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Updated: June 15, 2025
In 502, shortly after the expedition of Regulus to Africa, they amounted to 298,000 men capable of bearing arms; thirty years later, shortly before the commencement of the Hannibalic war , they had fallen off to 270,000, or about a tenth, and again twenty years after that, shortly before the end of the same war , to 214,000, or about a fourth; and a generation afterwards during which no extraordinary losses occurred, but the institution of the great burgess-colonies in the plain of northern Italy in particular occasioned a perceptible and exceptional increase the numbers of the burgesses had hardly again reached the point at which they stood at the commencement of this period.
Nothing perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under taxation, that the reserve was touched; whereas the Social war was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred to sell by auction the public sites in the capital and to seize the treasures of the temples rather than levy a tax on the burgesses.
But, when we take into account the enormous extraordinary revenues which in the generation after the close of the Hannibalic war came into the Roman treasury, the latter sum surprises us rather by its smallness than by its magnitude.
Already during the Hannibalic war the censors found occasion to visit with severe penalties the remissness of those who were liable to military service under the equestrian census.
All the burgess troops, on the other hand, that had continued under arms from the Hannibalic war, were discharged; volunteers alone, it was alleged, were to be enrolled for the Macedonian war, but they were, as was afterwards found, for the most part forced volunteers a fact which in the autumn of 555 called forth a dangerous military revolt in the camp of Apollonia.
Down to the period of the Hannibalic war there was no historical composition in Rome; for the entries in the book of Annals were of the nature of records and not of literature, and never made any attempt to develop the connection of events.
He distinguished himself so much in this way that his master gave him freedom, and even the authorities, who not unfrequently availed themselves of his services commissioning him, for instance, to prepare a thanksgiving-chant after the fortunate turn taken by the Hannibalic war in 547 out of regard for him conceded to the guild of poets and actors a place for their common worship in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine.
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.
But, when we take into account the enormous extraordinary revenues which in the generation after the close of the Hannibalic war came into the Roman treasury, the latter sum surprises us rather by its smallness than by its magnitude.
The scarcely- armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war. Internal Dissension among the Insurgents
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