Free The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire by Eric Nelson Page A

Romans. Later, the Romans fought the Numidian king Jugurtha from 111–104 B . C . E . Numidia was bordered in the south by the Sahara and to the west by what came to be called Mauretania, the land of the Moors.
    Mauretania stretched from Numidia around the Straight of Gibraltar. The people were a mixture of African and Berber tribes with Phoenician settlements and were ruled by tribal chieftains. Some of the chieftains from this area played a part in the war with Jugurtha and in the later Roman Civil War; under Roman rule, it provided important cavalry units for Roman armies.

The Greeks and Greece
    It would be hard to overestimate the influence that the Greeks had on the Roman world both directly and indirectly. Greek colonies existed in every corner of the Mediterranean, and after Alexander the Great, Greek became the lingua franca of the ancient world. Greek culture also served as a model from which the Romans developed Latin literature, philosophy, and rhetoric.
The Ancient Greek City-States
    When Rome was nothing more than a collection of small mud huts along the Tiber, Greek culture was emerging from a long dark age after the fall of Mycenean Culture (the Bronze Age Greek civilization) about 1200 B . C . E . After three or four centuries of dislocation, migration, and new settlements, the Greeks began to develop the Phoenician alphabet, and a long fermentation of oral literature sprang, fully formed, onto the page (or papyrus roll) with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These works were written down about the same time as the traditional date of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, ca 756 B . C . E .
    From the eighth through fifth centuries B . C . E ., the Greeks got rid of their monarchies and established poleis, or city-states. Cities and their surrounding territories were organized, governed, and defended by citizens. Aristocracies generally controlled the city-state, but some places, such as Athens, developed more broadly based governance in which the general citizenry, or demos, had more control.
    The Persians tried to conquer Greece in the early fifth century, and the Greek city-states cooperated to drive them from Greece. This conflict is called the Persian War (490–480 B . C . E .). Two states emerged as the most influential: Sparta, located in the Peloponnesus, and Athens, located in central Greece. These two city-states represented very different ideals in the fifth century. Sparta was a conservative, traditional, and land-based power; Athens was a radical, innovative, and sea-based empire.
    These states and their allies went to war at the end of the fifth century. This conflict is called the Peloponnesian War (430–404 B . C . E .). Sparta was eventually victorious, but not before Athens blossomed (in part through the tribute it extracted from its “ allies”) into the city of literature, drama, science, culture, philosophy, art, and architecture that students have been studying ever since. We often think of the Golden Age of Greece as being one in which men in white frocks strolled about marble buildings pulling their beards while musing about poetry and philosophy, but this period was, in fact, about as turbulent and unstable as it could be. In Chinese proverbial terms, it really was “interesting times.”
The End of the City-State and Alexander’s Empire
    In the fourth century, Athens regained some of its footing, but the age of the city-state was on the decline. Only two possibilities for larger order existed: cooperativefederation of the city-states under some larger body or conquest of the rest by one. Between the fractious city-states, Greek federations lasted about as long as modern Italian governments (not very long), so the conquest of the rest by one became the possibility that was eventually realized.
    A Macedonian king, whom many of the Greeks (at the time) would have considered a barbarian, brought this conquest about. Philip II (king from 359–336 B . C