According to the author, Harriet Flower, professor of classics at Princeton, “Roman Republics” (2010) is “based on the fundamental idea that periodization is essential to historical thinking and writing.” No one thinks of American history since 1776 as one monolithic bloc and, Flower argues, you shouldn’t think of Republican Rome’s 450-year history that way either. Dividing history into meaningful segments “serves the same function as the punctuation in a sentence and the paragraphs on a page,” she says.
The traditional lifespan of Republican Rome has often been categorized as 509 BC to 49 BC (when Caesar crossed the Rubicon), or perhaps 44 (when he was assassinated) or 27 (when Octavian took the name Augustus and inaugurated the system of the empire). Flower argues that the true end date of the Republic should be marked as 88, when Sulla first marched on Rome. Indeed, a central argument of “Roman Republics” is that historians have tended to “underestimate and misrepresent the decisive break that came with the New Republic established by Sulla in 81.”
Flower argues that based on the ancient evidence at least six distinct republics are “easily recognizable.” “Each republic had its own strengths and weaknesses,” she says, “different from those of other systems.” Her first order of revisionism is the start date of the Republic, which has universally been recognized as 509, the year of the Rape of Lucretia and the overthrow of the Tarquin dynasty. “Roman republicanism did not come into being at a single moment after the end of the monarchy,” she writes, “nor was it created by a single lawgiver or reformer,” although several ultimately tried, Sulla foremost among them. Rather, in Flower’s estimation the first Roman republic began in 450 with the introduction of the Roman law code enshrined in the Twelve Tables, which introduced the pivotal concept of equality of citizens before the law. The half-century after the fall of the monarchy was a transitional period of unwritten laws in a pre- and proto-republican system marked by significant political strife. The first Republic lasted for almost a century (450 to 366) and came to an abrupt end with the radical political reform that laid the foundation for a system of government led by two consuls, shared between patricians and plebeians.
Flower’s second republic lasted just a half century (367 to 300), but marked the political ascendency of the nobiles, an elected aristocracy that would dominate Rome for the next couple of centuries. By the end of this period the plebeians had gained equal access to all positions of political power within the city, including important religious roles, such as the pontifex maximus. “The values of the new elite were defined in terms of achievements in war and personal merit,” Flower writes, “rather than by inherited status or specialized religious knowledge.” This period closed out the first two centuries after the fall of the monarchy when Rome’s politics were marked by complex debates, continuous political experimentation, and occasional sweeping reform. The republics of the nobiles – a period from 300 to 88 divided into three distinct republics – were the political highwater mark for Republican Rome, according to the author, “the most characteristic and successful republics” in Roman history.
The third Republic was the longest, spanning over a century, from 300 to 180, when the lex Villia Annalis was passed, which officially fixed the cursus honorum, the minimum ages for men to stand for each political office. This period includes the first two Punic Wars, but curiously Flower never mentions them or how the specific political form and function of the third Republic influenced the existential wars against the Carthiginians and the Barca family.
During the fourth Republic, which occurred over just forty years (180 to 139), Flower highlights several seemingly disconnected events that had long term political implications. For instance, the founding of citizen colonies in Italy ceased in 177. As of 153, the Roman political calendar commenced on January 1st rather than March 1st. In 149, Rome introduced its first permanent jury court composed exclusively of senators. Shortly thereafter, in 146, the cities of Corinth and Carthage were razed. Finally, in 139, the secret ballot (the lex Gabinia tabellaria) was introduced at Rome. Flower says this was “a political revolution at the very heart of the republic dominated by the nobiles.” The author never explains the practical effects of these political innovations, but she notes that peaceful reform could be just as revolutionary as the violent variety. It was these peaceful political reforms “that initiated the momentum for changes of diverse sorts in republican political and military culture.”
The fifth Republic, which according to Flower ran from 139 to 88, covers the real meat-and-potatoes of late Republican political upheaval and, in the author’s estimation, concludes with the true collapse of the Roman Republic when Sulla and his client army first marched on his home city. The violence ushered in by the radical reforms of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121 was a shocking escalation from anything seen in Rome in living memory and fatally weakened, compromised, and ultimately corroded traditional republican political values and practices. At the heart of the political violence was the desire to appropriate political power for a small faction by circumventing republican practices, especially the free election of magistrates.
Flower emphasizes the disastrous consequences of Marius’s army reforms during the fifth Republic. In 107 Marius established Rome’s first ever standing army. In order to fill the ranks, he secured the right of the propertyless poor to enlist in the legions, thus severing the “essential and characteristic link between voting and military service.” Within a decade of the Marian reforms, the new landless recruits were battling each other on the streets of the city and intimidating the voting assemblies on the Forum. Marius himself, the most powerful individual Roman ever up to that point, was unable to control the monster that he had created. Virtual anarchy reigned in the 90s, the last decade of the true Roman Republic, according to Flower.
The author maintains that Rome’s crushing defeat in the Battle of Arausio against the Germanic tribes of the Teutoni and Cimbri in 105 was a critical turning point in Roman history. It was the biggest Roman defeat since Cannae against Hannibal in 216. Over 100,000 Roman legionaries and auxiliaries were reportedly lost. At this point in the Republic’s history, the Senate was unable to respond as they had during the Second Punic War. It now appeared that Rome’s only hope was a strong man who operated outside the rules. In this case it was Marius and his five consecutive consulships. Flower says that, “Marius’s career broke the republican pattern of collegiality, annuity, and the sharing of political and military duties and rewards among a group of men calling themselves the nobiles.” The republic would never recover.
The author contends that the tumultuous 80s were another transition period that featured a rogue regime in Rome led by Cinna against a rogue army in the field led by Sulla. The effects of Sulla’s eventual victory were devastating. “Any vestige of a republic was gone,” Flower says, “and in its place there were rivers of blood and a dictator who imposed his own political vision by force in the form of a new constitution.” Sulla used an extreme form of violence and even ethnic cleansing to combat the everyday lawlessness and disorder that plagued the city streets of Rome.
Sulla fashioned himself as a Roman Solon or Lycurgus: a benevolent lawgiver who bequeathed to his troubled city a new government and constitution that would remedy the ills that plagued their body politic. Sulla’s New Republic was “not a restoration of any kind,” Flower says. Indeed, “Sulla was a pragmatist, not an antiquarian.” His reforms presented a new and coherent system that represented a radical departure from what had come before. He sought to replace a system of tradition with a system of law. To implement his new legal program, Sulla doubled the size of the Roman Senate, from roughly 300 members to 600. The new senators were political novices, most of them of equestrian rank with no experience in public office. Most of these men served mainly as jurors in Sulla’s new and expanded system of law courts. Sulla also abolished the prestigious post of censor, which traditionally had developed and edited the list of senators (it would be reintroduced in the year 70). Finally, he introduced a drastic reduction in the power of the ten tribunes of the plebs. The once powerful tribunate was limited to helping individual citizens who were threatened by the arbitrary power of a magistrate. Moreover, tribunes were ineligible from ever holding any other office after their year of service was up, effectively turning the once vaunted post into a dead-end job.
Frankly, Sulla’s reforms, as described by Flower, sound highly rational. She says that the sixth Republic – effectively the Sullan Republic, which lasted from 81 to 60 and marks her final Republic in Roman history – was “a political constitution based on laws and their regular enforcement by a system of courts.” From a twenty-first century Western perspective, it all sounds quite familiar and commendable. Flower says this somewhat antiseptic system built on laws and courts was a drastic change from the far messier traditional Roman Republic that had been based on “deliberation in the senate, debate in front of the people, and on elaborate rituals of compromise and consensus building in both settings.” In other words, Flower concludes, lex (law) was to replace mos maiorum (ancestral customs).
Like Solon, Sulla left his politically transformed city to allow his reforms to set in without his overbearing presence. He died shortly thereafter in 78. “The content, style, and origins of Sulla’s New Republic were too revolutionary and too foreign to last in Rome,” Flower writes, “especially after they were imposed by a man who was not present to enforce them himself for any length of time.” Sulla had hoped to be remembered as a man who had established a new standard of law and order. Instead, he is best known for establishing the dangerous precedent of a powerful general marching on Rome with a client army, an act Flower calls “a decisive watershed in republican life.”
Sulla’s New Republic never took hold in Rome. At no point was the new legal system and associated law courts the established status quo. Resistance was immediate and intense. The extraordinary career of Pompey, especially his remarkable co-consulship with Crassus in 70 when he was only 36-years-old and without having held any other elective office, did much to undermine Sulla’s reforms, especially his restoration of the full powers of the tribunate. Long and aggressive military campaigns led by an all-powerful general drove significant expansions of the empire and vast wealth for the conquering legions. It was the exact situation that Sulla had sought to avoid. Flower says that Pompey’s legendary triumph parade after defeating Mithridates in 61 marks “the end of republicanism and the beginning of a new age of warlords.” Gone were the basic concepts of republican political life: “collegiality, annuity, gaps between office, standardized career patterns, repeated accountability in a court of law.” In the post-republican world, money and power (and loyal troops) were all that mattered. Politics, in the old sense of the terms, was a no-man’s land. “Marius and Sulla put an end to traditional republican politics,” Flower says, “and ushered in a lengthy and unstable era of transition to a type of monarchy.”
In closing, Flower contends that the Roman Republic couldn’t survive the tumultuous reforms of her fifth Republic (139 to 88), especially the army reforms of Marius (107) and the expansion of enfranchisement after the Social War (91). It is noteworthy that Julius Caesar is hardly mentioned in “Roman Republics” (just nine references in the index). That’s because Flower sees his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 as a mere symptom of the republic’s decades old fall, rather than its cause. Indeed, Caesar was very much a man of his times, according to the author.
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