Was the Roman Republic doomed?
The conventional answer to this is that victory in the Second Punic War opened up unbridgeable class tensions between the increasingly wealthy nobiles and the increasingly impoverished mass of the people. Not only was there a huge influx of wealth and slave labour from Rome becoming the dominant power in the Mediterranean, but smallholding citizen-soldiers who were supposed to be the bedrock of the Republic's armies were bankrupted by Hannibal's devastation of Italy and then required to go on far-flung military campaigns for years without compensation while their farms were left to ruin. The violent refusal of land reform by the Senate necessitated the opening up of the army to landless citizens who were then in the debt of the generals who lead them, which they exploited to gain political power by arms. And so on.
They tried land reform under Gracchus, but he was assassinated.
