Book: Concord Publications 6002 Imperial Rome at war
Author: Martin Windrow, Angus McBridge
Pages: 46
Format: PDF
Language: English
ISBN10: 9623616082
The armies of Imperial Rome, and the 500-year history of the empire which they won and defended, are the shared foundation of the whole Western military tradition. There is no simple explanation for the access of vigour
through which a nation rises to seize its historical hour of dominance; we can never know "why", but can ometimes puzzle over the "how". In the 8th Century BC Rome was an obscure village guarding a river crossing in north-east Italy. She threw off Etruscan rule in the 6th Century, and herself dominated the whole Italian peninsula by the mid-3rd Century. Between the 260s and 140s BC she destroyed the great western Mediterranean empire of Carthage, and came to dominate Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt. By 120 AD Rome's rule extended from the Atlantic almost to the Caspian, from northern England to southern Iraq. Despite catastrophic setbacks she remained the single strongest power in the Western world, and its only "modern" military machine, until the early 5th Century AD. She achieved this record, unique in history, with an army which until the 4th Century never exceeded about 320,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry.
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