Did Rome have better governments during the Republic?

[buritobr]

Republic is better than empire not only in theory, but if we look at the history of Rome, we could think that the governments were better during the Republic.
There were insane emperors like Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Comodus. There was a period after Comodus in which the emperors were removed through violence.

There was violent fight to the power during the Republic, when Julius Caesar defeated Pompeo and when he was murdered, but the Empire became much more violent.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

The violent fight for the power did not start with Julius Caesar.

Have you ever heard of Lucius Cornelius Sulla?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Yeah, the entire final century of the Republic was an endless parade of political breakdown, street violence and open civil war. The Principate was more stable, but popular memory is skewed to remember it as a parade of psychotically evil tyrants because the senatorial class wrote the histories. They despised imperial rule for all the uppity freedmen and equestrians receiving plum offices, the taxes levied on them and the not infrequent mass executions of senators when a plot against the emperor was discovered, and idealised the Republic as a golden age of liberty when the Senate and not some autocrat (who depended on popular support) called the shots.

In terms of quality of government one only needs to look at all of the massive public works projects completed under the emperors, the establishment of public firefighters and police, reform of the grain dole...under the Republic these and other sensible ideas were constantly blocked by the Senate and the politicians who proposed them assassinated because senators were afraid that anyone who got credit for reforms like these would become too popular with the ordinary people of Rome!

[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.

[StateBoiler]

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.

[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).

[Statilius the Epicurean]

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.

Yeah, it should be kept in mind that Augustus' founding of the "Empire" was really an ad hoc settlement based, at least de jure, within the Republican constitution. In order to avoid alienating the Senate and getting himself assassinated like Julius Caesar (and Nero, Caligula, Domitian, who also stepped on the Senate's toes by amassing too much monarchical power and were killed) all of Augustus' powers were carefully constructed to be operated through the authority of the traditional magistracies: the censor, the tribune of the plebs, the proconsulate etc.. And getting Senatorial buy-in to the Augustan solution to the problem of rogue armies required Emperors to 1) not set up a constitutional process of inheriting the purple as if they were kings, leading to constant succession crises, and 2) keep administration of the Empire largely within the closed circle of 600 Senators as if Rome was still a city state, preventing them from going for a bureaucratic taxation solution to the chronic fiscal problems the Empire faced every time they had to fight a war and leading to currency devaluation and eventually economic crisis in the 3rd century. This was only solved by the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, who finally sidelined the Roman aristocracy and for the first time established a professional imperial bureaucracy alongside a more monarchical style of rule to ease succession.

[StateBoiler]

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).

Duncan is talking about Cannae in The History of Rome about how the 2 counsels disagreed on what to do that there were 1 of 2 solutions - each counsel gets half the army or they alternated days of control, which they did at Cannae. He stated that as what they did and granted it was spoiled to me it was Rome's greatest ever military defeat but upon hearing "alternating days of control" I instantly thought "holy sh**t, what an incredibly awful idea".

Still, this counsel system even up from the end of the Kingdom until Cannae had lasted longer than the United States of America has now been in existence. It just amazes me it didn't create civil wars every 15 to 20 years through competition for control.

[buritobr]

Was the Roman Republic doomed?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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).

Specifically note that one of the Consuls who presided over that fiasco (the one who died) was the grandfather of Polybius' patron, and that filial piety may have resulted in a few cunning distortions here and there.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Was the Roman Republic doomed?

It lasted for over 450 years so I've always been of the opinion that, doomed or not, it had a better run than most countries or systems of government get.

[StateBoiler]

Was the Roman Republic doomed?

It lasted for over 450 years so I've always been of the opinion that, doomed or not, it had a better run than most countries or systems of government get.

The French are on their 5th attempt at a democratic republic in contrast.

To answer buritobr: "This too shall pass."

[Statilius the Epicurean]

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.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The Roman Republic was a system designed to be in perpetual war; with the Latins, Etruscans, Gauls, Samnites, Greeks, Carthaginians, Seluccids, Macedons and Lucitanians all serving as an endless series of enemies to be the designated villains of the era. As flawed as it was, plebs could reasonably believe they had a stake in the survival of this project and individual patricians knew their ambitions were synonymous with the success of the Roman project. (This is why the propaganda of the Republic extolled selfless nobles like Cincinnatus relinquishing his power and Brutus killing his traitorous sons) When Rome became a hegemon, suddenly the whole purpose of the system was turned on its head: military actions were no longer a noble act from a people threatened with extinction at the hands of barburous outsiders, but feathers in the caps of vainglorious individuals like Pompey and Caesar. When the Punic Wars were won (a process which necessitated the weakening of much of the democratic institutions, given populism was blamed for Cannae and so on), the plebs suddenly started to be aware of how little it all meant for them. The wars that the Republic ran on had ran out of fair targets, and so the patrician class were free to turn on each other.

[buritobr]

You mean, the republic worked well when Rome ruled only the Italian Peninsula, but became dysfunctional when Rome controlled a big area including the Iberic Peninsula, Galia and northern Africa?

[Samof94]

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.