The remarkable though largely unplanned territorial expansion of Rome between 375 and 275 bc brought lasting economic gains. With control of all of peninsular Italy, Rome established colonies on some of the conquered territories and elsewhere assigned lands to individual Roman citizens. The nearly 60,000 holdings distributed before the middle of the 3rd century helped solve the pressure of Rome’s land-hungry population. Nevertheless, by about 250 the city’s population had grown to almost 100,000. The booty from conquests also helped defray the costs of such public works as the building of temples and roads and the improvement of the city’s water supply. By the early 3rd century two aqueducts carried fresh water into the city.

In 264 Rome was drawn into a war with Carthage, the great Phoenician emporium in North Africa. After more than a century of conflict, Rome emerged as the strongest power in the Mediterranean. However, the acquisition of an empire, which for the most part had not been the conscious desire of the Roman people, brought new social and economic problems to the city itself. During the Second Punic War (218–201) large areas of the peninsula were devastated by invading troops from Carthage, led by the famous general Hannibal; much land was abandoned and many peasants sought refuge in Rome. The growing requirements of a standing army depopulated the countryside and concentrated veterans in the city. The Roman nobility, prohibited by law and by custom from investing in commerce or industry, profited from the economic distress of the peasantry by buying up large tracts of land in central and southern Italy. Slaves, whom Rome’s wars in the Mediterranean made available in large numbers, were introduced into Italy as farm labourers and herdsmen, causing further dislocation among the free peasantry. In general, the Roman economy lagged well behind the political development of both city and empire.

The late republic

During the 2nd century bc the rapid growth of the urban population and the extension of Roman citizenship led to the effective disenfranchisement of the urban vote. The Senate, now the chief policy-making body of the Roman state, was preoccupied with the problems of the empire and too often ignored the needs of the city. With no separate municipal government, public works and the management of food and water supplies were left to private initiative or to amateur public officials. Nevertheless, some progress did occur. Some of the main streets were paved; drains were covered; and several large basilicas and a new row of shops were built in the Forum. The first stone bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Aemilius (its ruins now known as the Ponte Rotto), was completed in 142, and the first high-level aqueduct was erected in 144, allowing settlement on the higher ground of the city’s eastern ridges. From the early 2nd century the river port at the base of the Aventine acquired new warehouses and docking facilities.

These and other projects, however, were inadequate to deal with the growing urban proletariat increasingly swollen with slaves and freedmen. Crowded into shoddy apartment houses (insulae) and with only minimal employment opportunities in what was an essentially nonindustrial city, the lower classes were surviving on the sporadic public works projects of the state and the largesse of the rich before the end of the 2nd century. Rome had, moreover, neither police nor fire protection.

The tribunes known as the Gracchi—Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and later Gaius Sempronius Gracchus—attempted to deal with the problems of urban unemployment and rising food prices, first by advocating the reestablishment of a small farmer class in Italy, then through the subsidization of the grain supply for the poor. Gaius Gracchus also encouraged public expenditure on roads and buildings. Coupled with currency reforms and heavy government spending, these measures partially restored prosperity to Rome in the late 2nd century, but the basic structural faults in the city’s economy and political life remained.

During the civil strife that occupied most of the first half of the 1st century bc, both population and problems multiplied in Rome. The creation of private armies attached to the Roman nobility offered employment to some of the urban lower classes but contributed greatly to the political violence that eventually spelled the end of the republic. Securing an adequate supply of cheap grain offered possibilities for the political manipulation of the urban masses. By the middle of the century, perhaps as many as 500,000 persons were receiving free grain. The upper classes became more interested in luxurious living, and their tastes were matched in the public sphere by the building programs of the leaders Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Pompey the Great. Public buildings and theatres paid for with tribute and booty enhanced Rome’s beauty but did not make a more livable city. In addition, heavy migration to Rome, especially from the Hellenistic east, added to the burdens of the already overcrowded city.