The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part II)

With the deaths of the Gracchii, the Senate had managed to stonewall reform attempts at the cost of most of its moral authority as a representative of the Republic, and with the even more worrying precedent of introducing legislation-by-mob-violence into the republican system. Troubling, too, was the fact that the Senate was no longer united - most of them, the optimates ("good men") were still in favour of the status quo, but some, the populares ("populists") desired land reform, if only as a safety valve. The optimates' nightmare scenario was a popularis general returning with his army to enforce his troops' demands; there would be little the Senate could do to stop such a combination.

In the actual event, the general was named Gaius Marius. The popularis Consul for 107 BC, he enacted a reform abolishing all land requirements for military service. This eased the manpower shortage that had been tightening around the army for the last half-century, but at the cost of setting up the army in utter opposition to the optimates. The Roman Legions of the fourth and third centuries had been composed of peasant farmers, really a (highly trained) militia. The legionary would go out to fight the Samnites or Epirotes; he would return in time for the harvest. The new army was recruited from the landless underclass springing up in Rome and its colonies, and what it wanted was cheap food for the cities, and land for the returning veterans. The soldiers, recruited direct out of the slums of Rome, would return to nothing if their generals couldn't get them land to retire on; and a general who promised this to his men was guaranteed their support in Republican politics. The Senate could not help but see the dangers of this, but their foreign enemies were on the move again and keeping the army up was vital.

Case in point: Marius' first two Consulships saw him overseas, putting down the Numidians, and then his next four saw him in northern Italy, stopping the invasions of the Cimbri and Teutones*. His unprecedented six terms as Consul, and the popularity he had gained in fending off the Cimbri and Teutones, deeply disturbed the Senate, which henceforth resolved to make the least possible use of his services. They managed to associate the credit for defeating Numidia to one of Marius' more conservative lieutenants, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and when Rome's Italian allies, looking to get a little more of fruits of empire, revolted in 91 BC, Sulla was put in charge of that too. The causes of the war were pretty straightforward to solve; once the Senate offered to grant all Italian allies Roman citizenship, the war was pretty much over, and the only real result of this "Social War" (apart from the widening of citizenship) was the enhancement of Sulla's reputation.

The same year the Social War ended (88 BC), a new war began in the east. The century of instability in Anatolia that had followed the defeat of Antiochus was coming to an end; the Kingdom of Pontus, under Mithridates VI, had conquered most of the surrounding kingdoms, including a few that had been put under Roman protection. But - distracted by the Social War and its own rapidly mounting social stresses - Rome's warning to him was uncharacteristically soft-spoken. Encouraged, Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia** in 89 BC and Greece in 88 BC.

This demanded a Roman response, of course, but the Republic was divided on who to send. The Senate voted for Sulla but the Popular Assembly - still remembering him as the saviour of Italy a decade earlier - voted for Marius. Sulla took matters into his own hands, took command of the army, and - to the horror of everyone, including the optimates - marched it into Rome. Marius attempted briefly to defend the city, failed, and barely managed to escape to Africa while Sulla's troops massacred Marius' supporters. Sulla's command of the army was hastily confirmed, and he marched back out again to Pontus. But, for the first time, Roman troops had fought each other in the field, and even more ominously, a Roman general had used his army to enforce his will on the city. It was all downhill from here for the Republic.

Sulla's war in the East ran smoothly, with Mithridates being pushed out of his new conquests in a couple of short campaigns; but the treaty they signed in 85 BC was again notably lax; Mithridates was required only to disgorge the Roman protectorates he had conquered and was permitted to keep the enlarged Kingdom of Pontus independent. Sulla swung his army around and sailed back to Italy: while he had been off fighting Mithradates, Marius had returned to Rome.

Marius' coup - enforced by an army he had raised in Africa - was surprisingly bloodless; he proscribed*** a few of the more conservative senators but for the most part kept his troops in check. But only a month after his return to Rome, he died of a stroke and without the great general his troops were easily defeated by Sulla's. Sulla's takeover (82 BC) was far bloodier than Marius' had been. Hundreds of Senators and thousands of people in total - anyone of any prominence whatsoever who could plausibly be connected to Marius or his rule - were proscribed and executed. Sulla was made Dictator for life by the cowed Senate****. He extensively revised the government, stripping away most of the reforms that had outlived the Gracchi and greatly reducing the power of the Plebeian Tribunes. With everything the populares had ever accomplished destroyed, along with most of their membership, Sulla retired (79 BC) and then died.

Sulla's retirement (and, even more, his death) restored Senatorial rule. But even compared to the half-century after the Gracchi, it was an unstable, tottering thing. Marius and Sulla had opened the door and now the Republic was a prize for anyone with an army and the ambition to use it. The most the Senate could reasonably do now was appoint conservatives as often as they could and hope none of them got too ambitious anyways.

While Sulla had been conquering the Republic, the situation out overseas had been deteriorating again. There was a general, Quintus Sertorius - not so much popularis as Marian - holding Spain in opposition to the Senate; Mithradates was on the move in Anatolia agian; and there was piracy. The Republic had long since removed any opponents capable of policing the seas but with its attention turned inwards, piracy now ran rampant. This was a particular problem as Italy had long since become insufficient for supplying the food needs of Rome; the city was now fed from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. For dealing with these, the Senate turned to the competent (and more importantly, loyal) Gnaeus Pompey. Pompey reconquered Spain (helped along quite a bit by Sertorius' convenient assassination) in 71 BC; returned to Italy to mop up the rebellion of Spartacus (along with a man named Marcus Licinius Crassus, more on whom later), then headed east to deal with the pirates. In three months in 67 BC he cleared them out; he was then given command of the army facing down Mithradates. He defeated Mithradates (64 BC) then moved south, conquering what was left of the Seleucid Empire and making a protectorate of the little Jewish Kingdom (63 BC; the Jews had become independent in the chaos following the Syrian War a century before).

Pompey returned to Rome again, having, in his words, "made the center of the Republic what I had found as its frontier". But in the course of the war he had promised his soldiers lands on their return***** and in any event his reputation was now too much for the Senate, who were now as afraid of him as they had been of Sulla. They waited for him to disband his army, then turned down his soldiers' demands and even refused to ratify his settlement of the east. Pompey took this smiling, and then mounted a constitutional coup. He got Crassus on his side for funding: Crassus was the richest man in Rome and more than ambitious enough to side with Pompey. For a front man, he picked a middle-aged playboy Senator named Gaius Julius Caesar, who was in charge of what was left of the populares. Between the three of them, they took the Consulate of 59, handed out offices to their supporters, and generally ran the Republic: much to the surprise of the Senate, which suddenly found itself powerless.

Nobody knew it then, but the Senate had now exercised its authority for the last time; the clock was ticking down fast on the Republic.

*Despite the fact that "Teutonic" has long been a synonym for "German", the Cimbri and Teutones were both Gallic, not Germanic, tribes.

**Consisting of westernmost Asia Minor, this had formerly been the kingdoms of Pergamum and Bithynia.

***Think "Stalinist purge" and you won't be far wrong.

****The Roman constitution actually contained a position for a Dictator (lit "one who speaks", since his every word was law). However, he was explicitly limited to a single term of six months; Sulla's unlimited Dictatorship was essentially a suspension of the constitution and Republican rule. (Just to note, the last Dictatorship had been during the Second Punic War, when it was feared Hannibal would attempt to take Rome.)

*****This rapidly became a necessity for post-Marian generals; even Sulla had done it (and, as dictator, was able to get it for them in the Po Valley).

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part I)

Why? Because I wanted to.

As the third century BC came to a close, the Roman Republic was the power to watch in the Mediterranean world. The preceding quarter-century had seen it engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Carthage, the other great power of the Western Mediterranean, and after 17 years of close-run fighting, Rome had emerged absolutely triumphant. Indeed, the Second Punic War* may well be considered the Republic's high point; through crushing defeat after crushing defeat, the Republic had never faltered in its efforts for absolute victory, or in its confidence that it would achieve it. Hannibal, the greatest general Carthage ever produced, could defeat the Romans in the field time after time after time, but the Romans never ceased fielding new armies and by 201 BC they had forced Carthage to a humiliating peace. Rome took all Carthage's overseas empire; Carthage itself was reduced to a dependency.

Rome had acquired by this time a rather patchwork empire. Italy from the Alps to the heel and toe was Roman, or subservient allies; Sicily, Corsica-Sardinia, and Near and Far Spain** were all provinces. In between, the tributary Greek colony of Massilia held Provence; on Africa, the Roman ally of Numidia ruled most of what is now northern Algeria, and Carthage was left with Tunisia. The strange thing was, the Republic had not particularly wanted any of this; Italy had been picked up piecemeal in the process of defending the city itself, and the other provinces had been taken from the Carthaginians during the wars. But the Empire proved so profitable - Sicily alone was almost as rich as Roman Italy - that more expansion suddenly seemed more attractive to the Senate.

The Senate - despite its name, the Roman Republic was a rather oligarchic state. The Senate, an unelected council of the richest and most noble citizens, held the legislative power. The people of Rome, through their popular assemblies, held the power to elect most officials, particularly the executive, the two co-Consuls, but in practice most of these were from the Senatorial class. The one real check the plebeians had was the office of the Plebeian Tribune, a position which held the power of veto (from the Latin veto, "I deny") over the Senate and Consuls; but in the first years of the second century, even they tended to at least passively support the aristocratic program.

However oligarchic it was in effect, though, the Roman Constitution supported the of separation of powers, at least within the Senatorial class. Early on, the Senate held less of the power; the Consulship, with the power to lead armies and the responsibility for the administration of government, was where the real interest lay. But the acquisition of empire changed this; the people might have the ability to elect the magistrates of Rome, but the Proconsular*** military commands and provinces - and the opportunities for wealth and power they provided - were the gift of the Senate. And the Senate suddenly had a plethora of military commands to hand out.

With the western Mediterranean at Rome's beck and call, the direction Rome looked now was east. Right next door to the new Roman empire was the Hellenistic world, the richest and most cultured part of the Earth. In the century or so since the death of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had spread across most of the eastern Mediterreanean, which in turn was now divided amongst a number of Greek principalities of varying size and power. First up on Rome's list was Macedon. The state which had once conquered the known world was now reduced to the confines of Greece, but it was still bar none the most powerful state there. Macedon's king Philip V ruled, more-or-less directly, most of the peninsula; and after a brief war in the 200s, he took most of the Aegean too. The last few states left outside Philip's hegemony - the Ionian city-states of Pergamum and Rhodes, and the mainland Greek Aetolian league - appealed to Rome for help. The Senate, always eager to pick up a new causus belli, agreed; but there was another reason, too. Philip had been an ally of Carthage in the last war; Rome had a score to settle.

The ensuing war was short, sharp, and decisive. The Macedonian phalanx had been a war-winning weapon on its lonesome a century before, but times had changed; the Roman legion was the new military trump card. At the battle of Cynocepahalae in 197 BC the Roman swordsmen got in amongst the tightly packed Greek spearmen and from there the victory was quick. Philip sued for peace, with the end result that he was restricted to Macedon proper (northern Greece) while the rest of the Greek states formerly under Macedonian hegemony were now under Roman. The Aetolians - who hadn't started the war just to trade one set of masters for another - promptly called in the next power over, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III.

The Seleucid kingdom was the largest - and as a result, the most troubled - of Alexander's successor states. Like the others, it was the creation of one of Alexander's generals, in this case, Seleucus; and its name tells its story. The domain of General Ptolemy, Egypt, is sometines referred to as the Ptolemaic Kingdom; the domain of the Antigonid Dynasty was never called anything but Macedon. By contrast, the Seleucid Kingdom - most of Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau - was never called anything but the Seleucid Kingdom, because there was nothing behind it but "that area currently ruled by the descendants of General Seleucus". Its history is nothing but the struggle against the centripetal forces slowly ripping it apart. Antiochus III had, in his 31 years on the throne, proved particularly capable holding it together. When, in 192 BC, he entered Greece at the plea of the Aetolians, he had no doubt he could successfully add Greece to his domains.

The Romans, of course, had other plans; and the fact that Antiochus had given refuge to Hannibal after his Roman-enforced exile from Carthage only added fuel to the fire. In the event (Magnesia, 190 BC) Antiochus' phalanxes proved no more able to defeat the legions of Rome than Philip's had; at the treaty in 188 BC he was forced to renounce all interest in the Aegean and hand over most of western Anatolia to Rome's loyal allies Pergamum and Rhodes. The treaty was not unduly harsh - Rome's direct domains expanded not at all**** - but the fact of his defeat undid Antiochus' life-work. The Parthians overthrew his rule in the east and rapidly overran most of the Iranian plateau; Anatolia disintegrated into a mess of principalities, largely Greek but none of them Seleucid. Antiochus was left with merely Mesopotamia and the Levant.

In less than two decades, then, Rome had defeated most of the states of the Mediterranean world and put the fear of the Republic into the rest. Of the fully-independent states remaining, Ptolemaic Egypt was a Roman ally paralyzed under a series of weak kings and regencies, the Seleucids were still trying to salvage what little they could of their humbled Empire, and the Anatolians were too small and unestablished, the Parthians too far away, to pose much of a threat. The next two generations would see mainly peaceful consolidation overseas and violent instability at home.

For the famous partnership between Senate and People, which had handed Rome control of the western Mediterranean world, was coming undone. The backbone of the early Republic had been the yeoman farmers of Latium, who had formed the army in its early wars and whose implacable determination had won them. But as time went on the Senatorial class became more and more powerful, and more and more rich, and began to acquire larger estates, at home and abroad, in the process squeezing out the smaller landholders, who moved discontentedly into the cities. This process also began to erode the army; without the farmers from which it had traditionally recruited, its manpower pool began to slowly dry up.

But for the time being, the process wasn't seen as a threat by the Senators, who were more concerned with their own aggranizement. From the end of the Syrian War with Antiochus, through to the end of the century, there were no major wars either, which helped. In the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC), the Republic finally reduced Macedon to a province; they did the same to the rest of Greece in 148 BC, Carthage in 146 BC*****, and Pergamum in 133 BC. But for the most part the trouble Rome was going through was internal. The decades of peace in the mid-second century saw the Senatorial classes accumulate more and more land, at the expense of the traditional yeoman farmers that had supported the early Republic. The impoverished and the dispossessed filtered into the cities, where, in 133 BC, they elected a Plebian Tribune in support of them. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a member of one of Rome's more prominent families - his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, had been the one to finally defeat Hannibal in 202 BC - started on a program of land reform, breaking up the Senatorial estates and distributing it amongst the landless. The Senate blocked this, Gracchus used his veto to effectively shut down the government, and then was murdered by a senatorial mob. His program was revived a decade later by his brother Gaius; Gaius added cheap food for the rest of the urban poor and tried to bring the middle classes onboard by offering to widen the qualifications for magistracies and provincial positions. But in 122 BC he too was killed in mob violence and most of his reforms were shut down by the Senate.

A crisis was now inevitable.

*Second, because of a first some three decades before; "Punic" is a synonym for Phoenician, from whom the Carthaginians were descended.

**Despite the name, "Far Spain" is not the Atlantic coast or even the interior, but merely the southern half of the Mediterranean coast, roughly the valley of the Guadalquivir. Near Spain is the valley of the Ebro.

***Literally "for the consul"; a military command assigned by the senate to someone who acts in place of the actual consul. As the frontiers moved out, the consuls tended to stay at home more and let the Senate delegate generalships to professionals. More on this later.

****The Senate, despite all the opportunities for personal aggrandizement annexation provided, were never actually that big on it; they always preferred to set up tributary allies. The Republic then tended to squeeze their allies until they revolted, and only then would they set up provincial governments.

*****The defeat of Carthage tells a lot about Roman feelings towards that city. It was the pet project of Marcus Porcius Cato, an early-second century politician best-known for the phrase "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed") which he famously ended his every speech with, no matter its subject. He pushed for war for most of his career, but it was not until 151 BC that the notoriously legalistic Senate was provided with an excuse. The treaty that ended the Second Punic War held that, amongst other things, Carthage could not go to war without Rome's permission; in 151 BC the Roman ally of Numidia finally upped its raiding of Carthage to the point where the Carthaginians felt obliged to respond. The Senate seized upon this as a breach of the treaty; the ensuing war amounted to a siege of Carthage in which the city held out for three years but the final outcome was never in doubt. In 146 BC the Romans breached the walls, sacked the city, burned it to the ground, sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery, and plowed salt into the ashes.