According to 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.” Just as no one would treat American history since 1776 as a single, undifferentiated era, Flower argues, we should not approach the roughly 450-year history of the Roman Republic that way either. Dividing the past into meaningful periods, she explains, “serves the same function as the punctuation in a sentence and the paragraphs on a page,” imposing structure on the historical narrative and helping us recognize moments of continuity, rupture, and transformation.
The traditional lifespan of the Roman Republic is generally dated from 509 BC to 49 BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, although alternative endpoints include his assassination in 44 BC or Octavian’s assumption of the title Augustus in 27 BC, which conventionally marks the beginning of the Roman Empire. Flower, however, argues that the decisive break came much earlier: in 88 BC, when Sulla became the first Roman commander to march his army against Rome itself. 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.” For Flower, therefore, the age of Caesar was not so much the moment when the traditional Republic suddenly collapsed as the culmination of a political order that had already been fundamentally and irreversibly transformed.
Flower argues that the ancient evidence reveals at least six distinct Roman republics that are “easily recognizable.” “Each republic had its own strengths and weaknesses,” she writes, “different from those of other systems.” Her first major revision concerns the Republic’s traditional starting date of 509 BC, the year associated with the rape of Lucretia and the overthrow of the Tarquin monarchy. “Roman republicanism did not come into being at a single moment after the end of the monarchy,” Flower argues, “nor was it created by a single lawgiver or reformer,” although several Romans would eventually attempt precisely that, Sulla foremost among them.
Instead, Flower dates the emergence of Rome’s first true republic to 450 BC and the promulgation of the Twelve Tables, Rome’s first written law code, which established the pivotal principle of citizens’ equality before the law. She therefore regards the half-century following the fall of the monarchy as a transitional era of unwritten law: a pre- and proto-republican political order characterized by considerable institutional experimentation and social conflict. Flower’s first Republic lasted for nearly a century, from roughly 450 to 366 BC, before giving way to another fundamental political transformation. The reforms of the mid-fourth century established the foundations of a new republican order centered on two annually elected consuls and, crucially, the sharing of Rome’s highest political offices between patricians and plebeians.
Flower’s second republic lasted barely half a century, from 367 to 300 BC, but witnessed the political ascendancy of the nobiles, an elected aristocracy that would dominate Roman politics for the next two centuries. By the end of this period, plebeians had secured equal access to virtually every position of political authority in the city, including important religious offices 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 brought to a close the first two centuries following the overthrow of the monarchy, an era characterized by intense political debate, continuous institutional experimentation, and occasional sweeping reform. What followed was the great age of the nobiles: a period stretching from roughly 300 to 88 BC that Flower divides into three distinct republics. These constituted the political high-water mark of republican Rome, what she calls “the most characteristic and successful republics” in Roman history. During these centuries, the institutions, political culture, and governing elite most commonly associated with the classical Roman Republic reached their mature form.
Flower’s third Republic was the longest, lasting more than a century, from roughly 300 to 180 BC. Its endpoint was marked by the passage of the lex Villia Annalis, which formally regulated the cursus honorum by establishing minimum ages for men seeking Rome’s principal political offices. This period encompassed the first two Punic Wars and Rome’s existential struggle against Carthage and the Barcid family. Curiously, however, Flower devotes little attention to these conflicts or to the larger question of how the distinctive political institutions and governing practices of the third Republic shaped Rome’s ability to mobilize resources, absorb catastrophic defeats, and ultimately prevail over Carthage. Given the magnitude of the Punic Wars — and particularly the extraordinary pressures imposed on the Roman political system by Hannibal’s invasion — this omission leaves largely unexplored the relationship between Flower’s republican periodization and one of the greatest tests those institutions ever faced.
Flower’s fourth Republic lasted just four decades, from 180 to 139 BC, and was marked by a series of seemingly disconnected developments that carried significant long-term political consequences. The founding of Roman citizen colonies in Italy ceased in 177 BC. Beginning in 153 BC, the Roman political calendar commenced on January 1 rather than March 1. In 149 BC, Rome established its first permanent jury court, composed exclusively of senators. Three years later, in 146 BC, Roman armies razed both Carthage and Corinth, dramatically confirming Rome’s supremacy across the Mediterranean. Finally, in 139 BC, the lex Gabinia tabellaria introduced the secret ballot at Rome, a reform Flower describes as “a political revolution at the very heart of the republic dominated by the nobiles.”
Flower does not always explain the practical effects of these individual innovations in detail, but she emphasizes their cumulative significance. Political transformation, she argues, need not be violent to be revolutionary. Indeed, it was precisely these peaceful institutional reforms “that initiated the momentum for changes of diverse sorts in republican political and military culture.” In Flower’s interpretation, therefore, the fourth Republic was less a period of sudden rupture than one of incremental change, as seemingly modest reforms gradually altered the political culture and institutional foundations of the republican system.
Flower’s fifth Republic, which lasted from 139 to 88 BC, encompasses the real meat and potatoes of late republican political upheaval and culminates, in her interpretation, with the true collapse of the Roman Republic: Sulla’s unprecedented decision to turn his client army against Rome and march on his own city. The political violence unleashed during the radical reform movements of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121 BC represented a shocking escalation beyond anything Rome had experienced in living memory. Over the following decades, recurring violence progressively weakened, compromised, and ultimately corroded the traditional values, conventions, and practices upon which republican government depended.
At the heart of this breakdown, Flower argues, was the growing willingness of competing factions to seize and retain political power by circumventing established republican practices; most importantly, the free election of magistrates and the expectation that political rivals would accept electoral outcomes. What began with extraordinary measures and political violence in the age of the Gracchi gradually became an alternative means of conducting politics. By 88 BC, when Sulla demonstrated that a Roman general could use the personal loyalty of his soldiers to overturn the political order by force, the fundamental rules of republican government had been shattered.
Flower emphasizes the disastrous consequences of Marius’s military reforms during the fifth Republic. In 107 BC, Marius created what amounted to Rome’s first standing army and, to fill its ranks, secured the right of the propertyless poor to enlist in the legions. In doing so, Flower argues, he severed the “essential and characteristic link between voting and military service” that had long underpinned republican citizenship. Increasingly, soldiers without property or independent economic standing looked to their commanders for rewards, land, and advancement, creating personal bonds of loyalty that could compete with their allegiance to the state.
Within little more than a decade of the Marian reforms, these new landless soldiers were fighting one another in the streets of Rome and intimidating voting assemblies in the Forum. Marius himself — the most powerful individual Roman to emerge up to that point — proved unable to control the political and military forces his reforms had helped unleash. By the 90s BC, virtual anarchy prevailed. For Flower, this was the final decade of the true Roman Republic, as political violence, electoral intimidation, and the growing personal allegiance of soldiers to individual commanders steadily overwhelmed the traditional institutions and conventions of republican government.
Flower maintains that Rome’s crushing defeat at the Battle of Arausio in 105 BC against the Germanic Cimbri and Teutones represented a critical turning point in Roman history. It was Rome’s worst military catastrophe since Cannae in 216 BC, with ancient sources claiming that more than 100,000 legionaries and auxiliaries were lost. Yet the political response to Arausio differed markedly from Rome’s reaction to Hannibal two centuries earlier. During the Second Punic War, the Republic’s institutions had absorbed catastrophic defeats while continuing to distribute political and military authority among competing magistrates. By 105 BC, Flower argues, the Senate and the traditional republican system seemed incapable of mounting a comparable response.
Rome increasingly appeared to require a strongman willing and able to operate outside traditional republican conventions. That man was Marius, whose unprecedented series of five consecutive consulships from 104 to 100 BC represented a profound departure from established political practice. “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,” Flower writes. The immediate crisis was ultimately overcome — Marius destroyed the invading armies — but at enormous institutional cost. In Flower’s interpretation, the precedent had been set: when confronted by existential danger, Rome had entrusted its survival not to the normal workings of republican government but to the exceptional authority of a single man. The Republic would never fully recover.
Flower contends that the tumultuous 80s BC constituted another transitional period, characterized by a rogue regime in Rome under Cinna confronting an equally rogue Roman army in the field under Sulla. The consequences of Sulla’s eventual victory were devastating. “Any vestige of a republic was gone,” Flower writes, “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 responded to the lawlessness, political violence, and disorder that had engulfed Rome with violence on an altogether greater scale. Through proscriptions, executions, confiscations, and what Flower characterizes as forms of ethnic cleansing, he sought not merely to restore order but to eradicate his opponents and remake the Roman political system according to his own vision.
Sulla fashioned himself as a Roman Solon or Lycurgus: a benevolent lawgiver who would bequeath to his troubled city a new government and constitution capable of remedying the ailments afflicting the body politic. Yet Sulla’s New Republic was “not a restoration of any kind,” Flower emphasizes. Indeed, “Sulla was a pragmatist, not an antiquarian.” His reforms constituted a coherent new political system and a radical departure from what had come before. At their core was an attempt to replace a political order governed largely by tradition, precedent, and unwritten convention with one regulated more explicitly by law.
To implement his new constitutional program, Sulla doubled the size of the Senate from roughly 300 to 600 members. Many of the new senators were political novices drawn from the equestrian ranks, with little or no previous experience in public office, and much of their work consisted of serving as jurors in Sulla’s greatly expanded system of permanent law courts. Sulla also abolished the prestigious office of censor, which had traditionally supervised the membership and composition of the Senate, although the censorship would be restored in 70 BC.
Most dramatically, Sulla drastically curtailed the powers of the ten tribunes of the plebs. The once formidable tribunate was largely reduced to its original protective function: defending individual citizens against the arbitrary exercise of power by magistrates. Even more consequentially, anyone who served as tribune was thereafter barred from holding another political office. By transforming the tribunate from a potential springboard to higher office into a political dead end, Sulla effectively stripped one of Rome’s most powerful popular institutions of both its ambition and much of its influence.
Frankly, Sulla’s reforms, at least as Flower describes them, sound remarkably rational. Her sixth and final Republic — the Sullan Republic, lasting from 81 to 60 BC — rested upon “a political constitution based on laws and their regular enforcement by a system of courts.” Viewed through the lens of twenty-first-century Western political culture, such a system sounds strikingly familiar and even commendable: political authority constrained by written law, institutionalized procedures, and permanent courts.
Yet Flower’s point is that this seemingly rational — and somewhat antiseptic — legal order represented a dramatic departure from the political culture of the traditional Roman Republic. The older system had depended less upon comprehensive written rules than upon “deliberation in the senate, debate in front of the people, and on elaborate rituals of compromise and consensus building in both settings.” Republican government had functioned through a dense web of precedent, custom, personal relationships, negotiated compromise, and shared assumptions about acceptable political behavior. Sulla attempted to replace much of this fluid political culture with a more rigid constitutional structure enforced through law. In Flower’s formulation, lex (written law) was intended to replace mos maiorum (the ancestral customs and conventions that had governed Roman political life for centuries).
Like Solon, Sulla deliberately withdrew from the city he had politically transformed, allowing his reforms to take root without the overbearing presence of their architect. He died shortly thereafter, in 78 BC. “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 the lawgiver who restored order to Rome and established a new constitutional framework capable of preventing the political chaos of the preceding decades. Instead, his most enduring legacy was the precedent he had established years earlier: that a powerful Roman general commanding an army personally loyal to him could march on Rome and impose his political will by force. Flower calls that act “a decisive watershed in republican life.” The irony is profound. Sulla sought to replace political violence and disorder with law, but the example he left behind demonstrated that law itself could ultimately be subordinated to the ambitions of the man who commanded the legions.
Sulla’s New Republic never truly took hold in Rome. At no point did his new legal order and its elaborate system of courts become the accepted political status quo. Resistance was immediate and intense. The extraordinary career of Pompey did much to dismantle Sulla’s constitutional settlement, most conspicuously with his unprecedented consulship alongside Crassus in 70 BC. Pompey was only thirty-six years old and had never held another elective office, yet he vaulted directly to the Republic’s highest magistracy. During their consulship, Pompey and Crassus restored the full powers of the tribunate, reversing one of the central pillars of Sulla’s reforms.
Pompey’s subsequent career further undermined the political order Sulla had attempted to create. Long and aggressive military campaigns entrusted extraordinary authority to a single commander, producing dramatic territorial expansion, enormous personal wealth, and armies whose loyalty increasingly attached to their victorious general. It was precisely the situation Sulla’s constitutional reforms had been intended to prevent. For Flower, Pompey’s magnificent triumph following his defeat of Mithridates in 61 BC marks “the end of republicanism and the beginning of a new age of warlords.” The fundamental principles that had once structured republican political life — “collegiality, annuity, gaps between office, standardized career patterns, repeated accountability in a court of law” — had largely ceased to constrain Rome’s most powerful men.
In this post-republican world, wealth, military power, and the personal loyalty of soldiers increasingly mattered more than traditional political rules. Politics, in the old republican sense of the term, had become a kind of no-man’s-land in which the conventions that once governed competition among the elite no longer commanded universal obedience, while no durable alternative had yet taken their place. “Marius and Sulla put an end to traditional republican politics,” Flower concludes, “and ushered in a lengthy and unstable era of transition to a type of monarchy.” Caesar and Augustus, in this interpretation, did not destroy a functioning Roman Republic. They emerged from the political vacuum created by a republican system that had already collapsed decades earlier.
In closing, Flower contends that the Roman Republic could not survive the political and social upheavals of her fifth Republic (139–88 BC), particularly Marius’s military reforms beginning in 107 BC and the dramatic expansion of Roman citizenship following the Social War of 91–88 BC. By the time Sulla marched on Rome in 88 BC, the traditional republican order had already been fatally compromised.
It is therefore striking that Julius Caesar, so often cast as the central figure in the Republic’s destruction, barely appears in Roman Republics; his name receives just nine references in the index. For Flower, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC was not the cause of the Republic’s collapse but a symptom of a political order that had disintegrated decades earlier. Caesar was, in this sense, very much a man of his times: the product of a post-republican world in which extraordinary commands, personal armies, immense wealth, political violence, and the ambitions of individual warlords had already displaced the conventions that once governed republican political life. The crucial question for Flower is therefore not why Caesar destroyed the Republic, but why Rome’s traditional republican system had ceased to exist long before Caesar arrived at the Rubicon.
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