No Longer Archaic, Not Yet Hellenistic: Urbanism in Transition

The complexity of the Middle Republican period for Rome’s history reveals itself in the constitutional, political, military, socioeconomical, and cultural dynamics that characterized the period between the Gallic Sack and the first war with Carthage. At the end of the Struggle of the Orders and after the constitution of a renewed patrician–plebeian aristocracy, progressive military affirmation on the peninsula led to the formation of Roman Italy – the terra Italia celebrated in 268 BCE with the construction of a temple dedicated to Tellus – establishing the foundations for Roman imperialism in the Mediterranean. This transformation of the power of Rome in both quantitative and qualitative terms was accompanied by a growing awareness of its role in an international political context. Among the many signs of profound changes taking place, the period witnessed the metamorphosis of the image of the city in Greek historiography and ethnography, with what sources understood as the “upgrade” of Rome from an “Etruscan city”/polis tyrrhenis into a “Greek city”/polis hellenis.