Factors Leading to the Fall of the Republic

What we see in this map is a map of Rome, the red and pink indicating Rome at the very greatest extent. In this lecture, Rome that I'll give right now, Rome is not yet this big, but we're getting there. In this lecture, I want to talk about the degeneration of the Roman Republic and its end. And as I talk about these things and think about them recently, these are some of the questions that have been on my mind. And I invite you to think about this as well. So why did the Roman Republic end? Are republicanism and empire compatible? Can you have them together? Or is there just something about this notion of a republic, of that participatory type of... government. And the Roman Republic was never entirely democratic, as we know. Some could vote, some couldn't vote. This was a hierarchical world, but one that understood itself to be a republic. And it grew and grew and grew into an empire. And so historians have asked the question, are republicanism and empire compatible? Or is there something about them that just they can't? work together. Another question people ask when we think about the end of the Roman Republic, it are values that in this story, there seems to be a degeneration of a common shared ethos. So we ask this question with respect to the Roman Republic and more generally, how much do values matter in keeping a political system together? especially in our statistical, data-driven, empirical world. How do we even talk about this kind of a notion? After all, how people feel, what they hold in their hearts, is a pretty intangible thing. As one sociologist in the 20th century said, often attributed to Einstein, but not him, a different, less known academic, he said, everything that matters. Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters. That's something that comes back to me when I think about this question of how much do values matter? And if we were to answer that question entirely, how might we mention them as historians? What evidence? A third question. What happens when freedom is juridical without economic stability? There's this notion of economic freedom and juridical freedom, as in as long as the law says you have this, you're good to go, conversation over. And there's this other school of thought that says freedom in a world that requires money or entitlements or resources where none of those are accessible isn't actually freedom at all. And then four, one thing I've been thinking about, how do we know? when the system is broken. The Roman Republic lasts for half a millennium. We definitely say it's over when Augustus comes to the fore. That'll be what we talk about next time. But by so many practical measures, in the events we're going to talk about here, we already have a system that's not working. When do you know that a system... is broken. So the degeneration of the Roman Republic. Fundamental economic changes are happening over the course of time that have begun over the course of the Punic Wars and accelerate. They are tied to Rome's territorial expansion. The territorial expansion brings fundamental changes to economic life of the republic. Campaigns get longer. This is a real disruption to economic life. Outside of the growing metropolis of Rome, the Italian peninsula is mostly an agrarian, fertile farmland, lots and lots of small farmers. But that model starts to give way to something different. Let me give you this. an example of the story of Regulus. Regulus was a Roman citizen and in 256 he was a council. And he was sent off into campaign as part of the Punic Wars. While he was away on campaign, the manager of his farm passed away. Then a worker stole all the tools and his livestock. His family was back there, quite helpless. Remember, a Roman woman couldn't do all the things in society that a man could do. And so Regulus asked the Senate. if he could be relieved from campaign to return and help on the farm to take care of his family. They were increasingly in desperate straits. The Senate needed him to serve Rome at the front, and so they didn't give him the release he was asking for. Instead, they sent a new manager to go and look after his farm, take care of his family. and put things in order so that he could focus on doing his job for Rome on the front lines. So that story shows that the Senate recognized the importance of providing assistance to his family, to the family, in order to keep the army in the field. But the reality was the Senate didn't provide that kind of support to every simple soldier. And simple soldiers could face similar challenges that Regulus felt. So, and they did. This land problem was a key issue for Rome. So as campaigns get longer and longer, it gets harder and harder for the Romans in the army. And at this point, in order to be a soldier in the Roman army, you needed to have property. That was a requirement. But as soldiers are around their campaigns increasingly, they lose their farms. It's not just because they're not there taking care of it. It's because, kind of two reasons. It's because grain is flooding the Roman, is flooding Rome now, cheap grain from the island of Sicily, which is a, that was conquered in the Punic, first Punic war, big grain producer, that grain is coming back into Rome. It's much cheaper, it's harder for those farmers. in the hinterland of the Italian peninsula to get a good price and stay afloat as farmers. Another consequence of success in war is also making life more difficult for farmers, and that is that as Rome wins campaigns, it gains more and more slaves and returns slaves back into the system. And that cheaper abundant labor throws things out of whack as well. So the economy is changing. In the face of these changes, lots of Romans are losing their land. They're in straits, they sell their land. And who do they sell them to? Well, this is a big benefit for the wealthy because that land is bought up by wealthy patricians, aristocats. aristocrats. And so you have this large scale disenfranchisement, this consolidation of what was many small farms into bigger and bigger estates. And what who used those who used to be humble Roman citizens falling out of the ranks of landowners. Many of those people flocked to the city where they can get, there's a sense that you can get a McNeil more easily. And in addition to this, more slave labor is coming into the empire. 20,000 came in one cargo in a ship from Africa in 256. Another couple years earlier, 25,000 come from Sicily. From the northwestern Greece in 167 BC, there's 150,000 slaves on record being imported. And then when Caesar seizes Gaul, some historians say that it led to about a million slaves being moved into the Italian peninsula. So this is a fundamental change. Also it's said that there's less productivity relative to the population with the birth rate being up. Well we won't talk too much about that. So remember this in some ways is coming back to that idea of a Punic curse, that conquest of Carthage that had eliminated a rivalry for hegemony in the Mediterranean, such a windfall to Roman wealth and luxury and profit followed from it. Cato, remember, would have hated it. We hated it. Carthage must be destroyed was what he said at every speech he gave, but he disapproved of the luxury that... it brought. Of course, all this social and demographic change, it brings, there's a lot of dynamics, not all of which we would call bad. For example, over the course of this, we start to see new classes of people emerging. Equites were low-born men who became wealthy enough to become members of the equestrian order. They emerge at this time. We also words like optimis and popularis, you know, new classes of people that want to be seen and recognized in this hierarchical Republican system. When we look at Rome in these centuries, historians say we see a change in values, that we see a society that went from self-sacrificing to self-dealing, that we see more. corruption. All this power and growth had changed the nature of society. And the Republican form of government that had developed when Rome was a small Italian power with a Senate composed of its leading citizens, many of whom knew each other as the governing body, couldn't manage this far-flung territory. And so to be named a governor was to have to make a fortune abroad. And these fortunes abroad caused trouble back home. By about the year 100 BC, after you see strongmen increasing with money and power, and at first it's just their power, but as the Republic, things really fall apart, it's military might as well. You'd have a general and then he would win a campaign or be a pro-council and they would be shipped out to some distant province where they would effectively plunder the land, making fortunes for themselves. Cicero is one of the most famous, famous personas from Republican Rome. He gave us the doctrine of humanitas. It's where the word. humanitarian comes from and the humanities, the study of the human story. And what is humanitas? Humanitas is that's quality of humanness, human life based on an honest and generous treatment of others and a commitment to a morality based on natural law, the parameters of which can change and do over time for various audiences and thinkers. But at any rate, we recall Cicero as a model citizen, gifted rhetorician, and deep thinker, and at some level a philosopher. Well, in a single year, in his time as the governor in distant Sicily, he pocketed two million sesterces, about the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was just the way things started to happen. It's as if plundering in the provinces didn't count for diminishing one's virtue. One pro-council explained that one needed to extract three fortunes when being governor of a province. One to pay the debts that were incurred in bribing senators to obtain the position. Another fortune to bribe the jury at your trial for corruption. Keep in mind, ideas of corruption exist. It's a concept that is not to be tolerated, and yet this is how the empire increasingly operated. So anyway, you need one debt to pay the debts incurred in bribing senators, another fortune to bribe the jury at one's trial for corruption, and a third fortune to live out. the rest of your life. So in other words, the kind of inclusivity on which Rome had prided itself, that kind of inclusivity that had created loyal Italians who wouldn't go over to Hannibal in the critical Second Punic War. They didn't want to help an invader. They didn't feel so oppressed that Hannibal might somehow liberate them from those awful Romans. They had a degree of loyalty. That inclusivity had given way to a more heavy-handed and self-serving exploitation. Augustine of Hippo, whom we'll talk about when we talk about early Christianity, he lived during the empire's reigning years, so even much, much later. But he concluded that empires were robbery on a grand scale. You might say, well, are we talking about a republic? Are we talking about an empire? You tell me. Meanwhile, the demographics of Rome. back in the city, which is growing tremendously to changes. And we have more and more people that are in the city that don't meet property qualifications for service in the Roman army and government. More and more disenfranchised people, but people that are there. The social wars, which we'll talk about. end with a mixture of force and granting citizenship to the rest of Italy. It's in the midst of, in the wake of those, however, things aren't entirely solved. There will be slave rebellions in the last century of the Republic as well. Maybe some of you have seen this movie Spartacus about, based, you know, it's a historical movie. It's based on history, but there were these slave results, some of them. white significant. So these change circumstances with this, the changing economic conditions and dynamics, the changing demographics, and among the leadership, what historians tell us, this change in values, all set the stage for an end to this Republican experiment. One thing when we look back in history, what we can point to and say, here's what was happening as it was going down, is we start to see the rise of strongmen and client armies. Rule of law gives way to an ethos of might makes right. So here, just a map of Rome, the dark orange is what... the territorial extent of Rome when Caesar passed away. And here is going to be the green sort of showing Rome's final expansions under its imperial status. So how did the republic end? What were some of the landmarks of these traditions deteriorating? And here I want to talk to you about the brothers Gracchi, the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, his younger brother. The Gracchus brother were grandsons of the famous General Scipio. They were educated by their mother at home. We don't have public schools yet. And they were from a good aristocratic Roman family. They, as they grew into their adulthood and entered the leadership of Rome, they were... quite disturbed by these growing demographics. They were persuaded that the Republic needed serious reform in order to supply, in order to survive. They were deeply concerned with the disenfranchisement of so many Roman citizens and more and more poor. And in order to attempt to advance those reforms, they undermined existing customs and principles of checks and balances. So Tiberius, he was, Tiberius, the older brother, he wanted to advance land reforms, saying we have to limit how much any one aristocrat can hold. And he also wanted to take measures to get to make it harder for Roman citizens to lose their land. He had a lot of support from this, from the poor people, from the popularities. And he broke precedent in order to advance that agenda. He said, if I can't get the Senate on board, then fine, we'll bypass the Senate. And I have the support of the little people. So he broke precedence. He was murdered for it in a very violent event in which many of his... supporters were also murdered. Gaius, his younger brother, was very much of that same mind with his brother. He became tribune years later in 121 BCE, a decade after his brother. He was even more radical. And he wanted to basically he wanted he proposed to create courts run by equites against the Senate. So what he wants to do is create new institutions that do more to enfranchise the the lower people. the not elites, and that could check the elites themselves. This also didn't go over well with the Senate, and he ended up dying by kind of a force, forced into suicide amidst unrest that left 3,000 Roman citizens dead. Both of these brothers, the Gracchi brothers, they resorted to a populist appeal. as in their aristocratic elite colleagues weren't sufficiently on board and they said, well let's reach out to the masses. And so this starts to be a new kind of politics in Rome. Gaius Marius is another one of these leaders who arises and resorts to this popular appeal. He's a self-made man from the equite class, very popular. And he's one of the first people to exhibit this dangerous transformation in which we start to see that soldiers are more loyal to their commander than to Rome itself. He's a new man. He was elected to council six times, which is flaunting Roman tradition. more norm busting. And what we recognize in him is the creation of a client army. With Gaius Marcus, we see the creation of client armies. Here's a slide. kind of zeroing in on Tiberius. So he wants to, he's a charismatic aristocrat. This is actually 19th century political cartoon inserting an anachronism. It puts a top hat on him, which is entirely anachronistic. That means kind of putting things into a time period where they did not exist. Also think of a Flintstones commercial where someone answers the telephone, for example. That is an example of anachronism. So too is this picture of a top hat in the days of the Roman Republic, but it signals that aristocracy from which he was. But his sympathies were with the lower classes. He wanted to advance land reforms and even was prepared to break precedents to do it. For this, he was. was murdered. The land reforms he proposed were however enacted. There were enough people in the Senate that recognized the utility and the soundness in these ideas. Here is a picture, none of them contemporary of course, of his brother Gaius, younger brother Gaius, and the one on the top shows him addressing the plebeian assembly. that these are the lower lower symbol and he wanted, he proposed granting citizenship to all of the republic's Italian allies and he wanted to propose courts run by the equates, that those lower class men who had rose into the ranks of those who could be in the calvary and that they would have courts against the senate and I told you about his assisted suicide. This color picture in the end is a much later rendition of that death. So now we have this situation. People recognize problems. Reforms are proposed. And maybe some reforms happen, but as 2020 shows us, not sufficient proposals to to preserve the republic. And this phenomenon in the last century of the Roman Republic, we deal with this phenomenon of client armies. And keep in mind, this is a century, almost a century. It doesn't happen quickly, which for me, prompts these questions of when do you know something's broken beyond repair? So Gaius Marcus, around 100 BCE, he creates these client armies. His soldiers are clearly, they are in it for him. Not so much their loyalty is to their general rather than to the greater republic. Because in one of the reasons that happened for Gaius Marcus is because he advances this change in which Roman soldiers need not be property owners. In a way, it was quite practical. But because of the demographics I talked about before, there's more and more people. without property and they're standing around, they could do something. And also as Rome expands its territory, it has more military needs. Although relative to say Napoleon's army, as your textbook tells you, the Roman army was never as large as a proportion of the population, but still it's got a substantial army. It needs soldiers. And so it made sense from a certain perspective to drop that property requirement. But what it did was it meant that those soldiers were even more dependent on their service in the army, the booty from a campaign that their general would distribute to them than they were necessarily to the Roman Republic at large. And they didn't have their own property necessarily to stand on. And so we have these clan armies emerge. Now, And things get even worse. I want to talk about Sulla. Sulla came from the class of Optimate, one of these new emerging classes. But he's a patrician. Pardon me, a subset of the patrician classes. They've been around for a while. But it is etymologically not something. nano term we see in the 500 BCE when the republic is formed. At any rate, Sulla is a patrician. He opposes dropping the property requirement, but when it happens, he takes advantage of it. And basically on his watch, we have a social war. Now, the social war, socii were people, conquered people on the Italian peninsula who wanted citizenship. but didn't get it. And they fight a war to stand up for this claim supported by, and you know, there is support. So in the wake of that war, the Sochi lose the war, but Rome does grant them citizenship after all. Sulla, despite his initial opposition to dropping the property requirement for soldiers, does very much take advantage of this. client army aspect. He uses his army to seize power in Rome, then lead a campaign against a revolt in Asia Minor. He comes back to Rome. He fights another civil war against Gaius Marius. It is bloody. It is street fighting. Sulla emerges victorious. He rules as a dictator. And he basically, in the time that he's ruling, he's a dictator. He restores patrician power. He wants, he sees himself as defending the Republic and protecting the Republic. But his view of Republic is one in which not everyone is part of the franchise. Not everyone has power. And he wants to restore that balance where the patricians definitely had the greater power. And this is some tough stuff. Civil war, dictatorship. He says, you know, it's temporary just to get us where we need to go. We've got big problems. I alone can fix them. It's something that dictators tend to say. During his rule, I just want to bring attention to this one feature that was part of a Republican feature that is absolutely not a feature of what we would call, dare I use the word, civilized democratic systems now. practice of prescription. Sulla proscribed his opposition, and this meant he put out a list of people that he decided were enemies of the people. And if someone's name was on this list, any citizen could kill that person and take their property. To editorialize, a barbaric practice, but this is one feature of that system. So these are kind of things, where are we themes and we'll skip this slide for now. And then we get into our, and then so things continue. Sulla ends up giving up the dictatorship, the republic supposedly passes on, but things aren't really fixed. These problems continue and they continue until we know you've all heard and probably read Shakespeare's play about Julius Caesar in high school, that the Republic really ends with Caesar officially kaput. And so these dynamics that I've been describing, they continue to obtain, the reforms aren't really fixed, even if the civil war is damped down. And we have in 60 BCE, the emergence of a triumvirate. And basically, these are three leading powers in Rome that are going to cooperate to consolidate their political power and advance their agenda. And that first triumphant we have is with Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar. It's actually an informal arrangement. The second one will be formalized. But at any rate, these guys, they get together to advance their agenda, but they're also competing with each other. Crassus gets taken out. Pompey consolidates power in Rome. And while he's in Rome, Caesar, his friend, you know, his partner in this triumvirate, is off on campaign. And he has a tremendously successful campaign. It conquers much of Gaul. Pompey gets the Senate to call Caesar back. Caesar has a sense that Pompey wants to oust him. And he doesn't want to be ousted. And he's called back to Rome without his army. And he... He... He comes back to Rome, but with his army. He doesn't want to just take what he thinks Pompey is planning to do and have him arrested or somehow deposed and removed from power and take him out of the picture. So Caesar decides to come back to Rome, not submissive, but with his army. And this is where we have this famous remark. Maybe you've heard this remark, alia iacta est. that is Latin for, the dye has been cast, right? If you're ever dyeing fabric, like once you pour that dye in, you can't take that back. It's like once you've cut some, you know, measure once, measure twice, cut once, the, the, I can't remove this move. I can't reverse this move. And supposedly Caesar uttered something along these lines when he crossed the Rubicon, a river in Northern Italy, as he was coming back. to Rome. That, you know, up to this point I'm moving around in my army, I have plausible deniability, but now that I'm really getting closer to Rome and I've still got my army with me, it is clear that I am not coming unarmed. So, and anyway, Caesar comes back, he fights it out again, violence in the streets, he manages to defeat Pompey and emerge victorious. he is charismatic, he is a reformer, and he is, well, reformer in the sense that he wants to try new things. He declares himself dictator for life. Here's a different bust of him, as well as him on a coin. You see someone looking very harried, which is a different look than what we're going to see in Augustus in a little bit. So Caesar really is running roughshod over Roman traditions when he declares himself a dictator for life. And a group of senators think that they need to take action to restore the Republic. And so famously, in 44 BCE, on March 15th, which is called the Ides of March, the Roman, the Latin calendar was very different, where they didn't really count day by day, but the Ides was right there in the middle of the month. So on the Ides of March, Caesar was... murdered and famously supposedly said et tu Brute which is and you Brutus in Latin but Despite Shakespeare's remark line in the play, Caesar, if he did say that, probably would have been talking in Greek. So he probably never said that. But he did die in 44 BCE. And contrary to the dreams of the conspirators who killed them, they did not manage to restore the Republic. And I just want to want to pause a little bit more. more civil, more violence in the streets, more civil war is coming in the streets of Rome before we emerge as a more peaceful, but empire. And so I want to pause on this contemporary and make a slightly contemporary moment. In a government, it is fundamental that the institutions of government work for everyone. In the United States system, how those institutions work is determined by laws. Laws that are produced by a Congress, which consists of a House of Representatives and a Senate, all of those people of which are elected by the populace. So there's this, the making of laws is done by an elected body. That's how our system works. In other systems, institutions, maybe the laws were determined by decree. What the king or queen said was the law. In our system, it's determined by this elected body that goes through this process. So it means that not everyone may like the laws, but the laws are made through an agreed upon process by representatives elected by the people and the institutions that do that work of government. are supported by taxpayer dollars, by the whole, and they must work for the whole, not an individual. And so these client armies, these Roman soldiers that started to emerge working for, you know, this general or that general, I'll take this general or that general's orders, that became to be, well, we saw it resulted in... in chaos, and it wasn't a workable system, much violence, much disarray. And so one of the fundamental principles that many republics drawing a lesson from the destruction of the Roman Republic, it's been really important to have the military, not to the military, to be an institution of the government for everyone, and not have the military in different parts of the military. answering to this or that person. And we saw resonance of that principle, that very important principle being tested in our own country in the summer of 2020. And on June 11th, 2020 of this year, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the highest positions in the biggest military in the world, apologized. to the people of the United States of America. He apologized for taking part in a photo op that the president, the chief of the army, the president wears many hats in this in this country as you'll remember from your civics classes earlier on. General Milley apologized for taking part in a photo op that involved walking across Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. where authorities had moments before cleared peaceful protesters, people demonstrating their First Amendment rights, and they had been dispersed violently with tear gas and bullet pellets so that the president could walk across and have a photo op in front of a church. And Mark Milley said this in his apology. He said, quote, I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. This general recognized the fundamental importance, a kind of lesson learned through the pain of the civil wars that wracked the Roman Republic in its last century, that the military needs to serve the government, work towards the government. objectives as a whole and not in a partisan format. Caesar, when he said, Alia Iakta Est, when he prepared to march into Rome with an army serving him against other rival senators in power, he understood that he was challenging a norm. And when the empire gets established, there's this term, you see, the primarium. It was the city limit. And that was a line that... armies were forbidden to cross, except in this ritual that would take place called a triumph, that if a general was to be celebrated for a particularly key victory or a highly successful career, there would be a parade where that general would march through the streets with his army. These were occasions that were, it was understood to be a special occasion, not an everyday thing. And that primarium was this line into which the armies, which fight other powers, would not cross. And so in some ways, General Milley's apology to the American people for participating in an environment that created a perception of the military involved. in domestic politics, in his own words, was a real reminder of this history of the Roman Republic and how important it is to be clear about the use of government institutions and use them appropriately. To switch gears and wrap up really quickly here. So Caesar's out, but the Republic isn't quite restored. We have more of this hard-toed politics a second triumvirate forms they actually put it on paper and they're an official thing um with someone lepidus you don't need to know about him he actually dies of old age um and mark anthony and octavian these three figures that will start to work together but also turn on each other um there will be fighting and wars wars and this is a really dramatic episode um that involves cleopatra the last ptolemaic um pharaohess and she And basically, to make a long story short, Caesar goes to Egypt on one of his campaigns. He also gets involved with Cleopatra, bears her a child. When Caesar's out of the picture, Mark Anthony, this bust with the full head of hair on the slide you're looking at now, he also falls in love with Cleopatra. This is one of the... the contingency and drama of this episode in history led the 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal to remark, Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. And maybe sometimes you've heard this phrase, Cleopatra's nose. Well, to make, to put it quite succinctly, I think that when this is being referred to is actually Pascal probably was referring to this sense that a really strong prominent nose indicated ambition and a desire for power, but I think that historians we've more often taken it to mean a really strong prominent nose, or rather many other historians have taken it to mean that Caesar and Marc Anthony were so taken by Cleopatra's beauty. that their relationships with her changed the course of history. I'll leave that there, but I want you to go forward in life having some sense of where this remark, Cleopatra's nose, comes to. At any rate, Caesar's out of the picture. Second triumphant formed. It's falling apart. Mark Anthony also gets involved with Cleopatra, bears her some children. On the pragmatic end, he thinks, hey. Egypt's army and strategic position can maybe help me in standing up to Mark Anthony, but it doesn't go his way, can maybe help me in standing up against Octavian, who is a grand nephew of Caesar, who Caesar had adopted him as his son, but power wasn't free. He still has to fight it out. And in the Battle of Actium, which happens in 31 BCE, Octavian wins. Mark Anthony and Cleopatra dramatically will... both die shortly thereafter. Cleopatra certainly, or pretty certainly by suicide, maybe from having a snake bite her. But anyway, Octavian wins and he will emerge. as the new leader of the new Rome. What we say, the Roman Empire, even though he'll continue to call it a republic and maintain a fiction of republicanism, even though going forward, the Rome we'll know is a republic in name only. The republic is a memory. And going forward, we have a Roman Empire. With that, we'll stop.

And as I talk about these things and think about them recently, these are some of the questions that have been on my mind. And I invite you to think about this as well. So why did the Roman Republic end? Are republicanism and empire compatible? Can you have them together?

Or is there just something about this notion of a republic, of that participatory type of... government. And the Roman Republic was never entirely democratic, as we know.

Some could vote, some couldn't vote. This was a hierarchical world, but one that understood itself to be a republic. And it grew and grew and grew into an empire.

And so historians have asked the question, are republicanism and empire compatible? Or is there something about them that just they can't? work together.

Another question people ask when we think about the end of the Roman Republic, it are values that in this story, there seems to be a degeneration of a common shared ethos. So we ask this question with respect to the Roman Republic and more generally, how much do values matter in keeping a political system together? especially in our statistical, data-driven, empirical world.

How do we even talk about this kind of a notion? After all, how people feel, what they hold in their hearts, is a pretty intangible thing. As one sociologist in the 20th century said, often attributed to Einstein, but not him, a different, less known academic, he said, everything that matters.

Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters. That's something that comes back to me when I think about this question of how much do values matter? And if we were to answer that question entirely, how might we mention them as historians?

What evidence? A third question. What happens when freedom is juridical without economic stability? There's this notion of economic freedom and juridical freedom, as in as long as the law says you have this, you're good to go, conversation over.

And there's this other school of thought that says freedom in a world that requires money or entitlements or resources where none of those are accessible isn't actually freedom at all. And then four, one thing I've been thinking about, how do we know? when the system is broken.

The Roman Republic lasts for half a millennium. We definitely say it's over when Augustus comes to the fore. That'll be what we talk about next time. But by so many practical measures, in the events we're going to talk about here, we already have a system that's not working. When do you know that a system...

is broken. So the degeneration of the Roman Republic. Fundamental economic changes are happening over the course of time that have begun over the course of the Punic Wars and accelerate.

They are tied to Rome's territorial expansion. The territorial expansion brings fundamental changes to economic life of the republic. Campaigns get longer. This is a real disruption to economic life. Outside of the growing metropolis of Rome, the Italian peninsula is mostly an agrarian, fertile farmland, lots and lots of small farmers.

But that model starts to give way to something different. Let me give you this. an example of the story of Regulus.

Regulus was a Roman citizen and in 256 he was a council. And he was sent off into campaign as part of the Punic Wars. While he was away on campaign, the manager of his farm passed away.

Then a worker stole all the tools and his livestock. His family was back there, quite helpless. Remember, a Roman woman couldn't do all the things in society that a man could do.

And so Regulus asked the Senate. if he could be relieved from campaign to return and help on the farm to take care of his family. They were increasingly in desperate straits.

The Senate needed him to serve Rome at the front, and so they didn't give him the release he was asking for. Instead, they sent a new manager to go and look after his farm, take care of his family. and put things in order so that he could focus on doing his job for Rome on the front lines.

So that story shows that the Senate recognized the importance of providing assistance to his family, to the family, in order to keep the army in the field. But the reality was the Senate didn't provide that kind of support to every simple soldier. And simple soldiers could face similar challenges that Regulus felt. So, and they did. This land problem was a key issue for Rome.

So as campaigns get longer and longer, it gets harder and harder for the Romans in the army. And at this point, in order to be a soldier in the Roman army, you needed to have property. That was a requirement.

But as soldiers are around their campaigns increasingly, they lose their farms. It's not just because they're not there taking care of it. It's because, kind of two reasons. It's because grain is flooding the Roman, is flooding Rome now, cheap grain from the island of Sicily, which is a, that was conquered in the Punic, first Punic war, big grain producer, that grain is coming back into Rome. It's much cheaper, it's harder for those farmers.

in the hinterland of the Italian peninsula to get a good price and stay afloat as farmers. Another consequence of success in war is also making life more difficult for farmers, and that is that as Rome wins campaigns, it gains more and more slaves and returns slaves back into the system. And that cheaper abundant labor throws things out of whack as well. So the economy is changing. In the face of these changes, lots of Romans are losing their land.

They're in straits, they sell their land. And who do they sell them to? Well, this is a big benefit for the wealthy because that land is bought up by wealthy patricians, aristocats. aristocrats. And so you have this large scale disenfranchisement, this consolidation of what was many small farms into bigger and bigger estates.

And what who used those who used to be humble Roman citizens falling out of the ranks of landowners. Many of those people flocked to the city where they can get, there's a sense that you can get a McNeil more easily. And in addition to this, more slave labor is coming into the empire. 20,000 came in one cargo in a ship from Africa in 256. Another couple years earlier, 25,000 come from Sicily. From the northwestern Greece in 167 BC, there's 150,000 slaves on record being imported.

And then when Caesar seizes Gaul, some historians say that it led to about a million slaves being moved into the Italian peninsula. So this is a fundamental change. Also it's said that there's less productivity relative to the population with the birth rate being up.

Well we won't talk too much about that. So remember this in some ways is coming back to that idea of a Punic curse, that conquest of Carthage that had eliminated a rivalry for hegemony in the Mediterranean, such a windfall to Roman wealth and luxury and profit followed from it. Cato, remember, would have hated it.

We hated it. Carthage must be destroyed was what he said at every speech he gave, but he disapproved of the luxury that... it brought. Of course, all this social and demographic change, it brings, there's a lot of dynamics, not all of which we would call bad.

For example, over the course of this, we start to see new classes of people emerging. Equites were low-born men who became wealthy enough to become members of the equestrian order. They emerge at this time. We also words like optimis and popularis, you know, new classes of people that want to be seen and recognized in this hierarchical Republican system.

When we look at Rome in these centuries, historians say we see a change in values, that we see a society that went from self-sacrificing to self-dealing, that we see more. corruption. All this power and growth had changed the nature of society.

And the Republican form of government that had developed when Rome was a small Italian power with a Senate composed of its leading citizens, many of whom knew each other as the governing body, couldn't manage this far-flung territory. And so to be named a governor was to have to make a fortune abroad. And these fortunes abroad caused trouble back home.

By about the year 100 BC, after you see strongmen increasing with money and power, and at first it's just their power, but as the Republic, things really fall apart, it's military might as well. You'd have a general and then he would win a campaign or be a pro-council and they would be shipped out to some distant province where they would effectively plunder the land, making fortunes for themselves. Cicero is one of the most famous, famous personas from Republican Rome.

He gave us the doctrine of humanitas. It's where the word. humanitarian comes from and the humanities, the study of the human story.

And what is humanitas? Humanitas is that's quality of humanness, human life based on an honest and generous treatment of others and a commitment to a morality based on natural law, the parameters of which can change and do over time for various audiences and thinkers. But at any rate, we recall Cicero as a model citizen, gifted rhetorician, and deep thinker, and at some level a philosopher. Well, in a single year, in his time as the governor in distant Sicily, he pocketed two million sesterces, about the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This was just the way things started to happen. It's as if plundering in the provinces didn't count for diminishing one's virtue. One pro-council explained that one needed to extract three fortunes when being governor of a province.

One to pay the debts that were incurred in bribing senators to obtain the position. Another fortune to bribe the jury at your trial for corruption. Keep in mind, ideas of corruption exist. It's a concept that is not to be tolerated, and yet this is how the empire increasingly operated.

So anyway, you need one debt to pay the debts incurred in bribing senators, another fortune to bribe the jury at one's trial for corruption, and a third fortune to live out. the rest of your life. So in other words, the kind of inclusivity on which Rome had prided itself, that kind of inclusivity that had created loyal Italians who wouldn't go over to Hannibal in the critical Second Punic War.

They didn't want to help an invader. They didn't feel so oppressed that Hannibal might somehow liberate them from those awful Romans. They had a degree of loyalty.

That inclusivity had given way to a more heavy-handed and self-serving exploitation. Augustine of Hippo, whom we'll talk about when we talk about early Christianity, he lived during the empire's reigning years, so even much, much later. But he concluded that empires were robbery on a grand scale.

You might say, well, are we talking about a republic? Are we talking about an empire? You tell me.

Meanwhile, the demographics of Rome. back in the city, which is growing tremendously to changes. And we have more and more people that are in the city that don't meet property qualifications for service in the Roman army and government. More and more disenfranchised people, but people that are there.

The social wars, which we'll talk about. end with a mixture of force and granting citizenship to the rest of Italy. It's in the midst of, in the wake of those, however, things aren't entirely solved.

There will be slave rebellions in the last century of the Republic as well. Maybe some of you have seen this movie Spartacus about, based, you know, it's a historical movie. It's based on history, but there were these slave results, some of them.

white significant. So these change circumstances with this, the changing economic conditions and dynamics, the changing demographics, and among the leadership, what historians tell us, this change in values, all set the stage for an end to this Republican experiment. One thing when we look back in history, what we can point to and say, here's what was happening as it was going down, is we start to see the rise of strongmen and client armies. Rule of law gives way to an ethos of might makes right.

So here, just a map of Rome, the dark orange is what... the territorial extent of Rome when Caesar passed away. And here is going to be the green sort of showing Rome's final expansions under its imperial status. So how did the republic end? What were some of the landmarks of these traditions deteriorating?

And here I want to talk to you about the brothers Gracchi, the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, his younger brother. The Gracchus brother were grandsons of the famous General Scipio. They were educated by their mother at home. We don't have public schools yet. And they were from a good aristocratic Roman family.

They, as they grew into their adulthood and entered the leadership of Rome, they were... quite disturbed by these growing demographics. They were persuaded that the Republic needed serious reform in order to supply, in order to survive. They were deeply concerned with the disenfranchisement of so many Roman citizens and more and more poor.

And in order to attempt to advance those reforms, they undermined existing customs and principles of checks and balances. So Tiberius, he was, Tiberius, the older brother, he wanted to advance land reforms, saying we have to limit how much any one aristocrat can hold. And he also wanted to take measures to get to make it harder for Roman citizens to lose their land.

He had a lot of support from this, from the poor people, from the popularities. And he broke precedent in order to advance that agenda. He said, if I can't get the Senate on board, then fine, we'll bypass the Senate.

And I have the support of the little people. So he broke precedence. He was murdered for it in a very violent event in which many of his...

supporters were also murdered. Gaius, his younger brother, was very much of that same mind with his brother. He became tribune years later in 121 BCE, a decade after his brother. He was even more radical. And he wanted to basically he wanted he proposed to create courts run by equites against the Senate.

So what he wants to do is create new institutions that do more to enfranchise the the lower people. the not elites, and that could check the elites themselves. This also didn't go over well with the Senate, and he ended up dying by kind of a force, forced into suicide amidst unrest that left 3,000 Roman citizens dead. Both of these brothers, the Gracchi brothers, they resorted to a populist appeal.

as in their aristocratic elite colleagues weren't sufficiently on board and they said, well let's reach out to the masses. And so this starts to be a new kind of politics in Rome. Gaius Marius is another one of these leaders who arises and resorts to this popular appeal.

He's a self-made man from the equite class, very popular. And he's one of the first people to exhibit this dangerous transformation in which we start to see that soldiers are more loyal to their commander than to Rome itself. He's a new man.

He was elected to council six times, which is flaunting Roman tradition. more norm busting. And what we recognize in him is the creation of a client army. With Gaius Marcus, we see the creation of client armies. Here's a slide.

kind of zeroing in on Tiberius. So he wants to, he's a charismatic aristocrat. This is actually 19th century political cartoon inserting an anachronism. It puts a top hat on him, which is entirely anachronistic. That means kind of putting things into a time period where they did not exist.

Also think of a Flintstones commercial where someone answers the telephone, for example. That is an example of anachronism. So too is this picture of a top hat in the days of the Roman Republic, but it signals that aristocracy from which he was.

But his sympathies were with the lower classes. He wanted to advance land reforms and even was prepared to break precedents to do it. For this, he was. was murdered. The land reforms he proposed were however enacted.

There were enough people in the Senate that recognized the utility and the soundness in these ideas. Here is a picture, none of them contemporary of course, of his brother Gaius, younger brother Gaius, and the one on the top shows him addressing the plebeian assembly. that these are the lower lower symbol and he wanted, he proposed granting citizenship to all of the republic's Italian allies and he wanted to propose courts run by the equates, that those lower class men who had rose into the ranks of those who could be in the calvary and that they would have courts against the senate and I told you about his assisted suicide. This color picture in the end is a much later rendition of that death. So now we have this situation.

People recognize problems. Reforms are proposed. And maybe some reforms happen, but as 2020 shows us, not sufficient proposals to to preserve the republic. And this phenomenon in the last century of the Roman Republic, we deal with this phenomenon of client armies. And keep in mind, this is a century, almost a century.

It doesn't happen quickly, which for me, prompts these questions of when do you know something's broken beyond repair? So Gaius Marcus, around 100 BCE, he creates these client armies. His soldiers are clearly, they are in it for him. Not so much their loyalty is to their general rather than to the greater republic.

Because in one of the reasons that happened for Gaius Marcus is because he advances this change in which Roman soldiers need not be property owners. In a way, it was quite practical. But because of the demographics I talked about before, there's more and more people.

without property and they're standing around, they could do something. And also as Rome expands its territory, it has more military needs. Although relative to say Napoleon's army, as your textbook tells you, the Roman army was never as large as a proportion of the population, but still it's got a substantial army. It needs soldiers. And so it made sense from a certain perspective to drop that property requirement.

But what it did was it meant that those soldiers were even more dependent on their service in the army, the booty from a campaign that their general would distribute to them than they were necessarily to the Roman Republic at large. And they didn't have their own property necessarily to stand on. And so we have these clan armies emerge.

Now, And things get even worse. I want to talk about Sulla. Sulla came from the class of Optimate, one of these new emerging classes.

But he's a patrician. Pardon me, a subset of the patrician classes. They've been around for a while. But it is etymologically not something. nano term we see in the 500 BCE when the republic is formed.

At any rate, Sulla is a patrician. He opposes dropping the property requirement, but when it happens, he takes advantage of it. And basically on his watch, we have a social war.

Now, the social war, socii were people, conquered people on the Italian peninsula who wanted citizenship. but didn't get it. And they fight a war to stand up for this claim supported by, and you know, there is support.

So in the wake of that war, the Sochi lose the war, but Rome does grant them citizenship after all. Sulla, despite his initial opposition to dropping the property requirement for soldiers, does very much take advantage of this. client army aspect. He uses his army to seize power in Rome, then lead a campaign against a revolt in Asia Minor. He comes back to Rome.

He fights another civil war against Gaius Marius. It is bloody. It is street fighting. Sulla emerges victorious. He rules as a dictator.

And he basically, in the time that he's ruling, he's a dictator. He restores patrician power. He wants, he sees himself as defending the Republic and protecting the Republic.

But his view of Republic is one in which not everyone is part of the franchise. Not everyone has power. And he wants to restore that balance where the patricians definitely had the greater power.

And this is some tough stuff. Civil war, dictatorship. He says, you know, it's temporary just to get us where we need to go. We've got big problems. I alone can fix them.

It's something that dictators tend to say. During his rule, I just want to bring attention to this one feature that was part of a Republican feature that is absolutely not a feature of what we would call, dare I use the word, civilized democratic systems now. practice of prescription. Sulla proscribed his opposition, and this meant he put out a list of people that he decided were enemies of the people.

And if someone's name was on this list, any citizen could kill that person and take their property. To editorialize, a barbaric practice, but this is one feature of that system. So these are kind of things, where are we themes and we'll skip this slide for now. And then we get into our, and then so things continue.

Sulla ends up giving up the dictatorship, the republic supposedly passes on, but things aren't really fixed. These problems continue and they continue until we know you've all heard and probably read Shakespeare's play about Julius Caesar in high school, that the Republic really ends with Caesar officially kaput. And so these dynamics that I've been describing, they continue to obtain, the reforms aren't really fixed, even if the civil war is damped down.

And we have in 60 BCE, the emergence of a triumvirate. And basically, these are three leading powers in Rome that are going to cooperate to consolidate their political power and advance their agenda. And that first triumphant we have is with Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar.

It's actually an informal arrangement. The second one will be formalized. But at any rate, these guys, they get together to advance their agenda, but they're also competing with each other.

Crassus gets taken out. Pompey consolidates power in Rome. And while he's in Rome, Caesar, his friend, you know, his partner in this triumvirate, is off on campaign.

And he has a tremendously successful campaign. It conquers much of Gaul. Pompey gets the Senate to call Caesar back.

Caesar has a sense that Pompey wants to oust him. And he doesn't want to be ousted. And he's called back to Rome without his army. And he... He...

He comes back to Rome, but with his army. He doesn't want to just take what he thinks Pompey is planning to do and have him arrested or somehow deposed and removed from power and take him out of the picture. So Caesar decides to come back to Rome, not submissive, but with his army.

And this is where we have this famous remark. Maybe you've heard this remark, alia iacta est. that is Latin for, the dye has been cast, right? If you're ever dyeing fabric, like once you pour that dye in, you can't take that back.

It's like once you've cut some, you know, measure once, measure twice, cut once, the, the, I can't remove this move. I can't reverse this move. And supposedly Caesar uttered something along these lines when he crossed the Rubicon, a river in Northern Italy, as he was coming back.

to Rome. That, you know, up to this point I'm moving around in my army, I have plausible deniability, but now that I'm really getting closer to Rome and I've still got my army with me, it is clear that I am not coming unarmed. So, and anyway, Caesar comes back, he fights it out again, violence in the streets, he manages to defeat Pompey and emerge victorious. he is charismatic, he is a reformer, and he is, well, reformer in the sense that he wants to try new things. He declares himself dictator for life.

Here's a different bust of him, as well as him on a coin. You see someone looking very harried, which is a different look than what we're going to see in Augustus in a little bit. So Caesar really is running roughshod over Roman traditions when he declares himself a dictator for life. And a group of senators think that they need to take action to restore the Republic.

And so famously, in 44 BCE, on March 15th, which is called the Ides of March, the Roman, the Latin calendar was very different, where they didn't really count day by day, but the Ides was right there in the middle of the month. So on the Ides of March, Caesar was... murdered and famously supposedly said et tu Brute which is and you Brutus in Latin but Despite Shakespeare's remark line in the play, Caesar, if he did say that, probably would have been talking in Greek.

So he probably never said that. But he did die in 44 BCE. And contrary to the dreams of the conspirators who killed them, they did not manage to restore the Republic.

And I just want to want to pause a little bit more. more civil, more violence in the streets, more civil war is coming in the streets of Rome before we emerge as a more peaceful, but empire. And so I want to pause on this contemporary and make a slightly contemporary moment. In a government, it is fundamental that the institutions of government work for everyone.

In the United States system, how those institutions work is determined by laws. Laws that are produced by a Congress, which consists of a House of Representatives and a Senate, all of those people of which are elected by the populace. So there's this, the making of laws is done by an elected body.

That's how our system works. In other systems, institutions, maybe the laws were determined by decree. What the king or queen said was the law. In our system, it's determined by this elected body that goes through this process. So it means that not everyone may like the laws, but the laws are made through an agreed upon process by representatives elected by the people and the institutions that do that work of government.

are supported by taxpayer dollars, by the whole, and they must work for the whole, not an individual. And so these client armies, these Roman soldiers that started to emerge working for, you know, this general or that general, I'll take this general or that general's orders, that became to be, well, we saw it resulted in... in chaos, and it wasn't a workable system, much violence, much disarray. And so one of the fundamental principles that many republics drawing a lesson from the destruction of the Roman Republic, it's been really important to have the military, not to the military, to be an institution of the government for everyone, and not have the military in different parts of the military.

answering to this or that person. And we saw resonance of that principle, that very important principle being tested in our own country in the summer of 2020. And on June 11th, 2020 of this year, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the highest positions in the biggest military in the world, apologized. to the people of the United States of America. He apologized for taking part in a photo op that the president, the chief of the army, the president wears many hats in this in this country as you'll remember from your civics classes earlier on. General Milley apologized for taking part in a photo op that involved walking across Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.

where authorities had moments before cleared peaceful protesters, people demonstrating their First Amendment rights, and they had been dispersed violently with tear gas and bullet pellets so that the president could walk across and have a photo op in front of a church. And Mark Milley said this in his apology. He said, quote, I should not have been there.

My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. This general recognized the fundamental importance, a kind of lesson learned through the pain of the civil wars that wracked the Roman Republic in its last century, that the military needs to serve the government, work towards the government. objectives as a whole and not in a partisan format.

Caesar, when he said, Alia Iakta Est, when he prepared to march into Rome with an army serving him against other rival senators in power, he understood that he was challenging a norm. And when the empire gets established, there's this term, you see, the primarium. It was the city limit.

And that was a line that... armies were forbidden to cross, except in this ritual that would take place called a triumph, that if a general was to be celebrated for a particularly key victory or a highly successful career, there would be a parade where that general would march through the streets with his army. These were occasions that were, it was understood to be a special occasion, not an everyday thing.

And that primarium was this line into which the armies, which fight other powers, would not cross. And so in some ways, General Milley's apology to the American people for participating in an environment that created a perception of the military involved. in domestic politics, in his own words, was a real reminder of this history of the Roman Republic and how important it is to be clear about the use of government institutions and use them appropriately.

To switch gears and wrap up really quickly here. So Caesar's out, but the Republic isn't quite restored. We have more of this hard-toed politics a second triumvirate forms they actually put it on paper and they're an official thing um with someone lepidus you don't need to know about him he actually dies of old age um and mark anthony and octavian these three figures that will start to work together but also turn on each other um there will be fighting and wars wars and this is a really dramatic episode um that involves cleopatra the last ptolemaic um pharaohess and she And basically, to make a long story short, Caesar goes to Egypt on one of his campaigns. He also gets involved with Cleopatra, bears her a child.

When Caesar's out of the picture, Mark Anthony, this bust with the full head of hair on the slide you're looking at now, he also falls in love with Cleopatra. This is one of the... the contingency and drama of this episode in history led the 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal to remark, Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. And maybe sometimes you've heard this phrase, Cleopatra's nose.

Well, to make, to put it quite succinctly, I think that when this is being referred to is actually Pascal probably was referring to this sense that a really strong prominent nose indicated ambition and a desire for power, but I think that historians we've more often taken it to mean a really strong prominent nose, or rather many other historians have taken it to mean that Caesar and Marc Anthony were so taken by Cleopatra's beauty. that their relationships with her changed the course of history. I'll leave that there, but I want you to go forward in life having some sense of where this remark, Cleopatra's nose, comes to.

At any rate, Caesar's out of the picture. Second triumphant formed. It's falling apart.

Mark Anthony also gets involved with Cleopatra, bears her some children. On the pragmatic end, he thinks, hey. Egypt's army and strategic position can maybe help me in standing up to Mark Anthony, but it doesn't go his way, can maybe help me in standing up against Octavian, who is a grand nephew of Caesar, who Caesar had adopted him as his son, but power wasn't free. He still has to fight it out. And in the Battle of Actium, which happens in 31 BCE, Octavian wins.

Mark Anthony and Cleopatra dramatically will... both die shortly thereafter. Cleopatra certainly, or pretty certainly by suicide, maybe from having a snake bite her.

But anyway, Octavian wins and he will emerge. as the new leader of the new Rome. What we say, the Roman Empire, even though he'll continue to call it a republic and maintain a fiction of republicanism, even though going forward, the Rome we'll know is a republic in name only.

The republic is a memory. And going forward, we have a Roman Empire. With that, we'll stop.

Transcript for:Factors Leading to the Fall of the Republic

Transcript for:
Factors Leading to the Fall of the Republic