Author Description

The readers will learn about the Gracchi brothers, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. A very interesting introduction to the period of Roman Republic, ancient military history and battles.Excerpt from Gracchi Marius and Sulla.Foreign wars will have but secondary importance in the following pages. The interest of the narrative centres mainly in home politics; and though the world did not cease to echo to the tramp of conquering legions, and the victorious soldier became a more and more important factor in the State, still military matters no longer, as in the Samnite and Punic wars, absorb the attention, dwarfed as they are by the great social struggle of which the metropolis was the arena. In treating of the first half of those hundred years of revolution, which began with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus and ended with the battle of Actium, it is mainly the fall of the Republican and the foreshadowing of the Imperial system of government which have to be described. In order to understand the times of the Gracchi it is necessary to understand the history of the orders at Rome. But, in order to understand rightly the events of those fifty years, some survey, however brief, of the previous history of the Roman orders is indispensable.