From the year after the end of the cataclysmic first Punic war to the year before the cataclysmic tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, this period saw the Roman conquest of Greece and much of the Hellenistic east, and indeed the development of Rome into an imperial state exercising dominion throughout the Mediterranean world. It saw also the developing effects of this process, upon the Romans and, not least, upon those with whom they dealt, in Italy itself and overseas. This time marked the beginning of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. It might be said also to have marked the end of liberty for Greece and much of the rest of the Mediterranean world: the ‘freedom of the Greeks’ was proclaimed by a Roman general in 196 BC, but in 146 BC both Corinth and Carthage were sacked and destroyed. Rome itself and Italy prospered, but wealth and empire brought tensions both within and between these.

This is also a time that produced one of the greatest historians of antiquity, Polybius of Megalopolis, whose subject was the establishment of Roman dominion and the effects of this upon the lives of all the peoples involved. A contemporary of the events, and detained in Rome in the 160s and 150s, he enables (and enlivens) productive study of this period, which saw, amongst so much else, the beginnings of Roman history writing. Inquiry is aided by an increasing number of surviving inscriptions and an increasingly detailed archaeological record.