User:Ifly6/Crisis of the Roman republic

The crisis of the Roman republic (also called the Roman revolution in older scholarship) is a term used to describe a prolonged period of political instability with resulted in the eventual collapse of the Roman Republic into a system of permanent one-man rule in the Roman Empire.

Various theories have been put forth as to the crisis's aetiology. The most influential modern theory is that the senate's short-sighted and self-serving policies alienated important stakeholders – especially the equites, poor plebeians, and the army – causing it to lose legitimacy and support, which allowed it to be overthrown by Julius Caesar in his civil war. Another influential theory that the republic suffered from a "crisis without alternative" where those who destroyed the republic did so unintentionally, not having conceived of and having no desire for an alternative political system.

Others, such as Erich Gruen, do not believe that the republic was suffering from any terminal disease at all, and was, up until the eve of Caesar's civil war in 49 BC, functioning (if under some difficulties) in a traditional fashion before it was destroyed by that civil war, the assassination of Caesar, and the ensuing chaos. Yet others view the crisis of the republic as having already come and gone by the Caesarian period: that the impact of the Social War and the politicisation of the army had already doomed the republic, which in it's Sullan form was living merely on borrowed time.

Historical synopsis

The main themes of the crisis were the emergence of political violence as a normal part of politics, the breakdown of consensual political activity, and the domination of supremely wealthy general-aristocrats (such as Gaius Marius, Sulla, and Julius Caesar). The republic c. 150 BC and its ritualised consensus politics, suffered from a breakdown of political processes which eventually resulted in the republic's permanent destruction. The following synopsis is highly condensed. Further information can be found at the appropriate articles.

Reform and violence

Further information: Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, and Gracchi brothers

The start of political breakdown is traditionally attributed to the tribunate of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 BC. He attempted to pass an agrarian law which would establish a commission to redistribute public land to the poor. In this, he was successful, though he also broke a number of political norms in deposing a fellow tribune, electing himself and relatives to that commission, and seizing provincial funds for the commission. His political tactics, however, and attempt to stand for a consecutive term as tribune, led a group of senators to murder Tiberius and his supporters at that year's elections and have their bodies thrown into the Tiber.

His younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, proposed an even more radical reform programme which included corn subsidies for the public. He was killed following his tribunates (123–22 BC) when protesting against repeal of his laws; to justify his killing, the senate passed the first senatus consultum ultimum instructing the magistrates to do whatever it took to protect the state. Most of Gaius Gracchus' laws, however, also survived his death, as they were meant to fix problems rather than undermine senatorial government.

A similar incident recurred in 100 BC. A group of reformers, who were led by Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Servilius Glaucia, passed agrarian legislation that year with the support of the consul Gaius Marius. Supporting Glaucia's illegal bid for the consulship, Saturninus murdered one of Glaucia's fellow candidates; amid uproar, he seized the Capitoline hill and attempted to bring tribunician legislation legitimising Glaucia's illegal candidature but was besieged by Marius following another senatus consultum ultimum and stoned to death by a mob after his capture.

Civil war and the Sullan republic

Further information: Social War (91–87 BC) and Sulla

After the death of Marcus Livius Drusus in 91 BC, Rome's Italian allies rose up in revolt; the Romans were victorious, in what was effectively a civil war against their allies, in part because Rome gave citizenship to the Italians en masse. In the aftermath of the Social War and riots in Rome, Sulla became the first general in centuries to march on Rome with his army; in doing so, he used force to suppress tribunician legislation and resolve in his favour a political question of provincial assignments. A breakdown in the legitimacy of popular legislation – because they were commonly passed by violent exclusion of non-supporters – allowed Sulla, along with his personal influence over the troops, to take this unprecedented step; the root cause of this conflict was a political and personal rivalry between Sulla and Marius.

After leaving for a war in the east, Sulla's political opponents waged a short civil war and took control of the city and purged some of Marius' enemies. Sulla returned with his army, purged his political opponents, had himself appointed dictator, and instituted a series of constitutional reforms. After his death, one of the consuls of 78 BC led a revolt against his regime in Cisalpine Gaul; the Sullan republic's opponents were not fully defeated in the field until the death of Sertorius in 73 BC.

Caesar's civil war

Further information: First Triumvirate and Caesar's Civil War

The resulting Sullan republic was unstable, and by the 60s BC, under the pressure of roving bands of politically-charged armed mobs who disrupted elections, criminal trials, murdered politicians in the streets. Against this political chaos, an alliance of three leading politicians – Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar – attempted to take control of politics, to varying degrees of success through the 50s BC. By 50 BC Crassus was dead, Caesar had won fame and glory in the Gallic Wars, and relations between Pompey and Caesar had fallen apart. Threatened with political extinction, Caesar marched on Rome in defence of his personal position in the state, triggering a Mediterranean-wide civil war in 49 BC.

Death of Caesar and rise of Augustus

Further information: Assassination of Julius Caesar, Second Triumvirate, Battle of Philippi, War of Actium, and Constitutional reforms of Augustus

In the aftermath of the civil war, Caesar assumed a permanent dictatorship and was promptly assassinated in 44 BC. In the aftermath, the Caesarians fought each other before consolidating into a formal legal structure known as the Second Triumvirate which turned to war against the assassins, defeated them at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC. The Caesarian coalition consolidated to two leaders, Octavian and Mark Antony, by 36 BC; they fought in 31 BC for control of the Roman world, with Octavian emerging triumphant at the Battle of Actium. Octavian's victory led him to experiment with a more permanent political settlement which established the Principate and completed the transformation of the republic into the autocratic Roman Empire.

Start and end dates

Many years have been and can be plausibly ascribed to the starting and ending of the crisis of the republic. The starting year is traditionally 133 BC, coinciding with Tiberius Gracchus' tribunate, but other years are also proposed, such as:

• 146 BC with the fall of Carthage or
• 139 BC with the passage of the lex Gabinia tabellaria, instituting secret ballots in Roman elections.

The end of the crisis corresponds also with the question of when the republic ended. Many years also can be plausibly argued. The following list comes from Morstein-Marx & Rosenstein 2006, p. 625:

• 59 BC with the First Triumvirate;
• 49 BC with Caesar's civil war;
• 44 BC with Caesar's death;
• 43 BC with the creation of the Second Triumvirate;
• 42 BC with the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi;
• 31 BC with Antony's defeat at Actium;
• 23 BC when Augustus took the title princeps; or
• AD 14 when Tiberius became the second Roman emperor.

Earlier views

The emperor Augustus, pictured, went to great lengths to assert that the traditional republican political system had not been abolished.

Portrait of Montesquieu (painted c. 1728).

Ancient views

Ancient views varied across time. In the immediate aftermath of Augustus' victory and assumption of one-man rule, the official line was that the republic had not ended at all, and that the Augustan regime was the republic both restored and revitalised. The first "unambiguous" distinction between republic and Principate is attested in Tacitus, writing in the early second century AD, with earlier identification of the Principate as monarchical emerging in Seneca the Younger's writings in the mid-first century AD.

Especially by the time of Nero, this perspective had changed: the Principate by this point had developed its own history and did not need to so firmly rest its legitimacy in representing itself as a continuation of the republic. By this point, Romans were more than willing to view the fall of the republic as inevitable. Their theories, however, focused mostly in terms of moral decay and the inevitability of imperial rule.

Polybius' theory of cyclic constitutions, where the Roman empire's riches would feed the oligarchic component into domination, leading to mob rule, followed by the creation of a tyranny. Most Roman historians, however, did not conceive of constitutional change as something that had happened. Rather, they pinned the republic's collapse on moral corruption from greed and unrestrained power after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Sallust's monographs, for example, cast the period after 146 as dominated by luxury, greed, and ambitions even though similar harangues against luxury and wealth had appeared in earlier works on earlier times.

Modern scholars do broadly do not accept the ancient's depiction of moral failure as the cause of the republic's downfall, describing it as "quaintly moralising": Andrew Lintott, for example, says "greed for wealth and power were not vices suddenly discovered by the Romans in 146"; Erich Gruen, similarly, writes "political strife, restlessness in the army, discontent among the plebs and in the provinces, misconduct by Roman officials, and the effects of luxury and greed are all attested well before the Ciceronean age".

The more structural causes identified by the ancient sources were related to agrarian deprivation: that the rise of Rome's empire created poverty in the lower classes and stoked their resentment more generally. The ancient sources posited that poverty inculcated greed and violence along the poor. This mass of resentment was then, in their view, cynically mobilised by aristocratic politicians in service of their own personal power, both in the forum as demagogues and on the field as generals. Those aristocratic politicians, with greater ambitions fuelled by the profits of empire, sought to dominate their fellow citizens and armed with compliant armies, destroyed the republic.

Other ancient sources simply accepted as a given that only monarchies could sustainably govern empires; the republic collapsed therefore due to its contradiction with this principle.

Early modern views

One of the most enduring and influential theses was that of Niccolò Machiavelli and Montesquieu, who argued that the republic fell because it acquired its empire.

Machiavelli's view was that the republic's collapse was inevitable unless it restricted military service and citizenship to the elite, which would have been precluded acquisition of the empire; for Machiavelli, the republic declined because of Roman militarism and diversity. He also advanced the long-enduring thesis that the republic's regular posting of large armies for long terms under ambitious aristocrats allowed them to supplant the soldiery's loyalties to the state, giving those aristocrats the power to challenge the state as a whole.

Montesquieu's Considérations sur la grandeur et décadence des romains focused on the latter client armies thesis and similarly attributed political strife in Rome its expansion of citizenship, with unrest emerging from a diversity of backgrounds causing a decline in popular cohesion.

Modern theories

A bust, traditionally identified as Gaius Marius.

A French sculpture (c. 1850) depicting Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius.

Imperial expansion

The theory of imperial expansion being incompatible with the republic's constitution was advanced in its most developed form by Peter Brunt, starting with his 1962 paper "The army and the land in the Roman revolution". He conceived of the republic's collapse in terms of the senate's inability to give timely concessions to various interest groups, including the Italians, equites, urban plebs, rural plebs, and soldiers. Alienating these groups due to its short-termism, the senate weakened its legitimacy to the point that most of Roman society was unwilling to defend it in Caesar's civil war.

One of the core features of this collapse was the senatorial oligarchy's use of conscription for foreign wars, which bankrupted Italian small farmers while enriching the senatorial oligarchy who then bought those farms and ran them with slave labour, creating a large class of dispossessed rural plebs. The opening of the legions to them under Gaius Marius made these poor men open to appeals from ambitious generals like Sulla and Julius Caesar who used them to defeat political opponents in exchange for promises of wealth and land. While this thesis is the dominant theory in the English-speaking world, it has become increasingly questioned in recent research.

The factual accuracy of the claim that military service caused the bankruptcy of the Italian farmer is incompatible with archaeological evidence which shows no widespread decline in small rural landholdings. Archaeological evidence suggests instead that Roman demands for military manpower did not deplete the population and were sustainable. Nor was there any population decline – a common justification for the Gracchan land reform programmes – in Italy over the last two centuries of the republic. Justifications for those reform programmes may be rooted instead either in rural poverty caused by recent shocks and disruptions (eg the Social War and financial turmoil in the 80s and 60s BC) or mere political posturing that did not reflect objective rural conditions.

Moreover, the connection made the army's demand for land and their conversion to client armies is suspect. That manpower demands were not depopulating the countryside implies there was little need to reduce property qualifications for army service. And the idea that Marius' reforms permanently opened the doors to landless volunteers may be a hasty generalisation.

Crisis without alternative

Christian Meier, in the 1966 book Res publica amissa, coined the term "crisis without alternative" (German: Krise ohne Alternative), a theory incorporating the lack of evidence for any actors consciously keeping the republic's destruction. Meier identified instead that the late republic was unable to balance the need to empower individuals to solve its enormous military and administrative problems with the political fear that such centralisation induced.

The downfall of the republic is cast in terms of the Romans treating their ancestral institutions as so core of their identity that changing it was impossible; thus, they were unable to fix their own broken political system by virtue of the fact that it was broken. Instead of resolving the problems of integrating the wealthy equites and professional armies under long-serving commanders, these problems festered until they broken into open civil war.

More problematic for the republic was that while many actors within the republic realised that the republic was not working as it ought to, the ancestral institutions were still minimally functional such that there was no need to abandon them. Nor were there any serious plans for wide-ranging reform. Thus, while people knew the republic was not working, there were no plans to replace the republican system.

One of the main contributions of this theory is that one can discard the premise that certain parties blamed for the republic's collapse wanted to overthrow the ancestral institutions which all parts of Roman society supported.

Unintentional collapse

Also arguing against Brunt's thesis was Erich S. Gruen in the 1974 book Last Generation of the Roman republic, where, while he agreed with Meier's thesis that none sought the destruction of the republic consciously, he also argued the republic was not suffering from any terminal disease at all. Gruen argues that republican politics were functioning until the eve of Caesar's invasion of Italy in 49 BC and that "civil war caused the fall of the republic, not vice versa".

Gruen notes that up to the eve of the civil wars, "voluminous legislative activity in the Ciceroian age shows the aristocracy alert and industrious". Nor was the aristocracy prostrate before the pooled prestige and influence of the so-called First Triumvirate, who more regularly lost elections than won them in the context of traditional republican institutions of the senate, elections, trials, and comitia.

Against Brunt's thesis that the senate alienated Italians and the equites, Gruen points to the relatively lasting political peace achieved by compromise in the lex Aurelia (70 BC) and the on-going incorporation of the Italian aristocracy into an open Roman political elite. As to the Sallustian division of nobilitas and plebs, Gruen also argues "that broad and simplistic analysis dissolves upon confrontation with the evidence[;] Rome's proletariat had neither the will nor the means to overturn the social structure" while also finding little evidence of permanent loyalties among the common soldiery who, during the civil wars, marched to save or free the republic from the domination of a faction rather than destroy it: "in the confusion of armed struggles, identification of the republic's true champions was a matter of opinion and of expediency... [both] Caesar and Pompey... presented themselves as defenders of Roman traditions [as did] leaders of in the later rounds of the contest".

Multiple republics in crisis

An alternative to viewing the crisis of the republic as a prolonged issue is to view it instead as a series of several shorter "republics". Doing so places a prolonged "crisis" into a number of segments, which Flower dates from the 139 BC and the passage of the lex Gabinia tabellaria that introduced the secret ballot into Roman elections and, in her view, catalysed the political transformation of the assemblies into relatively independent entities.

Flower's characterisation of a single Roman republic in terms of multiple republics in succession also changes the focus of analysis on the question of the eventual permanent demise of republican government. The focus of Flower's study rests instead on the collapse of the last "republic of the nobiles" in 88 BC and places the seeds of republican collapse at the start of the first century BC rather than its middle.

This new temporal focus also more closely synchronises the opening of the army to the landless poor and the collapse of this last "republic of the nobiles". Flower posits a self-regulating connection between the landholders levied for army service and the stability of Rome's political culture. Flower's focus on the Cinnan and Sullan periods also stresses the impact of the Social War developing armies willing to march on Rome, mutiny against previously respected authorities, and turn their arms against their own countrymen.

This view places the whole republic after Sulla's reforms into something of an aftermath to the death of the last traditional republic of the nobiles in the 80s BC. Flower stresses, therefore, that the novelty of Sulla's reforms and their general lack of legitimacy created the conditions for a weak political structure. The conditions of its birth also furthered political polarisation that prevented any meaningful integrative reform. The illegitimate nature of this Sullan republic created the conditions for politicians to act outside the normal bounds of acceptable behaviour, reducing political competition to military coalitions backed only by hard power.

References

Sources

• Beard, Mary (2015). SPQR: a history of ancient Rome (1st ed.). New York: Liveright Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87140-423-7. OCLC 902661394.
• Brunt, Peter (1962). "The army and the land in the Roman revolution". Journal of Roman Studies. 52 (1–2): 69–86. doi:10.2307/297878. ISSN 1753-528X. JSTOR 297878.
• Brunt, Peter (1988). The fall of the Roman republic and related essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-814849-6. OCLC 16466585.
• Crook, John; et al., eds. (1994). The last age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 BC. Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 9 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85073-8. OCLC 121060.
  • Lintott, Andrew (1994a). "The crisis of the republic: sources and source-problems". In CAH² 9 (1994), pp. 1 et seq.
  • Lintott, Andrew (1994b). "Political history, 146–95 BC". In CAH² 9 (1994), pp. 40–103.
  • Gabba, E. "Rome and Italy: the Social War". In CAH² 9 (1994), pp. 104 et seq.

• Flower, Harriet (2010). Roman republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14043-8.
• Flower, Harriet, ed. (2014). The Cambridge companion to the Roman republic (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-03224-8. OCLC 866253238.
  • von Ungern-Sternberg, Jürgen. "The crisis of the republic". In Flower (2014), pp. 78–100.

• Gowing, Alain (2005). Empire and memory: the representation of the Roman republic in Imperial culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-44582-5.
• Gruen, Erich (1995) [1974]. The last generation of the Roman republic. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02238-6.
• Mackay, Christopher S (2009). The breakdown of the Roman republic. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51819-2.
• Meier, Christian (1995) [First published, in German by Severin und Siedler, 1982]. Caesar. Translated by McLintock, David. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00895-X.
• Mouritsen, Henrik (2017). Politics in the Roman republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-03188-3. OCLC 961266598.
• Rafferty, David (2015). "The fall of the Roman republic" (PDF). Iris. 28. Classical Association of Victoria: 58–69.

• Rosenstein, N S; Morstein-Marx, R, eds. (2006). A companion to the Roman Republic. Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-7203-5. OCLC 86070041.
  • Jehne, Martin. "Methods, models, and historiography". In Rosenstein & Morstein-Marx (2006), pp. 3 et seq.
  • Morstein-Marx, R; Rosenstein, N S. "Transformation of the Roman republic". In Rosenstein & Morstein-Marx (2006), pp. 625 et seq.

Further reading

• Meier, Christian (1997) [First published 1966]. Res publica amissa (in German) (3rd ed.). Frankfurt. ISBN 978-3-518-57506-2. OCLC 610762802.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Syme, Ronald (2002) [First published 1939]. The Roman revolution (Revised ed.). Oxford. ISBN 1-4237-5745-9. OCLC 64668393.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)