Gruen’s assault on historical hindsight is refreshing and illuminating. In the pages that follow will be heard many echoes of his powerful challenges to the conventional wisdom on the end of the Roman Republic. Yet it is hard to follow him too closely in his claim that the Caesarean Civil War was essentially an ‘‘accident’’ of human choices with world-historical consequences. While Gruen may well be right to draw our attention to the notable show of vigor with which in 52 the Senate and Pompey drew the Republic back from the chaos that had prevailed for more than half a decade, it is also hard to credit the suggestion that had the tribune Curio or Caesar himself only acted more diplomatically in 50-49 the Republic would have lasted very much longer (see also Chapter 9). Montesquieu had a point when he wrote: ‘‘If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato, others would have thought like Caesar and Pom-pey.’’8 And it is not self-evidently obvious why the Republic could survive the damage wrought by Sulla, Marius, and Cinna in the 80s, complete with threefold military capture of the city itself and numerous bloodbaths of senators, ‘‘knights,’’ and common citizens, but not the civil wars of the 40s - unless it was because the political system was in a much weakened state the second time around. This time there was to be no reconstituting the broader distribution of power that characterized the old Senate and People of Rome, and after a brief anarchic hiatus in 44-36 the process of concentration resumed until it yielded the single Princeps, Augustus.
Here our earlier definition of the phenomenon might usefully be invoked. The ‘‘Fall,’’ ‘‘Collapse,’’ or even simply ‘‘End of the Republic’’ are frequently useful shorthand phrases, but they tend to set us thinking about the phenomenon as if it were susceptible to the same kind of analysis we apply to a discrete historical event, that is, an examination of the motives and plans of individual historical actors within the context of the specific political, social, and economic factors that help to shape their decisions. These factors can never be considered entirely determinative, and thus events can never be regarded as entirely inevitable consequences of them. But if what we really mean by these phrases, as was argued above, is a long-term historical process (the ‘‘Transformation of the Republic’’) that cannot be encapsulated within any specific event - not even the Caesarean Civil War - then it cannot successfully be analyzed in these terms. An explanation of the transformation of the Republic cannot be reduced largely to an analysis of the motives, strategies, and results, intended or otherwise, of the chief political agents in the developing crisis of the year 50.
A broader perspective on the problem might start with the venerable and authoritative thesis that the Republic ‘‘fell’’ as a fairly direct result of acquiring its empire. Two of the founders of modern political theory, Niccolct Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), meditated long on the history of the Roman Republic and the lessons it was thought to offer.
To account for the end of the Republic both perceived an ultimately fatal inconsistency between the Republic’s institutions as a city-state and its administration of a great empire: great armies in far-flung places were entrusted for long periods to competitive aristocrats, to whom, as their commanders, the soldiers increasingly directed their loyalties rather than to the Senate and People.9 If we call to mind the careers of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and especially Caesar (see Chapters 8 and 9), their argument appears plausible, perhaps even self-evident. Yet underneath such apparently self-evident and traditionally recognized truths often lurk questionable, if generally unquestioned, assumptions. Until the twentieth century it still seemed as axiomatic as it had to Cassius Dio (44.2) in the third century ad that only monarchic governments could successfully govern large states; one may reasonably wonder whether this great lesson of history has not been ‘‘read into’’ the Roman example as much as deduced from it.10 The assertion - often made but rarely, if ever, demonstrated in detail - that the Republic foundered on a fundamental contradiction between empire and the institutions of the city-state11 is simply the modern version of this traditional critique. That does not, of course, make it wrong; but it certainly invites careful scrutiny.
In English-speaking scholarship of recent decades the most influential version of the argument that the crisis of the Republic was a consequence of its conquest of an overseas empire in the second and first centuries was formulated by Brunt in his seminal paper of 1962, ‘‘The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution.’’12 Conscription for continuous wars abroad, Brunt argued, ruined Italy’s small farmers, while the profits from their victories flowed mainly into the purses of Rome’s ruling class, who used them to buy up bankrupt farms and turn them into vast estates worked by the slaves whom these same victories had made cheap and abundant. The result transformed Italy’s agrarian economy and created a large class of landless poor in the countryside, while overall the number of free inhabitants dwindled because their poverty prevented marriage and childrearing.13A series of reformers beginning with Tiberius Gracchus sought to alleviate their plight with various calls for land reform, but the event that made them an instrument of political change was Marius’ decision to open the legions to these men by ignoring the customary property requirement for military service (see also Chapters 8 and 13). Subsequent generals followed suit, particularly during the crisis of the Social War, so that the legions of the late Republic contained a high proportion of landless men with no stake in the status quo. Not that they were bent on revolution; they simply wanted to better their lot in life. But that made them open to appeals for their loyalty and support from some of the politicians who commanded them, like Sulla and Caesar, who, finding themselves outmaneuvered in the political arena by their opponents, sought to continue the struggle ‘‘by other means’’ with the help of their armies in exchange for promises, explicit or tacit, of wealth and land.
Several elements within this reconstruction have come under fire in recent years. That the Republic’s overseas wars in the second century would have ruined most or even many of the soldiers who fought them seems increasingly unlikely. Certainly, archaeological surveys in the countryside have failed to confirm a widespread decline in the numbers of small farms in Italy during this period, and recent studies have argued that scholars have greatly overestimated both the prevalence of large estates and the numbers of slaves working them. (For this and the remainder of this paragraph, see Chapters 14, 28, and 29.) It may be that, contrary to prior views, Roman manpower requirements for its wars abroad were not inconsistent with the traditional patterns of Italian agricultural life, so that the effects of these wars in the second century upon the Italian peasantry from which the armies were recruited were not nearly so negative, and far more complex, than have previously been thought.14 Overall, the number of free inhabitants of Italy seems either to have held steady at around 4 million over the Republic’s last two centuries or possibly even grown during that period at a healthy clip.15 But if all this is so, then it invites an obvious and crucial question, that is: if the domestic consequences of the Republic’s acquisition of an empire in the second century did not ruin Italy’s rural population, then what caused the poverty and landlessness and resultant calls for land reform during the late Republic? Possibly population growth continued throughout the period, so that demographic pressures can be blamed. But a growing consensus views this as less likely than long-term stability in the numbers of free Italians. It may be that the rural poverty we see in this period arose from much shorter-term and more transient causes than usually thought, for example, the devastation and confiscations that attended both the Social War and the two civil wars of the 80s or the debt crises of the 80s to mid-60s.16 Or perhaps there was much less poverty in the countryside than we have been led to believe by the powerful rhetoric and heightened passions that attended land reform proposals; perhaps these were actually aimed primarily at the urban population of Rome (which included recent migrants to the city), as the ancient sources sometimes claim17 and an earlier generation of scholars accepted.
The special power of Brunt’s thesis derived from the close link he forged between agitation for land in the late Republic and an erosion of the loyalty of the great late-republican armies to the republican political system. Yet this too proves, upon examination, to rest on little positive evidence. Key supports of that causal nexus were the hypotheses that the modest property-requirement to enjoy the status of an assiduus and thus be eligible for military service was steadily lowered in the late third and second centuries as the pool of non-destitute peasants dwindled, and that Marius decisively broke the link between wealth and military service by enrolling the property-less poor (proletarii) for his Jugurthan campaign of 107 (Sall. lug. 86.2-3); this is supposed to have set the pattern thereafter and opened the way to the formation of armies conscripted largely from the very poor who served chiefly in the hope of material advancement and looked to their commanders rather than the Senate for satisfaction of this goal. The first claim - that regarding assiduate status - has, however, been shown to depend on circular argumentation, while the second - that Marius’ precedent in 107 was followed more or less thereafter - seems to be a debatable extrapolation from a single known incident.18 However that may be, on the third and most important point we simply do not know whether in fact the poor and landless constituted the bulk of the late Republic’s legionaries.19 Since the demographic and social consequences Brunt and others before him drew from the wars of the late third and second centuries no longer seem firmly founded, it no longer seems self-evidently true that a dwindling pool of assidui and a general resistance to conscription led recruiters to levy the poor, ‘‘the very class least able to secure exemption by bribes or favour.’’20
Moreover, Brunt himself, while contending against the common notion that the late-republican legions were essentially ‘‘client armies,’’ acknowledged that it cannot be presumed as a rule that late-republican armies were simply disloyal to the Republic.2 We would go further and note that, despite the prevalence of the idea of the late-republican ‘‘personal army,’’ no single army that launches upon civil war can be shown to have entered upon its revolutionary course out of disaffection from the Republic or hopes to be rewarded with grants of land. Much cited in this connection is the motive Appian attributes to the army to which Sulla in 88 appealed to defend his dignitas by marching on Rome: ‘‘they were eager for the campaign against Mithridates because it was likely to be profitable, and they thought that Marius would recruit other soldiers for it in their place’’ (App. B Civ. 1.57). Observe that Appian says nothing here of the expectation of land-grants or of Sulla’s potential capacity to obtain plots for his troops but refers instead to the expectation of rich plunder - a thoroughly traditional incentive to forceful military action noted at least as far back as the popular vote for war with Carthage in 264 (Polyb. 1.11.2).
At times of deep crisis republican legitimacy itself was fragmented rather than directly denied, and it may well be that the soldiers who waged the struggles that ultimately established Caesar’s and then Augustus’ personal domination were motivated by their understanding of where that fragmented legitimacy predominated as much as by the material bounty that would come their way with victory.23 This is fairly evident in the two notorious ‘‘Marches on Rome,’’ by Sulla in 88 and by Caesar in 49. Scholars continue to be deeply shocked by Sulla’s and Caesar’s uninhibited citation of their wounded dignitas - ‘‘worthiness,’’ thus roughly ‘‘honor’’ - as a justification for their (counter)-attacks upon those who had attempted to destroy it, and almost equally, by their armies’ acceptance of that battle cry. Yet the respect and honor due from the community for personal dignitas, based upon achievements or the promise of achievements on behalf of the Commonwealth, lay at the very heart of the republican system.24 An outright assault on high dignitas, such as the tribune P. Sulpicius’ armed expulsion of both consuls from the city after deposing Sulla’s colleague Q. Pompeius Rufus from his magistracy in a riotous assembly, was itself a gross violation of republican norms that had already thrown into doubt where legitimacy actually lay - quite apart from the outrage of Sulpicius’ use of violence in the assembly, which had brought about the death of Pompeius’ own son. Sulla’s soldiers may well have felt that their own material interests coincided with those of the Republic, since they were after all defending the consuls of the Roman People (whom they had sworn in their military oath to obey), not rebelling against the Senate, cowed and intimidated as it was by ‘‘tyrants’’ (App. B Civ. 1.57; see also Chapter 8).25 Much the same could be said of the reaction of Caesar’s army to the virtual declaration of war passed on January 7, 49 by the Senate despite his extraordinary achievements (as they were seen) on behalf of the Republic.2 The opening chapters of Caesar’s Civil Wars, with their compelling picture of a craven Senate browbeaten by bullying enemies of Caesar, give a good sense of how the matter will have looked to his men: an attack by a vicious faction upon a popular and military hero whose services to Rome were second to none, exacerbated by a gross insult against the tribunate, was no merely personal quarrel.27 If Brunt’s observation that ‘‘without his army Caesar could neither have conquered Gaul nor overthrown the Republic’’ is self-evident, Gruen’s reply seems equally true that ‘‘not even the soldiers of Julius Caesar marched into Italy with the intent or desire to bring down the Roman Republic.’’28
Perhaps, indeed, they marched to save it. The disputed US presidential election of 2000 is a salutary recent lesson in how rapidly what was once unthinkable can be contemplated, when each side in a political crisis feels that the other has violated the fundamental norms of the system and thus itself strives - out of dedication to its interpretation of that system rather than in disaffection - to ‘‘save’’ it by increasingly dubious methods. That calculation of personal interest can often coincide with such public-spirited reasons will surprise few. Sulla’s and Caesar’s armies may very well have expected to benefit materially by their actions, as soldiers whose victories had served the Republic had always done. There need have been no contradiction in their minds.
What emerges, then, is a process marked by the fragmentation of legitimacy, in which the Republic could no longer unreflectingly be associated with the contemporary Senate but might be seen as incorporated in persons - the odd proconsul and tribune - who were temporarily at least at odds with the Senate. But this is not the same thing as disaffection from the Republic. Indeed, just the reverse: the Senate’s loss of a (near) monopoly of republican legitimacy was fully consistent with the continued monopoly status of the idea and traditions of the Republic as encoded in ancestral custom (mos maiorum). Adversaries of the Senate at any given time did not call for its abolition or overthrow but denounced the worthiness (and thus the moral legitimacy) of its current leaderships and called for a return to the paternalistic responsiveness of senatorial leadership to popular needs and demands that was a fundamental principle of the republican tradition.29 The best evidence we possess for the political attitudes of the urban plebs - the speeches delivered to them in the Forum (contiones) - suggests that even they, who are often represented in modern accounts as the most disaffected of all, continued to embrace republican political traditions and favored those who most plausibly appeared to embody that tradition.30 The power of this tradition, continually reinforced for the citizenry in mass oratory and civic rituals such as election, was such that no alternative model of state organization seen in recent history seems to have been realistically conceivable - certainly not the debased spectacle of late-Hellenistic monarchy.
The fragmentation of republican legitimacy doubtless had many causes and contributing factors which would reward careful analysis in future work and cannot be fully elaborated here. But we wish to stress one important point that seems to stand out fairly clearly. It was already in 133 that the astonishing cohesion of the senatorial order was blasted apart, first by Tiberius Gracchus’ agrarian law and then even more by the circumstances of its passage; this explosion divided the elite and threw its parts back upon the two civic power-bases in Rome - Senate and People - and upon their corresponding, now often opposing legitimating principles. Thereafter, the Roman elite was frequently divided against itself in the face of major controversies, many or most of them precipitated in some way by imperial problems and responsibilities (the
Italians, Mithridates, land for veterans, the pirates, Gaul). However, the alternative source of power exploited by those individuals or factions who took up, or were forced into, a position in opposition to those who were able to work their will through the Senate was initially the People in their public meetings (contiones) and voting assemblies; the real exploitation of the military as an alternative source of power for its powerful commanders does not actually appear until more than four decades after Tiberius Gracchus in the 80s (Marius in 107-100 at most suggested the way). This observation casts further doubt on the traditional claim that the Republic ‘‘fell’’ because of the inability of a city-state to rein in its overweening provincial commanders - the still-popular core of the argument of Machiavelli and Montesquieu. This was a relatively late and secondary factor which raised the stakes enormously but was more consequence than cause of the division of the elite.
It is surely to the early and middle second century that we need to look more closely for the factors that heightened the potential for elite division to the inflammable level reached in 133. Notoriously, ancient writers put their finger on two underlying causes for what they persisted in viewing as essentially a moral collapse:3 the enormous influx of wealth into Italy and Rome; and the removal of the last direct and plausible threat to Roman hegemonic domination of the Mediterranean basin. Although their analyses in detail sound quaintly moralizing to the modern ear, it would be hard to quarrel with the essential point that the victorious march of Roman arms from the Straits of Messana in 264 to the Carthaginian Byrsa in 146 produced a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the Roman elite that could not but loosen or even spring the restraints that had long operated upon aristocratic behavior. What Roman historians like Sallust and Livy diagnosed in the language available to them as moral collapse, a modern historian of a sociological bent might describe as an increase of individualism and relaxation of the social constraint that earlier generations, faced repeatedly with military crises beginning in the fifth century and extending through the Hannibalic War, had imposed upon themselves in the face of the exigencies of self-preservation. A dangerous and threatening world forced the aristocracy to become not only aggressive and militaristic but extraordinarily disciplined as well (see also Chapters 6, 17, and 26). Although military crises did not cease with the destruction of Carthage in 146 - the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutones and the Social War being only the most urgent - the willingness of aristocrats to impose restraints upon themselves did, leading to a spiraling escalation of violence and transgression of the unwritten rules of the political game. Further, the uneven concentration of wealth and power across the elite, depending on access to armies and profitable military assignments, or public contracts, must in itself have further upset the equilibrium upon which social cohesion depends. The elite was not wholly unconscious of these tendencies, it seems, to judge from the appearance of sumptuary laws, age limits on office holding, extortion courts, and the various judicial battles over triumphs and misappropriation of plunder through the second century.32 Yet the causes for the dissolution of elite cohesion are not to be found only among the elite. Unless one discounts altogether the role of the People in the Roman Republic one must acknowledge that urgent social, economic, and political discontents would tend to force themselves onto the consciousness of the political elite precisely because, in a highly competitive aristocracy, such problems offer opportunities for individual aristocrats prepared to part company with their peers to steal a march on their rivals by exploiting popular causes. Division among the elite was essentially a given during times of great sociopolitical stress (see also Chapter 18), as the period from at least 133 certainly was.
Still, it may be more fruitful, and indeed more consistent with historical patterns in the West, to turn the question of the ‘‘division among the elite’’ on its head. For the elite of the Roman Republic manifests a long-term strength, based on resilience and remarkable discipline, that seems unparalleled in European history. For 500-plus years men with the names Fabius, Claudius, Valerius, and so on supplied the state with generation after generation of consuls, priests, and censors. What is remarkable is not that this elite, whose competitive impulses were always, it seems, highly developed, eventually became chronically and sometimes violently polarized, but how such an artificial creation as a cohesive competitive elite had been created and was for so long sustained. In a discussion focusing on the end of the Republic it is reasonable to focus on the loss of cohesion, but we shall get the perspective right only if we understand that the survival of such a remarkable social construction was always tenuous, and that nothing would seem more natural than its dissolution through a kind of historical entropy.
Why, finally, did the gradual polarization and dissolution of a formerly cohesive elite entail concentration of power in the hands of one person, the defining step in the passage from Republic to Principate? Polybius, in his famous doctrine of the repetitive ‘‘cycle’’ (anakyklosis) of constitutions from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy and back again, had seemingly predicted some kind of democratic interlude (6.57.9), which, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (or Clodius) notwithstanding, never actually came about in Rome. A more plausible alternative, which emerges into plain sight after 43 with the War of Philippi and the unstable ‘‘Second’’ Triumvirate (with Sextus Pompeius thrown in for good measure), was a descent into warlordism. That this was averted through Octavian’s and Marcus Agrippa’s martial success at Naulochus in 36 and Actium in 31 may have been due to mere contingencies of personal decisions and chance, but it would be difficult to deny that the continuing power of the Roman political tradition and the continuing concentration of military power in Italy made it almost inevitable that if the unitary imperium was to survive, then the warlord who held on to Rome would ultimately possess it. The paradox that a process of deep fragmentation led ultimately to monarchy is therefore only apparent - although it remains a remarkable achievement that Augustus and his successors were able to sustain the monarchy he had created.
World History
