The Rise of the Roman Empire

John David Lewis The ancient writer Polybius narrates Rome’s rise to dominance over the Mediterranean within a 53-year period, an achievement that he calls unprecedented. He is very concerned with the causes of war. He thinks that war and foreign policy events have definite causes, and he presents a method to understand those causes. For example, he sees Hannibal’s attack on Italy as caused by Hannibal’s ambitious moral character, which was incited to action by the unfair conditions imposed by Rome after the First Punic War. Now I don’t think that Polybius is right about this. It is Hannibal’s ideas and those... (Source)