Did Rome have better governments during the Republic?

[Cassius]

It’s difficult to say given the fact that all surviving literary accounts are inevitably skewed by the biases of their authors (something that applies as much to those who wrote about the Republic as about the Empire). I will say that the Roman Republican constitution may have worked fairly well when Rome was a city-state and a purely Italy-based power, but once it emerged as the hegemon of the Mediterranean region it became a bad fit, something that was dramatically exacerbated by the change in the basis of the Roman military from a citizen army (which had also become a bad fit) to a professional one at the time of the Marian reforms. Augustus’ creation of the Principate, which essentially established one source of patronage for the professional army, partly voided one of the central problems of the late Republic, that of competing sources of patronage for different armies. It didn’t solve it though, and the problem would re-emerge with increasing frequency throughout the imperial period once you had emperors who didn’t enjoy the auctoritas of an Augustus, a Vespasian or a Trajan.

[Cassius]

Currently listening to the History of Rome podcast. In the middle of the 2nd Punic War at present.

That there were 2 counsels and this setup worked kind of stuns me.

Sometimes it did and sometimes it... really didn’t. Polybius’ account of the Battle of Cannae is a good example of the latter (although beware authorial bias as per).