The Late Republic & the Fall of the Republic

1. The Causes of the Crisis

By the mid-second century BC the conquest of the Mediterranean had transformed Rome — and set the Republic on a course to self-destruction. The long wars abroad had ruined the small Italian farmer-soldiers, who returned from campaigning to find their lands bought up by the rich into vast estates (latifundia) worked by cheap slaves brought back as war booty. The dispossessed poor flooded into Rome; the citizen-army based on property was collapsing; and a new class of immensely rich senators and equestrians (the business class) dominated politics. The old constitution, designed for a small city-state, could not manage a world empire or the new inequalities. Into this volatile situation stepped the reformers known as the Gracchi, and the result was a century of increasingly violent politics (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Republic," worldhistory.org/Roman_Republic/).

2. The Gracchi (133–121 BC)

Tiberius Gracchus, elected tribune of the plebs in 133 BC, proposed to redistribute the public land (ager publicus) to the poor, restoring the small farmers who had manned Rome’s armies. His moderate land bill was vetoed; he illegally removed the opposing tribune and went before the people, whose assembly passed the law. But his opponents, led by the Senate, accused him of aiming at tyranny, and when he stood for a second tribunate, a mob of senators, led by the pontifex maximus Scipio Nasica, beat him to death — the first time, in the words of contemporary observers, that blood had been shed in a political dispute within Rome. His brother Gaius Gracchus, tribune in 123–122 BC, went further: he renewed the land law, and added measures to provide cheap grain for the poor, to found colonies, to reform the juries in favour of the equestrians, and to extend citizenship to the Italian allies. His radical programme, and his plan to give citizenship to the Italians, united his enemies, and in 121 BC the Senate passed a decree empowering the consuls to use force; Gaius, defeated and surrounded on the Aventine, had himself killed by a slave. The deaths of the Gracchi were a watershed: thereafter political disputes in Rome were settled by violence, and the Senate’s authority was fatally weakened (World History Encyclopedia, "Gracchi Brothers," worldhistory.org/Gracchi/).

3. Marius and the Professional Army (c. 107 BC)

Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 BC), a "new man" (a man of no senatorial ancestry) of humble birth, transformed both the army and Roman politics. As consul in 107 BC, faced with war in Africa against the Numidian king Jugurtha, he broke with tradition and recruited the landless poor into the legions — creating the professional army of long-service, paid volunteers who owed their livelihood, rewards and retirement (land grants) not to the state but to their general. Marius reorganised the legion (with the cohort as its tactical unit and the eagle as its standard), re-armed the soldiers, and won the Jugurthine War. His army then saved Rome from the Germanic Cimbri and Teutones, who had destroyed several Roman armies, at the battles of Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and Vercellae (101 BC). But the professional army created a new danger: generals now commanded private, loyal armies, and could use them against the state. Marius, who held the consulship an unprecedented seven times (107, 104–100, 86 BC), became the model of the powerful army-commander, and in his old age led his veterans in the civil war against the Senate (World History Encyclopedia, "Gaius Marius," worldhistory.org/gaius_marius/).

4. The Social War and the Age of Sulla (91–82 BC)

Rome’s Italian allies, the socii, had long supplied soldiers but were denied citizenship. When their demands were rejected, they rose in the Social War (91–88 BC), a revolt of the Italian peoples against Rome. The Senate eventually won by conceding citizenship to the allies — a great widening of the civitas. But the war created new generals, chief among them Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who now competed against the aging Marius for the command of the war against Mithridates VI of Pontus in the east. Sulla, when the command was taken from him, marched his army on Rome itself (88 BC) — the first time a Roman general had turned his troops against his own city. He marched east and defeated Mithridates, while in his absence his enemies executed his followers and Marius briefly ruled. On his return in 82 BC Sulla defeated the Marians at the Battle of the Colline Gate, had himself appointed dictator, and unleashed a reign of terror through the proscriptions (public posted lists of citizens who could be killed with impunity and their property confiscated), which slaughtered thousands of his political enemies. He then reformed the constitution to strengthen the Senate, and — strikingly — resigned the dictatorship and retired in 79 BC, dying shortly after. Sulla had shown that a Roman general could seize the state by force; the precedent would be fatal (World History Encyclopedia, "Sulla," worldhistory.org/sulla/).

5. Spartacus and the Great Slave Revolt (73–71 BC)

The vast slave population of Italy — fed by conquest — erupted in the greatest slave revolt of antiquity. Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator, broke out of a training school at Capua in 73 BC with some 70 companions and gathered an army of tens of thousands of fugitive slaves that overran southern Italy, defeating a succession of Roman forces. The revolt, which threatened the man-power and economy of Italy, was finally crushed in 71 BC by the wealthy general Marcus Licinius Crassus, who crucified thousands of Spartacus’s followers along the Appian Way. Spartacus’s rebellion, though it failed, became a symbol of the oppressed fighting for freedom, and the name is remembered to this day. It also made the political fortune of Crassus, the richest man in Rome, who now joined the two other great leaders of the age — Pompey and Caesar (World History Encyclopedia, "Spartacus," worldhistory.org/spartacus/).

6. Pompey the Great and the First Triumvirate (70–53 BC)

Gnaeus Pompeius — Pompey the Great (106–48 BC) — was the most celebrated general of his day: he had won victories in Spain against Sertorius, destroyed the pirates of the Mediterranean, and in the east defeated Mithridates VI and annexed Syria, Judea and the eastern provinces, bringing the Seleucid empire to an end (63 BC). Against him stood Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), a patrician of immense ambition and brilliance who, building on the support of the people and of Crassus, forged the private political alliance of the First Triumvirate (60 BC) with Pompey and Crassus to dominate Rome. Caesar used his consulship (59 BC) and then the command of Gaul (58–50 BC) to win wealth, glory and a loyal veteran army, conquering all of Gaul in the Gallic Wars — defeating Vercingetorix at Alesia (52 BC) — and twice invading Britain (55, 54 BC). The death of Crassus at Carrhae (53 BC), defeated by the Parthians, removed a balance; Pompey and Caesar became rivals and then enemies (World History Encyclopedia, "Julius Caesar," worldhistory.org/Julius_Caesar/).

7. The Crossing of the Rubicon and the Civil War (49–45 BC)

When the Senate, dominated by Pompey, ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen (he would then face prosecution), Caesar refused — and in January 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon, the little river that marked the boundary of his province, with his Thirteenth Legion, declaring "alea iacta est" ("the die is cast") — an act of open war against the Republic, and the origin of the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" to mean passing the point of no return. In the ensuing Civil War, Caesar’s speed and genius told: he overran Italy, defeated Pompey’s forces in Spain, and then, having driven Pompey east, defeated him decisively at the Battle of Pharsalus in Greece (48 BC). Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was treacherously murdered. Caesar followed, and in Egypt met the young queen Cleopatra VII, with whom he formed a political and romantic alliance (she bore him a son, Caesarion). Caesar then defeated the last of Pompey’s supporters — at Thapsus (46 BC) and Munda (45 BC) — and returned to Rome as undisputed master of the Roman world (World History Encyclopedia, "Julius Caesar," worldhistory.org/Julius_Caesar/).

8. Caesar’s Dictatorship and the Ides of March (49–44 BC)

Caesar, granted the dictatorship (first briefly, then for life) and supreme power, carried out far-reaching reforms: he extended Roman citizenship and settled his veterans, reorganised the provinces, reformed the calendar (introducing the Julian calendar in 45 BC, the basis of our own), and planned great works and wars. But his personal rule — and his acceptance of honours appropriate to a king — alarmed the lovers of the Republic. On 15 March 44 BC, the Ides of March, a conspiracy of about sixty senators — including Marcus Junius Brutus, whom Caesar loved as a son, and Gaius Cassius Longinus — stabbed Caesar to death in the Senate-house (the Curia of Pompey). His last words, in Shakespeare’s famous rendering, were "Et tu, Brute?" ("And you, Brutus?"). The conspirators expected to restore the Republic; instead they provoked another civil war, and made Caesar’s name, and his heir’s claim, more powerful than before (World History Encyclopedia, "Assassination of Julius Caesar," worldhistory.org/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar/).

9. Antony, Octavian and Cleopatra — The End of the Republic (44–27 BC)

Caesar’s will adopted his great-nephew Octavian (born Gaius Octavius, 63 BC–AD 14) as his son and heir. The 19-year-old Octavian, allied at first with Caesar’s lieutenant Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) and the pontifex Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate (43 BC), crushed the assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi (42 BC). The alliance then fell apart. Antony, based in the east, fell under the spell of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, and dreamed of an eastern kingdom; Octavian, in Rome, skillfully portrayed Antony as a traitor to Roman values. In a final clash, Octavian’s fleet under Agrippa defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (2 September 31 BC); the lovers fled to Egypt and, the following year, committed suicide (Cleopatra, tradition says, by the bite of an asp). Octavian returned as sole master of the Roman world. In 27 BC he formally "restored the Republic," handing back his extraordinary powers — and was then, in a carefully staged charade, granted by the Senate the title Augustus ("the revered one") and supreme authority. The Roman Republic was at an end; the Roman Empire and the age of the emperors had begun (World History Encyclopedia, "Augustus," worldhistory.org/Augustus/).

9b. The Slave Economy and the Revolts Beyond Spartacus

The great slave revolts of the late Republic — of which Spartacus’ was the largest — arose from the nature of the Roman slave economy. The conquests of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC flooded Italy with slaves: captured in war or bought from the pirates and traders who supplied the great markets, they were set to work in the mines (like the massive silver mines of the Spanish and the Laurium-type operations), on the great estates (latifundia) that had displaced the small farmers, in workshops, and in the enormous households of the rich. Slave revolts broke out repeatedly in the 2nd century BC: in Sicily, in 135–132 BC (the First Servile War, under the self-proclaimed king Eunus) and 104–100 BC (the Second, under Salvius/Tryphon and Athenion), great armies of slaves overran the island before being crushed. The Third Servile War (73–71 BC) under Spartacus was the greatest: beginning with some seventy gladiators at Capua, it grew into an army of tens of thousands that defeated several Roman armies in Italy before Crassus and Pompey finally crushed it. These revolts, however heroic, could not succeed against the organised might of Rome; but they revealed the brutal foundation of Roman wealth and the deep social tension beneath the Republic’s glittering surface, and they contributed to the crisis that produced the military dynasts — and ultimately the emperors — who would rule over the slave-owning world (World History Encyclopedia, "Spartacus," worldhistory.org/spartacus/).

9c. The Orators of Rome — Cicero and the Power of the Word

The late Republic was the golden age of Roman oratory, and its master was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC). A "new man" from the town of Arpinum who rose by his own eloquence to the consulship (63 BC), Cicero delivered the speeches — the Verrines against the corrupt governor Verres, the Catilinarians against the conspirator Catiline, the Philippics against Mark Antony — that made his name the synonym for the orator and the guardian of the Republic. His treatises (De Oratore, Brutus, De Re Publica, De Officiis) defined the theory of rhetoric and transmitted Greek philosophy to the Latin world; his hundreds of letters, above all the Letters to Atticus, give us an incomparable, day-by-day window onto the politics of the age; and his execution in the proscriptions of 43 BC, ordered by the triumvirs Antony and Octavian, made him the martyr of the Republic. Cicero’s influence is incalculable: his speeches and essays were studied as models of Latin prose for two thousand years, and the republican ideal he defended — law, liberty, the mixed constitution — passed, through his writings, into the political thought of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and so into the founding of modern republics. In the collapse of the Republic, the power of the word reached its height — even as it failed, in the end, to save the state it loved (World History Encyclopedia, "Cicero," worldhistory.org/Cicero/).

9d. The Parthians and the Eastern Frontier — Crassus at Carrhae

The late Republic’s eastern wars brought Rome into collision with the new power of Parthia, the successor state of the old Persian empire east of the Euphrates. The ruinous meeting came at Carrhae in 53 BC, where Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and the third member of the First Triumvirate, led a Roman army into Mesopotamia in search of military glory to rival his allies. He was caught in the open desert by the Parthian cavalry — the heavily armoured cataphracts and, above all, the mounted archers whose arrows, shot in clouds, decimated the immobile Roman infantry, while the famous Parthian "hit-and-run" (the "Parthian shot," shooting backward while retreating) prevented pursuit. Some 20,000–30,000 Romans were killed or captured; Crassus himself was killed (his head, in the gruesome tradition, was used as a prop in a play at a Parthian banquet), and the legionary eagles (standards) were captured. The disaster at Carrhae had profound consequences: it removed Crassus and with him the balance within the Triumvirate, hastening the confrontation between Pompey and Caesar; it fixed the Euphrates as the permanent eastern frontier; and it established Parthia as Rome’s great eastern rival for centuries. The loss of the standards was a humiliation Rome would forever seek to avenge (Augustus recovered them by diplomacy in 20 BC), and the Parthian wars of the later empire, down to the Sasanians, would be among the most costly in Roman history (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Carrhae," worldhistory.org/Carrhae/).

10. Selected Sources & Further Reading

The die is cast.— Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, 49 BC (reported by Suetonius and Plutarch)