1. Despite an unprecedented march over the Alps, the mountains separating Italy from the rest of Europe, and several crushing defeats inflicted on Roman armies, Hannibal was unable either to put Rome itself under siege or to win over her north Italian allies. He was finally recalled to Africa when a Roman force under Publius Cornelius Scipio (later granted the additional name `Africanus’) threatened Carthage. Scipio won the war for Rome by defeating Hannibal in one of the most decisive battles of European history at Zama in 202 B.C..

2. Although Carthage was no longer a real threat, some Romans felt there was still a danger it might revive and so, using as a pretext a dispute between Carthage and Rome’s north African allies, the city was finally destroyed in 146 B.C. and its inhabitants killed or enslaved.

3. During the war with Hannibal, Macedon, one of the Greek-ruled kingdoms into which Alexander the Great’s empire had been divided, had intervened on the Carthaginian side. Rome sought revenge and then became progressively more involved in disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean, which she dominated by the middle of the 1st century B.C.

4. In 133 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus, who had tried to bring in reforms to help landless citizens, was murdered by his political opponents. This ushered in a period of increasing conflict between `Populares’ (`the People’s party’) and `Optimates’ (defenders of the intersests of the aristocracy)

5. In 90 B.C. many of Rome’s Italian allies, angered by her refusal to grant them full citizenship, revolted and tried to set up an independent state. They issued a coin showing the Italian bull trampling the Roman wolf. The war ended with a Roman victory in 88 but they then granted the allies the citizenship rights they had originally demanded.

6. In 88 B.C., the Roman general Sulla led his army into Rome itself to reverse the decision to transfer command in a war against King Mithridates in Asia Minor to a rival leader, Marius. Soldiers increasingly saw themselves as followers of their commander, who they expected to provide them with land after their retirement, rather than as servants of the state. Sulla was the victor in the civil war that followed his return from the East in 83.

7. In 73-71 B.C. Rome struggled to put down a slave rebellion led by Spartacus. After the final defeat of the rebels by Crassus, thousands were crucified along the sides of the Via Appia. The picture is from the 1960 film starring Kirk Douglas

8. In 67 B.C., Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), a general who had been one of Sulla’s followers, was given sweeping powers to rid the Mediterranean of pirates. The following year he defeated King Mithridates of Pontus in Asia Minor, who had fought three wars against the Romans over the previous twenty years.

9. In 63 B.C. a conspiracy to take over the government was formed by an indebted aristocrat, Cataline, who fled the city after his denunciation in the senate by the consul, Cicero. Cicero had some of Cataline’s collaborators executed without trial and Cataline himself was defeated in battle.

10. In 60 B.C, rising politician Julius Caesar (centre) reconciled rival strongmen Pompey (left) and Crassus (right) and the three formed an informal alliance known as the `First Triumvirate’. It was agreed that after serving as consul in 59, Caesar should become governor of Ilyricum (former Yugoslavia), and of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul (the Po valley in northern Italy and southern France)

11. In August 55 B.C., Julius Caesar, who was fighting to establish Roman control over all of what is now France, Belgium and the western edge of Germany, invaded Britain but he withdrew shortly afterwards. He invaded again in 54 and reached the Thames before once more returning to Gaul.

12. Relations between Caesar and Pompey deteriorated after Caeasar’s daughter, who Pompey had married, died in 54 B.C. and the third triumvir, Crassus, was killed at Carrhae the following year in an ill-judged attack on the Parthians, an Iranian people who controlled the territory east of the Roman province of Syria.

13. Caesar wanted to be allowed to stand as a candidate for a second consulship whilst still retaining command in Gaul as he was afraid that if he returned to Rome as a private citizen he would be prosecuted by his political enemies. In January 49 B.C, when no compromise could be reached with the senate, with which Pompey was now collaborating, Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon, the small river separating Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, to begin another civil war. The expression `crossing the Rubicon’ now means `taking an irrevocable step’