sheer greed played a large part in swaying opinion. The action that led to war was to send an army to protect Messana, in the hands
of a band of Italian mercenaries, against Hiero of Syracuse, despite the fact that the protection of Carthage had already been
invoked. The action was in character; neither the Roman aristocracy nor the Roman state as a whole could ever resist the temptation
to intervene when the chance arose.
The war lasted from 264 to 241 and was in effect a war for the control of Sicily, since Hiero of Syracuse decided at an early stage in
the proceedings to throw in his lot with the Romans. Roman persistence won through, and Roman chicanery added Sardinia to the
prize. Much is obscure about the way in which Rome set about organizing her new acquisitions, but two points are worth making.
In the first place, it is clear that the Italian model of a treaty which imposed on the defeated community the obligation to provide
manpower at the behest of Rome was not applied; both Sicily and Sardinia were regarded as territories to be ruled and taxed. In the
second place, a group of recently discovered inscriptions from Entella in western Sicily reveal at least one Italian in a semi-official
position of influence under Roman auspices during the First Punic War, and probably profiting from the position.
Politics in the Middle Republic
Leadership in the wars that Rome fought in the fourth and third centuries was provided by the mixed patrician-plebeian nobility
which had emerged as a result of the resolution of the struggle of the orders. Holders of the consulship or other high office and their
descendants came to be regarded as forming the nobility under the new dispensation. It was this group that constituted the Senate in
the traditional age of senatorial domination.
It must be said that our ignorance of how politics worked in this society is almost total. The problem arises at at least two levels,
within the senatorial elite and between the elite and the population as a whole. Although what our sources tell us about this period,
the period of the middle Republic, is no doubt heavily tinged with romanticism, it seems reasonable to suppose that both the elite
and society as a whole were united to an extent that was clearly not true in the age of Cicero.
Obviously there was competition within the elite for office, power, and influence. We possess from the third century one early
grave monument, that of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (above, p. 402; the inscription is later than the sarcophagus) and part of the
elogium pronounced at the death of L. Caecilius Metellus, consul in 251. Neither the inscription of Barbatus nor the elogium on
Metellus makes sense except in the context of a competitive aristocracy. Clearly there were moments of tension, as when an
ancestor of Sulla (below, pp.413f., 459 ff.) was expelled from the Senate for excessive display of wealth. But it is wildly unlikely
that the fourth and third centuries were characterized by the bitterness and the unscrupulousness which marked political conflict in
the age of Cicero. The consul of 251 was described as possessing great wealth, honourably acquired. Only the first part of this
description could have been applied to Caesar.
When there was disagreement within the elite over policy, we simply do not know how it was resolved. It is, however, worth
remarking that one modern theory, according to which entire gentes such as the Cornelii or the Caecilii operated as single entities,
building stable alliances with other gentes, is almost certainly fantasy. The theory does not work for any period where we have first-
hand evidence, and it is paradoxical to apply it when there is no such evidence; and men such as Barbatus and Metellus emerge as
larger-than-life individuals, whose ambitions sometimes actually played a part in pushing Rome into war.
We are even more in the dark when it comes to understanding the nature of the relationship between the elite and the population as
a whole. Again, of course, there was controversy, over matters which were to be characteristic causes of controversy in the second
and first centuries; thus there was argument in 290 over the relative balance to be achieved in the use of conquered land in Sabinum
between its distribution to the poor and its sale to the rich; and Polybius records a controversy aroused in 232 by the proposal to
distribute land in Picenum and the south-east of the Po valley. But Roman history in the fourth and third centuries is
incomprehensible except on the assumption that the lower orders were largely satisfied with the leadership of the nobility and with
the rewards to be won under their command.
Conventionally clientela, a traditional, often inherited relationship of dependence of one man on another, is regarded as the
principal integrating factor in Roman society of the middle Republic. But other factors were surely at work. Although Rome, as we
shall see in a moment, was already in the third century large in comparison with most ancient states, it was probably still a society
where contact between different social levels was relatively easy; the number of enterprises, such as war and colonization, in which
elite and people shared, ensured that the two remained relatively closely integrated. And now, as later, the elite could and did justify
its actions to the population as a whole in terms of shared values; these values involved, among other things, the belief that the