Transcript for:
The Final Years of the Roman Republic

now we're going to look at the last years of the roman republic and that means looking at the civil wars that destabilize the roman republic ultimately leading to its collapse but i will point out that although the roman republic would collapse it doesn't mean that rome as an empire or as a civilization collapsed rome continued on for many more centuries in fact rome became bigger stronger wealthier than it ever had been before following the fall of the roman republican government but when that roman republic fell it did lead to a new state a new constitution let's say a new political constitution for the roman state that we're going to be looking at in more detail with our next subject so in the upcoming videos but for now we want to look at the the problems that the roman republic experienced beginning particularly in the late second century bce and those problems getting much worse by the first century bce ultimately leading as i said the collapse of the republic itself we will see after the death of julius caesar in fact here you see a modern 19th century i should say depiction of julius caesar being assassinated by senators which we are certainly going to be talking about in this particular video a little bit later on you'll remember from our last video that although the roman republic included a variety of different let's say political features such as a democratic monarchical but also aristocratic features for the state that uh on the whole the roman republic had been governed really by the senate because the senate which were of course uh roughly 300 aristocrats had the traditional role of giving advice to other officers of the roman state and to the popular assemblies of the roman state and traditionally that advice had always been heated because after all the advice is coming from very wealthy respected families but we saw before that the role of the senate had become more controversial because of the perception that due to its own self-interest and corruption it was unwilling to do what needed to be done to deal with the land crisis which you'll recall related to the the the enlargement of estates by wealthy landowners in the italian countryside and essentially small scale family farmer type level people were forced to sell out because they could not compete and they became impoverished that land crisis was a serious issue because it also reduced the number of regular italian men who could be eligible to serve in the roman army and we saw that since the senators as very wealthy aristocrats benefited from the growing inequality you could say in the countryside they were they weren't seemingly really interested in solving that crisis but we also saw that the roman senators often competed with each other to be nominated as governor of the provinces with the point of then exploiting that time of being governor in the provinces for their own personal enrichment and didn't seem that the senate was that interested in reigning that kind of behavior in either and so it it created a crisis in the republic by the second century these things need attention the land crisis and corruption in the provinces it needs attention but the senate is unwilling to act and what that led to was the rise of a group of leaders who would become known as popolares which i think the best english translation would be populists meaning they were roman leaders who wanted to bypass the senate and solve the problems of the republic by turning to the popular assemblies of the roman republic that is to say get the popular assemblies to pass laws that fix the problems that provide reform even though that is not in line with the advice of the senate here you see a depiction of the most important of the first papillaries the rocky brothers i'll tell you a little bit more about in a moment but before i tell you more about the rocky brothers i just want to emphasize here that this popularis or populist faction it's not that they are violating the way the roman republic worked on paper to say constitutionally it is the job of the popular assemblies to make laws it's just that it's entirely untraditional for these popular assemblies led as they were you will see by the rocky brothers and later others it was untraditional for them to pass laws in the face of the senate advising against those laws and so this is what will cause not just factionalism we will see in the republic but also outright violence so in response to the apparent unwillingness of the senate to tackle these really crucial issues for the republic some roman leaders started to ignore the advice of the senate and just directly go to the popular assemblies to pass laws fixing the problems they thought needed fixing that led in response to a different faction forming in rome in the republic and this faction was made up mainly of the senators but also those elites who believed in the traditional power of the senate and the name they adopted for themselves was optimates which means the best men are the best these were by tradition the senate was supposed to be made up of people who not only displayed the most patos in rome but descended from ancestors who had been legendary for their own examples of pietas and so this is the idea behind the idea that they're the best right they're the ones who are the uh wisest you see and the most idealistic in theory of the roman republic of course as we've just heard me remind you there are plenty of people by the second century bce who have started to believe these are not the best men after all but in fact are corrupt so the popularis really take off the atomates in the senate because the will the senate is no longer being respected by these popularized or populist leaders and it will lead to violence in the republic that's why this video is subtitled civil wars it leads to a series of violent conflicts in their own republic that can be described as civil wars ultimately leading to the end of the republic altogether but again that last stage of the story we're going to say for the next video i should also point out here as we look at examples of popolaris leaders doing their thing that we shouldn't forget that although these men turn to the popular assemblies for reform and change we don't want to forget that they themselves were also aristocrats so it's not like the leaders of the popolaris factions are like commoners themselves they're aristocrats in fact many of them would be senators as well and because of that it led them i think to earn the uh anger of the altamante's faction all the more because they saw these fellow aristocrats is betraying their own interests you can see here that the atamantes would actually accuse the popolaris leaders meaning their fellow aristocrats of simply exploiting the masses in order to enhance their own personal power and according to the aftamate side of this debate that was a dangerous thing to do because it undermined the republic as a whole and it is true of course that since the republic had in reality been governed by the aristocrats in the senate for centuries it is untraditional for the popolaris to use the popular assemblies in the way they did and it does threaten to cause controversy maybe even instability and yet of course from the papillary's point of view they feel or they argued anyway that they were just doing what they had to do in order to once and for all deal with rome's very serious problems you can see a depiction a modern depiction 18th century depiction of the two brothers that would become the most important populist or popolaris leaders in the second century bce they are depicted here alongside their mother cornelia and the reason i show you this image is because the rocky brothers again popolaris leaders you will see they were grandchildren through their mother of the military hero who had won the second punic war against carthage so basically these guys these rocky brothers are like the grandchildren of i don't know what would a modern equipment be basically the dwight d eisenhower of the second war against carthage so they're really connected like their their family name their standing is very very elite in rome so we don't want to forget that anyway that the leader of the popularized faction uh of the leaders anyway of the popolaris group that we'll be talking about here were typically very aristocratic themselves here's the first of those brothers tiberius what he did was he became elected as tribune by the assembly of the plebs and then as tribune directed the assembly to pass laws that took land away from the big estates and made it available to poor people who had become landless to give you just a little bit more explanation of this the assembly of the plebs or please it plebs is the latin but in english it's usually just said plebes um but the plebes to be more english about it and less latin um the plebes refers to the common people and the roman republic had a series of popular assemblies but as i've already pointed out many times here for centuries assemblies like that of the plebes had voted the way the senate advised them to vote not anymore with tiberius in charge the tribune was an elected executive office that had been created centuries before in order to placate common people in order to placate the plebes and make them feel that their interests were represented in the republican government so the tribune is typically or there's actually two of them at any one time but the tribunes were the leaders of the assembly of the police and since tiberius was elected as one of the tribunes he then used that authority to guide the assembly of the plebes again to pass a land reform law that took land away from the wealthy and gave it to the poor or sold it to them anyway very small essentially giving it to the poor i'll just leave it at that keep it simple needless to say the senators and of course the alta mates dominated the senate they were really angry about this because it went against their advice but you can see why from the popularis point of view it seemed that tiberius was doing a very good thing but the senate believed claimed that tiberius was not only upsetting the traditional role of the senate in republican government that he really was simply using the common people as a foundation from which to gain for himself a level of personal power that was not appropriate for the republic and so based on this the senate was able to incite a mob of its supporters to attack tiberius and his supporters leading to the murder of tiberius himself this is just a modern you can see depiction of that event so this is what i mean when i talk about civil wars or political violence marring the republic right the popularis under tiberius used their authority to pass a law it wasn't illegal but it was untraditional and it really upset the senate and they murdered tiberius and many of his supporters in reaction to this well as it turns out soon afterward or i say soon a few years later uh the younger brother of tiberius gaius believed in the same populist methods and he himself was elected tribune like years later and just like his older brother despite what had happened to his older brother he used the assembly of the plebs to pass more laws taking land from those who had so much of it and given it to those who did not so more land reform but gaius also used the assembly assemblative labs to start funding the sale of very cheap grain for common people which as you can see would be pretty popular with the plebes or the common people this is a 19th century painting showing gaius essentially going to confront the senate and this is his wife and child pleading with him to not do this because she's worried he's going to say going to share the fate that his older brother had um unfortunately experienced and this guy is saying no i have to do what i have to do he's not willing to stay out of the public limelight in any case once again the senate incited a mob to attack guys and his supporters right the ata mates you see attacking the popolaris here again and when it was clear he was going to be captured and killed gaius committed suicide and then the slaver would help him do that committed suicide himself that's what's being depicted in this painting to see attackers you see of gaius about to reach him he's already been stabbed and his slave is stabbing himself here too so this is political violence obviously and it's kind of what you might call the first round of the civil wars that the roman republic now would experience so this rivalry between the popolaris and the optimates faction would bedevil the republic for decades and decades after the rocky brothers departed from the scene there was a new round you could say a second round of civil war or violence that engulfed the republic with the rise of the general named marius marius was a popolaris he supported reform to benefit the poor he added an interesting tool i guess you could say to the uh to be used by popolaris leaders like him in the future and that was he was a general but he began to recruit soldiers for his army that were not landowners but instead were just urban poor people many of those urban poor actually would have been previously rural people who lost their lands in the countryside and hadn't moved to the city like rome but the urban poor were recruited to serve in marius's army and he promised those soldiers that in return for their service they would be given land which presumably marius would make sure happen as a general in other words he's sort of telling these urban poor people that hey i'm gonna i'm gonna cause land reform to happen and when that happens i'm going to give you land because you serve for me in my army so you can see why that's connected to the popularis faction because of course land reform is exactly what tiberius and gaius had gone for with their work as tribunes before here though we're talking about an actual general and not only does he earn the support of many of his soldiers by this promise of land but these soldiers were quite obviously loyal not to the senate or the republic but to marius because it's only with marius's strength and support that these soldiers will get the land that they desire so this is uh yet another chapter in these civil wars that would undermine the stability of the republic in fact marius was not able to achieve the land reform for his soldiers that he hoped to but that didn't mean he didn't first at some point take control of the city of rome himself he wasn't exactly tolerant as general for those who opposed his wishes in that city showed violence in other words toward his opponents well eventually marius did die as general and then one of the men who had become a rival of his a man named sola also a general but a man belonging to the optomantes faction after marius had died this general sola marched his army on rome and seized control of it by force and he claimed he was doing that in order to re-store the republic so he seized rome from control of the popolaris faction and he did this though by force in the name of restoring the republic after sola the optomantis had taken control of rome by this military action he then forced the senate to name him dictator in 82 bce and proceeded to launch a reign of terror against all of his opponents in the city of rome he obviously marius himself would certainly have been on this list uh of people to be executed but fortunately for marius i guess you could say he had died a few years before and thus was beyonce's reach but that did not stop solo from executing many many supporters of maris who had been in the ascendancy in the city of rome before his arrival with his army naming himself dictator by the way asula did that that sounds like completely outrageous it's not quite as crazy as it sounds because the roman republic actually did have this feature i guess you would say in their constitution where if the state was in an emergency that it was not that it was okay for the senate to temporarily appoint a dictator to help the state solve its problem so there had been dictators in the past in the roman republic it's just that in this case sola is seizing first of all run by force with his army and then secondly forcing the senate to name him dictator of course he is a member of the altamonte's faction and he did claim they wanted to do all these things in order to restore the the power the influence of the senate as it had once been sola announced in 79 bce after his reign of terror had ended that he believed he had restored the republic and then somewhat surprisingly he retired feeling that his job was done and so as it turns out died shortly thereafter sola believed that he had restored the republic because he had gotten rid of basically of all the important papillaries people in rome and he believed he had paved the way for the senate to once again be dominant in republican affairs unfortunately for him at least and for those who agreed with his goals that turned out not to be the case because instead he had really just created new precedence for one thing he had marched on rome and taken it by force with his army and that really hadn't happened like that before um secondly more importantly sola of course had forced the senate to name him dictator and it's those precedents which loom large when we now look at the third round of civil war that engulfed the roman republic in the first century bce i would say that the rivalry between marius and sola sort of marked the second round of this civil war violence but it's the third round of civil war that's possibly the most famous or among the most famous examples of political violence on the roman republic in the late republic there were three new contenders to be dominant in roman affairs that emerged in the 70s and 60s and these were three men who together created something of a temporary alliance to intimidate the said and others in rome and giving them what they wanted this sort of informal alliance of these three ambitious men became known as the triumvirate which is a latin word that means three men i'm actually not going to worry about two of the three here because the main thing to know for our story is that the most as it turns out powerful of these three figures would be the man julius caesar julius caesar was not a member of the atamantes faction like sola had been he was a popolaris and he did though a number of the things that not only marius had done but some of the things that seoul had done too although with a popolar school julius caesar who had already actually commanded army successfully he intimidated the senate to give him a new military command with with which he intended to conquer a new province for rome it turns out there's virtually nothing you can do in rome to gain more prominence for yourself more prestige for yourself than to conquer a new province for the state and this is exactly what caesar intended to do so he intimidated the senate into giving him an army to command and then he marched that army to the north out of italy this is italy of course down here he marched the army he was given into what is now france but an area that the romans called gaul and he proceeded over years really almost a decade to conquer rome excuse me to conquer rome to conquer gaul that is actually one of the things that caesar julius caesar became quite known for was his conquest of gaul and his creation of gold therefore as a province for this growing roman empire took him years to do it but it it gained caesar a huge amount well first of all a prestige i've already commented briefly on that but also wealth i mean he seized not only wealth and gall but he enslaved thousands and thousands of people who we could then bring back to rome to sell as slaves in the markets but he also julius caesar also gained a lot of supporters in gaul believe it or not some gauls didn't support him that's for sure like the ones who were uh fielding armies against caesar and were defeated by him but um in fact here you can see one of them this is one of the powerful gaulish kings who organized some other gauls to fight and resist the romans along with him and here he is uh surrendering to caesar when he realized that the fight was over although uh individuals like this would not necessarily become big fans of rome it turns out that there were many gauls who were willing to side with julius caesar and fight against other rivals you see that they possessed in gaul gaul was not some unified kingdom or something like this when caesar invaded it it was completely politically disunified divided into different tribes and different uh political rivalries of the of their own so though the point here is that caesar was able to ally with some of the kings and aristocrats in gaul against others but he made friends of those individuals and he used them to enhance the size of his own army and he promised some of the elites in gaul that he allied with to give them elite standing in the roman state as well so what this all means is that by the time julius caesar was done conquering gaul he's marching now back into italy with an even bigger army than he had set out with and he clearly has the intent of rewarding his gaulish allies with various honors and positions in the roman state plus on top of all this caesar's earned a lot more public prestige for himself based on the conquest he has managed for rome so the senate which of course is still dominated by otamantes oriented people people want to keep the senate as the dominant political power in the state the senate were none too happy to realize that caesar was on his way back into italy and he was marching a massive army along with him because it seemed pretty obvious that when caesar arrived in rome itself he was basically going to take control of the place and so because of this the senate ordered caesar and his entire army to stay out of italy which back in this period the northern boundary of italy as a this area the roman state was considered to be the rubicon river so basically the senate told caesar's army stay north of the rubicon river you're not allowed to come south famously cesar decided to defy this order by the senate and he claimed that the die was cast meaning that he was going to cross the rubicon recognizing that there was no going back right and that it was going to lead to a fight to violence so caesar famously decided to defy the senate's orders to march his army across the rubicon down into italy itself into central italy itself and even to the city of rome of course when caesar and this big army got down to rome he did in fact have to fight the army that was willing to the generals of which were willing to defend the altamontes so caesar as you'll see is a popolaris leader and with this big army he brings back from gaul he then fights the optimates faction in battle and wins this is a as you can see a 19th century depiction of caesar it's like a symbolic image it's not an image that is necessarily a positive one for caesar's memory here you can see caesar on horseback he's holding in his hand the world indicating his ambition right to be a dominant world leader and you can see some of his soldiers marching behind him as well here are people who are in misery because of the fact they basic they've been enslaved by uh caesar and his conquests you can see like smoke and rising above and the symbol here of the sort of war and pestilence these are although they're dressed in white figures that are associated with reaping the dead and here you can see are the victims now that caesar's about to trample over now that he's entering italy so it's not exactly the rosy depiction of julius caesar he's a very as we will see controversial figure and he has also been seen as very in a very positive light but he did march into italy and he was able to beat the army raised by the optomattes to fight him and after that was accomplished just like sola he forced the senate to name him dictator corsola had been in optomantes thinking he had restored the republic clearly that didn't work out because years later now we have caesar a popolaris taking over rome and also naming himself dictator but dictator a dictator was supposed to be a temporary power only given in time of emergency it was supposed to be relinquished as soon as any emergency had passed but you can see that caesar wasn't regarding this title or this office is temporary because in 44 bce he forced the senate to agree that he should be dictator for his entire life for his entire life well you'll remember that roman tradition was that they had lived under kings in their early history for about 250 years before they got so sick and tired of the tyranny they kicked kings out forever and created the republic quite obviously caesar looks like he wants to be a king other popolaris leaders like tiberius in fact and gaius much earlier in this story i'm telling you had also been accused of perhaps the ambition of trying to become king but that was uh that was a political no-no in the republic and it's sort of difficult to deny the fact that caesar had an ambition to rule like a king even if he didn't take that title directly now there's a lot of criticism that therefore could be level at caesar based on this ambition to be all-powerful and yet it should also be recognized that caesar was surprisingly uh merciful and uh toward those who had resisted him in a seizure of rome in 48 bc at least those who didn't die in the process like you know killed in battle so for the most part julius caesar was willing to to give clemency to show mercy in other words to to those who had opposed his entry into the city of rome including the senate you can see again a modern painting but 19th century but this is cicero here using his gift of persuasion to persuade julius caesar on the right that the senator on the left should be exonerated for his role in supporting keeping caesar out of the city of rome and in fact in this particular case caesar did glen grant excuse me clemency which turned out not to work out very well for caesar because this man would later participate in the assassination of julius caesar but we'll get to that in just a moment here caesar did prove to be relatively merciful uh it is true that he essentially neutered the power of the senate meaning he refused to allow the senate to to rule independently any longer but he did keep the senate in place and he did show the senators on the whole mercy he also used his authority as dictator to do a number of things that historians have largely looked unfavorably which is to say for example he engaged in building projects this you're looking at the edge of the roman forum at what's called the julian forum this forum area here was built to adjoin the roman forum and it included in their obviously ruins today but included this massive temple complex devoted to the goddess venus so he was a builder he also founded roman colonies in other parts of the empire of the republic particularly you can see here spain god north africa meaning he began to have roman towns built and he began to spread essentially latin culture into other areas of the empire which would turn out to be an important means of binding this large empire across the mediterranean world together in later years this doesn't seem to be as major perhaps at the time but it turns out to be culturally important so i mention it somewhat in passing here but caesar recognized that the traditional lunar calendar that was in use by rome was not accurate that in other words the year wasn't long enough and so it was causing the months to become increasingly uh disassociated from the months they were supposed to be associated with and so he he lengthened the calendar and made it based on as it was a solar calendar of 3 365 days a year and the reason i mentioned this actually at all is because it is the calendar that western civilization would later adopt and then eventually modify in the 16th century but essentially the core of the calendar that we use today was put in place by julius caesar after caesar's assassination by the way uh his supporters who were able to take over rome named the seventh month of the calendar at that point after julius caesar naming it july but i also want to point out here that another important thing that julius caesar was able to accomplish as dictator was he made administrative reforms and what that means is he created oversight over the governors in the provinces but he also created oversight over italian officials and what he was able therefore to do is significantly reduce the corruption that as we have seen had become recognized as an important problem in the republic many years before he had also by the way been supportive of land reform and so that of course addresses as well the other issue that had made the automatic faction unpopular among many in rome so it is true that julius caesar was subverting it seemed the republican goal of avoiding monarchy but on the other hand it seems that the power that the things that he did with his power perhaps are were very beneficial for the roman state you can see therefore why he would be really controversial right on the one hand he undermines the republic itself but on the other he's solving problems for the republic that clearly did need to be solved yet another step taken by julius caesar was his extension of citizenship to many of the gauls with whom he had allied during his years of conquest there now again this doesn't mean that caesar's extending roman citizenship to just regular average people who live in gaul he's extending it to the elites who had sided with him but still this was a pretty big step to take up until this point roman citizenship had been spread throughout italy itself in fact earlier in the first century even then in the around 100 bc it was still controversial back then to extend citizenship throughout to men who were elite throughout the italian peninsula but that had basically been accomplished by the time of julius caesar's career but now caesar was extending roman citizenship to elites in gaul itself outside of italy and no doubt there were many people in italy who resented that i should say elites in italy who resented this because they saw it as competition for themselves and if they were offended by that boy they were really offended by the fact that julius caesar dramatically expanded the size of the senate he in fact tripled it in size to roughly 900 people and then many of those new senators he added were actually elites from gaul so for for italian nativists who are elites who are already resentful that that elite calls are getting uh citizenship to see them actually suddenly showing up in the senate itself that august body uh in large numbers was pretty controversial for them but it's clearly another way for caesar to undermine the power and the influence of the otomontes faction in the republic but although that would have been controversial for elites in italy we look back today from a modern point of view at the extension this gradual and uneven extension roman citizenship to more and more people as part of a process that in our modern democracy we support because really what the romans were practicing here and it sort of was a practice that would lurch forward here and there based on circumstance but they're practicing what we would call naturalized citizenship the idea of meeting that even if you're not born into rome or you're not born a citizen of rome that you can become one anyway ultimately it takes several centuries before roman citizenship is spread throughout to the elites anyway of all the provinces that's something we'll talk about in a later video but we today would look at caesar and we would perhaps see this favorably the idea of naturalized citizenship it does in fact it seems the long view of it is it does strengthen the empire because if you give elites and conquered territories a stake in the empire i mean that would dramatically reduce right rebellion and separation of different areas you know they it would reduce the centrifugal forces that would otherwise act to break up the empire this is one of the things we look back at in fact now and think wow that was really a wise thing about rome is the way in which it gave a stake in the success of the state to the elites at least well despite what many would look at favorably we will of course recall that caesar had taken on as dictator for life more power than had ever been seen before in the republic and naturally the altamonte's faction in the senate was not thrilled with these developments and so as you probably already knew since it's so famous but if you didn't i guess you'll find out now uh julius caesar was assassinated by ottomantes in the senate in 44 bce and the assassins explicitly stated they did this because they were defending the republic and rome should never have a king and in their mind caesar was clearly becoming just like a king unfortunately for the automatics who carried out the assassination the the aftermath of the assassination was not the restoration of the republic as the senators wanted it to be it simply led to a fourth round of civil war and violence that would permanently end the republic as anyone knew it but you can see how some who believed in the idea of no king in a republic would look at the assassins as heroic whereas others who instead admired the accomplishments of caesar and what he did for rome as seeing these assassins as villains it's kind of interesting if you look back over western history really in the middle ages in the early modern period the tendency was to look at caesar historically as being a heroic figure and i suppose that should make sense shouldn't it because western civilization for centuries was in fact ruled and dominated by kings but then when you enter more modern times like say by the 19th century and 20th centuries when democracy started to become a big idea in western culture by that point caesar was more looked at as a villain and there was more sympathy instead for the assassins so it is kind of interesting the way in which our own contemporary views can affect the way we look at figures from the past well i'll finish this video by just pointing out that by the time caesar was assassinated really there had been a lot of damage done but to both of the factions that we've been looking at here both the popularis faction and the antamantes like both had used violence right to achieve their goals uh neither side seemed to be prioritizing the stability that the roman republic seemed to require and so the question here after caesar's assassination is what next is there anyone who can once and for all end the violence and bring stability back to wrong is there anyone who could perhaps even uh offer not only something to the popularis faction but even something to the automatics and as you might be able to see by my obvious foreshadowing here there is a man of figure who will emerge named octavian who will in a fourth round of violence lead to the end of civil war of rome and re-establish the roman state in a form it would keep for centuries so we'll be looking at octavian and his amazing career in the next video