8 The Roman Republic

In many ways, Rome defines Western Civilization.  Even more so than Greece, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire that followed created the idea of a single, united civilization, sharing certain attributes and providing a lasting intellectual and political legacy.  Its boundaries, from what is today England to Turkey and from Germany to Spain, mark out the heartland of what its inhabitants would later consider itself to be “the West” in so many words.  The Greek intellectual legacy was eagerly taken up by the Romans and combined with unprecedented organization and engineering on a scale the Greeks had never imagined, even under Alexander the Great.

Roman Origins

Rome was originally a town built amidst seven hills surrounded by swamps in central Italy.

The legend that the Romans themselves invented about their own origins had to do with two brothers: Romulus and Remus.  In the legend of Romulus and Remus, two boys were born to a Latin king, but then kidnapped and thrown into the Tiber River by the king’s jealous brother.  They were discovered by a female wolf and suckled by her, eventually growing up and exacting their revenge on their treacherous uncle.  They then fought each other, with Romulus killing Remus and founding the city of Rome.  According to the story, the city of Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BCE.  This legend is just that: a legend.  Its importance is that it speaks to how the Romans wanted to see themselves, as the descendants of a great man who seized his birthright through force and power, accepting no equals.  In a sense, the Romans were proud to believe that their ancient heritage involved being literally raised by wolves.

The Romans were a warrior people from very early on, feuding and fighting with their neighbors and with raiders from the north.  They were allied with and, for a time, ruled by a neighboring people called the Etruscans, who lived to the northwest of Rome.  The Etruscans were active trading partners with the Greek poleis of the south, and Rome became a key link along the Etruscan–Greek trade route.  The Etruscans ruled a loose empire of allied city-states that carried on a brisk trade with the Greeks, trading Italian iron for various luxury goods.  This mixing of culture – Etruscan, Greek, and Latin – included shared mythologies and stories.  The Greek gods and myths were shared by the Romans, with only the names of the gods being changed (e.g., Zeus became Jupiter, Aphrodite became Venus, Hades became Pluto, etc.).  In this way, the Romans became part of the larger Mediterranean world of which the Greeks were such a significant part.

By 600 BCE the Romans had drained the swamp in the middle of their territory and built the first of their large public buildings.  As noted, they were a monarchy at the time, ruled by (possibly) Etruscan kings but with powerful Romans serving as advisers in an elected senate.  Native-born men rich enough to afford weapons were allowed to vote, while native-born men who were poor were considered full Romans but had no vote.  In 509 BCE (according to their own legends), the Romans overthrew the last Etruscan king and established a full republican form of government, with elected senators making all of the important political decisions.  Roman antipathy to kings was so great that no Roman leader would ever call himself Rex – king – even after the Republic was eventually overthrown centuries later.

The Republic

The Roman Republic had a fairly complex system of government and representation, but it was one that would last about 500 years and preside over the vast expansion of Roman power.  An assembly, called the Centuriate Assembly, was elected by the citizens and created laws.  Each year, the assembly elected two executives called consuls to oversee the laws and ensure their enforcement.  The consuls had almost unlimited power, known as imperium, including the right to inflict the death penalty on law-breakers, and they were preceded everywhere by twelve bodyguards called lictors. Under the consuls there was the Senate, essentially a large body of aristocratic administrators, appointed for life, who controlled state finances.  The whole system was tied closely to the priesthoods of the Roman gods, who performed divinations and blessings on behalf of the city.  While the Romans were deeply suspicious of individuals who seemed to be trying to take power themselves, several influential families worked behind the scenes to ensure that they could control voting blocks in the Centuriate Assembly and the Senate.

The rich were referred to as patricians, families with ancient roots in Rome who occupied most of the positions of the Senate and the judiciary in the city.  There were about one hundred patrician families, descending from the men Romulus had, allegedly, appointed to the first Senate.  They allied with other rich and powerful people, owners of large tracts of land, to try to hold in check the plebeians, Roman citizens not from patrician backgrounds.

While the Senate began as an advisory body, it later wrested real law-making power from the consuls (who were, after all, almost always drawn from its members).  By 133 BCE, the Senate proposed legislation and could veto the legislation of the consuls.  An even more important power was its ability to designate funds for war and public building, giving it enormous power over what the Roman government actually did, since the Senate could simply cut off funding to projects it disagreed with.

Class Struggle

Rome struggled with a situation analogous to that of Athens, in which the rich not only had a virtual monopoly on political power but in many cases had the legal right to either enslave or at least extract labor from debtors.  In Rome’s case, an ongoing class struggle called the Conflict of Orders took place from about 500 BCE to 360 BCE (140 years!), in which the plebeians struggled to get more political representation.  In 494 BCE, the plebeians threatened to simply leave Rome, rendering it almost defenseless, and the Senate responded by allowing the creation of two officials called Tribunes, men drawn from the plebeians who had the legal power to veto certain decisions made by the Senate and consuls.

Roman soldiers were citizen-soldiers, farmers who volunteered to fight for Rome in hopes of being rewarded with wealth taken from defeated enemies.  An important political breakthrough happened in about 350 BCE when the Romans enacted a law that limited the amount of land that could be given to a single citizen after a victory, ensuring a more equitable distribution of land to plebeian soldiers.  This was a huge incentive to serve in the Roman army, since any soldier now had the potential to become very rich if he participated in a successful campaign against Rome’s enemies.

In the midst of this ongoing struggle, the Romans came up with the basis of Roman law, the system that, through various iterations, would become the basis for most systems of law still in use in Europe today (Britain being a notable exception).  Private law governed disputes between individuals (e.g., property suits, disputes between business partners), while public law governed disputes between individuals and the government (e.g., violent crimes that were seen as a threat to the social order as a whole).  In addition, the Romans established the Law of Nations to govern the territories it started to conquer in Italy; it was an early form of international law based on what were believed to be universal standards of justice.

The plebeians had been concerned that legal decisions would always favor the patricians, who had a monopoly on legal proceedings, so they insisted that the laws be written down and made publicly available.  Thus, in 451 BCE, members of the Roman government wrote the Twelve Tables, lists of the laws available for everyone to see, which were then posted in the Roman Forum in the center of Rome.  Just as it was done in Athens a hundred years earlier, having the laws publicly available reduced the chances of corruption.  In fact, according to a Roman legend, the ten men who were charged with recording the laws were sent to Athens to study the laws of Solon of Athens; this was a deliberate use or “copy” of his idea.

Roman Expansion

Roman expansion began with its leadership of a confederation of allied cities, the Latin League.  Rome led this coalition against nearby hill tribes that had periodically raided the area, then against the Etruscans that had once ruled Rome itself.  Just as the Romans started to consider further territorial expansion, a fierce raiding band of Celts swooped in and sacked Rome in 389 BCE, a setback that took several decades to recover from.  In the aftermath, the Romans swore to never let the city fall victim to an attack again.

Rome rapidly expanded to encompass all of Italy except the southernmost regions.  Those regions, populated largely by Greeks who had founded colonies there centuries before, invited a Greek warrior-king named Pyrrhus to aid them against the Romans around 280 BCE (Pyrrhus was a Hellenistic king who had already wrested control of a good-sized swath of Greece from the Antigonid dynasty back in Greece).  Pyrrhus won two major battles against the Romans, but in the process, he lost two-thirds of his troops.  After his victories, he made a comment that “one more such victory will undo me” – this led to the phrase “pyrrhic victory,” which means a temporary victory that ultimately spells defeat, or winning the battle but losing the war.  He took his remaining troops and returned to Greece.   After he fled, the south was unable to mount much of a resistance, and all of Italy was under Roman control by 263 BCE.

Roman Militarism

It is important to emphasize the extreme militarism and terrible brutality of Rome during the republican period, very much including this early phase in which it began to acquire its empire.  Wars were annual: with very few exceptions, over the centuries, the Roman legions would march forth to conquer new territory every single year.  The Romans swiftly acquired a reputation for absolute ruthlessness and even wanton cruelty, raping and/or slaughtering the civilian inhabitants of conquered cities, enslaving thousands, and in some cases, utterly wiping out whole populations (the neighboring city of Veii was obliterated in roughly 393 BCE, for example, right at the start of the conquest period).

Roman soldiers were inspired by straightforward greed as well as the tremendous cultural importance placed on military glory.  Nothing was as important to a male Roman citizen as his reputation as a soldier.  Likewise, Roman aristocrats all acquired their political power through military glory until late in the republic, and even then, military glory was all but required for a man to achieve any kind of political importance.  The greatest honor a Roman could win was a triumph, a military parade displaying the spoils of war to the cheers of the people of Rome; many people held important positions in Rome, but only the greatest generals were ever rewarded with a triumph.

The overall picture of Roman culture is of a society that was in its own way as fanatical and obsessed with war as was Sparta during the height of its barracks society.  Unlike Sparta, however, Rome was able to mobilize gigantic armies, partly because slaves came to perform most of the work on farms and workshops over time, freeing up free Roman men to participate in the annual invasions of neighboring territories.  One prominent contemporary historian of Rome, W.V. Harris, wisely warns against the temptation of “power worship” when studying Roman history.  Rome did indeed accomplish remarkable things, but it did so through appalling cruelty and astonishing levels of violence.

The Punic Wars

Rome’s great rival in this early period of expansion was the North-African city of Carthage, founded centuries earlier by Phoenician colonists.  Carthage was one of the richest and most powerful trading empires of the Hellenistic Age, a peer of the Alexandrian empires to the east, trading with them and occasionally skirmishing with the Ptolemaic armies of Egypt and with the Greek cities of Sicily.  Rome and Carthage had long been trading partners, and for centuries there was no real reason for them to be enemies since they were separated by the Mediterranean.  That being said, as Rome’s power increased to encompass all of Italy, the Carthaginians became increasingly concerned that Rome might pose a threat to its own dominance. Conflict finally broke out in 264 BCE in Sicily.  The island of Sicily was one of the oldest and most important areas for Greek colonization. The First Punic War lasted from 264 to 241 BCE. (“Punic” refers to the Roman term for Phoenician, and hence Carthage and its civilization.)

The Romans suffered several defeats, but they were rich and powerful enough at this point to persist in the war effort.  Rome benefited greatly from the fact that the Carthaginians did not realize that the war could grow to be about more than just Sicily; even after winning victories there, the Carthaginians never tried to invade Italy itself (which they could have done, at least early on).  The Romans eventually learned how to carry out effective naval warfare and stranded the Carthaginian army in Sicily.  The Carthaginians sued for peace in 241 BCE and agreed to give up their claims to Sicily and to pay a war indemnity.  The Romans, however, betrayed them and seized the islands of Corsica and Sardinia as well, territories that were still under the nominal control of Carthage.

From the aftermath of the First Punic War and the seizure of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica emerged the Roman provincial system: the islands were turned into “provinces” of the Republic, each of which was obligated to pay tribute (the “tithe,” meaning tenth, of all grain) and follow the orders of Roman governors appointed by the Senate.  That system would continue for the rest of the republican and imperial periods of Roman history, with the governors wielding enormous power and influence in their respective provinces.

Unsurprisingly, the Carthaginians wanted revenge, not just for their loss in the war but for Rome’s seizure of Corsica and Sardinia.  For twenty years, the Carthaginians built up their forces and their resources, most notably by invading and conquering a large section of Spain, containing rich mines of gold and copper and thousands of Spanish Celts who came to serve as mercenaries in the Carthaginian armies.  In 218 BCE, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal (son of the most successful general who had fought the Romans in the First Punic War) launched a surprise attack in Spain against Roman allies and then against Roman forces themselves.  This led to the Second Punic War (218–202 BCE).

Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy from Spain with 60,000 men and a few dozen war elephants (most of the elephants perished, but the survivors proved very effective, and terrifying, against the Roman forces).  For the next two years, he crushed every Roman army sent against him, killing tens of thousands of Roman soldiers and marching perilously close to Rome.  Hannibal never lost a single battle in Italy, yet neither did he force the Romans to sue for peace.

Hannibal defeated the Romans repeatedly with clever tactics: he lured them across icy rivers and ambushed them, he concealed a whole army in the fog one morning and then sprang on a Roman legion, and he led the Romans into narrow passes and slaughtered them.  In one battle in 216 BCE, Hannibal’s smaller army defeated a larger Roman force by letting it push into the Carthaginian center, then surrounding it with cavalry.  He was hampered, though, by the fact that he did not have a siege train to attack Rome itself (which was heavily fortified), and he failed to win over the southern Italian cities that had been conquered by the Romans a century earlier.  The Romans kept losing to Hannibal, but they were largely successful in keeping Hannibal from receiving reinforcements from Spain and Africa, slowly but steadily weakening his forces.

Eventually, the Romans altered their tactics and launched a guerrilla war against Hannibal within Italy, harrying his forces.  This was totally contrary to their usual tactics, and the dictator Fabius Maximus who insisted on it in 217 BCE was mockingly nicknamed “the Delayer” by his detractors in the Roman government despite his evident success.  The Romans vacillated on this strategy, suffering the terrible defeat mentioned above in 216 BCE, but as Hannibal’s victories grew and some cities in Italy and Sicily started defecting to the Carthaginian side, they returned to it.

A brilliant Roman general named Scipio defeated the Carthaginian forces back in Spain in 207 BCE, cutting Hannibal off from both reinforcements and supplies, which weakened his army significantly.  Scipio then attacked Africa itself, forcing Carthage to recall Hannibal to protect the city.  Hannibal finally lost in 202 BCE after coming as close as anyone had to defeating the Romans.  The victorious Scipio, now easily the most powerful man in Rome, became the first great general to add to his own name the name of the place he conquered: he became Scipio “Africanus” – conqueror of Africa.

An uneasy peace lasted for several decades between Rome and Carthage, despite enduring anti-Carthaginian hatred in Rome; one prominent senator named Cato the Elder reputedly ended every speech in the Senate with the statement “…and Carthage must be destroyed.”  Rome finally forced the issue in the mid-second century BCE by meddling in Carthaginian affairs. The third and last Punic War that ensued was utterly one-sided: it began in 149 BCE, and by 146 BCE Carthage was defeated.  Not only were thousands of the Carthaginian people killed or enslaved, but the city itself was brutally sacked. The Romans created a myth to commemorate their victory, claiming that they had “plowed the earth with salt” at Carthage so that nothing would ever grow there again – that was not literally true, but it did serve as a useful legend as the Romans expanded their territories even further.

Greece

Despite their tremendous pride in Roman culture, the Romans still found much to admire about Greek intellectual achievements.  By about 230 BCE, Romans started taking an active interest in Greek literature.  Some Greek slaves were true intellectuals who found an important place in Roman society.  One status symbol in Rome was to have a Greek slave who could tutor one’s children in the Greek language and Greek learning.  In 220 BCE a Roman senator, Quintus Fabius Pictor, wrote a history of Rome in Greek, the first major work of Greek literature written by a Roman (like so many ancient sources, it has not survived).  Soon, Romans were imitating the Greeks, writing in both Greek and Latin and creating poetry, drama, and literature.

That being noted, the interest in Greek culture was muted until the Roman wars in Greece that began with the defeat of Philip V of Macedon.  Rome’s Greek wars created a kind of “feeding frenzy” of Greek art and Greek slaves.  Huge amounts of Greek statuary and art were shipped back to Rome as part of the spoils of war, having an immediate impact on Roman taste.  The appeal of Greek art was undeniable.  Greek artists, even those who escaped slavery, soon started moving to Rome en masse because there was so much money to be made there if an artist could secure a wealthy patron.  Greek artists, and the Romans who learned from them, adapted the Hellenistic Greek style.  In many cases, classical statues were re-created exactly by sculptors, somewhat like modern-day prints of famous paintings.  In others, a new style of realistic portraiture in sculpture that originated in the Hellenistic kingdoms proved irresistible to the Romans; whereas the Greeks of the Classical Age usually idealized the subjects of art, the Romans came to prefer more realistic and “honest” portrayals.  We know precisely what many Romans looked like because of the realistic busts made of their faces: wrinkles, warts, and all.

Along with philosophy and architecture, the most important Greek import to arrive on Roman shores was rhetoric: the mastery of words and language in order to persuade people and win arguments.  The Greeks held that the two ways a man could best his rivals and assert his virtue were through battle and through public discussion and argumentation.  This tradition was felt very keenly by the Romans, because those were precisely the two major ways the Roman Republic operated – the superiority of its armies was well-known, and individual leaders had to be able to convince their peers and rivals of the correctness of their positions.  The Romans thus very consciously tried to copy the Greeks, especially the Athenians, for their oratory skill.

Not surprisingly, the Romans both admired and resented the Greeks for the Greek mastery of words.  The Romans came to pride themselves on a more direct, less subtle form of oratory than that (supposedly) practiced in Greece.  Part of Roman oratorical skill was the use of passionate appeals to emotional responses in the audience, ones that were supposed to both harness and control the emotions of the speaker himself.  The Romans also formalized instruction in rhetoric, a practice of studying the speeches of great speakers and politicians of the past and of debating instructors and fellow students in mock scenarios.

Roman Society

The government of the late Republic was still in the form of the Plebeian Assembly, the Centuriate Assembly, the Senate, ten tribunes, two consuls, and a court system under formal rules of law.  By the late republic, however, a network of patrons and clients had emerged that largely controlled the government.  Elite families of nobles, through their client networks, made all of the important decisions.  Beneath this group were the equestrians: families who did not have the ancient lineages of the patricians and who normally did not serve in public office.  The equestrians, however, were rich, and they benefited from the fact that senators were formally banned from engaging in commerce as of the late third century BCE.  They constituted the business class of republican Rome who supported the elites while receiving various trade and mercantile concessions.

Meanwhile, the average plebeian had long ago lost his or her representation.  The Plebeian Assembly was controlled by wealthy plebeians who were the clients of nobles.  In other words, they served the interests of the rich and had little interest in the plight of the class they were supposed to represent.  This created an ongoing problem for Rome, one that was exploited many times by populist leaders: Rome relied on a free class of citizens to serve in the army, but those same citizens often had to struggle to make ends meet as farmers.  As the rich grew richer, they bought up land and sometimes even forced poorer citizens off of their farms.  Thus, there was an existential threat to Rome’s armies, and with it, to Rome itself.

At the bottom of the Roman social system were the slaves.  Slaves were one of the most lucrative forms of loot available to Roman soldiers, and so many lands had been conquered by Rome that the population of the Republic was swollen with slaves.  Fully one-third of the population of Italy were slaves by the first century CE.  Even freed slaves, called freedmen, had limited legal rights and had formal obligations to serve their former masters as clients.  Roman slaves spanned the same range of jobs noted with other slaveholding societies like the Greeks: elite slaves lived much more comfortably than did most free Romans, but most were laborers or domestic servants.  All could be abused by their owners without legal consequence.

Slavery was a huge economic engine in Roman society.  Much of the “loot” seized in Roman campaigns was made up of human beings, and Roman soldiers were eager to capitalize on captives they took by selling them on returning to Italy.  In historical hindsight, however, slavery undermined both Roman productivity and the pace of innovation in Roman society.  It simply was not necessary to seek out new and better ways of doing things in the form of technological progress or social innovations because slave labor was always available.  While Roman engineering was impressive, Rome developed no new technology to speak of in its thousand-year history.  Likewise, the long-term effect of the growth of slavery in Rome was to undermine the social status of free Roman citizens, with farmers in particular struggling to survive as rich Romans purchased land and built huge slave plantations.

There were many slave uprisings, the most significant of which was led by Spartacus, a gladiator (warrior who fought for public amusement) originally from Thrace.  Spartacus led the revolt of his gladiatorial school in the Italian city of Capua in 73 BCE.  He set up a war camp on the slopes of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius, to which thousands of slaves fled, culminating in an “army” of about 70,000.  He tried to convince them to flee over the Alps to seek refuge in their (mostly Celtic) homelands but was eventually convinced to turn around to plunder Italy.  The richest man in Italy, the senator Crassus, took command of the Roman army assembled to defeat Spartacus, crushing the slave army and killing Spartacus in 71 BCE (and lining the road to Rome with 6,000 crucified slaves).

In one area, however, Rome represented greater freedom and autonomy than did some of its neighboring societies (like Greece): gender roles.  While Roman culture was explicitly patriarchal, with families organized under the authority of the eldest male of the household (the pater familias), there is a great deal of textual evidence that suggests that women enjoyed considerable independence nevertheless.  Women retained the ownership of their dowries at marriage, could initiate divorce, and controlled their own inheritances.  Widows, who were common thanks to the young marriage age of women and the death of soldier husbands, were legally autonomous and continued to run households after the death of the husband.  Within families, women’s voices carried considerable weight, and in the realm of politics, while men held all official positions, women exercised considerable influence from behind the scenes.

It is easy to overstate women’s empowerment in Roman society; Roman culture celebrated the devoted mother and wife as the female ideal, and Roman traditionalists decried the loosening of strict gender roles that seems to have taken place over time during the Republic.  Women were expected to be frugal managers of households, and in theory, they were to avoid ostentatious displays.  Likewise, Roman law explicitly designated men as the official decision-makers within the family unit.  That being noted, however, one of the reasons that we know that women did enjoy a higher degree of autonomy than in many other societies is the number of surviving texts that both describe and, in many cases, celebrate the role of women.  Those texts were written by both men and women, and most Romans (men very much included) felt that it was both appropriate and desirable for both boys and girls to be properly educated.

The End of the Republic

The Roman Republic lasted for roughly five centuries.  It was under the Republic that Rome evolved from a single town to the heart of an enormous empire.  Despite the evident success of the republican system, however, there were inexorable problems that plagued the Republic throughout its history, most evidently the problem of wealth and power.  Roman citizens were, by law, supposed to have a stake in the Republic.  They took pride in who they were, and it was the common patriotic desire to fight and expand the Republic among the citizen-soldiers of the Republic that created, at least in part, such an effective army.   At the same time, the vast amount of wealth captured in the military campaigns was frequently siphoned off by elites, who found ways to seize large portions of land and loot with each campaign.  By around 100 BCE even the existence of the Plebeian Assembly did almost nothing to mitigate the effect of the debt and poverty that afflicted so many Romans thanks to the power of the clientage networks overseen by powerful noble patrons.

The first step toward violent revolution in the Republic was the work of the Gracchus brothers – remembered historically as the Gracchi (i.e., “Gracchi” is the plural of “Gracchus”).  The older of the two was Tiberius Gracchus, a rich but reform-minded politician.  Gracchus, among others, was worried that the free, farm-owning common Roman would go extinct if the current trend of rich landowners seizing farms and replacing farmers with slaves continued.  Without those commoners, Rome’s armies would be drastically weakened.  Thus, he managed to pass a bill through the Centuriate Assembly that would limit the amount of land a single man could own, distributing the excess to the poor.  The Senate was horrified and fought bitterly to reverse the bill.  Tiberius ran for a second term as tribune, something no one had ever done up to that point, and a group of senators clubbed him to death in 133 BCE.

Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus took up the cause, also becoming tribune.  He attacked corruption in the provinces, allying himself with the equestrian class and allowing equestrians to serve on juries that tried corruption cases.  He also tried to speed up land redistribution.  His most radical move was to try to extend full citizenship to all of Rome’s Italian subjects, which would have effectively transformed the Roman Republic into the Italian Republic.  Here, he lost even the support of his former allies in Rome, and he killed himself in 121 BCE rather than be murdered by another gang of killers sent by senators.

The reforms of the Gracchi were temporarily successful: even though they were both killed, the Gracchi’s central effort to redistribute land accomplished its goal.  A land commission created by Tiberius remained intact until 118 BCE, by which time it had redistributed huge tracts of land held illegally by the rich.  Despite their vociferous opposition, the rich did not suffer much, since the lands in question were “public lands” largely left in the aftermath of the Second Punic War, and normal farmers did enjoy benefits.  Likewise, despite Gaius’s death, the Republic eventually granted citizenship to all Italians in 84 BCE, after being forced to put down a revolt in Italy.  In hindsight, the historical importance of the Gracchi was less in their reforms and more in the manner of their deaths – for the first time, major Roman politicians had simply been murdered (or killed themselves rather than be murdered) for their politics.  It became increasingly obvious that true power was shifting away from rhetoric and toward military might.

Julius Caesar

Thus, there is an unresolved question about the end of the Roman Republic: when a new politician and general named Julius Caesar became increasingly powerful and ultimately began to replace the Republic with an empire, was he merely making good on the threat posed by Marius and Sulla, or was there truly something unprecedented about his actions?  Julius Caesar’s rise to power is a complex story that reveals just how murky Roman politics were by the time he became an important political player in about 70 BCE.  Caesar himself was both a brilliant general and a shrewd politician; he was skilled at keeping up the appearance of loyalty to Rome’s ancient institutions while exploiting opportunities to advance and enrich himself and his family.  He was loyal, in fact, to almost no one, even old friends who had supported him, and he also cynically used the support of the poor for his own gain.

Two powerful politicians, Pompey and Crassus (both of whom had risen to prominence as supporters of Sulla), joined together to crush the slave revolt of Spartacus in 70 BCE and were elected consuls because of their success.  Pompey was one of the greatest Roman generals, and he soon left to eliminate piracy from the Mediterranean, to conquer the Jewish kingdom of Judea, and to crush an ongoing revolt in Anatolia.  He returned in 67 BCE and asked the Senate to approve land grants to his loyal soldiers for their service, a request that the Senate refused because it feared his power and influence with so many soldiers who were loyal to him instead of the Republic.  Pompey reacted by forming an alliance with Crassus and with Julius Caesar, who was a member of an ancient patrician family.  This group of three is known in history as the First Triumvirate.

Each member of the Triumvirate wanted something specific: Caesar hungered for glory and wealth and hoped to be appointed to lead Roman armies against the Celts in Western Europe, Crassus wanted to lead armies against Parthia (i.e., the “new” Persian Empire that had long since overthrown Seleucid rule in Persia itself), and Pompey wanted the Senate to authorize land and wealth for his troops.  The three of them had so many clients and wielded so much political power that they were able to ratify all of Pompey’s demands, and both Caesar and Crassus received the military commissions they’d hoped for.  Caesar was appointed general of the territory of Gaul (present-day France and Belgium), and he set off to fight an infamous Celtic king named Vercingetorix.

From 58 to 50 BCE, Caesar waged a brutal war against the Celts of Gaul.  He was both a merciless combatant who slaughtered whole villages and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Celts (killing or enslaving over a million people in the end), and a gifted writer who wrote his own accounts of his wars in excellent Latin prose.  His forces even invaded England, establishing a Roman territory there that lasted centuries.  All of the lands he invaded were so thoroughly conquered that the descendants of the Celts ended up speaking languages based on Latin, like French, rather than their native Celtic dialects.

Caesar’s victories made him famous and immensely powerful, and they ensured the loyalty of his battle-hardened troops.  In Rome, senators feared his power and called on Caesar’s former ally Pompey to bring him to heel (Crassus had already died in his ill-considered campaign against the Parthians; his head was used as a prop in a Greek play staged by the Parthian king).  Pompey, fearing his former ally’s power, agreed and brought his armies to Rome.  The Senate then recalled Caesar after both rejecting the renewal of his governorship of Gaul and his military command and refusing to allow him to run for consul in absentia.

The Senate hoped to use the fact that Caesar had violated the letter of republican law while on campaign to strip him of his authority.  Caesar had committed illegal acts, including waging war without authorization from the Senate, but he was protected from prosecution so long as he held an authorized military command.  By refusing to renew his command or allow him to run for office as consul, he would be open to charges.  His enemies in the Senate feared his tremendous influence with the people of Rome, so the conflict was as much about factional infighting among the senators as fear of Caesar imposing some kind of tyranny.

Caesar knew what awaited him in Rome – charges of sedition against the Republic – so he simply took his army with him and marched off to Rome.  In 49 BCE, he dared to cross the Rubicon River in northern Italy, the legal boundary over which no Roman general was allowed to bring his troops; he reputedly announced that “the die is cast” and that he and his men were now committed to either seizing power or facing total defeat.  The brilliance of Caesar’s move was that he could pose as the champion of his loyal troops as well as that of the common people of Rome, whom he promised to aid against the corrupt and arrogant senators; he never claimed to be acting for himself, but instead to protect his and his men’s legal rights and to resist the corruption of the Senate.

Pompey had been the most powerful man in Rome, both a brilliant general and a gifted politician, but he did not anticipate Caesar’s boldness.  Caesar surprised him by marching straight for Rome.  Pompey only had two legions, both of whom had served under Caesar in the past and he was thus forced to recruit new troops.  As Caesar approached, Pompey fled to Greece, but Caesar followed him and defeated his forces in battle in 48 BCE.  Pompey himself escaped to Egypt, where he was promptly murdered by agents of the Ptolemaic court who had read the proverbial writing on the wall and knew that Caesar was the new power to contend with in Rome.  Subsequently, Caesar came to Egypt and stayed long enough to forge a political alliance and carry on an affair with the queen of Egypt: Cleopatra VII, last of the Ptolemaic dynasty.  Caesar helped Cleopatra defeat her brother (to whom she was married, in the Egyptian tradition) in a civil war and seize complete control over the Egyptian state.  She also bore him his only son, Caesarion.

Caesar returned to Rome two years later after hunting down Pompey’s remaining loyalists.  There, he had himself declared dictator for life and set about creating a new version of the Roman government that answered directly to him.  He filled the Senate with his supporters and established military colonies in the lands he had conquered as rewards for his loyal troops (which doubled as guarantors of Roman power in those lands, since veterans and their families would now live there permanently).  He established a new calendar, which included the month of “July” named after him, and he regularized Roman currency.  Then he promptly set about making plans to launch a massive invasion of Persia.

Instead of leading another glorious military campaign, however, in March of 44 BCE, Caesar was assassinated by a group of senators who resented his power and genuinely desired to save the Republic.  The result was not the restoration of the Republic, however, just a new chapter in the Caesarian dictatorship.  Its architect was Caesar’s heir, his grand-nephew Octavian, to whom Caesar left (much to almost everyone’s shock) almost all of his vast wealth.

Mark Antony and Octavian

Following his death, Caesar’s right-hand man, a skilled general named Mark Antony, joined with Octavian and another general named Lepidus to form the “Second Triumvirate.”  In 43 BCE they seized control in Rome and then launched a successful campaign against the old republican loyalists, killing off the men who had killed Caesar and murdering the strongest senators and equestrians who had tried to restore the old institutions.  Mark Antony and Octavian soon pushed Lepidus to the side and divided up control of Roman territory – Octavian taking Europe and Mark Antony taking the eastern territories and Egypt.  This was an arrangement that was not destined to last; the two men had only been allies for the sake of convenience, and both began scheming as to how they could seize total control of Rome’s vast empire.

Mark Antony moved to the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where he set up his court.  He followed in Caesar’s footsteps by forging both a political alliance and a romantic relationship with Cleopatra, and the two of them were able to rule the eastern provinces of the Republic in defiance of Octavian.  In 34 BCE, Mark Antony and Cleopatra declared that Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, was the heir to Caesar (not Octavian) and that their own twins were to be rulers of Roman provinces.  Rumors in the west claimed that Antony was under Cleopatra’s thumb (which is unlikely: the two of them were both savvy politicians and seem to have shared a genuine affection for one another) and was breaking with traditional Roman values, and Octavian seized on this behavior to claim that he was the true protector of Roman morality.  Soon, Octavian produced a will that Mark Antony had supposedly written, ceding control of Rome to Cleopatra and their children on his death; whether or not the will was authentic, it fit in perfectly with the publicity campaign on Octavian’s part to build support against his former ally in Rome.

When he finally declared war in 32 BCE, Octavian claimed he was only interested in defeating Cleopatra, which led to broader Roman support by avoiding the premise of yet another Roman civil war.  Antony and Cleopatra’s forces were already fairly scattered and weak due to a disastrous campaign against the Persians a few years earlier.  In 31 BCE, Octavian defeated Mark Antony’s forces, which were poorly equipped, sick, and hungry.  Antony and Cleopatra’s soldiers were starved out by a successful blockade engineered by Octavian and his friend and chief commander Agrippa, and the unhappy couple killed themselves the next year in exile.  Octavian was 33.  As his grand-uncle had before him, Octavian began the process of manipulating the institutions of the Republic to transform it into something else entirely: an empire.

Conclusion

One of the peculiar things about the Roman Republic is that its rise to power was in no way inevitable.  No Roman leader had a “master plan” to dominate the Mediterranean world, and the Romans of 500 BCE would have been shocked to find Rome ruling over a gigantic territory a few centuries later.  Likewise, the demise of the Republic was not inevitable.  The class struggles and political rivalries that ultimately led to the rise of Caesar and then to the true transformation brought about by Octavian could have gone very differently.  Perhaps the most important thing that Octavian could, and did, do was to recognize that the old system was no longer working the way it should, and he thus set about deliberately creating a new system in its place.  For better or for worse, by the time of his death in 14 CE, Octavian had permanently dismantled the Republic and replaced it with the Roman Empire.

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