My theory is that every book written about the fall of the Roman Empire is more about the political climate of the time it was written and the political perspective of the author writing it.
In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state.
Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written.
edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.
The military disasters referenced are the Battle of Cannae and the previous Battle of Lake Trasimene, both of which suffered appalling losses by the Roman side when they were trapped unable to retreat. After those Rome relied on the unflashy but effective tactic of Fabius the Delayer to defeat Hannibal over a period of time, rather than risk yet another disastrous confrontation.
Fabius was dictator after Trasimene, but before Cannae. Although his tactics were effective, the Romans cared more about virtus than effectiveness and replaced him with Varro and Paulus, who engaged with Hannibal directly at Cannae. The aim of ancient war was the demonstration of martial virtue, with victory as a relatively secondary concern. Because victory without the clash of arms was worth little to the Romans, Roman generals often had a hard time getting their armies to not engage when delaying would lead to circumstance more favorable to victory (c.f. Caesar at Gergovia).
The more interesting period politically is the ascent of the Gracchi, who consistently violated unwritten political norms. The response of the establishment was to murder them, as there was no institutional mechanism to reign them in.
The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Romans who both served as tribunes in the late 2nd century BC. They attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the major aristocratic landholdings among the urban poor and veterans, in addition to other reform measures. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by enemies of these reforms.
More importantly, they were the first to bypass the democratic norms of the republic in order to get their agendas passed (by skipping senatorial approval for their bill, and censuring a tribune for vetoing it), and their opponents violated even more norms in order to halt their agendas (by passing an emergency decree calling for their deaths).
The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.
To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land reform for the poor (specifically, redistributing land illegally acquired smallholders by members of the senatorial oligarchy) in the service of their own political ambitions, and in doing so they repeatedly violated the norms of the governing oligarchy, which protected their property (itself frequently acquired in technical violation of legal norms) by murdering the reformers and massacring their followers.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
The sky isn’t so much blue as it is light that has a wavelength around 450-495 nm.
I understand that a historian would take great offense to the anachronism you’ve pointed out, but I still can’t help but to think that we’re describing the same thing with different words. Yes yes, words matter, but, there’s some underlying truth about when groups of apes stop being able to govern themselves that comes out, no matter the words.
They didn't call them "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries", sure, but that's what they were. These are descriptive terms, not proper nouns.
"democratic norms" are behaviors in the public sphere that are expected under the assumption that politicians are interested in the good of everyone and that the popular will has political meaning.
"progressives" are politicians who want to improve society through reform and the redistribution of wealth and power.
"reactionaries" are politicians who want to return things back to the way they were before progressives existed.
These terms are perfectly appropriate to describe the political climate in the late republic.
You keep asserting that there was a "ruling oligarchy" when this is simply not true. If Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, then the Gracchi never would have got off the ground.
Leaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of their society, I'm afraid you're laboring under some extreme misapprehensions about the nature of the late Republican government. That Republican Rome was governed by an aristocratic land-owning oligarchy for pretty much its entire existence is an undisputed historical fact. The Gracchi were wealthy members of the ruling elite wielding land redistribution as a political tool in their competition for power with other members of the ruling elite. They weren't ordinary Roman citizens organizing popular resistance from below.
Can you name a historical society where there wasn't any manner of "aristocratic ruling class"?
It is a historical constant that rich people are more likely to find themselves in office. Campaigning takes time and effort and you don't get paid for it, so you pretty much have to have some wealth stashed up before you can run for office. That was true then as it is true now.
That doesn't mean that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. No matter how wealthy you are, in order to get those jobs, you have to convince people to vote for you.
I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It was fundamentally and wholly governed by wealthy land-owning elites, who derived their position in the system from their wealth, despite the presence of institutions that bear a superficial similarity to institutions present in modern democracies.
I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.
Would you agree that more often than not, most ‘revolutions’ throughout history have been members of the ruling elite wielding wealth redistribution as a political tool? I ask this seriously, and if you can point me towards some related literature I’d greatly appreciate it.
How should history account for the economic unrest allowing the Gracchi to come to power? It seems that if the overall economic system were not functioning to distribute prosperity widely enough then some sort of chaos would ensue - is it the norm breaking, could the economic instability be a stronger contributing cause? Would the norm breaking even be possible without the lack of access to economic opportunity?
Definitely. In times of peace, prosperity, and contentment, people would be much more harsh on those who want to overturn the liberal democratic order.
When people are feeling desperate, and it's become clear that the system is not working, it's easy for populists to come in and promise to fix all the problems if only you'll let them do away with that pesky free press, and take votes away from those frustrating opposition people, and get rid of the annoying rules about making profit while in office.
Fabian tactics didn't defeat Hannibal. Hannibal's Italian army was never defeated. Rome won the war by ignoring Hannibal and striking at Carthage directly. The threat to the homeland forced Carthage to recall Hannibal, leaving his best troops in Italy, to fight a losing battle with fresh recruits against Roman veterans in Africa.
That was largely the point of the Fabian strategy, was it not? Similar to the concept of a Fleet in Being[1], maintaining a functioning force is protected, but still able to threaten the other side constrains their options and makes it harder for them to achieve victory. Hannibal may have never lost in Italy, but he was nonetheless prevented from winning either. Though the main armies could only do so much to keep him from taking objectives, it made it difficult for him to maintain control over them. Notably, Hannibal had difficulty securing lasting control or alliance with many of the Italian city states, and those he did control often required losing some of his limited forces in order to garrison, otherwise they risked being retaken by the Roman army once Hannibal had moved on.
Bit of a tangent but if this period interests you, Robert Harris has a trilogy of excellent and entertaining novels starting with Imperium that trace the rise and fall of Cicero's life, a peer of Crassus and Caesar. Highly recommended!
The conceit of the series is that it is actually a biography of Cicero that in really was written by Tiro but has unfortunately been lost to history since. (We know about it by references to it from other ancient works.)
Sulla had an opportunity to fix everything, but he misidentified the symptoms for the disease, formalizing the cursus honorum and stripping power from the Assembly, instead of changing the incentive structure of the Senate and addressing wealth inequality.
I don't think that's systemic analysis, the governmental form of Republican Rome was based on small freehold farmers. Once they were displaced by the slave-powered Latifundia, the Homo Novus would have find a way to translate their economic power into political power, displacing the patrician class.
It is hard to un-break democratic norms, but there is no theoretical reason it can't be done. It'll just take a lot of work and some major changes.
Here's a little game that pop historian Mike Duncan released a little while ago. See if you can figure out the political moves you have to make to pull the Roman Republic back from the brink: https://www.riddle.com/showcase/165065/narrative
Haha, that's a good one from Duncan. All you have to do it put the republic above yourself each time (also the order is citizenship > war > land reform, and watch out for loops in the decision tree)
I've only found one "loop" in the decision tree that wasn't really a loop, because no matter what "next choice" you make, the people get tired of your wishy washyness and you get cast into exile.
Since there has been ongoing process in concentrating power in the federal government, which itself concentrates its power into the executive branch - and there appears to not be slowing down or reversing - the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take.
>the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take.
The question will remain if as long as the right to bear arms remains a right. No tyranny can survive an armed and angry population.
The problem that follows that, though, is something the French faced during their revolutionary years. We could be in for a bloodbath if we don't move correctly.
Because (despite what you seem to think) Citizens United did not create a tyranny.
And it seems ironic that you oppose Citizens United, but favor the First Amendment. If Citizens United had been decided the other direction, that would have been a blow against the First Amendment.
Some rulings against Citizens United would have been tyrannical, it was and is a very complicated question where assets of a campaign like their access to media and a copy shop offering to print bulletins for free can become really sticky questions.
The US needs to heavily reform how election funding, free speech and volunteered labour all relate and it is a complicated question. But Citizens United did take us a big step in the wrong direction by lowering the impact of individuals' expression of free speech in relation to financial endorsement.
Citizens United would not have been a blow to the First, that's silly. The right of free speech does not necessarily include the right to unlimited corporate political campaign spending. Our country ran just fine and the people were plenty free before the age of super-PACs.
Talk about tyranny of the majority can be counter-productive. Whether they believe they themselves are gods or not, many Americans believe that the framers were practically gods [1]. The framers were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, and had it in mind when designing the federal system. [fuzzy non-logic goes here]. Therefore whoever governs in America is not tyrannical, regardless of whether they hold a majority, and they are justified in whatever they do.
I might be reaching a bit, but I'd think that, with current technology, psyops etc., it should not be that hard to defeat any rebellion before it ever starts - whether by neutralizing (not "kill" in the USA, but deincentivize, defame or frame) potential leaders or stopping public discourse from ever reaching that stage.
And if it really got bad, you’re not winning against fighter jets and tanks with whatever guns you’ve been allowed to amass. The 2nd amendment is weird, and the political fighting about it even weirder. In 1776, you could reasonably expect to possess the same weaponry as a government. In 2018, you’d need to have advanced military technology. For all the hoopla about the 2nd amendment these days, it’s painfully naive to believe it makes any bit of sense in the context of modern warfare.
I'd say that depends on the convictions of the people involved. I don't know how kids feel about their Constitution, or their rights. If they don't care, we're screwed.
If there is a deep commitment to protecting their rights, no defamation will stop them.
I think this idea would make an interesting speculative novel: America is on the brink of tyranny. The Constitution has been set aside (for some 'sufficient' reason) and freedoms summarily stripped from the people (in essence, we have become what China is now).
What do Federal law enforcement agencies have to do in order to quell rebellion? Psy-ops? Kill teams and other wet work? Propaganda? Probably a liberal mashing up of these and other tactics.
How would rebellion work? Who succeeds and survives? Why and how do others fail? What is the best outcome? The worst?
Psyops, definitely. jimjimjim upthread has the right idea. Start by setting up all sorts of alternative news sources each of which tell you to distruct the others. Get the militia movement on side, that's completely critical. Have a convicted traitor running the NRA. The kind of people who volunteer to do their own immigration enforcement, or who seize wildlife reserves. All this lot hate the "federal government", so you have to rebadge the takeover as something else.
Spread reports of election interference by "liberals". Use it as a pretext for cancelling polling in certain counties. Stage a couple of mass shootings at polling places. Bingo.
The norms are generally established at the same time as the constitution is; ie, after a revolution or other major political event. I'm not a historian, but I can't think of an example of democratic norms being re-established peacefully after being violated.
But the norms of democracy were never challenged during the civil war. Nobody ever denounced the press or said that votes shouldn't count, or that the courts are illegitimate, or that the constitution was somehow wrong. It was a formal rebellion seeking independence under a different democracy.
> Nobody ever denounced the press or said that votes shouldn't count, or that the courts are illegitimate, or that the constitution was somehow wrong. It was a formal rebellion seeking independence under a different democracy.
I really love Roman history. I'm just a hobbyist here (i.e. I've read a ton of biographies on great Roman leaders), so please correct me if any of my thoughts here are incorrect.
My feeling has been that Sulla's purges were the effective end of the Republic. Rome had no bureaucracy. It instead relied on great administrators (like Pompey, for example) to carry out public work projects effectively. The conflicts of the 80s not only thinned out talent from entering into the oligarchy, it required the entry of new men or men with families with less auctoritas like Cicero and Caesar. The emergence of new men created a rift between the optimates (conservatives, traditional oligarchy) and new folks that reduced compromise and lateralized society further.
Cicero was very moderate most of his career until his attempts to split up the Caesarians after the assassination, even so he found himself butting heads with stubborns like Cato his entire life. Caesar felt as though his hand was forced in the civil war, as the optimates wanted to arrest him for his land reform a decade earlier as consul as soon as he put down his imperium from the Gallic campaigns.
I would perhaps argue that the largest parallel the US has with Republican Rome is the breakdown of compromise and trust alongside increased lateralization. One can examine vote pairing incidence in the US Senate to observe this: recently Lisa Murkowski voted "present" during the Kavanaugh vote to allow a republican colleague to go to his daughter's wedding. Vote pairing used to be commonplace, and is seen as a gesture of compromise and good will, but it is very, very rare nowadays.
What would you say about the argument that that breakdown of compromise and trust was, and is, spurred by the expansion of full citizenship and voting rights, in both republics. Preventing more Italians from Roman citizenship seemed to be one of Sulla’s main talking points.
Have you read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project? Lewis has basically chronicled the destruction of large swaths of the American bureaucracy. The parallels between Sulla and Trump are so striking, even down to the hair!
I really enjoyed Dan Carlin’s ‘Celtic holocaust’ that went at length into the character and motivations of Julius Caesar. What I mostly appreciate in listening to Carlin is his ability to sympathize with the people living through the moment but being respectful not to bias his reading of history so it doesnt reflect modern wishes and thinking. It’s in this vein I criticize the book as it sounds like it’s applying modern realities (income inequality, discontent, lack of democracy etc) to the past as a way to justify making predictions you want to see today (popular revolt / trump is evil and will be toppled etc what you will)
But I haven’t read the book so I could be talking out of my ass
Dan Carlin's "Death Throes of the Republic" series goes way into the fall of the Roman Republic. It's $10 if you buy directly from his site and absolutely worth it.
Along the same lines, fans of Mike Duncan's "History of Rome" podcast should consider purchasing his book "The Storm Before the Storm." It covers this period with nuance and depth.
Currently reading "The Storm Before the Storm" and, though (or perhaps because) it is quite detailed with great depth, it's an enjoyable and engaging read.
That reading of the fall of the Republic long pre-dates Trump.
The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill).
The exciting part of the fall of the republic that all the plays and history books are written about, with the civil wars and the dictators for life and the "friends, Romans, countrymen", that was all enabled by the earlier boring but highly consequential political fighting and norm-breaking.
Oh, and this was totally recognized at the time. Sulla tried to address these problems directly with his constitutional reforms, but it was too little to late. Later politicians like Cato and Cicero tried to re-normalize democratic behavior, but failed because their opposition had learned how much profit there was in abusing the system.
>The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill).
The more you look the more parallels you see. Unpopular military quagmires in far-off places for no purpose but the enrichment of the leaders, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic racism and xenophobia, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it. All taking place a few decades after a decisive victory in a long cold war, leaving Rome hegemon of the world.
I recommend checking out The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan. It illustrates the process from "hey, the rules don't technically say bills have to start in the upper house..." to all-out civil war, step by step.
Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.
Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome is an extremely well researched and entertaining novelization of the events of the fall of the Republic, starting with Gaius Marius and continuing through Sulla and Caesar.
The economist has been freaking out about norms destruction since day 1 of the trump whitehouse. This “book review” seems like just another chance to sound their favorite alarm.
Not that they’re wrong, but the people (at least almost half of them) voted for someone who promised to break these norms. As far as I’m concerned, we signed a contract for 4 years of bull in china shop. Smart people need to be focusing on he silver lining and coming up with new, better norms and institutions that we will need when the rage winds down.
The thing about norms is that, once they're broken, it's very hard to un-break them.
It is in every politician's best interest to obstruct their opponents, prevent their opponents from voting, destroy ballots, jail their enemies on made-up charges, halt investigations into themselves, pack the court that will oversee their cases with allies, etc.
"Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other, in the mutual interest of republicanism and democracy. They are highly advantageous, but the consequences are dire.
This is why, during the Obama presidency when Republicans first started deploying them, they called it "the nuclear option". Once one side has gone nuclear, the other side must reciprocate or die.
> "Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other
This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.)
What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues.
I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks.
(As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)
> The economist has been freaking out about norms destruction since day 1 of the trump whitehouse.
Isn't this a necessary action in order to preserve any semblance of norms? If no one said anything, we'd just silently drift to a new field, let alone a moved set of goalposts.
Approximately half the country wants the goalposts moved to the next county over and isn't picky about which direction they get moved. While I understand that someone who wants the goalposts right where they are would fight to keep them there it seems like an exercise in futility. It's not like the traditions of how government operates circa 2016 resulted in highly effective government. There's plenty of Trump administration policy things to be be angry about. Destruction of norms is not one of them IMO.
Yeah, but Johnson survived not because anyone supported him or his policies, rather he survived because politicians wanted to protect norms. Times have changed considerably since then. I'm pretty sure politicians are far more interested in destroying norms. So I wouldn't count on the Johnson Conundrum happening again. People are out to break those norms nowadays.
Sure, the country survived, but did it return to the political status quo? Last I checked, presidents are still allowed to use the veto on policy proposals they disagree with, rather than it's original purpose as a constitutional defense tool.
Rome survived when their political structures fell apart in the first century BC too. Does that mean you would be equally happy to live under the thumb of Nero as you would to live in the free and open democratic society of the second century BC republic?
Some people say that Brexit was a similar act of norm-breaking, and now the govenment is stockpiling insulin in advance of their planned disaster.
The current US government is actually not all that bad in practical terms by the standards of its behaviour in the 60s and 70s, but this is mostly because it's corrupt and ineffectual. They can't even prevent their own money launderers from being jailed.
Why would they prevent it? They are just cannon fodder, for them doing time is an occupational hazard that comes with such a high service price. If they can protect the king long enough (i.e. enough news cycles that people will bore of the whole affair), then it’s job done.
the rage is not winding, its now a part of cultural. There are kids that have seen antifa rallies and this is the norm to them. On the other end there are kids that have seen this and will always see these people as traitors. Maybe the protest are a fad but the supporters of the protest and against the protest have deep seeded hate.
We are in the anti civil rights era. Where the position of segregation and identity politics is being sold as the answer for the outcome of the equality era.
This is not a position argued , but a position felt. Many dont like minority quotas and many dont trust white men. The diversity is our strength idea while not wrong does not come without costs.
If I told you a new norm would be secession would you accept that?
Let's not forget that Rome was broke when it met its demise, having debased its currency as tax revenues declined, and after taxing land owners to the point that additional revenue was unavailable and - anecdotally at least - some land owners sold themselves into tax-free slavery rather than face the consequences of non-payment.
That's the Empire, not the Republic. We should be more interested in how Rome fell from a liberal democratic republic into autocratic tyranny before worrying about how it collapsed militarily after 400 years of brutal dictatorship.
Rome at the end of the Republic may have technically been republican (if oligarchic republicanism counts), but it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberalism didn’t exist in name or form for another 1800 years.
One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.
It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage. And even Senators were de-facto elected, since elevation to the Senate was automatic upon the completion of a term in an elected office. Sure, Rome began as an Oligarchic Republic, but after the secession of the plebs in 494 BC 12 years later, it was solidly Democratic.
Think about it, if Rome wasn't a democracy, then why did the Populares exist at all? In an oligarchy, wouldn't a political party that panders to the masses be utterly powerless?
While Romans didn't call what they had liberalism, they definitely practiced a liberal society. People were free to speak their minds, travel as they wished, and speak for or against people in power however they wanted (see: Catullus and the invention of slam poetry).
All of these freedoms were locked down tight the moment Augustus came to power. People were okay with it, because having your speech, movement, and life trajectory restricted is better than being dead in a civil war, but Roman society under the Empire was way less free than Roman society under the Republic.
> It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage.
That's very, very wrong. First of all, the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Political power was monopolized in the hands of very few families who formed the nobility. When somebody outside this incredibly tiny elite, a homo novus, completed the cursus honorum, it was a seen as sensation.
Furthermore, the most important offices of the cursus honorum were not selected by something we would recognize as a democratic election. If you did not belong to the equites or the first class, your vote in the comitia centuriata which elected the consuls, the praetors and the censors had basically no effect.
So? They were still elected by popular vote. The fact that votes were grouped in a certain way doesn't suddenly change the system from democracy to something else.
If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and other elected offices.
In the centuriate assembly, senators + equites, a few thousand men among several million citizens, represented a majority of the votes (98 of the 193 tribes). This is pretty much a textbook oligarchy.
The Centuriate assembly was only used to elect three offices: consuls, praetors, and censors.
The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal and senators and equites aren't allowed, elected Tribunes who had an absolute veto over all government activity, including the senate and the consuls, and controlled the treasury.
This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy. You can't just ignore the rest of the government and its other electoral mechanisms.
No, the voting was by tribe, with the vast majority of voters crammed into the 4 urban tribes and the wealthy were enrolled in 31 much smaller rural tribes.
> and senators and equites aren't allowed.
Sure they were, as long as they were not patrician. By the first century BC, the vast majority of senators were plebeian.
> This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy.
The US indeed has oligarchic tendencies already. Now imagine if the constitution guaranteed that citizens with $1M+ in property had 50+% of the vote, and that your "state" was not determined primarily by residence, but anybody without substantial property was automatically registered in California, Texas, or New York...
In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state.
Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written.
edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.