Roman Republic

The Republic was founded, by tradition, in 509 BC when the last king Tarquin was driven out and replaced with two annually elected consuls and a Senate. Over the next five centuries Rome expanded by stages: the conquest of Italy (to 270 BC), the three Punic Wars against Carthage (264–146), the destruction of Corinth and the absorption of Greece (146), the eastern wars against Mithridates of Pontus (88–63), and Pompey’s settlement of the East that placed Syria and Judea under Roman power in 63 BC. The last century of the Republic was the century of the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, Spartacus, Cicero, Pompey, and Julius Caesar — a long sequence of civil wars driven by an old constitution unable to govern a Mediterranean empire. Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC and the war between his heir Octavian and Mark Antony ended at Actium in 31 BC. Four years later the Senate granted Octavian the title Augustus, and the Republic in name continued but in fact gave way to monarchy. The Bible’s direct contact with the Republic is brief but decisive: 1 Maccabees 8 records a treaty between Rome and Judah Maccabee (c. 161 BC), and Pompey’s storming of Jerusalem in 63 BC began Roman rule over the Jewish people.