Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
For instance, in 536, nearly twice as many of the allies were called out as of the burgesses: after the end of the Hannibalic war all the burgesses received their discharge, but not all the allies; the latter were chiefly employed for garrison duty and for the odious service in Spain; in the triumphal largess of 577 the allies received not as formerly an equal share with the burgesses, but only the half, so that amidst the unrestrained rejoicing of that soldiers' carnival the divisions thus treated as inferior followed the chariot of victory in sullen silence: in the assignations of land in northern Italy the burgesses received ten jugera of arable land each, the non-burgesses three -jugera- each.
In Italy the scenes of disorder, which were among the immediate painful consequences of the Hannibalic war, seemed now to be renewed; all at once the Romans were obliged to seize and execute in the capital 150, in Minturnae 450, in Sinuessa even 4000 slaves . Still worse, as may be conceived, was the state of the provinces.
Pestilences were common at Rome in her early history, and have left their mark in the calendar of her religious festivals; for example, the Apolline games were instituted during the Hannibalic war as the result of a pestilence, and fixed for the unhealthy month of July.
Chaldaean astrologers and casters of nativities were already in the sixth century spread throughout Italy; but a still more important event one making in fact an epoch in the world's history was the reception of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods among the publicly recognized divinities of the Roman state, to which the government had been obliged to give its consent during the last weary years of the Hannibalic war . A special embassy was sent for the purpose to Pessinus, a city in the territory of the Celts of Asia Minor; and the rough field-stone, which the priests of the place liberally presented to the foreigners as the real Mother Cybele, was received by the community with unparalleled pomp.
Cato and those who shared his opinions demanded such measures, pointing, on the one hand, to the devastation of Italy by the Hannibalic war and the alarming diminution of the farms and of the free Italian population generally, and, on the other, to the widely extended possessions of the nobles occupied along with, and similarly to, property of their own in Cisalpine Gaul, in Samnium, and in the Apulian and Bruttian districts; and although the rulers of Rome did not probably comply with these demands to the extent to which they might and should have complied with them, yet they did not remain deaf to the warning voice of so judicious a man.
Corinth, Orchomenus, Argos, Sparta in the Peloponnesus, and Heraclea near to Oeta and to reduce their league to the condition in which it stood at the end of the Hannibalic war.
During the severe disciplinary times of the war as to Sicily the Roman aristocracy had gradually raised itself to the height of its new position; and if it unconstitutionally usurped for the senate functions of government which by right foil to be shared between the magistrates and the comitia alone, it vindicated the step by its certainly far from brilliant, but sure and steady, pilotage of the vessel of the state during the Hannibalic storm and the complications thence arising, and showed to the world that the Roman senate was alone able, and in many respects alone deserved, to rule the wide circle of the Italo-Hellenic states.
In fact, a plan of Hannibal obtained the royal approval, according to which he was to receive from Antiochus a fleet of 100 sail and a land army of 10,000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, and was to employ them in kindling first a third Punic war in Carthage, and then a second Hannibalic war in Italy; Tyrian emissaries proceeded to Carthage to pave the way for a rising in arms there Finally, good results were anticipated from the Spanish insurrection, which, at the time when Hannibal left Carthage, was at its height.
There was in fact in that famous year a real social fermentation going on, caused by economic disturbance of the most serious kind; the germs of the disease can be traced back to the Hannibalic war and its effects on Italy, but all the symptoms had been continually exacerbated by the negligence and ignorance of the government, and brought to a head by the Social and Civil Wars in 90-82 B.C. In 63 the State escaped an economic catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance of the respectable classes under his leadership.
The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination with the five years' deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking