All that we have been able to reconstruct of Roman history confirms this description. Rome won her territory by the force or the fear of her armed might. At first she intervened in international affairs in a struggle for her life against her rival, Carthage, and was drawn into war after war. Then, crushing one opponent after another, she finally became the aggressive, irresistible conqueror of the Mediterranean world and Western Europe. At the beginning of the Christian Era and a little later, the iron might of the Roman legions stood back of the Pax Romana—the Roman peace.

Rome was the largest and strongest empire the world had hitherto known.

 This is not the later, divided stage of Alexander’s empire, but the next empire, which conquered the Macedonian world. Daniel elsewhere represents the Hellenistic monarchies, the divisions of Alexander’s empire, by the Grecian goat’s four horns (ch. 8:22), not by a separate beast (compare the four heads of the leopard; see on ch. 7:6).

It is obvious that the kingdom that succeeded the divided remnants of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander was what Gibbon has aptly called the “iron monarchy” of Rome, though it was not a monarchy at the time it first became the leading world power. Early Rome was settled, long before the traditional date of 753 B.C., by Latin tribes who had come into Italy in successive waves about the time other related Indo-European tribes had settled in Greece. From about the 8th to the 5th century the Latin city-state was ruled by neighboring Etruscan kings. Roman civilization was strongly influenced by the Etruscans, who came to Italy in the 10th century, and especially by the Greeks, who arrived two centuries later.

 About 500 B.C. the Roman state became a republic, and remained a republic for nearly 500 years. By 265 B.C. all Italy was under Roman control. By 200 B.C. Rome had emerged victorious from the life-and-death struggle with her powerful North African rival Carthage (originally a Phoenician colony). Henceforth Rome was mistress of the western Mediterranean, and more powerful than any of the states in the east, although she had not yet come to grips with them. From then on Rome first dominated and then absorbed, in turn, the three surviving kingdoms of Alexander’s successors (see on ch. 7:6), and thus became the next great world power after Alexander’s. This fourth empire was the longest lived and most extensive of the four, stretching in the 2d Christian century from Britain to the Euphrates. For a parallel prophecy see on ch. 7:7.