4 ms·
Fabius was dictator after Trasimene, but before Cannae. Although his tactics were effective, the Romans cared more about virtus than effectiveness and replaced
by 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 agoInteresting 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 agoMore 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 agoThe first part of that sure sounds familiar.
- wisdomoftheages 8y agoTo 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 agoThey 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.
- wisdomoftheages 8y agoLeaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of their society, I'm afraid you're laboring under some extreme misapprehensions about the nature of the late Republican government. That Republican Rome was governed by an aristocratic land-owning oligarchy for pretty much its entire existence is an undisputed historical fact. The Gracchi were wealthy members of the ruling elite wielding land redistribution as a political tool in their competition for power with other members of the ruling elite. They weren't ordinary Roman citizens organizing popular resistance from below.