Roman Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Roman Republic began with an act of violence and ended with one. In 509 BC, according to Roman tradition, a noblewoman named Lucretia was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king. The outrage that followed swept the monarchy from power. Nearly five centuries later, on the 15th of March 44 BC, senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. Between those two bloodstained moments lay the rise of a city from a modest settlement in Latium to the dominant power of the entire Mediterranean world. How did a small republic of warring families build an empire spanning three continents? How did the same institutions that forged that empire eventually buckle and collapse under the weight of it? And who were the men and women whose ambitions, rivalries, and deaths defined one of history's longest-running experiments in collective governance?

• 2. Revolution and Early Order

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  Lucius Junius Brutus, the semi-mythical figure credited with leading the revolution against King Tarquin, gave the new state a defining principle: no single person would hold supreme power for life. The king's authority was divided between two consuls elected for exactly one year, each able to cancel the other's decisions by veto. Modern scholars look at the traditional founding story with skepticism. Many now read it as a mythologized account of either an aristocratic coup within the royal family or the consequence of an Etruscan occupation of Rome rather than a popular uprising.

  The Cornelii, the Aemilii, the Claudii, the Fabii, and the Valerii were among the roughly fifty large family groups, called gentes, who dominated the early Republic. These patrician clans monopolized the magistracies, the state priesthoods, and the senior military posts. Their power rested on land, on their position as patrons to large networks of clients, and on the simple fact that they had locked out everyone else.

  The vast majority of Romans were plebeians: smallholding farmers, artisans, traders, and tenants who formed the economic backbone of the city. For the most desperate among them, the earliest political weapon was collective withdrawal. In 494 BC, plebeians suffering under patrician creditors during a famine staged the first secessio plebis, a strike and walkout. The Senate conceded ground, giving the plebs access to written laws and to the electoral process. To guard those gains, the plebs created the tribunes, officers who were personally sacrosanct and could veto any magistrate's action with a single word.

• 3. Conquest of a Peninsula

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  Rome's first wars were wars of survival and proximity. The city fought the Sabines, the Etruscans, and the Latin cities of its own region, winning at Lake Regillus in 496 BC and at Ariccia in 495 BC, but suffering a serious loss at the Battle of the Cremera in 477 BC against the Etruscan city of Veii. Rome avenged that defeat in 396 BC by destroying Veii entirely.

  Then, around 390-387 BC, a Gallic tribe called the Senones did what few enemies had managed: they routed a Roman army at the Battle of the Allia River, eleven Roman miles north of the city, and sacked Rome itself. Archaeological evidence suggests the sack was largely superficial, but the psychological wound ran deep. Rome rebuilt and redoubled.

  What followed was a century of systematic southern expansion. Three wars against the Samnites, fought between 343 and 290 BC, gave Rome most of the central and southern Italian peninsula. The Latin War of 340-338 BC eliminated the last independent Latin cities. Rome then faced one of the most celebrated soldiers of the ancient world: Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, a cousin of Alexander the Great, who landed in Italy in 280 BC with an army of 25,500 men and twenty war elephants.

  Pyrrhus beat Rome twice, at Heraclea and at Asculum in 279 BC, but at such a cost in his own troops that he reportedly said, "if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined." That phrase entered history as the definition of a victory not worth having. A side campaign in Sicily against Carthage failed when he could not take the fortress of Lilybaeum, and his harsh rule drove Sicilian cities to defect. He returned to Italy only to be defeated at Beneventum in 275 BC by the consul Manius Dentatus, who captured eight of his elephants. Pyrrhus left Italy for good, and his death in battle at Argos in 272 BC forced his garrison at Tarentum to surrender to Rome.

• 4. The Carthage Wars

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  Between 288 and 283 BC, a band of mercenaries called the Mamertines seized the Sicilian city of Messina. When the tyrant of Syracuse, Hiero II, defeated them, they appealed to Rome for help. The Senate was divided, but a war-supporting consul named Appius Claudius Caudex put the question to a popular assembly, promising plunder, and got his favorable vote. That decision drew Rome into a twenty-three-year struggle with the dominant naval power of the western Mediterranean.

  The First Punic War exposed a critical Roman weakness: the sea. Carthage's naval superiority prevented Rome from besieging coastal Sicilian cities. Rome responded with extraordinary energy: using a captured Carthaginian ship as a blueprint, it built 100 quinqueremes in only two months. It also invented a new boarding device called the corvus, a grappling hook that let Roman soldiers fight ship-to-ship combat the way they fought on land. At the Battle of Mylae, the consul Gaius Duilius became the first Roman to win a naval triumph, destroying or capturing 44 enemy ships.

  Yet the war nearly destroyed Rome. A Roman expedition to Africa in 256 BC ended when the Spartan general Xanthippus, hired by Carthage, crushed the Roman infantry on the Bagradas plain: only 2,000 soldiers escaped, and the consul Marcus Atilius Regulus was taken prisoner. A storm afterward destroyed 184 of the 264 ships returning from victory at Cape Hermaeum, drowning some 25,000 soldiers and 75,000 rowers. The corvus was abandoned after another storm catastrophe in 253 BC.

  Hamilcar Barca harassed Roman forces from a mountain fortress at Mt. Eryx from 247 BC onward. Rome eventually financed a new fleet through a forced borrowing from the wealthy. In 242 BC, 200 quinqueremes under consul Gaius Lutatius Catulus blockaded Carthage's last Sicilian stronghold. Carthage's relief fleet was defeated. The peace terms were punishing: 3,200 talents in indemnity, and evacuation of Sicily. The fine was so large that Carthage could not pay the mercenaries who had fought for it, triggering the Mercenary War. While Carthage struggled to suppress that revolt, Rome seized Sardinia in violation of the treaty. That act of bad faith left a permanent bitterness in Carthage, and with it a seed for the next war.

  The Second Punic War began in 219 BC when Hannibal took Saguntum, a city south of the Ebro river that had appealed to Rome for protection. In May 218, he crossed the Ebro with roughly 100,000 soldiers and 37 elephants, marched through Gaul, crossed the Alps, and descended into Italy having lost nearly half his force to the cold and the terrain. What remained was enough. At the Trebia river in December 218, he destroyed the army of the consul Sempronius Longus. At Lake Trasimene in 217, he lured the consul Flaminius into an ambush and annihilated his army of 30,000 men. At Cannae in 216, outnumbered roughly two-to-one, he used his heavy cavalry to envelop eight Roman legions and killed approximately 20 percent of Rome's military-aged male population in a single afternoon. Eighty senators died at Cannae. Rome's allies began to defect.

  Rome survived through attrition. The young Scipio, given a special proconsulship for the Iberian campaign after his father and uncle died there in 211, took the main Carthaginian base of Carthago Nova in 209 and defeated Hasdrubal at Baecula the following year. When Hasdrubal marched over the Alps to reinforce his brother, the consuls Livius Salinator and Claudius Nero intercepted and killed him at the Battle of the Metaurus. Hannibal received his brother's severed head in his camp. He retreated to the toe of Italy with one elephant, a animal named Surus, and stayed there on the defensive.

  Scipio crossed to Africa in 204. He won the Battle of the Great Plains and laid the groundwork for the final reckoning. At Zama in 202 BC, he turned Hannibal's own tactics against him, using Numidian cavalry to rout the Carthaginian wings before flanking the infantry. Hannibal was defeated for the first time. The peace terms made Carthage a minor power in all but name: 10,000 talents in fifty installments, the surrender of all war elephants and nearly all warships, and the loss of every territory outside its core African holdings.

• 5. From Orders to Oligarchy

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  While Rome was fighting its external wars, an internal struggle called the Conflict of the Orders was reshaping the state from within. The tribunes Gaius Licinius Stolo and Lucius Sextius Lateranus spent nearly a decade between 376 and 367 BC blocking patrician elections and pushing a package of legislation that would open the consulship to plebeians. When other tribunes controlled by the patricians vetoed their bills, Stolo and Lateranus simply vetoed elections for five consecutive years while being continuously reelected by the plebs themselves, producing a governing stalemate that neither side could break by force.

  The resolution came from the dictator Camillus. He agreed to the tribunes' main demands; they agreed to the creation of new offices - the praetorship and the curule aedileship - reserved for patricians. Lateranus became the first plebeian consul in 366 BC; Stolo followed in 361 BC. Gaius Marcius Rutilus became the first plebeian dictator in 356 BC and the first plebeian censor in 351 BC. In 300 BC, the tribunes Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius opened the college of pontiffs and augurs to plebeians for the first time, breaking the last major religious monopoly.

  Yet the outcome was more complicated than a simple victory for the common people. Stolo, Lateranus, and the tribune Genucius had bundled their political demands together with debt-relief measures, exploiting the economic suffering of poor plebeians to advance the interests of wealthy plebeian families. The Conflict of the Orders ended by creating a new mixed elite called the nobiles, composed of about a dozen surviving patrician families and twenty successful plebeian ones, who between them continued to dominate the magistracies. Many small patrician clans faded entirely during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, unable to compete for the narrowing pool of senior positions.

  Shortly before 312 BC, the lex Ovinia transferred the power to appoint senators from the consuls to the censors, who could remove a senator only for misconduct and so effectively gave senators life tenure. In 312 BC, the patrician censor Appius Claudius Caecus used his new power to fill the Senate to its new limit of 300 members, including descendants of freedmen, which struck contemporary opinion as scandalous. Caecus also built the first Roman aqueduct, the aqua Appia, and the first Roman road, the via Appia.

• 6. The Republic Breaks

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  From 133 BC onward, the Republic entered a phase of deepening structural crisis. The historian Erich S. Gruen argued that civil war caused the fall of the republic rather than the other way around, but the causes of civil war were themselves embedded in the Republic's success: enormous wealth flowing from conquest, a Senate blinded by short-term self-interest, and generals commanding professional armies whose loyalty had shifted from the state to the man who paid them.

  Tiberius Gracchus, elected plebeian tribune in 133 BC, attempted to pass a land-reform law that would have capped private land ownership and redistributed public land to the rural poor. The aristocratic families who stood to lose fought back. When a fellow tribune named Marcus Octavius vetoed the bill, Tiberius induced the plebs to remove Octavius from office - an act that was constitutionally unprecedented. His law passed. Then, when Tiberius stood openly for reelection to the tribunate, enemies beat him to death. His brother Gaius, elected tribune in 123 and reelected for 122, pushed further reforms including grain subsidies and citizenship rights for Rome's Italian allies. In 121, amid violent street protests, the Senate issued its first senatus consultum ultimum and Gaius was killed on the Aventine hill along with many of his supporters.

  The Jugurthine War, fought between 111 and 104 BC in North Africa, became a referendum on senatorial competence. Gaius Marius, a self-made man from outside the noble families, was elected consul in 107 BC over aristocratic objections and had the African command reassigned to himself through a popular assembly. He won. His five successive consulships during the Cimbrian War of 113-101 BC - in which he commanded Roman armies that virtually annihilated the Germanic Cimbri and Teutons - made him the most celebrated soldier of his era and exposed how far military loyalty had drifted from the Senate to individual commanders.

  The Social War of 91 BC, in which Rome's Italian allies took up arms to demand citizenship, tripled the citizen rolls when Rome conceded the main point to stave off military defeat. The war also blurred the line between Romans and enemies in ways that would haunt the subsequent civil conflicts. When the consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla was assigned command against the Pontic king Mithridates in 88 BC, his rival Marius used a tribune to transfer that command to himself by popular legislation. Sulla responded by marching his army on Rome, the city he was constitutionally forbidden to enter under arms. He declared Marius and eleven others outlaws and left for the east.

  Marius returned from exile, seized the city, and began purging his enemies. He and his ally Cinna were elected to the consulship of 86 BC in what the sources describe as an irregular fashion. Marius died a fortnight after taking office. When Sulla returned from the east in 83 BC with a small but experienced army, he fought his way to Rome and won the Battle of the Colline Gate. His soldiers then proceeded, in the words surviving from the sources, "killing for profit, pleasure, or personal vengeance anyone they pleased." Sulla formalized the killing through proscription lists: anyone whose name appeared could be killed on sight and their killer could claim the property. He made himself dictator in November 82 BC and passed constitutional reforms intended to strengthen the Senate and replace unwritten custom with rigid statute law. He resigned the dictatorship in 81 BC, served as consul in 80, retired, and died in 78 BC.

• 7. Caesar and the Final Crisis

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  The political alliance formed in 59 BC between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus - later called the First Triumvirate by scholars - was a transaction of mutual convenience rather than shared principle. Caesar passed land redistribution for the poor and secured ratification of Pompey's eastern settlements; Pompey got land for his veterans; Crassus got relief for tax collectors. Caesar got a five-year proconsular command in Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul, and Illyria and the military record he needed for his political future.

  Caesar's Gallic Wars, fought between 58 and 49 BC, transformed him into a figure of extraordinary power and popularity. In 55 and 54 BC, he made two expeditions to Britain, the first Roman commander to do so. His defeat of the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix at the Battle of Alesia completed the conquest of Transalpine Gaul. By 50 BC, all of Gaul lay in Roman hands. Meanwhile, Crassus died in the disaster at Carrhae in 53 BC when his invasion of Parthia ended in annihilation deep in enemy territory. Pompey's wife Julia, who was Caesar's daughter, died in childbirth, severing the personal bond between the two men. By 49 BC, the Senate demanded that Caesar lay down his army or be declared an enemy of the state.

  On the 10th of January 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon river with his veteran army, the legal boundary beyond which no Roman commander could bring his troops. Pompey, the consuls, and the Senate fled to Greece. Caesar entered Rome unopposed. Pompey was defeated decisively at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC and fled to Egypt, where he was murdered. Caesar consolidated power steadily: permanent tribunician powers in 48, censorial powers in 46 with which he expanded the Senate to 900 members, and legislation allowing him to appoint all magistrates including consuls and tribunes. These powers transformed the magistrates, in the source's framing, from representatives of the people to representatives of the dictator.

  A group of senators led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus assassinated Caesar at a Senate meeting on the 15th of March 44 BC. The conspirators fled immediately. Caesar's associate Mark Antony, his adopted son Octavian, and his cavalry commander Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate and defeated the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC. The alliance fractured predictably. Lepidus was stripped of his offices and exiled to Circeii in 36 BC after a dispute with Octavian over the distribution of lands. Antony, who had married Cleopatra of Egypt to use the kingdom's wealth as a base against Octavian, was defeated at Actium in 31 BC. Octavian's forces then invaded Egypt; Antony and Cleopatra both committed suicide in 30 BC in Alexandria.

  Octavian accumulated offices and powers one by one: sole imperium within Rome, permanent consular authority, credit for every Roman military victory. In 27 BC, the Senate granted him the name Augustus. That grant is the conventional marker for the end of the Republic and the beginning of something the Romans had abolished five centuries earlier in a wave of outrage over a single act of rape: rule by one man.