Rome 09: Scipio Aemilianus and the Gracchi

This Rise of the Individual, as I call it, is both the natural result of Roman expansion and increased wealth and a testament to the strength of the Roman Republic but it is also the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Beginning in the second century, Rome had outgrown the institutions that it had. One theme that I will continue to emphasize over the next eight lectures is that Rome would not, or more likely, could not change their political and social structures quickly enough to accommodate for their rapid expansion. As a result, that would allowed them to emerge so quickly in the Western Mediterranean as a dominate force would ultimately be their undoing as they drifted into civil war at the end of the first millennium. This lecture marks the beginning of that story.