The ‘‘Fall of the Roman Republic’’ is the canonical English phrase - but a potentially misleading one. The Roman Republic did not ‘‘fall’’ in the way that the French Ancien Regime did, or the Third Reich, or the Soviet Union. Nor is just when it ‘‘fell’’ an objective, public fact: In 59 (Joseph. AJ 19.187), with the activation of the alliance between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus that Varro called the ‘‘Three-Headed Monster’’? In 49, when Caesar marched on Rome? In 48, 46, or 45, with each of Caesar’s major victories in the Civil War? In 44, after Caesar’s assassination? In 43, with the legal ratification of a kind of junta rule? In 42, on the funeral pyres of Philippi? In 31, with Octavian’s defeat of Antony at Actium? In 28 and 27, when, paradoxically, public affairs were ostentatiously, and ostensibly, handed back to the Senate and People of Rome? In 23, when Augustus took the title of Princeps (‘‘First Citizen’’) and assumed the complex of powers that would henceforth distinguish the ruling emperor? Or perhaps as late as ad 14, when Tiberius, the second Princeps, succeeded to his adoptive father’s position in monarchic fashion and in effect abolished popular election to the magistracies?1 One could construct a plausible argument for any one of these dates. The important point is that the end of the Republic was not something objectively and explicitly marked by some public fact in our evidence - the beheading of a king, the suicide of a dictator, the resignation of a General Secretary - but something that we must infer circumstantially from a variety of facts and factual changes over the course of several decades.
Consequently, in an objective sense the Republic never actually ‘‘fell’’ - an overworked metaphor that anyway prejudices the issue in various ways: by prompting us to look for a single, catastrophic event; by insidiously suggesting that one side in the conflicts of the mid-first century represented the Republic, overcome by others seeking to destroy the Republic, or alternatively, that it ‘‘collapsed’’ of its own long-incubating illnesses. On the contrary, the res publica (usually best translated
‘‘state’’) to which Cicero devoted himself was transformed incrementally and for the most part imperceptibly into the res publica over which Augustus presided as Princeps. Contemporary Romans do not appear to have distinguished terminologically between these phases in the life of their res publica. Use of that phrase to distinguish what we now call the Republic from the Principate is not unambiguously attested before Tacitus, writing toward the beginning of the second century ad; the most recent examination of the problem finds that, while consciousness of the special position of the Princeps within the res publica is of course manifest from the time of Augustus, the writings of the younger Seneca (mid-first century ad) are the first to betray a reasonably clear conceptualization of the Principate as monarchy, and thus as a fundamental change of the political system from the traditional Republic.2
The brilliant beginning of Tacitus’ history of the post-Augustan Principate (Ann. 1.1-15) usefully highlights the problem of definition. ‘‘The names of officials remained the same. The younger men had been born after the victory at Actium, and most even of their elders, in the years of civil war. Few were left who had seen the Republic’’ (Tac. Ann. 1.3.7). Even when such a strong demarcation between Republic and Principate as this is imposed by an author looking back on this transformation from the distance of a century, ‘‘the Republic'' still turns out to be something defined by experience and behavior, not the surface facts of political life. In these opening chapters of the Annals, the traditional Republic is conceptually opposed to any personal domination, however cloaked by formal legitimization. However, republican norms had also been temporarily suspended in the past without thereby actually constituting the definitive end of the traditional state: Tacitus notes for the ‘‘early’’ Republic the dictatorship, the Decemvirate of 451-450 (see Chapter 11), and the period of military tribunes with consular imperium; for the ‘‘late’’ Republic, the personal dominance of Cinna, Sulla, and the so-called ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘Second’’ Triumvirates (Ann. 1.1.1). On this view, personal domination, if transitory, was not in fact inconsistent with the survival of the old Republic; and permanence is something that by its very nature is proven only to posterity. Before Tiberius assumed his predecessor’s position in ad 14 it would have been possible even for a hypothetical contemporary Tacitus to see the entire ‘‘reign’’ of Augustus as an interruption, rather than the termination, of Rome’s deeply embedded republican tradition.
But from the vantage point of history it is perfectly clear that something important had changed over this considerable interval of time. If we are to dispense with the metaphor of the ‘‘Fall’’ of the Republic, how then should we describe the profound political change we see between the days of Cicero and those of Augustus? In essence, and irrespective of names and institutional formalities, a system directed by a relatively small and entrenched elite subject (to a greater or lesser extent) to popular approval became one apparently at least guided by a single man (cf. Tac. Ann. 4.33.2). The traditional diffusion of political power among leading senators (principes civitatis), the nobility, the Senate as a body, ‘‘knights’’ (equites), and the People, at least in part flowing along independent lines, was replaced by a much narrower concentration of power around the single Princeps and flowing directly from him.
World History
