The History of Rome, Book III From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States — Inside the Classic

Siege and Surrender as Structural Motifs

The excerpts repeatedly depict sieges as turning points that expose both Roman method and local resistance. The investment of Sparta under Nabis is described in tactical detail: 50,000 men brought into the field, the capital invested, a reign of terror within the walls. Mommsen notes that Nabis’s “gang of robbers” rejected peace terms because they feared a reckoning—a psychological observation that links internal terror to external defiance. The assault on the walls is nearly successful until fire forces a retreat. This pattern—siege, negotiation, renewed fighting, conditional surrender—recurs across the volume, from Carthage to Corinth. Mommsen uses these episodes to illustrate how Roman commanders balanced overwhelming force with political calculation, granting terms that dismantled enemy power while preserving nominal independence.

Federations and the Redrawing of Political Space

Mommsen’s account of the post-war settlement in Greece reveals a meticulous restructuring of alliances. The Achaean league is “the best organized and most respectable of all the Greek states,” so it receives Corinth and Philip’s Peloponnesian possessions. The Aetolians, by contrast, are treated with “little ceremony”: they gain Phocis and Locris but are denied Acarnania and Thessaly, which are split into four small confederacies. The Rhodian league benefits from liberated islands. This is not mere narrative; Mommsen is tracing a deliberate Roman policy of fragmentation and consolidation. The language of “incorporation,” “symmachy,” and “independent confederacies” reflects a legal-administrative mindset. The reader sees how Rome used existing Greek institutions—leagues, diets, city-states—as tools of control, rewarding loyalty and penalizing resistance through territorial adjustment.

The Language of Legitimacy and Terror

Mommsen’s characterization of Nabis as an “obstinate petty robber-chieftain” who “confirmed his rule afresh by a complete reign of terror” is typical of his moral-political vocabulary. He contrasts the “legitimate king” Agesipolis with the tyrant, and notes that the Spartan “people” were actually a “gang of robbers” deceived by lies. This binary—legitimate federation versus criminal autocracy—runs through the volume. Yet Mommsen also records that the Romans left Nabis in power, retaining his monarchy, after stripping him of foreign possessions and military capacity. The settlement is pragmatic: the “free Laconians” are created as a rival community, enrolled in the Achaean league. The language thus serves both to condemn and to explain, showing how Roman hegemony accommodated unsavory rulers when useful.

Movement Between Theaters: From Italy to Asia

The excerpts show Mommsen shifting rapidly between geographical arenas: from the Peloponnesus to the Isthmus, from Corinth to Sparta, from Thasos to Asia Minor. Each paragraph moves with the Roman army or fleet, and the narrative is punctuated by declarations of war, diets, and embassies. The war against Nabis is declared “by all the Hellenes at a great diet in Corinth,” and Flamininus advances “accompanied by the fleet and the Romano-allied army.” This constant motion mirrors the Roman capacity to project power across the Mediterranean. Mommsen’s prose rarely lingers; it presses forward from one crisis to the next, much as the Republic itself did. The reader is given a sense of simultaneity—events in Greece, Carthage, and Asia Minor are interwoven, though the excerpts here focus on the Greek theater.

Readers should attend to Mommsen’s use of institutional detail—the names of leagues, the terms of treaties, the numbers of troops—as evidence of how Rome transformed military victory into durable political control. The volume rewards those who follow the movement of armies and the redrawing of borders, noting how each settlement sowed the conditions for the next conflict. Mommsen’s own voice, at once analytical and judgmental, is part of the history he writes.

Reading Mommsen’s siege maps, I remembered my father’s old atlas, its creased pages over France. That same ache of watching borders redraw themselves returned with Augustus: The Life and Times of the Founder of the Roman Empire — Reading Companion, where order finally settles after chaos—a quieter peace, almost sad, like a garden after rain.