ON THIS DAY · 21 APRIL 753 BC
Traditional founding of Rome
Rome is founded — by tradition, on this day, by a fratricide. The city will run the Mediterranean for seven centuries.
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The moment in context
The war became a test of endurance, and the reason becomes clear once we look at how each of the two states was actually built. Rome’s real strength was a system for producing soldiers. Over the previous two centuries it had tied the other peoples of Italy to itself as allies who kept their own governments and, in return, owed troops whenever Rome called, so that a generation later the Greek historian Polybius reckoned this network could field more than 700,000 men of fighting age, a reserve closer to that of a modern nation mobilising its whole population than to a typical ancient city. Carthage produced its power through wealth instead. Its trading empire financed the finest navy in the region and paid for professional soldiers hired from many nations, though armies raised in this way last only as long as the money and the ports that supply them, and they shrink the moment either one fails.
From First Punic War, chapter 1 of The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476 (264 BC).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The socii system: manpower as a constitution. Rome’s wars ran on a unique alliance structure. Defeated Italian states kept their laws and lands but supplied troops — and the loyal could earn…
- The turn — The Mamertine appeal, 264 BC. The Senate, uneasy about aiding mercenaries who had seized a city by massacre, deadlocked — and referred the choice to the popular assembly, which…
- What it changed — Rome becomes a naval power in five years. Using a wrecked Carthaginian quinquereme as a template, Rome built 100+ warships and invented the corvus boarding-bridge to turn sea battles into…
Then ask the room: Rome and Carthage had been allies against Pyrrhus just fourteen years earlier. Why did a squabble over one Sicilian city pull them into twenty-three years of war? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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