Roman RepublicThe Roman Republic (Res publica Romana ˈreːs̠ ˈpuːblɪka roːˈmaːna) was the era of classical Roman civilization beginning with the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom (traditionally dated to 509 BC) and ending in 27 BC with the establishment of the Roman Empire. During this period, Rome's control expanded from the city's immediate surroundings to hegemony over the entire Mediterranean world. Roman society at the time was primarily a cultural mix of Latin and Etruscan societies, as well as of Sabine, Oscan, and Greek cultural elements, which is especially visible in the Ancient Roman religion and its Pantheon.
Ancient RomeIn modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), Roman Republic (509–27 BC), and Roman Empire (27 BC–476 AD) until the fall of the western empire. Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula.
SicilySicily (Sicilia siˈtʃiːlja; Sicilia sɪˈ(t)ʃiːlja) is the largest and most populous island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 20 regions of Italy with the Strait of Messina dividing it from the region of Calabria in Southern Italy. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions and is officially referred to as Regione Siciliana. The region has 4.8 million inhabitants. Its capital city is Palermo. Sicily is in the central Mediterranean Sea, south of the Italian Peninsula in continental Europe, from which it is separated by the narrow Strait of Messina.
Punic WarsThe Punic Wars were a series of wars between 264 and 146BC fought between Rome and Carthage. Three conflicts between these states took place on both land and sea across the western Mediterranean region and involved a total of forty-three years of warfare. The Punic Wars are also considered to include the four-year-long revolt against Carthage which started in 241BC. Each war involved immense materiel and human losses on both sides.
Second Punic WarThe Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC) was the second of three wars fought between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC. For 17 years the two states struggled for supremacy, primarily in Italy and Iberia, but also on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and, towards the end of the war, in North Africa. After immense materiel and human losses on both sides, the Carthaginians were defeated. Macedonia, Syracuse and several Numidian kingdoms were drawn into the fighting, and Iberian and Gallic forces fought on both sides.
Punic peopleThe Punic people, or Carthaginians, also known as Western Phoenicians, were a Semitic people in the Western Mediterranean who migrated from Tyre, Phoenicia to North Africa during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term Punic, the Latin equivalent of the Greek-derived term Phoenician, is exclusively used to refer to Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, following the line of the Greek East and Latin West.
Hellenistic periodIn classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the death of Cleopatra VII (30 BC) followed by the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year. The Ancient Greek word Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the word Hellenistic was derived.
PolybiusPolybius (pəˈlɪbiəs; Πολύβιος, ; 200-118 BC) was a Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He is noted for his work The Histories, a universal history documenting the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries BC. It covered the period of 264–146 BC, recording in detail events in Italy, Iberia, Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Africa, and documented the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars among many others.
PalermoPalermo (pəˈlɛərmoʊ,_-ˈlɜːr- , paˈlɛrmo; Palermu paˈlɛmmʊ, locally also Paliemmu or Palèimmu) is a city in southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan province. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old. Palermo is in the northwest of the island of Sicily, by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Ancient GreeceAncient Greece (Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (600 AD), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and other territories. Most of these regions were officially unified only once, for 13 years, under Alexander the Great's empire from 336 to 323 BC (though this excludes a number of Greek city-states free from Alexander's jurisdiction in the western Mediterranean, around the Black Sea, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica).
