So, there was Rome in the last century B.C., with a more or less inadvertent empire. The French were a Republic too, when they went out conquering natives and seizing colonies, in the 19th century. We don’t think of the Presidents of the Republic who prosecuted those wars of colonial conquest in French Indochina, or French Africa. We don’t think of the war between Mexico and the USA as President Polk’s war, which it was.
There is that fact, then, that the Roman Empire was basically assembled during the Republic. The emperors came later.
They were ambivalent while they were putting it together. They discussed policy in the Senate before they tried to implement it. They’d look at foreign opportunities, and foreign threats, potential or actual.
There’d always be some faction that would say doing something about something was a bad idea. But enough projects were greenlighted that by the end of the first century B.C., the Roman Republic had amassed a set of foreign territories that dwarfed its homeland in territory, population, and wealth. Which brought up the questions of what to do with all this stuff, and why, and how. These people, these resources, these places.
That, in the broadest of strokes, is how they come to own all of what is now the Republic of Turkiye.
To recap what we discussed last time, in the latter half of the last century B.C., what is now European Turkey was Roman provinces. Anatolia was a mix of provinces and
