9 ms·

Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

87 points by mastazi 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago
The military disasters referenced are the Battle of Cannae and the previous Battle of Lake Trasimene, both of which suffered appalling losses by the Roman side when they were trapped unable to retreat. After those Rome relied on the unflashy but effective tactic of Fabius the Delayer to defeat Hannibal over a period of time, rather than risk yet another disastrous confrontation.
- wcarey 8y ago
  Fabius was dictator after Trasimene, but before Cannae. Although his tactics were effective, the Romans cared more about virtus than effectiveness and replaced him with Varro and Paulus, who engaged with Hannibal directly at Cannae. The aim of ancient war was the demonstration of martial virtue, with victory as a relatively secondary concern. Because victory without the clash of arms was worth little to the Romans, Roman generals often had a hard time getting their armies to not engage when delaying would lead to circumstance more favorable to victory (c.f. Caesar at Gergovia). The more interesting period politically is the ascent of the Gracchi, who consistently violated unwritten political norms. The response of the establishment was to murder them, as there was no institutional mechanism to reign them in.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    Interesting summary of Gracchi on Wikipedia [1]: The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Romans who both served as tribunes in the late 2nd century BC. They attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the major aristocratic landholdings among the urban poor and veterans, in addition to other reform measures. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by enemies of these reforms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      More importantly, they were the first to bypass the democratic norms of the republic in order to get their agendas passed (by skipping senatorial approval for their bill, and censuring a tribune for vetoing it), and their opponents violated even more norms in order to halt their agendas (by passing an emergency decree calling for their deaths). The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.
      - philipov 8y ago
        The first part of that sure sounds familiar.
      - wisdomoftheages 8y ago
        To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land reform for the poor (specifically, redistributing land illegally acquired smallholders by members of the senatorial oligarchy) in the service of their own political ambitions, and in doing so they repeatedly violated the norms of the governing oligarchy, which protected their property (itself frequently acquired in technical violation of legal norms) by murdering the reformers and massacring their followers. The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
        hannasanarion 8y ago
        They didn't call them "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries", sure, but that's what they were. These are descriptive terms, not proper nouns. "democratic norms" are behaviors in the public sphere that are expected under the assumption that politicians are interested in the good of everyone and that the popular will has political meaning. "progressives" are politicians who want to improve society through reform and the redistribution of wealth and power. "reactionaries" are politicians who want to return things back to the way they were before progressives existed. These terms are perfectly appropriate to describe the political climate in the late republic. You keep asserting that there was a "ruling oligarchy" when this is simply not true. If Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, then the Gracchi never would have got off the ground.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  Fabian tactics didn't defeat Hannibal. Hannibal's Italian army was never defeated. Rome won the war by ignoring Hannibal and striking at Carthage directly. The threat to the homeland forced Carthage to recall Hannibal, leaving his best troops in Italy, to fight a losing battle with fresh recruits against Roman veterans in Africa.
  - ricree 8y ago
    That was largely the point of the Fabian strategy, was it not? Similar to the concept of a Fleet in Being[1], maintaining a functioning force is protected, but still able to threaten the other side constrains their options and makes it harder for them to achieve victory. Hannibal may have never lost in Italy, but he was nonetheless prevented from winning either. Though the main armies could only do so much to keep him from taking objectives, it made it difficult for him to maintain control over them. Notably, Hannibal had difficulty securing lasting control or alliance with many of the Italian city states, and those he did control often required losing some of his limited forces in order to garrison, otherwise they risked being retaken by the Roman army once Hannibal had moved on. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
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kingraoul3 8y ago
The Senate binned Republicanism when they murdered the Gracchi.
- swift532 8y ago
  Agreed. Once the taboo of violence against other officials in the state got broken, all hell broke loose.
  - e40 8y ago
    This implies that once a political norm is broken, it will forever be broken. That does not bode well for our current political situation in the US.
    - ReptileMan 8y ago
      Since there has been ongoing process in concentrating power in the federal government, which itself concentrates its power into the executive branch - and there appears to not be slowing down or reversing - the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take.
      - all2 8y ago
        >the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take. The question will remain if as long as the right to bear arms remains a right. No tyranny can survive an armed and angry population. The problem that follows that, though, is something the French faced during their revolutionary years. We could be in for a bloodbath if we don't move correctly.
        swift532 8y ago
        I might be reaching a bit, but I'd think that, with current technology, psyops etc., it should not be that hard to defeat any rebellion before it ever starts - whether by neutralizing (not "kill" in the USA, but deincentivize, defame or frame) potential leaders or stopping public discourse from ever reaching that stage.
deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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nkingsy 8y ago
The economist has been freaking out about norms destruction since day 1 of the trump whitehouse. This “book review” seems like just another chance to sound their favorite alarm. Not that they’re wrong, but the people (at least almost half of them) voted for someone who promised to break these norms. As far as I’m concerned, we signed a contract for 4 years of bull in china shop. Smart people need to be focusing on he silver lining and coming up with new, better norms and institutions that we will need when the rage winds down.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  The thing about norms is that, once they're broken, it's very hard to un-break them. It is in every politician's best interest to obstruct their opponents, prevent their opponents from voting, destroy ballots, jail their enemies on made-up charges, halt investigations into themselves, pack the court that will oversee their cases with allies, etc. "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other, in the mutual interest of republicanism and democracy. They are highly advantageous, but the consequences are dire. This is why, during the Obama presidency when Republicans first started deploying them, they called it "the nuclear option". Once one side has gone nuclear, the other side must reciprocate or die.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    > "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.) What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues. I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks. (As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)
gnfisher 8y ago
Bit of a tangent but if this period interests you, Robert Harris has a trilogy of excellent and entertaining novels starting with Imperium that trace the rise and fall of Cicero's life, a peer of Crassus and Caesar. Highly recommended!
- btilly 8y ago
  I am currently reading the trilogy and second the recommend. It is told from the point of view of Tiro, slave of Cicero and inventor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes. The conceit of the series is that it is actually a biography of Cicero that in really was written by Tiro but has unfortunately been lost to history since. (We know about it by references to it from other ancient works.)
rrggrr 8y ago
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/11/cj14n2-7.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/c... Let's not forget that Rome was broke when it met its demise, having debased its currency as tax revenues declined, and after taxing land owners to the point that additional revenue was unavailable and - anecdotally at least - some land owners sold themselves into tax-free slavery rather than face the consequences of non-payment.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  That's the Empire, not the Republic. We should be more interested in how Rome fell from a liberal democratic republic into autocratic tyranny before worrying about how it collapsed militarily after 400 years of brutal dictatorship.
  - jdpedrie 8y ago
    Rome at the end of the Republic may have technically been republican (if oligarchic republicanism counts), but it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberalism didn’t exist in name or form for another 1800 years. One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage. And even Senators were de-facto elected, since elevation to the Senate was automatic upon the completion of a term in an elected office. Sure, Rome began as an Oligarchic Republic, but after the secession of the plebs in 494 BC 12 years later, it was solidly Democratic. Think about it, if Rome wasn't a democracy, then why did the Populares exist at all? In an oligarchy, wouldn't a political party that panders to the masses be utterly powerless? While Romans didn't call what they had liberalism, they definitely practiced a liberal society. People were free to speak their minds, travel as they wished, and speak for or against people in power however they wanted (see: Catullus and the invention of slam poetry). All of these freedoms were locked down tight the moment Augustus came to power. People were okay with it, because having your speech, movement, and life trajectory restricted is better than being dead in a civil war, but Roman society under the Empire was way less free than Roman society under the Republic.
safgasCVS 8y ago
I really enjoyed Dan Carlin’s ‘Celtic holocaust’ that went at length into the character and motivations of Julius Caesar. What I mostly appreciate in listening to Carlin is his ability to sympathize with the people living through the moment but being respectful not to bias his reading of history so it doesnt reflect modern wishes and thinking. It’s in this vein I criticize the book as it sounds like it’s applying modern realities (income inequality, discontent, lack of democracy etc) to the past as a way to justify making predictions you want to see today (popular revolt / trump is evil and will be toppled etc what you will) But I haven’t read the book so I could be talking out of my ass
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  That reading of the fall of the Republic long pre-dates Trump. The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill). The exciting part of the fall of the republic that all the plays and history books are written about, with the civil wars and the dictators for life and the "friends, Romans, countrymen", that was all enabled by the earlier boring but highly consequential political fighting and norm-breaking. Oh, and this was totally recognized at the time. Sulla tried to address these problems directly with his constitutional reforms, but it was too little to late. Later politicians like Cato and Cicero tried to re-normalize democratic behavior, but failed because their opposition had learned how much profit there was in abusing the system.
  - geogra4 8y ago
    >The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill). well, that sounds very much like today!
SirensOfTitan 8y ago
I really love Roman history. I'm just a hobbyist here (i.e. I've read a ton of biographies on great Roman leaders), so please correct me if any of my thoughts here are incorrect. My feeling has been that Sulla's purges were the effective end of the Republic. Rome had no bureaucracy. It instead relied on great administrators (like Pompey, for example) to carry out public work projects effectively. The conflicts of the 80s not only thinned out talent from entering into the oligarchy, it required the entry of new men or men with families with less auctoritas like Cicero and Caesar. The emergence of new men created a rift between the optimates (conservatives, traditional oligarchy) and new folks that reduced compromise and lateralized society further. Cicero was very moderate most of his career until his attempts to split up the Caesarians after the assassination, even so he found himself butting heads with stubborns like Cato his entire life. Caesar felt as though his hand was forced in the civil war, as the optimates wanted to arrest him for his land reform a decade earlier as consul as soon as he put down his imperium from the Gallic campaigns. I would perhaps argue that the largest parallel the US has with Republican Rome is the breakdown of compromise and trust alongside increased lateralization. One can examine vote pairing incidence in the US Senate to observe this: recently Lisa Murkowski voted "present" during the Kavanaugh vote to allow a republican colleague to go to his daughter's wedding. Vote pairing used to be commonplace, and is seen as a gesture of compromise and good will, but it is very, very rare nowadays.
- pesmhey 8y ago
  What would you say about the argument that that breakdown of compromise and trust was, and is, spurred by the expansion of full citizenship and voting rights, in both republics. Preventing more Italians from Roman citizenship seemed to be one of Sulla’s main talking points. Have you read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project? Lewis has basically chronicled the destruction of large swaths of the American bureaucracy. The parallels between Sulla and Trump are so striking, even down to the hair!
ebertx 8y ago
My theory is that every book written about the fall of the Roman Empire is more about the political climate of the time it was written and the political perspective of the author writing it. In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state. Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written. edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.
- pesmhey 8y ago
  Yes, it’s quite the correct sentiment! https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-...
User23 8y ago
Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.
User23 8y ago
Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.

87 points by mastazi 8y ago

The military disasters referenced are the Battle of Cannae and the previous Battle of Lake Trasimene, both of which suffered appalling losses by the Roman side when they were trapped unable to retreat. After those Rome relied on the unflashy but effective tactic of Fabius the Delayer to defeat Hannibal over a period of time, rather than risk yet another disastrous confrontation.

wcarey 8y ago
Fabius was dictator after Trasimene, but before Cannae. Although his tactics were effective, the Romans cared more about virtus than effectiveness and replaced him with Varro and Paulus, who engaged with Hannibal directly at Cannae. The aim of ancient war was the demonstration of martial virtue, with victory as a relatively secondary concern. Because victory without the clash of arms was worth little to the Romans, Roman generals often had a hard time getting their armies to not engage when delaying would lead to circumstance more favorable to victory (c.f. Caesar at Gergovia). The more interesting period politically is the ascent of the Gracchi, who consistently violated unwritten political norms. The response of the establishment was to murder them, as there was no institutional mechanism to reign them in.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  Interesting summary of Gracchi on Wikipedia [1]: The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Romans who both served as tribunes in the late 2nd century BC. They attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the major aristocratic landholdings among the urban poor and veterans, in addition to other reform measures. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by enemies of these reforms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    More importantly, they were the first to bypass the democratic norms of the republic in order to get their agendas passed (by skipping senatorial approval for their bill, and censuring a tribune for vetoing it), and their opponents violated even more norms in order to halt their agendas (by passing an emergency decree calling for their deaths). The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.
    - philipov 8y ago
      The first part of that sure sounds familiar.
    - wisdomoftheages 8y ago
      To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land reform for the poor (specifically, redistributing land illegally acquired smallholders by members of the senatorial oligarchy) in the service of their own political ambitions, and in doing so they repeatedly violated the norms of the governing oligarchy, which protected their property (itself frequently acquired in technical violation of legal norms) by murdering the reformers and massacring their followers. The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
      - hannasanarion 8y ago
        They didn't call them "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries", sure, but that's what they were. These are descriptive terms, not proper nouns. "democratic norms" are behaviors in the public sphere that are expected under the assumption that politicians are interested in the good of everyone and that the popular will has political meaning. "progressives" are politicians who want to improve society through reform and the redistribution of wealth and power. "reactionaries" are politicians who want to return things back to the way they were before progressives existed. These terms are perfectly appropriate to describe the political climate in the late republic. You keep asserting that there was a "ruling oligarchy" when this is simply not true. If Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, then the Gracchi never would have got off the ground.
hannasanarion 8y ago
Fabian tactics didn't defeat Hannibal. Hannibal's Italian army was never defeated. Rome won the war by ignoring Hannibal and striking at Carthage directly. The threat to the homeland forced Carthage to recall Hannibal, leaving his best troops in Italy, to fight a losing battle with fresh recruits against Roman veterans in Africa.
- ricree 8y ago
  That was largely the point of the Fabian strategy, was it not? Similar to the concept of a Fleet in Being[1], maintaining a functioning force is protected, but still able to threaten the other side constrains their options and makes it harder for them to achieve victory. Hannibal may have never lost in Italy, but he was nonetheless prevented from winning either. Though the main armies could only do so much to keep him from taking objectives, it made it difficult for him to maintain control over them. Notably, Hannibal had difficulty securing lasting control or alliance with many of the Italian city states, and those he did control often required losing some of his limited forces in order to garrison, otherwise they risked being retaken by the Roman army once Hannibal had moved on. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being

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kingraoul3 8y ago

The Senate binned Republicanism when they murdered the Gracchi.

swift532 8y ago
Agreed. Once the taboo of violence against other officials in the state got broken, all hell broke loose.
- e40 8y ago
  This implies that once a political norm is broken, it will forever be broken. That does not bode well for our current political situation in the US.
  - ReptileMan 8y ago
    Since there has been ongoing process in concentrating power in the federal government, which itself concentrates its power into the executive branch - and there appears to not be slowing down or reversing - the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take.
    - all2 8y ago
      >the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take. The question will remain if as long as the right to bear arms remains a right. No tyranny can survive an armed and angry population. The problem that follows that, though, is something the French faced during their revolutionary years. We could be in for a bloodbath if we don't move correctly.
      - swift532 8y ago
        I might be reaching a bit, but I'd think that, with current technology, psyops etc., it should not be that hard to defeat any rebellion before it ever starts - whether by neutralizing (not "kill" in the USA, but deincentivize, defame or frame) potential leaders or stopping public discourse from ever reaching that stage.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

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nkingsy 8y ago

The economist has been freaking out about norms destruction since day 1 of the trump whitehouse. This “book review” seems like just another chance to sound their favorite alarm. Not that they’re wrong, but the people (at least almost half of them) voted for someone who promised to break these norms. As far as I’m concerned, we signed a contract for 4 years of bull in china shop. Smart people need to be focusing on he silver lining and coming up with new, better norms and institutions that we will need when the rage winds down.

hannasanarion 8y ago
The thing about norms is that, once they're broken, it's very hard to un-break them. It is in every politician's best interest to obstruct their opponents, prevent their opponents from voting, destroy ballots, jail their enemies on made-up charges, halt investigations into themselves, pack the court that will oversee their cases with allies, etc. "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other, in the mutual interest of republicanism and democracy. They are highly advantageous, but the consequences are dire. This is why, during the Obama presidency when Republicans first started deploying them, they called it "the nuclear option". Once one side has gone nuclear, the other side must reciprocate or die.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.) What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues. I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks. (As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)

gnfisher 8y ago

Bit of a tangent but if this period interests you, Robert Harris has a trilogy of excellent and entertaining novels starting with Imperium that trace the rise and fall of Cicero's life, a peer of Crassus and Caesar. Highly recommended!

btilly 8y ago
I am currently reading the trilogy and second the recommend. It is told from the point of view of Tiro, slave of Cicero and inventor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes. The conceit of the series is that it is actually a biography of Cicero that in really was written by Tiro but has unfortunately been lost to history since. (We know about it by references to it from other ancient works.)

rrggrr 8y ago

https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/11/cj14n2-7.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/c... Let's not forget that Rome was broke when it met its demise, having debased its currency as tax revenues declined, and after taxing land owners to the point that additional revenue was unavailable and - anecdotally at least - some land owners sold themselves into tax-free slavery rather than face the consequences of non-payment.

hannasanarion 8y ago
That's the Empire, not the Republic. We should be more interested in how Rome fell from a liberal democratic republic into autocratic tyranny before worrying about how it collapsed militarily after 400 years of brutal dictatorship.
- jdpedrie 8y ago
  Rome at the end of the Republic may have technically been republican (if oligarchic republicanism counts), but it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberalism didn’t exist in name or form for another 1800 years. One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage. And even Senators were de-facto elected, since elevation to the Senate was automatic upon the completion of a term in an elected office. Sure, Rome began as an Oligarchic Republic, but after the secession of the plebs in 494 BC 12 years later, it was solidly Democratic. Think about it, if Rome wasn't a democracy, then why did the Populares exist at all? In an oligarchy, wouldn't a political party that panders to the masses be utterly powerless? While Romans didn't call what they had liberalism, they definitely practiced a liberal society. People were free to speak their minds, travel as they wished, and speak for or against people in power however they wanted (see: Catullus and the invention of slam poetry). All of these freedoms were locked down tight the moment Augustus came to power. People were okay with it, because having your speech, movement, and life trajectory restricted is better than being dead in a civil war, but Roman society under the Empire was way less free than Roman society under the Republic.

safgasCVS 8y ago

I really enjoyed Dan Carlin’s ‘Celtic holocaust’ that went at length into the character and motivations of Julius Caesar. What I mostly appreciate in listening to Carlin is his ability to sympathize with the people living through the moment but being respectful not to bias his reading of history so it doesnt reflect modern wishes and thinking. It’s in this vein I criticize the book as it sounds like it’s applying modern realities (income inequality, discontent, lack of democracy etc) to the past as a way to justify making predictions you want to see today (popular revolt / trump is evil and will be toppled etc what you will) But I haven’t read the book so I could be talking out of my ass

hannasanarion 8y ago
That reading of the fall of the Republic long pre-dates Trump. The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill). The exciting part of the fall of the republic that all the plays and history books are written about, with the civil wars and the dictators for life and the "friends, Romans, countrymen", that was all enabled by the earlier boring but highly consequential political fighting and norm-breaking. Oh, and this was totally recognized at the time. Sulla tried to address these problems directly with his constitutional reforms, but it was too little to late. Later politicians like Cato and Cicero tried to re-normalize democratic behavior, but failed because their opposition had learned how much profit there was in abusing the system.
- geogra4 8y ago
  >The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill). well, that sounds very much like today!

SirensOfTitan 8y ago

I really love Roman history. I'm just a hobbyist here (i.e. I've read a ton of biographies on great Roman leaders), so please correct me if any of my thoughts here are incorrect. My feeling has been that Sulla's purges were the effective end of the Republic. Rome had no bureaucracy. It instead relied on great administrators (like Pompey, for example) to carry out public work projects effectively. The conflicts of the 80s not only thinned out talent from entering into the oligarchy, it required the entry of new men or men with families with less auctoritas like Cicero and Caesar. The emergence of new men created a rift between the optimates (conservatives, traditional oligarchy) and new folks that reduced compromise and lateralized society further. Cicero was very moderate most of his career until his attempts to split up the Caesarians after the assassination, even so he found himself butting heads with stubborns like Cato his entire life. Caesar felt as though his hand was forced in the civil war, as the optimates wanted to arrest him for his land reform a decade earlier as consul as soon as he put down his imperium from the Gallic campaigns. I would perhaps argue that the largest parallel the US has with Republican Rome is the breakdown of compromise and trust alongside increased lateralization. One can examine vote pairing incidence in the US Senate to observe this: recently Lisa Murkowski voted "present" during the Kavanaugh vote to allow a republican colleague to go to his daughter's wedding. Vote pairing used to be commonplace, and is seen as a gesture of compromise and good will, but it is very, very rare nowadays.

pesmhey 8y ago
What would you say about the argument that that breakdown of compromise and trust was, and is, spurred by the expansion of full citizenship and voting rights, in both republics. Preventing more Italians from Roman citizenship seemed to be one of Sulla’s main talking points. Have you read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project? Lewis has basically chronicled the destruction of large swaths of the American bureaucracy. The parallels between Sulla and Trump are so striking, even down to the hair!

ebertx 8y ago

My theory is that every book written about the fall of the Roman Empire is more about the political climate of the time it was written and the political perspective of the author writing it. In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state. Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written. edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.

pesmhey 8y ago
Yes, it’s quite the correct sentiment! https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-...

User23 8y ago

Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.

User23 8y ago

Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.