Civic pride is a powerful motivator, especially for defense. However, I think that the Roman Republic was remarkably belligerent even by the standards of polities where the common people had a great deal of civic pride. Civic pride also doesn’t explain why Roman socii were so enthusiastic about fighting alongside the Romans.
(I’m not a historian and I don’t have any explanation of my own to propose as an alternative to yours.)
Oh, yes, you are absolutely correct there! Like I said - there were a great many causes for the Republic’s level of… enthusiastic expansion. We could go into the fact that the entire Roman state was organized around war, or the cultural value placed by Romans on their own superiority, or the relative equality of citizenry in the state, or the Republic’s willingness to include outsiders to a place within the polity (and not just under it); but the full list of reasons takes up entire books and libraries.
At the same time, you can see a distinct difference in the consistency of aggressive policy between city-state style polities, like Rome and most pre-Alexander Greek city-states, which cultivated intense bonds between their citizenry and the very abstract state they belonged to; and traditional kingdoms and broader confederations, whose aggression waxed and waned with their leadership’s decisions.
Civic pride is a powerful motivator, especially for defense. However, I think that the Roman Republic was remarkably belligerent even by the standards of polities where the common people had a great deal of civic pride. Civic pride also doesn’t explain why Roman socii were so enthusiastic about fighting alongside the Romans.
(I’m not a historian and I don’t have any explanation of my own to propose as an alternative to yours.)
Oh, yes, you are absolutely correct there! Like I said - there were a great many causes for the Republic’s level of… enthusiastic expansion. We could go into the fact that the entire Roman state was organized around war, or the cultural value placed by Romans on their own superiority, or the relative equality of citizenry in the state, or the Republic’s willingness to include outsiders to a place within the polity (and not just under it); but the full list of reasons takes up entire books and libraries.
At the same time, you can see a distinct difference in the consistency of aggressive policy between city-state style polities, like Rome and most pre-Alexander Greek city-states, which cultivated intense bonds between their citizenry and the very abstract state they belonged to; and traditional kingdoms and broader confederations, whose aggression waxed and waned with their leadership’s decisions.