The Fall of the Roman Republic (BBC)

By Mary Beard    -   Last updated 2011-03-29

Roman revolution

In 133 BC, Rome was a democracy. Little more than a hundred years later it was governed by an emperor. This imperial system has become, for us, a by-word for autocracy and the arbitrary exercise of power.

At the end of the second century BC the Roman people was sovereign. True, rich aristocrats dominated politics. In order to become one of the annually elected 'magistrates' (who in Rome were concerned with all aspects of government, not merely the law) a man had to be very rich.

Even the system of voting was weighted to give more influence to the votes of the wealthy. Yet ultimate power lay with the Roman people. Mass assemblies elected the magistrates, made the laws and took major state decisions. Rome prided itself on being a 'free republic' and centuries later was the political model for the founding fathers of the United States.

By 14 AD, when the first emperor Augustus died, popular elections had all but disappeared. Power was located not in the old republican assembly place of the forum, but in the imperial palace. The assumption was that Augustus's heirs would inherit his rule over the Roman world - and so they did.

This was nothing short of a revolution, brought about through a century of constant civil strife, and sometimes open warfare. This ended when Augustus - 'Octavian' as he was then called - finally defeated his last remaining rivals Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC and established himself on the throne. Why did this revolution happen?

Daggers in the forum

Many Romans themselves put the key turning point in 133 BC. This was the year when a young aristocrat, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, held the office of 'tribune' (a junior magistracy which had originally been founded to protect the interests of the common people). As one ancient writer put it, this was when 'daggers first entered the forum'.

The course of events is clear enough. Gracchus proposed to distribute to poor citizens stretches of state-owned land in Italy which had been illegally occupied by the rich. But instead of following the usual practice of first consulting the 'senate' (a hugely influential advisory committee made up of ex-magistrates), he presented his proposal directly to an assembly of the people.

In the process, he deposed from office another tribune who opposed the distribution and argued that his reforms should be funded from the money that came from the new Roman imperial province of Asia.

Gracchus's land bill was passed. But when he tried to stand for election for another year's term as tribune (a radical step - as one of the republican principles was that each office should be held for one year only), he was murdered by a posse of senators.

Gracchus's motivation is much less clear. Some modern historians have seen him as a genuine social reformer, responding to the distress of the poor. Others have argued that he was cynically exploiting social concerns to gain power for himself.

Whatever his motives were, his career crystallised many of the main issues that were to underlie the revolutionary politics of the next hundred years.

Painting dated 1781 depicting a young Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus with their mother, Cornelia.

Challenge of the army

The consequences of Rome's growing empire were crucial. Many of the poor had fallen into poverty after serving for long periods with armies overseas - and returning to Italy to find their farmland taken over by wealthier neighbours.

How were the needs of such soldiers to be met? Who in Rome was to profit from its empire, which already stretched from Spain to the other end of the Mediterranean?

Tiberius's decision to use the revenues of Asia for his land distribution was a provocative claim - that the poor as well as the rich should enjoy the fruits of Rome's conquests.

But Tiberius's desire to stand for a second tribunate also raised questions of personal political dominance. The state had few mechanisms to control men who wanted to break out of the carefully regulated system of 'power sharing' that characterised traditional Republican politics.

This became an increasingly urgent issue as leading men in the first century BC, such as Julius Caesar, were sometimes given vast power to deal with the military threats facing Rome from overseas - and then proved unwilling to lay down that power when they returned to civilian life. There seemed to be no solution for curbing them apart from violence.

Intensifying crisis

The events of 133 BC were followed by a series of intensifying crises. In 123-122 BC, Tiberius's brother Gaius was elected to the tribunate, introduced a whole package of radical legislation, including state-subsidised corn rations - and was also murdered.

At the end of the century Gaius Marius, a stunningly successful soldier, defeated enemies in Africa, Gaul and finally in Italy, when Rome's allies in Italy rebelled against her.

He held the highest office of state, the consulship, no fewer than seven times, an unprecedented level of long-term dominance of the political process.

Marius then came into violent conflict with Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another Roman warlord, who after victories in the east actually marched on Rome in 82 BC and established himself 'dictator'.

This had been an ancient Roman office designed to give a leading politician short terms powers in an emergency. Sulla held it for two years, in the course of which he had well over a thousand of his political opponents viciously put to death.

Unlike Julius Caesar, however, who was to become dictator 40 years later, Sulla retired from the office and died in his bed.

Pompey vs Caesar

Marble bust of Pompey the Great  ©

The middle years of the first century BC were marked by violence in the city, and fighting between gangs supporting rival politicians and political programmes.

The two protagonists were Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus ('Pompey the Great', as he was called, after Alexander the Great) and Julius Caesar. Originally allies, they became bitter enemies. Both had conquered vast tracts of territory: Pompey in what is now Turkey, Caesar in France.

Caesar promoted radical policies in the spirit of Tiberius Gracchus; Pompey had the support of the traditionalists.

Historians in both the ancient and modern world have devoted enormous energy to tracking the precise stages by which these two men came head-to-head in civil war. For much of this period we can actually follow the daily course of events thanks to the surviving letters of a contemporary politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

But the fact is that, given the power each had accrued and their entrenched opposition, war between them was almost inevitable. It broke out in 49 BC. By the end of 48 BC, Pompey was dead (beheaded as he tried to land in Egypt) and Caesar was left - to all intents and purposes - as the first emperor of Rome.

But not in name. Using the old title of 'dictator', he notoriously received the kind of honours that were usually reserved for the gods. He also embarked on another programme of reform including such radical measures as the cancellation of debts and the settlement of landless veteran soldiers.

He did not, however, have long to effect change (perhaps his most lasting innovation was his reform of the calendar and the introduction of the system of 'leap years' that we still use today). For in 44 BC he too was murdered by a posse of senators, in the name of 'liberty'.

Not much 'liberty' was to follow. Instead there was another decade of civil war as Caesar's supporters first of all battled it out with his assassins, and when they had been finished off, fought among themselves.

There was no other major player left when in 31 BC Octavian (Caesar's nephew and adopted son) defeated Antony at a naval battle near Actium in northern Greece.

Augustus, emperor

Marble statue of Augustus, believed to have been commissioned in 15 AD, now held at the Vatican Museums and Galleries, Italy  ©

During his 40-year rule, Octavian established the political structure that was to be the basis of Roman imperial government for the next four centuries.

Some elements of the old republican system, such as magistracies, survived in name at least. But they were in the gift of the emperor ( princeps in Latin).

He also directly controlled most of the provinces of the Roman world through his subordinates, and he nationalised the army to make it loyal to the state and emperor alone. No longer was it to be possible for generals, like Pompey or Caesar, to enter the political fray with their troops behind them.

There was a good deal of clever spin here. The princeps rebranded himself, getting rid of the name 'Octavian', and the past associations of civil war, and called himself 'Augustus' instead - an invented name which meant something like 'blessed by the gods'.

No less important, like many autocrats since, he invested heavily in reshaping the city of Rome with massive building projects advertising his rule, while poets sang the praises of him and the new Rome. He spared no effort promoting his family as a future imperial dynasty.

Augustus was both canny and lucky. When he died in 14 AD, aged well over 70, he was succeeded by his stepson, Tiberius. By then the idea of the 'free republic' was just the romantic pipe-dream of a few nostalgics.

Find out more

Books

Rome in the Late Republic by M Beard and M Crawford, (2nd ed, Duckworth, 1999)

Et tu Brute? Caesar's Murder and Political Assassination by G Woolf, (Profile Books, 2006)

Augustan Rome by A Wallace-Hadrill, (Bristol Classical Press, Duckworth, 1998)

Camridge Companion to Republican Rome by H Flower (ed), (CUP, 2004)

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Select Letters by (Penguin, 2005)