THE FALL OF SPARTA

When the Spartans and their allies made their defiant and most famous stand against the Persians at Thermopylae, Rome was nothing more than a simple settlement straddling the Tiber River. When Philip of Macedon claimed hegemony over the Greek city states and his son Alexander marched his army to the edge of the known world, Rome had just begun to prove itself as a regional power in central Italy. But by the turn of the 3rd century BCE Sparta had fallen from its near-mythical pedestal and Alexander’s empire had fragmented – yet the Romans had kept on conquering.

Over several centuries, the city of Rome had ascended from a monarchy to an oligarchic republic and become sovereign over most of the Italian peninsula. The war-mongering Romans spent the middle of the 3rd century BCE mostly occupied with their first war against Carthage – a rich North African trading city on the southern side of the Mediterranean – over control of the island of Sicily. It was a hard-fought campaign that spanned over two decades, but the grit of the Romans eventually paid off; they claimed not only victory but also their first overseas territory. With most of Italy, the bulk of Sicily and Sardinia now firmly under their control, they were free to turn their attention east for the first time.

Their immediate concern was with Illyria, which sat north of mainland Greece and separated the Macedonians from the Adriatic Sea. The Illyrians had been plaguing Roman trade, and so with their veteran navy the Romans sailed across the water and delivered over 20,000 legionnaries on their enemy’s shores. Despite the best preparations from