
Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny - mastazi
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/12/08/lessons-from-the-fall-of-a-great-republic
======
ebertx
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.

~~~
pesmhey
Yes, it’s quite the correct sentiment!

[https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-
helped-...](https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-
fall-of-rome)

------
pjc50
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.

~~~
wcarey
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.

~~~
dv_dt
Interesting summary of Gracchi on Wikipedia [1]:

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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi)

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
wisdomoftheages
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.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
wisdomoftheages
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.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
wisdomoftheages
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.

------
gnfisher
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!

~~~
btilly
I am currently reading the trilogy and second the recommend.

It is told from the point of view of Tiro, slave of Cicero and inventor of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes).

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.)

------
kingraoul3
The Senate binned Republicanism when they murdered the Gracchi.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
kingraoul3
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.

------
SirensOfTitan
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.

~~~
pesmhey
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!

------
safgasCVS
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

~~~
loudmax
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.

~~~
swasheck
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.

I highly recommend it.

------
User23
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.

------
User23
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.

------
nkingsy
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.

~~~
verylittlemeat
Andrew Johnson was a norm breaking president and the United States survived

~~~
bilbo0s
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.

------
rrggrr
[https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/c...](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-
journal/1994/11/cj14n2-7.pdf)

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.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
jdpedrie
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”.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
microtherion
> Every office except senator was decided by majority vote

For some values of "majority vote". The voting was by centuries / tribes, both
of them being extremely unbalanced in voting power.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republic#Structure_and_process)

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
microtherion
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.

~~~
hannasanarion
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.

~~~
microtherion
> The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal

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...

