Fall of the Roman Republic 1
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Introduction
In a very short period of time, the Romans conquered the entire Medierranean basin. In 264 their overseas involvement began with the first war against Carthage (First Punic War), which gave Rome its first overseas provinces in Sicily and Sardinia. By 202 Carthage was destroyed as a major power in the Second Punic War, gaining two provinces in the Spanish peninsula. By 146 Rome had defeated all the major Hellenistic powers and destroyed Carthage, and established provinces in North Africa and Greece (Macedonia). The next centuries saw vast political and social problems in Rome arising from these conquests.
The governmental system at Rome, which was basically designed to run an Italian town with a moderate amount of nearby territory, was ill-suited to managing the provincial administration and perhaps more importantly the permanent military establishment necessitated by these conquests.
Internally, the vast wealth that arose from the wars of conquest and from provincial governorships (generally through corruption, though even an honest governor like Cicero made 2,000,000 sesterces as a governor for only a year) had serious repurcussions in Italy. This wealth was used to buy land in Italy, and the small landowners who formed the backbone of the Roman military (only landowners were subject to military service) were pushed from their lands and thus made ineligible for service. At the same time, the wealth associated with office holding led to widespread corruption in elections and a domination of the political scene by those families that had done best at profitting from waging the wars of conquest.
Several major civil wars resulted from the political instability of the Late Republic...