From Asculum to Actium

"Between 91 and 87 B.C. Rome fought and won the brutal Social War against its Italian allies, who had risen up in revolt. The settlement which followed saw the extension of Roman citizenship to the defeated, turning Italy for the first time into a unified political entity, a seminal moment in the history of the Late Republic. The Roman state thus created was vastly greater, in citizen numbers and territorial extent, than any hitherto known, Edward Bispham examines the consequences for the communities of Italy of municipalization: the transformation of autonomous states with their own sovereign assemblies, political practices, religious systems, and cultural traditions, into municipia, citizen communities within the Roman territorial state. The creation of a municipal system, which provided Rome with a series of communities which could act as interlocutors between Rome and local populations, implement justice, oversee financial needs, look after infrastructure and religious rituals, and ensure the orderly administration of rural territories, was the major achievement of the fifty years after the Social War. Not only was Italy transformed, but a template was fashioned without which the western Roman empire could never have survived. Bispham looks at the practical and ideological implications of the political structures created for the new municipia in Italy, and assesses the strengths and the limits of the political unification of Italy in the last decades of the Republic, an integration which is seen as being heavily dependent on the processes of change analysed here."--BOOK JACKET.Bispham, Edward is the author of 'From Asculum to Actium', published 2007 under ISBN 9780199231843 and ISBN 0199231842.