It is the year 509 BC. The last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, has been ousted by an aristocratic revolt, led by a certain Lucius Junius Brutus, which then placed a senate of noblemen patricians in charge of the city. For over five-hundred years this senate, and the later plebeian assemblies, ruled the growing power that was the city of Rome. By c. 240 BC she had already annexed all of central and southern Italy, and her conquest had led her into conflict with a great power, Carthage. But Rome overcame its overweening adversary and carved up Carthage's empire, then pushing east, into Greece and Anatolia. Wracked by civil war during the first century BC, when general Gaius Marius and Sulla Felix clashed. Far from damaging Rome's power, this conflict led to the subduing of Rome's latest adversary, the Pontic king Mithridates and set the stage for greater conquests.
For the civil war had brought men like Pompey and Crassus experience in warfare and politics. They were to go on to join Julius Caesar in the first triumvirate and begin to tear the political fabric apart. Because Sulla had taken that fateful step back in the eighties and nineties BC, to take his armies and march on Rome. He had been the first to prove that men could hold the empire through force of arms, not through election. The empire, by the time of the Battle of Pharsalus in which Pompey, the last real threat to Caesar's conquest, was neutered (not literally) was so large that legislation from the senate was too inefficient and would lead to the empire's destruction, through the greed and vanity of ambitious men.
For the civil war had brought men like Pompey and Crassus experience in warfare and politics. They were to go on to join Julius Caesar in the first triumvirate and begin to tear the political fabric apart. Because Sulla had taken that fateful step back in the eighties and nineties BC, to take his armies and march on Rome. He had been the first to prove that men could hold the empire through force of arms, not through election. The empire, by the time of the Battle of Pharsalus in which Pompey, the last real threat to Caesar's conquest, was neutered (not literally) was so large that legislation from the senate was too inefficient and would lead to the empire's destruction, through the greed and vanity of ambitious men.
Octavian's final wresting of power from the senate and the setting up of the principate, following the end of the civil war with Mark Anthony triggered by Caesar's murder in 44 BC, was possibly the most important political moment in Europe's history. It was an event that great leaders of the last 2000 years have tried to emulate. So it was that Napoleon Bonaparte and his grande armé carved up the French government following la grande terreur, a period in which a struggling Republic was wrought with conflict and inefficiency that threatened to drown the country, and using his force of arms, he set up branches of the government in Roman style to act simply as his advisers and nothing more. A senate and tribunate, such obvious duplications, and poor ones at that, of the ancient Roman governance. But it was the point that Augustus [Octavian] had united the country and made his government far more efficient to govern his great empire, that Napoleon wanted to drive home.
His famous march over the Alps against the Austrians and his crowning by the pope as King of Italy and Emperor of France show how far he was prepared to go to make the link that would send the message not only to his own people, but also to his rivals, of France's aspirations. No-one had united Europe under one banner since a 'descendant' of Augustus had sat in the Senate house. This was a clear message to the British, the Russians and the Ottomans of France's intentions.
Of course he failed, Europe was far easier to conquer for the Romans than for Bonaparte, but that didn't stop someone else trying. Adolf Hitler was mad, let that not be in doubt, but his subtle references to history should not be ignored. The golden eagle and red standards were simply another sign of ambition. The Reich would unite Europe with an iron fist, as the Romans had done. He would finish what Otto II, the Holy Roman Emperor had failed to do, make good his claim to that heritage. For no-one could do what they did, march from one end of this great continent to the other and never leave their empire.
NOS ROMANI SVMVS FORTISSIMI
We Romans are the Greatest
A bold claim, but yet somehow hard to dispute.
His famous march over the Alps against the Austrians and his crowning by the pope as King of Italy and Emperor of France show how far he was prepared to go to make the link that would send the message not only to his own people, but also to his rivals, of France's aspirations. No-one had united Europe under one banner since a 'descendant' of Augustus had sat in the Senate house. This was a clear message to the British, the Russians and the Ottomans of France's intentions.
Of course he failed, Europe was far easier to conquer for the Romans than for Bonaparte, but that didn't stop someone else trying. Adolf Hitler was mad, let that not be in doubt, but his subtle references to history should not be ignored. The golden eagle and red standards were simply another sign of ambition. The Reich would unite Europe with an iron fist, as the Romans had done. He would finish what Otto II, the Holy Roman Emperor had failed to do, make good his claim to that heritage. For no-one could do what they did, march from one end of this great continent to the other and never leave their empire.
NOS ROMANI SVMVS FORTISSIMI
We Romans are the Greatest
A bold claim, but yet somehow hard to dispute.
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