I’ve just wrapped a couple audiobooks on the Roman republic.
The Storm Before The Storm, by Mike Duncan, read by him. This must be the 4th-5th time I’ve started this, but I kept getting interrupted by life stuff. Not this time! It runs from the aftermath of the Punic Wars (about which I’ll say a bit more below) to the end of Sulla’s time as dictator, fifty-sixty years from the 130s BC to 80 BC. Duncan is a very good storyteller and narrator, and it’s a lively book.
Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts, read by Matt Kugler. This is a more expansive book, starting with Pyrrhus’ invasion of southern Italy in 280 BC and running forward to the assassination of Julius Caesar and its aftermath in 44-43 BC. He has a specific argument to make, too, which I’ll also describe below. This is a more emotionally intense book than Duncan’s and Kuglar does a great job conveying that sense of impending disaster that might have been avoided, but not by these principal players.
The last two centuries of the Roman republic are the story of the dog catching the car, repeatedly. In the preceding three centuries, it grew from a single town to ruling an increasingly large fraction of the peninsula, and mostly made it work. Frays in the seams about precisely what social position to allow the “allies”, the subjects outside Rome, were accumulating, but would probably have gotten resolved if the republic hadn’t kept enlarging.
But it did.
This happened again and again: “Grr! We’re being threatened/harassed by the Cimbrians/Greeks/Cathaginians/etc and we’ve got to put a stop to that! Stomp stomp stomp stomp, because we’ve got the best ideology and logistics around! Yay, we won! Um. Now what do we do with these guys and all their stuff?” And they never did arrive at a better answer than making more and more the swag the personal loot of winning commanders and their replacements every few years.
Watts has a thesis: The republic worked when it had a monopoly on the rewards that people could earn via extraordinary service to it. Offices, triumphs, public memorials like statuary, ongoing privileges for oneself and one’s heirs, all this was under the control of the state, so that one’s peers and rivals had a say in what came of your being the best around at something. This broke down with geographical expansion, as more of the state’s work required people to be further away for longer periods of time. Purely personal kingdoms of wealth and power built up on the frontiers because they had to. Effective review could only be a sometimes thing, and over just a few generations, sums of money, troops under one’s direct command, and the like grew by literally orders of magnitude. In the final 2-3 republican generations, there were guys with resources directly comparable to the emperors coming up later. And there are limitation how much you can govern someone at that point if they don’t want you to govern them.
(Why, yes, in this book published in 2020, Watts does have things to say about modern problems of politics and society.)
It’s fascinating and tragic to watch a fairly stable aristocracy that could have become more democratic (and occasionally did!) crumble under the weight of problems that could probably only ever really get solved by the most successful people voluntarily passing up whole categories of self-enrichment.
