I've seen some interest on HN for the Roman Kingdom, Republic and Empire.
For a very interesting history of Rome, from the 2 foundation myths (Romulus vs Aeneas) until the end of the "Pax Romana", I strongly suggest the book "SPQR", by Mary Beard.
She is a very respected scholar on Ancient Rome and she has a lot of documentaries on Youtube.
I just started the famous "Decline and fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbons, covering the period after the SPQR book. Still in the beginning, to early for conclusions.
I have to shout out the “Masters of Rome” series by Colleen Mccullough. It starts with “The First Man in Rome” covering Gaius Marius’ rise to power, and proceeds through the fall of the Republic and the establishing of the Empire.
These books are incredibly well researched and informative, but also have SUCH a compelling narrative style and characterizations. It’s very immersive.
According to Ms Beard the most basic cause for the Roman republic downfall was the establishment of private armies.
Julius Caesar amassed an enormous military power with his private army on his military campaigns on Gaul and used it to just grab the power in Rome.
Truth, it was his nephew Octavian/Augustus that finished and buried the Republic, but he wouldn't be able to do so unless Caesar hadn't given the mortal blow before.
No wonder Putin tried to put a leash on Prigozhyn before it would be too late.
Also, Imran Khan must understand very well what happens when the military isn't under the government control.
I don't disagree with the central thesis, and you can argue all sorts of moments for the fall of the Republic, but the establishment of client armies started with Marius, not Caesar. Even then, it was in response to political, economic and military issues which predated even Tiberius Gracchus whose tribunate many use to mark the beginning of the end. Rome's constitution was a marvel, as noted by Polybius, and it granted stability for a long time. But by the time of Sulla (who marched an army into Rome decades before Caesar), all pretence of a government that intended to give equal voice to all factions had disappeared. The idea that Ceasar or Octavian dismantled a functioning or even salvageable republic seems fanciful to me.
I would go back even farther, all the way to the end of the Second Punic War. Scipio Africanus was the one who expanded the practice of client-patron relationships to a geopolitical scale to build an independent power base. He was also the innovator of the cults of personality that would become common. He never tried to overthrow the republic, but some of the political practices used to destabilize the late republic can be traced back to his innovations.
How were Caesars' legions “private”? Are you sure you're not confusing with the fall of the Roman Empire, with autonomous military leadership in the provinces (but even then, calling them “private armies” would still sound anachronistic)
The most relevant quote I could easily find: "Rewarding soldiers with loot and using conquered lands to form colonies wasn’t new and Marius doesn’t standardize it, Augustus does."
The cause of what? We don't know much about the cause of the republic because any records of that were lost in the first sack of Rome. As for the cause of the fall of the republic, Julius Caesar did not cause those factors to exist, but in him we see the culmination of a hundred years of learning how to abuse the flaws in their civic constitution. He wasn't the first, but he put all the pieces together.
In fact, I think he's quite similar to Philip II, who put all the pieces together in Macedon. Alexander the Great was able to reach such heights because he had the way paved for him, the same way Julius Caesar paved the way for Octavian.
That's the book that Mike Duncan wrote following up his work on the History of Rome podcast. The first of the two books he wrote while running the Revolutions podcast, with the second being a biography of Lafayette.
The basic premise I got from Mike Duncan's podcast was that: when Rome ran out of dangerous external enemies to fight (ie Carthage), people in Rome found internal enemies to fight.
That was fine for a few centuries, until external enemies re-emerged, and then it really fell apart.
Eh, kinda. It was more that they overextended themselves and could no longer defend their borders with their citizen-soldiery that expected to be home in time for harvest. Multiyear campaigns and distant conquest required a professional army. Because of that, Marius reformed the army to allow the proletarii in, pay them from the treasury and outfit them from state arsenals and armories. Prior to the reforms, soldiers were patricians and wealthy plebeians who could afford to outfit themselves with equipment and supplies.
The wealthy of Rome were not willing to pay for all of this, so the practice was for generals to pay their soldiers out of taxes and loot. Thus the legions became loyal to their generals instead of to the Republic, which essentially made them warlords. There were plenty of places left to conquer - Augustus would somewhat famously and disastrously try to conquer Germania east of the Rhine, Egypt was assimilated after Pompey's defeat, etc.
Both you and the person you're replying to are correct. These are not mutually exclusive factors. (Well, except the part about egypt: that was assimilated after Anthony and Cleopatra's defeat, not after Pompey's defeat. Caesar allowed Cleopatra to remain a client monarch.)
Interestingly, that disasterous campaign you mentioned by Augustus to try to conquer up to the Rhine was done exactly to address the difficulty of defending Rome's extended borders. He felt that it was important for the empire to achieve its natural borders, just the same as France sought to do after the revolution.
However, even had those natural borders been secured, it would have done nothing to address the internecine strife that was was instrumental to the decline and final collapse of the western empire. It is necessary to look at a combination of both internal and external pressures to explain what happened.
That's a very pejorative way of saying "I don't agree" and unfortunate in the context of her specifically, since she's been the recipient of foul sexist abuse from her media presence, and even from some of her peers.
There's room for scholarly disagreement. There's no need to be nasty. She's not a racist revisionist. Ethnicity across roman times, and the degree of ethnicity in the forces stationed in the british islands is complicated.
There is some reason to believe there had been trade links into the islands of greater britain from distant economies long before the Roman invasion, and there were Romans, Auxilliaries, traders and slaves from across the Roman empire into North Africa and the middle east who would have found themselves in the margins, by virtue of the economics and politics of the time: you don't leave conquered peoples in-place if you want to ensure there's no slave revolt, you deploy them elsewhere.
> There is some reason to believe there had been trade links into the islands of greater britain from distant economies long before the Roman invasion, and there were Romans, Auxilliaries, traders and slaves from across the Roman empire into North Africa and the middle east who would have found themselves in the margins, by virtue of the economics and politics of the time
All true, and all irrelevant; Middle-Eastern and North African people do not (and did not) have the skin tones that were being depicted in the cartoons in question.
> There's room for scholarly disagreement. There's no need to be nasty. She's not a racist revisionist.
It wasn't scholarly disagreement, it was deception. She used her erudition and her position to wilfully mislead the less sophisticated; she said things that while literally true were intended to create a false impression in the minds of those reading. That is absolutely something to be condemned in the strongest possible terms; it's very much akin to when a physically strong person uses that strength to bully those weaker than them.
No, none of this is stuff that reasonable people can disagree about. No credible anthropologist thinks that middle-eastern/north african peoples of that time had the sub-saharan skin tones seen in those videos, and Beard is not ignorant enough to think so either (and indeed doesn't claim so - rather she sophistically pretends that people are asking a different question).
It's interesting that options for Patricians were so severely restricted. After Questorship 2 out 4 Aedile spots were reserved for Plebians and of course they were also barred from being elected as Peoples's Tribunes (10 other spots).
Seems like a form of ancient "affirmative action". I guess it's more likely that were able to just skip a step and jump straight to Praetor and the weren't that many Patricians left by the late republic. Then again it's interesting that these laws were instituted in the first place (IIRC one the Consuls had to be a Plebian as well).
I guess the real question is whether those offices were proportionate to the amount of patricians. If there were only 100 patrician families, and by the Middle Republic many of those families had died out, then perhaps the patricians remaining would have found those offices sufficient (even though they shared them with plebians).
These restrictions originated during the Struggle of the Orders, when the patrician/plebeian distinction was extremely important (at least as far as we can tell - most of our sources for this period were writing much later). By the middle and late Republic (the period which TFA mostly covers), many of the old patrician families seem to have declined making the restrictions much less relevant.
So sounds like same problem as we have in USA today - complex system that only works if people follow established conventions in addition to codified laws. Like us, Romans probably thought it was not necessary to call out the obvious and then centuries later their successors disregarded the norms and tore the empire apart.
I paint Rome as if it was politically stable, but it was always very far from it. People have been killing each other throughout the republic, and the mere establishment of empire was exactly a blatant disregard for the norms — they essentially got the KING, the one thing that the republic was built to prevent, even if he was called something else. Even two centuries of "Pax romana" were filled with constant bloody struggle for power between nobles, only five good emperors giving some semblance of stability. And after that, crisis of the third century and switch from principate to dominate was even more severe change in these unwritten rules.
US, on the other hand, now has 158 years without internal military conflict, so it's doing extremely, unfathomably well by roman standards.
My understanding is that political violence was really only an issue that crept up after the killing of Tiberius Gracchus, so you're really only looking at the last century or so of the roman republic.
This isn't really true, given the Conflict of the Orders etc. Even in the Gracchi's case, they were essentially trying to pass land reforms, and Rome had a history of responding to that with violence since at least 486BC. Nobody in Rome's history had a particularly good solution to the central problem that they wanted a massive and expensive army, but didn't want it dominating politics.
Scipio Nascia wasn’t punished for Tiberius’ murder. Spurius Maelius didn’t get a trial but people celebrate Cincinnatus as a hero.
Seems to me that the same undercurrents were always there, they never got resolved, and sure, eventually things blew up. But they would have done so without the Gracchi. I don’t know what the right solution was - obviously agrarian reform led to increased tensions with the socii who were experiencing the same disenfranchisement. But what we ultimately got were the Marian reforms, and that’s what really caused violence to dominate politics for the rest of Rome’s history.
We don't know much about the Conflict of the Orders and whether it even happened. e.g. we have records of people from plebeian families holding the consulship and other important offices before they were supposedly allowed to (of course it was no inconceivable that they might have been barred from it later as Patricians were trying to monopolize power which incited the conflict).
Also the first historian to write about Rome and whose history because just a couple of decades after the last plebeian secession doesen't even mention it.
Ah interesting, I assumed that Roman empire had to have been stable in some ways to last so long. I certainly wouldn't bet on US remaining a single country for even another century, although there are also less scary aftermaths scenarios like states increasingly ignoring federal government and running their own internal affairs, but still retaining common defense and free or easy travel and trade. Something close to Poland vs Netherlands in European Union.
Now imagine if Ft. Sumter happened today. It would be over in a flash but the other way: positions firing onto the fort would be lit up in minutes by ordinance coming out of orbit.
I feel as though nuclear weapons have purchased an everlasting hedgemony. If the US really started to crumble and I mean actually crumble, we'd just go back to the form of government we had developed during WWII: a centrally planned militarized state where non-useful sections of the economy are rationed or outlawed, useful sections of the economy are simply told to follow the directive of military command, labor is either conscripted or otherwise has no choice but to work in a job environment dominated by government openings, communications are monitored, press and media are tightly controlled, and any political opposition within government structures is systematically rooted out and silenced. I believe we'd sooner revert to this and bomb the world into submission "for the good of the nation" than relinquish this hegemony.
Plato's Republic [1] really shifted my view on this. It was written 2400 years ago, and with but a handful of real exceptions - like his casually referencing slavery, it reads like it was written by an edgelord writing with hindsight of contemporary times and events. And in that regard you'd normally just dismiss it, but given that it was written 2400 years ago, in a world nothing like today, yet 'predicts' the events of today down a tee is a somewhat absurd degree of proof that the notion that 'history repeats itself' is not just in the abstract, as I always thought.
In his book he sees a system of 5 political systems, what he calls regimes. And he argues that they tend to each transition between each other, not out of some revolutionary cause - but because of an abundance of the virtue of each system. In democracy that virtue is freedom, and its transition is into tyranny. He argues that excesses of freedom gradually leads to the decay of social values, norms, and ultimately the rule of law itself. And in the process of this leaders would emerge overtly appealing to the base desires and emotions of masses as arguments for election; ethos and values of times past not even feigned at.
But these leaders themselves are of course also only driven by their own endless pursuit of self indulgence and power. And transitioning from democracy to authoritarianism is but a matter of one man, supported by the masses, turning against the normal system. With the catch, yet to be seen, that this man also eventually turns against the people that supported him - becoming tyrannical and obsessed by the pursuit of his own ideals and virtues, which need not inherently run contrary to the interests of society. Napoleon is the 'classical' example - which came thousands of years after The Republic was written.
The point I make here is that it often feels like we're entering into some wild unknown, in many things. Yet when you look back at things like the classical philosophers and other writings, a lot of what they're saying suddenly seems more apt than ever. And so I think the issue is not that we're entering into some strange and unprecedented era in human civilization, but rather we're just leaving one. The relative era of peace, rationality, and stability that we all grew up in was the bubble, and it seems to have to burst.
[1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55201/55201-h/55201-h.htm#Bo... (This link is already to the exact 'book' (chapter) which is about what I am referencing. To get to the exact meat of it, search for "And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?")
I think the main issue with comparing past principles on governing and current ones, are the technological differences. Communications around the world take an instant. A missile in Wisconson can be sent anywhere in the world to destroy a city within probably a half hour. Past political philosophers have nothing to compare this to. In their time, a revolutionary force really was on an even keel at times with the military of the government, back when the ordinance carried by each was more or less the same, the communications technologies used by each more or less the same, and the resources such as food and firewood to draw upon for supplying a force being more or less the same surrounding villages near the battlefields.
Today, the US military doesn't need to consider anything about the local resources available, they can just airdrop in food and water while you and your band of rebels slowly starves if you can't live off the land. They can out communicate you and coordinate fighting on the land, sea, air, and space, while you might have a short wave radio if you are lucky that they are also probably monitoring. They can of course out gun you, without even sending boots into harms way though probably dozens and dozens of different technologies and permutations of these technologies and strategies.
I don't think Plato could have conceived of a predator drone, or a military satellite, or an aircraft carrier, or a nuclear submarine packed with ICBMs. The balance of power has never been so historically lopsided with who controls the technology of contemporary war.
As odd as it may sound at first, I think safe to say that the overall asymmetry in professional vs civilian forces has dramatically decreased over time. Spain's conquest of the Inca Empire, a warlike nation, is analogous to the edge professional militaries of the times would have had against peasants. And they were able to destroy an entire empire of these 'peasants', with an 'army' of exactly 168 Spaniards. Disease played a relatively small role given these absurdly disproportionate odds. What mattered was horses, weaponry, and armor. It was enough to make the Spaniards seem literally invincible.
In modern times, America has ostensibly the most powerful army on Earth. Yet in Afghanistan we lost to sandal wearing religious radicals primarily equipped with WW2 era weaponry and some improvised explosives. And our "victory" in Iraq was defined as being left constrained to micro-sized 'green zones' we're completely unable to leave without extensively armored and prepped convoys, or otherwise it's like to turn into a one way trip.
Of course the catch is that it's dumb to mock things as 'WW2 era weaponry.' A Talibani armed with a Springfield 1903, or Mauser 1898, numbers indicating their manufacturing date, is not only able to kill literally any soldier, but also from extremely far distances. And until the opportunity emerges said Talibani can simply keep that rifle tucked under his robes, looking just like any other civilian. Unless the e.g. US wants to simply start engaging in mass genocide, it's essentially impossible to defeat these sort of insurrections. Especially when each person you kill suddenly turns their otherwise moderate neighbors, friends, and brothers into the next insurrectionists.
In the case of the spaniards its a little different. They ambushed the emperor and essentially slaughtered his host who continued to throw themselves in front of the spanish to protect the emperor, eventually order broke down and they were routed, but the incan empire and the spanish would contest for power for decades still. Another Spaniard around this time, Magellan, made it to the beaches with some 60 men thinking with god and modern arms he would have the advantage against some three thousand Filipinos, and he didn't make it off that beach. The narrative that the spanish just routed everyone doesn't actually hold much water, most of the big takings e.g. in mexico were from identifying existing political enemies operating within a feudal system not unlike that of europe, rallying them and supplying them in their own proxy war against the established aztec power.
In modern times you only see the restraint you see because of the political consequences of allowing the full force of the military machine to be umleashed. Consider how the military actualy behaved in afhanistan or iraq vs the pacific theater. They would visit villages on foot and use interpreters and attempt to form relationships with the locals, instead of just strategically bombing them flat on the off chance they harbor something important to the war machine. The most intense battle of Iraq, the second battle of Falluja, saw 600 civilian deaths. The battle for Okinawa saw over 100,000 civilians dead, a third of the population. That being said I think it goes to show that if push really came to shove, the new war planning would readily go away for the old war planning of strategic bombing along with atomic weaponry, at which there is no cave that will protect you when we have nuclear warheads designed to penetrate the deepest bunkers. There is no safe haven when the US army can engage you from beyond the curve of the earth.
The Battle of Cajamarca [1], where the Incan Emperor was captured, had the emperor arrive with a retinue of some 7000+ experienced soldiers who were armed with weapons such as knives, axes, and lassos. His advisers had already advised him that the Spanish were low in number, probably human, and recommended killing them. The Incan recounting of the battle states that the Spanish attacked after the Emperor threatened to kill them. The slaves the Emperor had around him were the ones who stood impassively as the Spanish butchered them, but that happened after the 'army' of 168 Spaniards had already managed to route the army of 7000+ warriors around the emperor, suffering a total of one injury in the process.
In modern times you're conflating conventional warfare with insurgent warfare, which are very different. Conventional warfare is largely defined by sizable groups organizing and intentionally making the presence known in a limited region, setting the stage for 'normal' engagements. So for instance Iraq quickly turned into an insurgency but the Second Battle of Falluja was one of the few conventional encounters. Several thousand disorganized insurgents with limited arms and equipment decided to stick around and engage a modern military, multiple times their size, head on. They were obviously, and knowingly, signing on for a one way trip to Allah. That said, even there a heavily outnumbered, out-gunned, and out-teched rabble suicidally engaging in conventional warfare managed to inflict hundreds of casualties - about 5% of the military force.
Imagine a similar scenario in times past where you had a rabble of 4000 peasants equipped with whatever instruments they could manage, against 13,000+ armed and armed soldiers with cavalry and archery support. It's highly unlikely that the army would suffer a single casualty, let alone death.
I always find it hilarious when people look at past societies and simply assume they'd have been born in the upper classes. It is overwhelmingly more likely that you'd have been born a plebeian. This isn't "how to roman republic", this is "how to roman republic's aristocracy". It's like larping as a billionaire today. It's fun, but it's a life you'll never have.
Of this author's many excellent series, one is about Sparta (https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/), and it makes this point practically word for word. He is vehement in deconstructing the idea that Sparta is represented by the Spartiates, repeatedly emphasising that the majority were helot slaves who are invisible to history but whose lot we'd be far more likely to share.
Your observation stands as a generality but it's somewhat ironic still, making this complaint about a post by a historian who is very very aware of what you're saying.
This is the tyranny of documentation. We really have little insight into the plebian life. Most direct information comes from funerary inscriptions and graffiti.
For a very interesting history of Rome, from the 2 foundation myths (Romulus vs Aeneas) until the end of the "Pax Romana", I strongly suggest the book "SPQR", by Mary Beard.
She is a very respected scholar on Ancient Rome and she has a lot of documentaries on Youtube.
I just started the famous "Decline and fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbons, covering the period after the SPQR book. Still in the beginning, to early for conclusions.