An Empire of Obedience? The Interests of Rome's Italian Allies and their Motivations for Compliance in the Third and Second Centuries BCE

This thesis explores the interests of Rome's Italian allies and their motivations for compliance or resistance to Rome in the Third and Second centuries BCE. In order to address such a question, I apply the Sociologist Dennis Wrong’s typology of power to identify what forms of power influenced allied decision making. The results support the widespread modern acknowledgment that fear and rewards had a strong impact on maintaining allied compliance and, more importantly, the results suggest that many allies came to consider Roman control as legitimate.