sulla to give him the title of Magnus (The Great), won prominence by subduing the traitor Quintus Sertorius, who as a governor of Spain had attempted to set up a separatist regime of his own in that province. Crassus, in addition to his victory over the slaves, had made himself fabulously wealthy through various and sundry unscrupulous deals and now the two men united to undue Sulla's constitution and had themselves elected consuls in 70 B.C. This was the era of Marcus Tullius Cicero, a lawyer who had as his fondest desire to be accepted into the inner circle of the Senatorial class and his whole career was geared to that aim. By prosecuting one of the corrupt provincial governors Cicero gained a praetorship and a rise to power. Meanwhile Pompey gained still more esteem by conquering the Cilician and Cretan pirates who had been preventing normal sea commerce in the Mediterranean and disrupting the great slave emporium at Delos. Soon, therefore, with Cicero's help, Pompey was given absolute power over both land and sea forces through the entire empire. It was then that he went to reorganize the entire Near East. When he returned after several years involvement in the Mithridatic wars, organizing Asia Minor and Syria and conquering Jerusalem he allegedly brought back some two million slaves. (Ref. 213 )