Discussion of the end of the Republic has been dominated for a generation by the theories formulated by three of the great republican historians of our time - Peter Brunt, Erich Gruen, and Christian Meier - and published within a decade of each other in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It would be fair to say that Peter Brunt’s account of the end of the Republic became the orthodoxy in the English-speaking world; it therefore serves as the best point of departure for most readers of this volume. Brunt judges that the collapse of the Republic was the result of a shattering of political consensus as different sectors of Roman society in the late Republic developed irresolvably conflicting interests. The Senate, blinded by short-term self-interest, progressively eroded its own authority by its persistent failure to solve problems brought by Roman expansion through timely concessions to the Italians, ‘‘knights,’’ urban plebs, peasantry, and soldiery. Thus eventually the state was left stripped of defenders and prey to powerful dynastic figures who could more effectively, if cynically, champion these interests. The process unfolded over many decades from at least the time of the Gracchi; but by the time that Caesar, the rebellious proconsul, was preparing to cross the Rubicon, all of these important sectors of Roman society were broadly alienated from senatorial governance and prepared either to stand aside or make common cause with the man who sought to destroy it.3
The theories of Christian Meier and Erich Gruen in effect rebut different aspects of this powerful and coherent thesis. Meier (to take him up first) did not dispute that the death of the Republic was directly caused by the rise of a sequence of excessively powerful individuals who could no longer be constrained in the traditional manner. His innovation lay rather in constructing a complex and challenging argument that despite the succession of grievous troubles into which the Late Republic sank, all contemporary stakeholders, from the political elite to the plebs, remained intellectually and psychologically in thrall to the traditional political system, and since they lacked an objective perspective upon the real causes of the institutional failure in which they found themselves, their responses were limited either to aporetic paralysis or clinging ever more tightly to the traditional, but now anachronistic system - which merely accelerated and worsened the crisis. None of those sectors of society that had a role in the system, from the ancient nobility down to the plebs and out to the newly enfranchised Italians, actually sought to destroy the Republic. On the contrary, this was, in Meier’s coinage, a ‘‘Gefalligkeitsstaat,’’ a neologism that is impossible to translate (‘‘accommodation-state?’’), but that attempts to describe a system in which the needs of those privileged elements of the citizenry that played a significant role were sufficiently accommodated to prevent any one of them from regarding the system as the problem rather than as an essential part of any solution. Thus there evolved a ‘‘crisis without alternative’’ (‘‘Krise ohne Alternative’’), in Meier’s pithy but somewhat ambiguous formulation: that is, a crisis that was inevitably worsened and ultimately made irremediable by the inability of contemporaries to conceive realistically of, or at least to accept, an alternative to the failed Republic.4
One will note that this interesting theory is not so much an explanation for the end of the Republic as for the notable failure of contemporaries to diagnose and remedy the affliction besetting their state. It is also somewhat awkward that eventually - under Augustus - an ‘‘alternative’’ did in fact arguably emerge (though one acceptable largely because it could be presented not as an alternative, but as an improvement of the Republic). But the theory’s major contribution is that it made a thought-provoking case for the seeming paradox that those who brought down the Republic, or were complicit with the leading agents in doing so, did not actually seek to destroy it but even arguably to save it (with the possible exception of Caesar). It followed that, in contrast to Brunt, it was unnecessary to show, or presume, that any of the major parties to the ‘‘Fall’’ had become deeply disillusioned with a traditional political system whose past glories gave it unparalleled prestige in the historical consciousness of all quarters of Roman society.5
It has seemed worthwhile to describe Meier’s thesis at somewhat greater length than the others because, despite having enormous influence upon present-day German scholarship, it is unfortunately relatively little known and less read in the Englishspeaking world. Partly, no doubt, this is for merely linguistic reasons, but surely also because Meier’s indulgence of sometimes murky abstraction and his pessimistic, almost tragic view of the gap between human cognition and historical process are both rather alien to the ‘‘Anglo-Saxon’’ empirical tradition of historical scholarship. That is a pity, for the richness of Meier’s analysis can be easily measured by the lively and thoughtful debate it stimulated, and still stimulates, in German scholarship (see Chapter 1) on a subject about which the English tongue seems to have fallen strangely mute.
Erich Gruen targeted another premise of the traditional analysis.6 Gruen was one with Meier in stressing that no one consciously sought the Republic’s demise, but his even more provocative claim was that the state was suffering from no such terminal disease as scholars had long diagnosed. In his view, republican politics functioned in an essentially traditional fashion right down to the eve of the Caesarean civil war. The Senate showed, if anything, renewed vigor in its confrontation of continuing challenges after the death of Sulla. The recurring problems in the city and countryside, the association of great armies with powerful individuals, even the notorious ‘‘extraordinary’’ long-term commands such as that given Pompey against the pirates and then Mithridates in 67-62, or Caesar in Gaul ultimately from 58-49, which have so often been seen as crucial instruments of revolution - none of these were signs that the Republic was on its deathbed. Rather, ‘‘Civil war caused the fall of the Republic, not vice versa.’’7 An unyielding proconsul dealt one grievous blow, his assassination another, and more than a decade of intermittent civil war finished the job. The view that by 49 the Republic was an empty shell ripe for toppling was, for Gruen, a product of the historian’s professional vice of treating every result, no matter how undesired and paradoxical to contemporaries, as somehow inevitable in hindsight.
Despite their salient differences, it is clear that Meier and Gruen have together mounted a serious challenge to Brunt’s central idea that the end of the Republic came because it (as represented by the Senate) had forfeited the allegiance of important sectors of its citizenry. This important divergence of ideas probably offers a promising opening for further progress in this debate.
World History
