However, towards the end of the second century Rome met with a number of defeats at the hands of
barbarian enemies, notably Jugurtha in Africa and the northern Cimbri and Teutones who had invaded
Italy (both wars were in the end successfully concluded by C. Marius). She was also preoccupied by
internal problems brought to a head by the brothers Gracchi (above, pp. 411 £), and from 91 with the
'Social' War against the Italian allies (above, pp. 413 f.). Upon this followed the first real civil war,
leading to Sulla's brief dictatorship and his restoration of senatorial government. Understandably only
small gains were made abroad in this period. Neglect of the East, which had allowed the rise of
Mithridates of Pontus, who seized all Asia Minor, exploiting anti-Roman sentiment, and whose forces
even invaded Greece, was ultimately remedied. The Roman general Pompey (below, pp. 463 ff.) decided
that more direct rule was needed. He set up provinces in Syria (where the Seleucid kingdom had been in
decline since its original defeat by Rome, with resulting disorder) and in Bithynia-Pontus in northern
Asia Minor; he enlarged the 'province' of Cilicia, where Rome had for some time been trying to deal
with pirates based on the wild coast. The rest of the East was put under selected kings and dynasts, at
least some of whom paid tribute to Rome. The Empire had now reached the Euphrates, and Rome was in
direct touch with Armenia and Parthia beyond it, kingdoms -where the Greek cultural influence
predominant in most of the Near East began to wear very thin.
Only a few years later, in 58 B.C., C. Julius Caesar (below, pp. 467 f.) became governor of southern
Gaul and embarked on a war of conquest in the centre and north which even took him across the Rhine
and the English Channel. He failed to make Britain tributary, but Gaul was organized as a province. This
was the first of Rome's conquests remote from the Mediterranean or its extension the Black Sea, and led
on to the successful Alpine and Balkan, and unsuccessful German, campaigns of Augustus. However the
attempt by M. Crassus, the third member of the so-called First Triumvirate (below, pp. 469 ff), to invade
Parthia was a disaster, and the next major annexation completed the circuit of the Mediterranean:
Cleopatra was encouraged by her Roman lover, Antony, to rebuild Egypt's power in the eastern
Mediterranean, but they were defeated by Antony's rival for supremacy at Rome, the future Emperor
Augustus.
The Evidence
No one disputes that the consequences for Rome of these conquests were vast, economically, socially,
culturally, and politically. But to particularize raises hotly debated issues. The difficulties are due partly
to the shortcomings of our sources. Polybius wrote a full and pretty reliable account of most of Rome's
wars from 264 to 146, but his later books survive only in fragments and for the earlier ones he depended
on previous writers whom he knew to be biased. Some of the missing parts of Polybius can be
reconstructed from Livy, who sensibly used him for Rome's relations with the East; but Livy, who is
again incompletely preserved (only in epitomes and derivatives after 167) also used the so-called
annalistic tradition of his Latin-writing predecessors. Its reliability, and the extent to which it draws on
documentary evidence, is disputed, but it certainly often distorts events for patriotic or dramatic ends
(the desire of most historians to provide moral exempla, and their training in rhetoric, must be borne in
mind). Of authors later than the Augustan Livy, the Greek historian Appian, who recounts many of
Rome's wars, is notable, as is Plutarch, though the main interest of his Lives is in individual character.
For Caesar's campaigns we have his own Commentaries, often disingenuous; and Cicero's speeches and