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Updated: June 15, 2025
The work was finished in the spring of 560; Flamininus once more assembled the deputies of all the Greek communities at Corinth, exhorted them to a rational and moderate use of the freedom conferred on them, and requested as the only return for the kindness of the Romans, that they would within thirty days send to him the Italian captives who had been sold into Greece during the Hannibalic war.
Besides, and this was the outer of the two forces, the East was crying out to Rome. There were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic time.
On the other hand the Hannibalic war had fearfully devastated southern Italy and had ruined, in addition to a number of smaller townships, its two largest cities, Capua and Tarentum, both once able to send into the field armies of 30,000 men.
The leaders were crucified; others of the slaves who had escaped the carnage were restored to their masters. But these disturbances, that may have seemed mere sporadic relics of the havoc and exhaustion left by the Hannibalic war, were only quelled for the moment. It was soon found that the seeds of insecurity were deeply planted in the settlement that was called a peace.
We will deal first with the publicani. In a passage of Livy quoted just now it is stated that at the beginning of the Hannibalic war money was advanced to the State by societates publicanorum; Livy also happens to mention that three of these competed for the privilege.
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.
The leaves of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
The increasing number and importance of the freedmen are shown by the very serious discussions that arose in the previous century, and were continued during the present, as to their right to vote in the public assemblies, and by the remarkable resolution, adopted by the senate during the Hannibalic war, to admit honourable freedwomen to a participation in the public collections, and to grant to the legitimate children of manumitted fathers the insignia hitherto belonging only to the children of the free-born.
The reserve hitherto stationed in Lower Italy was destined for Greece, the army of Glabrio for Asia: when it became known who was to command it, 5000 veterans from the Hannibalic war voluntarily enrolled, to fight once more under their beloved leader.
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.
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