Book III of The History of Rome opens on the great Mediterranean contest that carried Rome from Italian unification to imperial power. Mommsen ranges from Hannibal's wars and the administration of land, capital, faith, manners, literature, and art to the larger struggle between Rome, Carthage, and the Greek kingdoms, tracing how military victory became political mastery. He begins with the Phoenicians as the ancient world's supreme commercial people: ingenious seafarers who linked the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean through trade, colonization, and navigation, yet produced little lasting art, science, or civic freedom compared with Greece and Italy. That contrast sharpens in Carthage, the greatest Phoenician settlement, whose harbor, farmland, and strategic position made it a rising power of agriculture, industry, and commerce. Initially cautious and dependent, Carthage grew into a western Mediterranean empire, subduing Libya, extending influence through Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily, and fighting long wars with Syracuse for control of the sea. Mommsen then turns to the Macedonian struggle: Philip's resistance, Roman pressure, and the advance under Flaminius and at the Aous, ending in retreat and the widening Roman grip on Greece. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Mommsen, Theodor

Theodor Mommsen was a towering German scholar, historian, jurist, and public intellectual whose life stretched across the turbulent nineteenth century, from the aftermath of the Napoleonic era to the dawn of modern Europe. Born in 1817 and trained in law and classical studies, he built a career that combined rigorous scholarship with civic engagement, teaching at several universities and taking part in political life as a liberal voice in Prussia. His greatest achievement was his monumental reconstruction of the ancient Roman world, especially his sweeping multi-volume history of Rome, which transformed the study of antiquity through its vivid narrative energy, command of sources, and insistence that history should be both exacting and alive. Mommsen also made lasting contributions to Roman law, inscriptions, and the methods of historical research, helping establish standards of precision that still shape classical scholarship today. At the heart of his work lies a fascination with power, citizenship, law, empire, and the fragile institutions that hold societies together—questions that remain strikingly current in an age still wrestling with democracy, authoritarianism, and the uses of national memory. His legacy endures not only in the academy but in the broader imagination, where he remains a model of the scholar as interpreter of civilization. Readers who enjoy grand historical vision, classical antiquity, political history, and intellectually serious prose will find him especially rewarding.