MAPS OF HISTORY · Rome · THE QUIZ
The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476 · TEST YOURSELF
The quiz
7 questions from the atlas’s Field Exam, free to try. Answer, then read the verdict — every answer is an argument, not a flashcard.
After Cannae, Hannibal expected Rome to negotiate. Why could Rome absorb a catastrophe that would have ended any other ancient state?
The census counted roughly 700,000 eligible men across Rome’s Italian network — and the core allies did not defect. Hannibal won battles inside an alliance that declined to break.
Marius’ reform of 107 BC let the landless poor join the legions. Its fatal side effect was that —
Veterans’ farms could only be extorted from the Senate by a powerful patron. Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and Octavian are the same incentive structure wearing four faces.
Augustus claimed to have “restored the Republic.” What actually secured his power?
The offices stayed republican; the army did not. Fixed pay, fixed terms and a state military treasury ended the client-army era — by making every soldier the emperor’s client.
In AD 212 Caracalla granted citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. Contemporaries noted his motive as —
Cassius Dio says it plainly: citizens paid the 5% inheritance tax. The grant completed Rome’s oldest integration machine — and retired citizenship as an incentive at the same stroke.
The silver denarius went from ~97% pure under Augustus to under 5% by the 270s. The deepest damage of this debasement was —
Inflation was the constitutional solvent of the third century: it converted the Antonine bargain — cheap loyal government — into extraction, right as Goths and Persia attacked.
Modern historians treat the Vandal capture of Carthage in 439 as the West’s mortal wound because —
A soldier cost the taxes of about five households, and Africa was the biggest intact revenue line. After 439 every loss made the next one unaffordable to prevent — arithmetic, then collapse.
In 476 the West’s last emperor was deposed without a battle, a sack, or a revolt. What best explains the silence?
Salvian reported Romans fleeing to Gothic rule to escape Roman taxes decades earlier. An empire is a protection bargain; when protection stopped and bills continued, the customers closed the account.
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