THE WAR WITH PYRRHUS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROME IN III CENTURY BC
Keywords:
Apennine Peninsula, Roman Republic, Pyrrhic War, hegemony, expansionAbstract
The war of the Romans with King Pyrrhus of Epirus was a kind of borderline that conditionally divided the history of Roman republic into two main periods. Many modern researchers follow the concept of the Greek historian Polybius, who considered the expulsion of the Epirus king from Italy as the start of the gradual establishment of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean. The further expansion of Rome, first to the South of Italy, and then outside – to Sicily, was accompanied by an internal political struggle between two groups in Roman society, one of which defended the agrarian development of Rome and therefore was not interested in expanding to the South and leaving Italy, but the second, represented by trade and craft circles, strove for new conquests and the acquisition of new markets. The question of the exact time of minting silver coins in Rome is highly controversial, but there is no doubt that their issue began soon after the end of the war with Pyrrhus. Another consequence of the Pyrrhic War was the recognition by the Romans of their vulnerability due to the lack of their own navy, the construction of which began twenty years after the events mentioned – during the first Punic War. After the war, there was a change in the mentality of the Romans, who, on the one hand, began to realize themselves as the masters of Italy. On the other hand, the harsh customs of their ancestors went down in history and were replaced by the desire for enrichment, undermining the moral foundations of the Roman Republic: the Romans, who had previously rejected the gifts of the emissary of the Epirus king, after a few decades, became familiar with luxury goods, becoming an obligatory subject of their daily life. Over time, the attitude of the Romans to the personality of the Epirus king himself changed. In their eyes, he turned from a noble hero into an ordinary enemy like Hannibal or Philip V. In fact, the victory of the Romans over Pyrrhus was a harbinger of the Punic wars and, ultimately, the establishment of the hegemony of Rome in the Mediterranean. But, speaking of the Pyrrhic war itself, modern researchers for some reason forget about the role of the personality of the Epirus king himself, which in one way or another caused the changes that took place in the history of Rome.References
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