Roman Republics

Manhattan's sinking like a rock
Into the filthy Hudson, what a shock
They wrote a book about it
Said it was like Ancient Rome
The perfume burns his eyes
Pulls him tightly to her thighs
Something flickered for a minute
Then it vanished and was gone

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When I was recently in Manhattan, Jan of the Observatory gave me Harriet Flowers, Roman Republics. After all these years, I’m still a sucker for a good history of Rome and Flowers’ account of the republic’s last century is essential. She correctly makes the case, funnily enough the first time I’ve seen it, that the republic ended with Sulla, who for the first time in four centuries marched Roman troops into Rome to settle a domestic political dispute. Flowers writes the forty years that followed, the years of Caesar, Cicero, Pompey et al., were nothing more than the republic’s death rattle – “there was simply no one left playing the old republican game.”

Flowers astutely notes the republic’s fall was caused by a variety of factors, most importantly a changed economy resulting from the empire the republic conquered. This economy was the domain of vast plantations operated by slaves and overflowing with cheap imported goods. Economic wealth became ever more concentrated. The old independent yeoman farm citizen body descended into the mass landless urban proletariat, economically powerless, but politically enfranchised.

The other great factor in the republic’s demise was Rome’s incessant militarism. Funnily enough, as the Romans turned to fighting themselves, they never stopped fighting the rest of the Mediterranean world. Battling Jugurtha in North Africa, the Cimbri and Teutoni in modern France, and Mithridates in Asia Minor played significant roles in the republic’s demise. The endless warring created the need for a professional army, who were more loyal to their commanders and plunder than the republic itself.

Flowers correctly notes while it was Sulla who plunged the newly created mercenary army spear into the heart of the forum, it was Marius' dismantling of established republican tradition and processes, who created it. Unprecedentedly, Marius served five terms in a row as consul ("president"). "The combination of several military threats produced both the unparalleled career of Marius and the decision to accept landless volunteers in the Roman army.”

In Roman politics, “Marius words seem to have a much more corrosive tone, especially his sweeping criticisms of the established political families as incompetent and dishonest... denigrating much of what was republican and Roman political culture.” She adds, “Marius career became a pattern of irregularity that suggested Rome could not survive without a strong man who operated outside the rules.” 

Sulla himself is largely lost to popular knowledge of the republic’s fall, if there is any such popular knowledge? In most histories, Caesar, the second general to march his troops on Rome, is perceived the republic’s destructor. Part of this is because Caesar's adopted son Octavian, the self-titled Augustus, would institute imperial rule twenty years later. Yet it was Sulla, who truly personified the republic’s demise.

Sulla, reacting in part to Marius' rule, loosed his troops on Rome forty years before Caesar. A few years later, assuming the title of dictator, and in response to Rome’s desperate need for democratic reform, Sulla disempowered the Tribunes, the citizenry’s principal magistrates, and further centralized power in the senate and the economic elite. These reforms proved worthless. “There was no time when Sulla’s republic was both fully functional and unchallenged as the established status quo. The intensity, variety, and immediacy of opposition to the new system is a powerful indication of its perceived revolutionary character.”

The republic never recovered, the democratic ills of wealth concentration, perpetual militarism, and complete political dysfunction continued over the next half-century until Augustus inaugurated his new system of one man rule, the princeps, the noxious notion of "first among equals."

Flowers wonderfully takes down all the figures following Sulla who claimed they were acting to save or reform the republic. She writes, “The '60s also saw the rise to prominence of Cicero and Cato, two famous Romans who would play their own roles in destabilizing what was left of republican politics, although each claimed to be defending the traditional system.”

She continues, “Cato came from a famous political family and had a grand heritage of public service to live up to. Yet his politics of constant obstruction and provocation made any kind of negotiation or compromise significantly harder to achieve…. Cato was a man of his age insisting on narrow family tradition over constructive dialogue or innovation and in focusing on appearances at the expense reality.”

Cicero even worse. “Despite his protest that he stood for all that was most Roman and republican in politics, his views cannot be taken as representative either of a majority of senators or of the most powerful and aristocratic inner circle. ...he contributed to a sense of insecurity in Rome, especially in his consulship of 63, which was a crucial time of destabilization and fierce partisanship.”

All feel familiar my fellow Americans?

Few historians of Rome ever recognized Cicero’s duplicity. But worse, for whatever reason, Cicero’s writings managed to survive to a greater degree than most others. I think in part this is because they proved less offensive to the imperial rule that followed. Cicero pined for and whined about a system that was both corrupt and dysfunctional. Most detrimental, it his sad writings history so often wrongly turned to define republicanism.

The greatest fault in Flowers’ work is like almost all writing since the republic’s fall, she gives short shrift to the Roman assembly. Yet, this participatory assembly of the Roman citizenry was the republic’s essential democratic element. Its discarding by Augustus saw the disappearance of any such institutions from all Western history that followed. It can be argued the old American townships were its greatest renaissance.

I have written plenty about America having a lot to learn from Rome. Just as that little ancient village of the Italian peninsula conquered the Mediterranean, we, a people once clinging to the side of a vast continent, in just two and half centuries created an historically unprecedented massive global empire. Today, the same pressures of empire, the anti-democratic concentration of wealth, and the now Ciceronian corruption and dysfunction of the political process rot DC as they once spoiled Rome. We have yet to see our Sulla, but if we, like Rome, fail to bring about significant reform of self-government, his figure can be seen coming into ever sharper focus on the horizon.