ABSTRACT
During the period of nearly three hundred years which lies between the beginning of the Punic Wars—that is, the first attempt of Rome to extend her domain outside the peninsula of Italy—and the death of Augustus—that is, the time when the Empire was constituted in its chief territorial limits and in the general form which it would more or less retain down to the barbarian invasions—the Roman State absorbed, one after another, the various Mediterranean countries in which economic life had developed at various rates and under different conditions. Her victory over Carthage made Rome mistress of the Western Mediterranean; the conquest of Greece and the defeat of the Oriental sovereigns, Antiochos, Mithradates, and Cleopatra later, gave her the dominion of the eastern seas; the submission of Gaul up to the Rhine and the occupation and organization of the vast regions on the right bank of the Danube from the Lake of Constance to the Black Sea carried her economic influence with her political power into the heart of Central Europe. When that achievement was completed (to be rounded off later in Europe by the annexation of a great part of Britain, the Agri Decumates between the upper Rhine and upper Danube, and Dacia, and in Asia by that of Mesopotamia and Arabia), the ancient world, once divided and tugged about between frequently warring states and kings, found itself collected in a single political organism, under the direction of a powerful mistress who was able to maintain that new unity, strong enough to allow free play to the economic forces working within the limits of the Empire, and also strong enough and prosperous enough to attract to herself or to reach the resources of vast countries outside, such as India, China, and Central and East Africa.
