Roman Republic

Seven kings and the one who broke it

formationDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

Rome's own tradition gave it seven kings, from Romulus, a supposed founder suckled by a wolf, to Tarquin the Proud, driven out in 509 BC. Livy, writing under Augustus more than four and a half centuries later, says plainly in his own preface that events before the city's founding and immediately after it are better suited to poetry than to reliable history, and that he will not undertake to guarantee them. What follows here keeps that distinction: the kings are legend the Romans told about themselves, not a documented government.

What the legend was for

Whatever the historical kernel, the tradition gave later Romans something to define themselves against. Each king added a fixed institution to the city in turn - Numa the religious calendar and priesthoods, Servius Tullius the census and the military classes it organised citizens into - so that by the time the tradition reaches its final king, Rome already has, in outline, the machinery a republic without a king would go on using: an assembly organised by property class, a priesthood, a senate of elders advising the ruler.

The last king is where the legend turns openly moralising. Tarquin the Proud is remembered as a tyrant who ruled without consulting the senate and put opponents to death without trial - the charge sheet, not coincidentally, against exactly the kind of one-man rule the Romans spent the next five centuries organising their state to prevent.

Lucretia

The story the tradition gives for the actual expulsion is specific rather than general. Tarquin's son raped a Roman noblewoman, Lucretia, who told her husband and father what had happened, made them swear to avenge it, and killed herself rather than live with the disgrace. Her body was carried into the Forum. Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the men who had sworn the oath, pulled the knife from her wound and swore on it that he would drive out the whole house of Tarquin by every means in his power, and called on Rome to join him.

It worked. The king and his family fled the city, and the Romans - according to Livy, in the same year - voted to abolish the monarchy and replace it with two annually elected magistrates, holding equal power, each able to block the other's actions. Brutus was one of the first two.

Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Guido Reni · Public domain

What the story is actually evidence of

Whether Lucretia existed, and whether the mechanics happened in a single year rather than across a longer and messier transition modern archaeology would find harder to date so precisely, is not something the surviving record can settle. What can be said with more confidence is what the Romans themselves chose to remember about their own founding moment: not a constitution debated and drafted, but a single act of intolerable abuse by a king's household, answered by an oath and a public killing that made monarchy itself the thing to be ashamed of.

Every later Roman who accused a rival of aiming at kingship - and it happened repeatedly, across five centuries, to men who had done nothing resembling what Tarquin's son was said to have done - was invoking exactly this story. The republic's whole political vocabulary of suspicion toward concentrated personal power starts here, whether or not the woman at the centre of it ever lived.

The Conflict of the Orders

expansionDrafted from Livy, The History of Rome (1912)

Abolishing the monarchy did not make Rome's citizens equal. It left a hereditary aristocracy, the patricians, holding the senate, the priesthoods and the new consulship between them, and everyone else - the plebeians, the great majority of the citizen body - excluded from all three. The two centuries after 509 are substantially the story of the second group forcing its way into the first's institutions, by a method Rome used nowhere else in its history: withdrawing its labour and its soldiers rather than fighting in the streets.

The first secession

In 494, according to the tradition, the plebeians who made up most of the army simply walked out of the city and camped on a hill outside it, refusing to return until their grievances - chiefly debt bondage, which could turn a citizen who owed money into another citizen's unfree labourer

• were addressed. A city that depended on those men to fight its wars could not function without them, and the senate negotiated.

What came out of it was a new office found nowhere else in the ancient world in quite this form: the tribune of the plebs, a magistrate elected by the plebeians alone, sacrosanct - anyone who harmed a tribune was accursed and could be killed without penalty - and holding the power to veto any act of any other magistrate, including a consul. It was a constitutional brake built for one purpose: to let the excluded half of the citizen body stop the included half from acting against it.

The plebeians repeated the tactic, by the later tradition's count, several more times over the following two centuries, each secession winning a further concession.

The Twelve Tables

One of those concessions deserves a word here without repeating in full what its own fuller telling, and its afterlife in the classical jurists and in Justinian's later codification, already covers in detail. Around 451 and 450 BC, plebeian pressure produced Rome's first published law code, ten tables of rules posted in the Forum and later extended to twelve - a fixed, public text that ended the patrician priesthood's exclusive, unwritten knowledge of what the law actually was. It did for Rome's own citizens what the tribunate did for their magistrates: replaced an arrangement resting on one group's discretion with one either side could read and cite.

Livy, The History of Rome (1912) · Engraving after Sebastian Sapia · Public domain

The Lex Hortensia

The conflict's formal end came in 287. A law named for the dictator Quintus Hortensius made resolutions of the plebeian assembly binding on the whole Roman people, patrician and plebeian alike, without requiring the senate's prior approval - closing a loophole that had let the senate disregard plebeian votes it disliked. By any strict reading of the constitution, Rome was now a state in which the majority of citizens could make binding law without the old aristocracy's consent.

What it did and did not change

It did not abolish the aristocracy. Wealthy plebeian families had been marrying into patrician ones and standing for the consulship since the fourth century, and by 287 the two groups had substantially merged into a single governing class - patrician birth remained a mark of prestige, but a plebeian noble family's wealth and political standing were no longer meaningfully different from a patrician one's. What the conflict produced was not economic equality among Roman citizens, which never arrived, but a set of institutions - the tribunate, the plebeian assembly, published law - that stayed in place for the rest of the republic's life and that the next generation of ambitious Romans learned to use for their own purposes rather than for the plebeians' original ones. The seventh chapter is about what happened when they did.

Latium, then Italy

expansionDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

While the plebeians and patricians were negotiating their own arrangement inside the city, Rome was becoming the dominant power in the country around it, and the two processes ran on the same timetable for a reason: a city that needed its citizen-soldiers to keep winning wars could not afford to let a third of them sit out a campaign in protest indefinitely.

The neighbours

Rome spent the fifth and early fourth centuries fighting the other Latin cities of the plain around it, the Etruscan city of Veii to the north, and assorted hill peoples to the east and south, in a pattern common to every city-state in the region: alliances, betrayals, and slow accumulation of territory measured in individual towns rather than provinces. Veii fell after what the tradition remembers, almost certainly with exaggeration, as a ten-year siege. A Gallic raid sacked Rome itself around 390, a humiliation the Romans never fully stopped referring to, and the city rebuilt and kept expanding regardless.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Rijksmuseum · CC0

The Samnite Wars and the method that mattered more than any battle

The decisive conflicts were three wars against the Samnites, a confederation of hill peoples controlling the mountainous centre of the peninsula, fought intermittently between 343 and 290 BC. Rome lost badly at least once - an entire army was trapped and forced to pass under a symbolic yoke at the Caudine Forks in 321, a humiliation on the scale of the Gallic sack - and still won the war.

Paestum Archaeological Museum, Italy · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

What made the outcome durable was not the fighting but what Rome did with each victory. Rather than annexing defeated peoples outright and ruling them as subjects, Rome bound them as allies - socii - obliged to supply troops for Rome's wars and forbidden an independent foreign policy, but left with their own local government, their own laws, and in many cases eventual paths to Roman citizenship itself. A defeated people became part of the war machine that had defeated them rather than a resentful subject population waiting for the chance to break away. By the time of the wars against Pyrrhus of Epirus in the 280s and 270s - a Greek king whose victories over Roman armies cost him so many men that "another such victory and we are lost" became his own reported verdict on winning - Rome could replace its losses from a pool of Italian allies no single defeat could exhaust.

What "all Italy" meant by 264

By the time Rome went to war with Carthage in 264 BC, it controlled, directly or through the alliance system, the whole Italian peninsula south of the Po valley - not as a single administered territory, but as a network of scores of individual treaties, each specifying exactly what each community owed in soldiers and owed nothing else. No other Iron Age Mediterranean state had assembled manpower this way, on this scale, and it is the reason Rome could absorb catastrophic defeats in the following century and keep fielding armies when a state that ruled through direct annexation and a single citizen body would have run out of men.

Hannibal

expansionDrafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)

Polybius, an Achaean statesman deported to Rome as a hostage after his own country's defeat, wrote his history explicitly to explain to a Greek audience how Rome had conquered the known world in under a century - and he treats the war against Hannibal as the hinge the whole story turns on.

Bardo National Museum, Tunis · Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889) · Photograph: Issam Barhoumi · CC BY-SA 4.0

The first war, briefly

Rome and Carthage fought their first war, from 264 to 241 BC, over Sicily, and Rome won it at sea - a land power that had never before maintained a serious fleet built one, lost it repeatedly to storms and battle, rebuilt it each time, and eventually forced Carthage to accept peace on Roman terms. Carthage kept its African base and lost Sicily, its wealthiest overseas territory, along with an indemnity it spent years paying.

Carthage, Tunisia · Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889) · Photograph: Citizen59 · CC BY 3.0

The second war

Hannibal, a Carthaginian general who had grown up in Spain under his father's command and inherited both the army and, by his own later account, an oath sworn as a boy never to be a friend to Rome, invaded Italy directly in 218 BC by marching an army - including a contingent of war elephants that mostly did not survive the crossing - over the Alps in autumn, a route no army was expected to attempt.

He then destroyed three Roman armies in succession. At Trasimene in 217 he ambushed a consular army along a lake shore in fog and annihilated it. At Cannae in 216 he encircled and destroyed an army of a scale Rome had never before committed to a single battle - Polybius's own casualty figures, and those of other ancient sources, disagree on the exact count but agree that it was the worst single defeat Roman arms ever suffered, killing a meaningful fraction of the republic's entire adult male citizen body in a single afternoon.

What Rome did instead of negotiating

Polybius's own argument is that this is the moment the Roman system proved what it was for. A Greek city that had just lost an army of that size to an enemy loose in its own countryside would, in his judgment, have sued for peace. Rome refused even to discuss it. The senate met the survivors at the gates and thanked them for not despairing of the republic. New legions were raised from citizens too young or too old for normal service, from freed slaves, from whatever manpower the Italian alliance network - battered but still substantially intact - could still supply.

Fabius Maximus, a dictator appointed after Trasimene, adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle with Hannibal entirely, shadowing his army and cutting his supplies while refusing the one kind of fight Hannibal kept winning - a policy unpopular enough at the time that it earned him the nickname Cunctator, the Delayer, meant as an insult and preserved as a compliment. Hannibal spent the next thirteen years marching around Italy, winning battles, and watching the Italian alliance system refuse to break: some allied cities defected to him, most did not, and without a fleet capable of resupplying him from Carthage or reinforcing him at the scale he needed, he could win every battle he fought and still not win the war.

Zama

Rome took the war to Carthage's own territory instead. Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had survived Cannae as a young officer, invaded North Africa in 204 and forced Hannibal's recall from Italy for the first time in fifteen years. At Zama in 202, Scipio - reinforced by Numidian cavalry that had switched sides - defeated Hannibal decisively on ground of his own choosing for once. Carthage sued for peace on terms that stripped it of its fleet, its war elephants, and its independent foreign policy, and Scipio returned to Rome with the name Africanus.

Polybius's own verdict, writing two generations later with access to Carthaginian as well as Roman accounts, is that the war was decided less by any single battle than by the structural fact underneath all of them: Rome could lose army after army and field another, and Carthage, for all Hannibal's own genius, never found a way to make that stop being true.

Corinth and Carthage in the same year

peakDrafted from Alexandria, The Civil Wars (1899)

Rome spent the six decades after Zama fighting the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, and finished the process in 146 BC by destroying two of the Mediterranean's oldest and wealthiest cities within months of each other, on opposite ends of the sea, for two different reasons that converged on the same outcome.

Macedon and the Greek cities

Rome fought three wars against Macedon between 214 and 168 BC, the last of which ended at Pydna with a Roman legion breaking a Macedonian phalanx in open battle, a genuine turning point in how heavy infantry was used in the ancient Mediterranean. Macedon's monarchy was abolished outright and the kingdom broken into four client republics forbidden to trade or intermarry across their new borders.

Corinth, Greece · Alexandria, The Civil Wars (1899) · Photograph: Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 3.0

The Greek cities further south, nominally free after Rome's earlier declarations that it fought to liberate Greece from Macedonian rule, found that liberation had limits. The Achaean League, a federation of Greek cities that had at various points been a Roman ally, rose against Roman authority in 146 over a dispute originating in Sparta's own status within the league. Rome crushed the revolt in a single campaign and destroyed Corinth, one of the wealthiest and best-positioned trading cities in Greece, as an example: the male population was killed or enslaved, the city's famous art was shipped to Rome, and the site was left deliberately unoccupied for a century.

The third Punic War

In the same year, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Rome finished what Zama had left unfinished. Carthage had rebuilt itself as a prosperous trading city under the terms of the peace of 201, without its former empire or its fleet, and a faction in the Roman senate - Cato the Elder is remembered for ending every speech on any subject with the same sentence, that Carthage must be destroyed - argued for decades that a wealthy Carthage was a Carthage that would eventually threaten Rome again, treaty terms or not.

Rome manufactured a pretext, besieged the city for three years, and razed it in 146 after fighting through its streets house by house. The population that survived the siege was sold into slavery and the territory was organised as the new province of Africa.

Carthage, Tunisia · Alexandria, The Civil Wars (1899) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

What the same year means

Appian, who structured his own history of Rome by writing a continuous narrative for each conquered people rather than a single year-by-year account, makes the comparison explicit: two of the oldest and richest cities on the Mediterranean, one Greek and one Punic, destroyed within months of each other by the same power, for grievances that in neither case required annihilation as the remedy. Rome had spent two and a half centuries fighting wars it could plausibly present as defensive or retaliatory. By 146 it no longer needed the pretence to be convincing. No Mediterranean power remained that could contest Rome for anything, and the generation that grew up after 146 inherited a republic with no serious external rival left to organise its politics around - which the following chapters treat as part of the explanation for what that generation did to itself instead.

How the republic actually governed

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

Rome had no written constitution in the modern sense and no single document that set out how power was distributed. What it had was a set of offices, assemblies and customs that had accumulated since 509, each one a response to a specific earlier crisis, held together by a habit of deference to precedent - the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors - stronger than most of the individual rules it enforced.

The ladder

An ambitious Roman climbed a fixed sequence of elected offices, the cursus honorum: quaestor first, handling financial administration, usually in a province; then aedile, responsible for the city's markets, festivals and public buildings, an office with no formal power but a well-understood use as free advertising for a future consular campaign; then praetor, holding judicial authority and, increasingly, provincial military commands; and finally consul, the senior magistracy, held jointly by two men elected for a single year. Each rung had a minimum age attached, enforced with real inconsistency the better a candidate's family connections were, and moving from one rung to the next required a fresh election every time - no office carried automatic promotion to the one above it.

Two further devices were built into the design specifically to prevent any one part of it working the way a king's power had. Collegiality meant every major office was held by at least two men simultaneously, each with power to block the other. Annuality meant every term lasted exactly one year, with a customary though not always observed expectation of a ten-year gap before repeating a magistracy. A man who wanted to matter in Roman politics for longer than a year had to keep winning elections, which meant keeping the electorate persuaded - by military success, by public generosity, by oratory, or by all three at once.

The senate

The senate itself held no formal legislative power under most readings of the constitution: it could not pass binding law. What it held instead was auctoritas - a Latin word usually translated as authority but closer in sense to accumulated institutional weight - expressed through formal advice, the senatus consultum, that no magistrate in practice felt free to ignore. Roughly three hundred men, mostly former magistrates who held their seats for life once enrolled, met to debate foreign policy, finance, and any matter a sitting magistrate chose to bring before them. It was not elected and not accountable to the citizen assemblies in any direct sense, and for most of the republic's life it ran the state anyway, because the men who held the elected offices were, with rare exceptions, the same men who sat in it.

Roman Forum, Rome · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

The assemblies

Formal legislative power, and the election of magistrates, belonged to the citizen assemblies - several different bodies, organised on different principles (by property class in one, by geographic voting unit in another), each with its own jurisdiction over which kinds of law and which elections it handled. In practice, attendance required a citizen to be physically present in Rome on the day of the vote, which meant that citizens living at a distance, farming their own land or serving in the army, were structurally underrepresented relative to the urban population and, disproportionately, relative to the wealthy who could afford to keep a household in the city. A system that was formally popular in the fullest sense - every free adult male citizen had a vote - was informally skewed toward whoever could get their own supporters into the Forum on the right day.

What held it together, and what it assumed

None of this worked by force. There was no police force and no standing army permitted inside the city itself for most of the republic's life. What kept two consuls from simply refusing to leave office, or a tribune from ignoring an unfavourable vote, was the expectation that everyone else - the senate, the other magistrates, the electorate the next time a candidacy came up - would treat the man who broke the rules as having put himself outside the system that gave him standing in the first place. It worked for a very long time because ambitious Romans kept finding it more useful to win inside the rules than to break them.

The chapters that follow are substantially the story of what happened once that stopped being true.

The land nobody was farming

contractionDrafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

Rome's conquests had produced a problem its own institutions had no settled answer for: what to do with the enormous quantity of land - the ager publicus, public land technically owned by the Roman state - that conquered enemies had forfeited, most of it in Italy itself.

What had actually happened to it

In principle the state assigned public land in small parcels to citizens or leased it out at a nominal rent. In practice, over generations, wealthy families had occupied vastly more of it than the legal limit permitted, farming it with slave labour - itself supplied in growing numbers by the same wars that had produced the land - rather than the free peasant smallholders whose military service the republic's whole army system depended on. Plutarch's account, drawing on now-lost earlier sources, has Tiberius Gracchus travelling through Etruria on his way to a military post and being struck by the absence of free farmers working the land at all, and the presence instead of imported slave labour gangs.

Boscoreale, Campania, Italy · Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: RealCarlo · CC BY 2.0

Tiberius

Elected tribune for 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus proposed enforcing the existing legal limit on public land holdings and redistributing the excess in small parcels to landless citizens - not a new law so much as enforcement of an old one the wealthy had been ignoring for generations. It was popular with the citizens it would benefit and understood immediately by the senate as an attack on property its own members held, however irregularly.

When a fellow tribune, acting - by the more sympathetic ancient accounts - at senatorial instigation, vetoed the bill using exactly the constitutional power the tribunate had been created to exercise, Tiberius did something no tribune had done before: he had the assembly vote to depose his colleague from office mid-term, on the argument that a tribune who worked against the people's own interest had forfeited the office's protection. The bill passed. It was a procedural innovation with no clear precedent either sanctioning or forbidding it, and it convinced a significant part of the senate that Tiberius intended to rule by the assembly's votes rather than by the constitution's ordinary checks.

The killing

Tiberius stood for a second consecutive year as tribune, itself widely read as a further break with custom, campaigning on rumours - Plutarch is explicit that the truth of them was never established - that he intended still more sweeping changes. On the day of the election, a group of senators led by Tiberius's own cousin, convinced the sitting consul would not act against him, armed themselves with clubs and broken furniture, marched into the assembly, and beat Tiberius and some three hundred of his supporters to death. Their bodies were thrown into the Tiber rather than given proper burial.

What actually changed

The land question itself was not resolved by the killing - Tiberius's own younger brother Gaius, elected tribune a decade later in 123, revived and extended the programme along with a wider set of reforms before he too was killed in renewed political violence in 121, the first time the senate authorised the consuls to use whatever force was necessary against a citizen, a precedent invoked repeatedly in the civil wars that followed.

What mattered more than either brother's specific programme was the precedent the first killing set. Rome had fought wars, endured betrayals and survived Hannibal without its own political class killing each other in the Forum over a domestic policy dispute. After 133 it did that routinely, for the rest of the republic's life, and every subsequent generation of Roman politicians who reached for violence against a domestic rival could point to precisely this moment as the one that had made it thinkable.

Marius and Sulla

contractionDrafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

The reform that did the most long-term damage to the republic's stability was not aimed at the constitution at all. It was a practical fix for a recruitment shortage, made by a general who needed soldiers and found the old property-qualified levy could no longer supply enough of them.

Marius opens the legions

Gaius Marius, elected consul an unprecedented seven times between 107 and 86 BC, responded to a war in North Africa and a looming threat from migrating Germanic peoples by recruiting from the landless poor - men who did not meet the old census property threshold and had therefore never been eligible for legionary service - promising them pay, equipment supplied by the state rather than themselves, and a share of land or plunder on discharge.

It solved the manpower problem immediately and permanently changed what a Roman soldier's loyalty rested on. A property-owning citizen levy of the old kind had a farm to go home to regardless of how a campaign turned out, and its loyalty ran to the state that had called it up for the season. A landless volunteer whose livelihood depended entirely on his general securing him land or money at discharge had every reason to want that general, specifically, to stay powerful enough to deliver - and no comparable reason to prioritise the senate's own institutional interests over his.

Sulla marches on Rome

The consequence arrived within twenty years. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a former subordinate of Marius's turned rival, was assigned command of a war against Mithridates of Pontus in 88 BC; a political manoeuvre in Rome transferred the command to Marius instead while Sulla's own army was still mobilised nearby. Sulla did what no Roman general had done before: he led his legions into Rome itself, by force, against a rival Roman politician's faction rather than a foreign enemy, and his soldiers followed him rather than refusing to march against their own city - the clearest possible demonstration of exactly the loyalty shift Marius's reform had created.

Marius fled and later returned when Sulla left for the eastern war, seizing Rome in turn and killing a number of his own political enemies. Both men, in effect, had shown the same thing was possible; only the order differed.

The proscriptions

Sulla returned from the eastern war in 82 BC, defeated the faction that had controlled Rome in his absence, and had himself appointed dictator - an emergency office the republic's own constitution provided for, traditionally limited to six months and a specific crisis, which Sulla held with no fixed term at all. He then published proscription lists: names of citizens declared outlaws, whose killers could claim a reward from the victim's confiscated property and whose property, disproportionately, ended up in the hands of Sulla's own supporters. Thousands died, by the ancient accounts' own uncertain counts, in a process that made political killing an openly administered state policy rather than a mob's improvisation.

What nobody expected

Sulla used his dictatorship to push through a substantial programme of constitutional reform, most of it aimed at strengthening the senate against the kind of popular tribunate that had produced the Gracchi - stripping the tribunate of much of its legislative initiative, enlarging the senate, formalising the cursus honorum's age requirements. Then, in 79 BC, he resigned every power he held and retired to private life, dying the following year of natural causes.

Palestrina, Lazio, Italy · Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: Camelia Boban · CC BY-SA 3.0

No later Roman with comparable power ever did the same thing, which is itself worth noting: Sulla's retirement was treated by his contemporaries as remarkable precisely because it was not what the logic of the previous decade suggested a man in his position would do. What his career had demonstrated, and what every ambitious Roman after him had now watched happen twice, was that an army loyal to its general rather than to the state could take Rome, kill its political opponents by the thousand, and rewrite its constitution - and that whether the man who did it chose to give the power back afterward was now entirely a matter of his own character rather than anything the constitution itself could enforce.

Three men who agreed to share

contractionDrafted from Alexandria, The Civil Wars (1899)

Sulla's reforms had strengthened the senate against individual popular tribunes. They had done nothing to stop three ambitious men from simply agreeing among themselves to override the senate together, which is what happened in 60 BC.

The arrangement

Gnaeus Pompeius, called Pompey, had won a string of major military commands - against pirates infesting the Mediterranean, against Mithridates of Pontus, in the settlement of the whole eastern Mediterranean afterward - and returned to Rome expecting the senate to ratify his arrangements and grant land to his veterans. It refused, suspicious of a general who had shown he could raise armies the senate did not fully control. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome, wanted political influence to match his money. Gaius Julius Caesar, a patrician with plebeian sympathies and heavy debts, wanted a major military command of his own and the wealth and prestige that came with one.

The three men - none of whom held any formal joint office, since nothing in the constitution provided for one - agreed privately to pool their influence: Pompey and Crassus would use their standing to get Caesar elected consul for 59, and all three would support each other's subsequent interests against the senate. It worked. Caesar, as consul, pushed through Pompey's eastern settlements and land grants for his veterans over senatorial objection, and secured for himself a five-year military command in Gaul - later extended to ten - that no ordinary consular term would have granted him.

Gaul

Caesar used the command to conquer the whole of Gaul, roughly modern France and Belgium, in a series of campaigns between 58 and 50 BC that his own published commentaries on the war presented, deliberately, as a defensive response to threats against Rome's existing allies - a framing later readers have found considerably more convenient for Caesar than the actual sequence of events supports. He crossed briefly into Britain twice and built a bridge across the Rhine to raid Germanic territory beyond it, neither campaign producing lasting conquest but both producing exactly the kind of dramatic report that kept his name prominent in Rome while he was away from it.

The conquest also gave him what Pompey and Sulla before him had both had: an army of many battle-hardened legions personally loyal to him, funded in large part by Gallic plunder, and a fortune to match it.

Alise-Sainte-Reine, France · Alexandria, The Civil Wars (1899) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

What broke the arrangement

Crassus, seeking a military reputation to match his wealth, led an invasion of the Parthian empire in 53 BC and was killed along with most of his army at Carrhae, removing the third leg of the arrangement and leaving Pompey and Caesar as two men of comparable military standing with no remaining reason to cooperate. Pompey, increasingly courted by a senate that had come to see him as the lesser danger, drifted toward its side; Caesar's Gallic command, and the immunity from prosecution it gave him, was due to expire, and his political enemies in Rome made clear they intended to prosecute him for actions taken during his own consulship the moment he became a private citizen again.

In January 49 BC the senate declared Caesar a public enemy unless he disbanded his army by a fixed date. Caesar chose the alternative, and what he did next is the chapter that follows.

The Ides of March

contractionDrafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

Caesar led a single legion across the Rubicon, the small stream marking the boundary between his own province and Italy proper, in January 49 BC - a deliberate act of war against his own state, since a general was forbidden to bring troops into Italy under arms. Plutarch has him hesitating at the river and then quoting a Greek proverb about the die being cast before he crossed; whether or not the words are authentic, the act itself was unambiguous.

The war against Pompey

Pompey and most of the senate, judging Rome itself indefensible against Caesar's veterans, abandoned the city rather than fight for it, gathering their own forces in Greece instead. Caesar, moving with the speed that had made his Gallic campaigns effective, secured Italy and Spain first and then crossed to face Pompey directly. The decisive battle came at Pharsalus in Greece in 48 BC, where Caesar's smaller, more experienced army broke Pompey's larger one built substantially from newer recruits. Pompey fled to Egypt, expecting shelter from a kingdom his own earlier eastern settlement had helped stabilise, and was murdered on the beach as he landed, on the orders of the Egyptian court, who hoped the killing would please Caesar when he arrived in pursuit. Caesar, by the ancient accounts, wept at the sight of Pompey's head.

Dictator

Caesar spent the following three years mopping up the remaining Pompeian resistance across the Mediterranean - in Egypt, where he became involved with Cleopatra and helped secure her hold on the Egyptian throne; in North Africa; in Spain - while accumulating, in Rome itself, a series of extraordinary honours and powers the constitution had no real precedent for. He was made dictator repeatedly, and in February 44 BC accepted the title dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, formally abolishing the office's traditional time limit altogether.

He used the position for a genuine programme of reform: a reorganised calendar, closely resembling the one still in use today with periodic adjustment; new colonies founded to resettle veterans and the urban poor; citizenship extended to more of Rome's provincial subjects; debt relief for citizens in genuine distress, though less sweeping than some of his own supporters had hoped for. None of it addressed the question that mattered most to the senators who had once been his peers: whether Rome was still, in any meaningful sense, a republic with two consuls and no permanent ruler.

The killing

A conspiracy of more than sixty senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus - who some ancient sources claimed, probably wrongly, descended from the Brutus who had expelled the kings four and a half centuries earlier, a connection the conspirators themselves seem to have found rhetorically useful whether or not it was genuine - and Gaius Cassius Longinus, stabbed Caesar to death at a senate meeting on the Ides of March, 44 BC. Plutarch records that Caesar, seeing Brutus among his attackers, said nothing further and simply covered his face.

Rome · Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: John Samuel · CC BY-SA 4.0

The conspirators had a plan for the killing and almost none for what followed it. They had assumed, by most ancient accounts, that removing one man would restore the republic's ordinary operation more or less automatically. Mark Antony, Caesar's own consular colleague, delivered a funeral oration that turned the Roman crowd against the assassins within days, and the conspirators - who had taken no measures to secure the city, arrest Caesar's supporters, or control his veteran soldiers - fled Rome within weeks. Caesar's eighteen-year-old great-nephew and adopted heir, Gaius Octavius, arrived in Italy from abroad almost immediately afterward to claim his inheritance, and the republic the conspirators had killed a dictator to save had, within a year, three more men fighting over exactly the position they had killed him for holding.

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The last triumvirate

contractionDrafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

Where the first arrangement between Pompey, Crassus and Caesar had been a private understanding with no legal standing, the second was voted into formal existence. In 43 BC a law gave Octavian, Mark Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus joint dictatorial power for five years, with the explicit authority to make law, appoint magistrates and put citizens to death without trial - a constitutional recognition of the same kind of personal military dominance that had previously operated outside the law entirely.

Proscriptions again

The triumvirs published proscription lists on the same model Sulla had used two generations earlier, and used them, among other purposes, to remove personal enemies and to fund their own armies through confiscated property. Cicero, Rome's most prominent orator and a persistent public critic of Antony, was among those killed; Antony, by several ancient accounts, had his head and hands displayed on the speaker's platform in the Forum where Cicero had delivered his own speeches against him.

Philippi

Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius, had spent the two years since the killing raising an army in the east from the provinces they controlled.

The triumvirs' combined forces met them at Philippi in Macedonia in 42 BC in two engagements; Cassius, misreading the outcome of the first, killed himself, and Brutus, defeated in the second, did the same rather than be captured. The last organised resistance in Caesar's name to Caesar's own killers was over, and the triumvirs divided the Roman world between them: Antony took the wealthy eastern provinces, Octavian the west and Italy, and Lepidus, steadily marginalised by the other two, was left with a diminishing role that ended in effective retirement within a few years.

Philippi, Greece · Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: Berthold Werner · CC BY-SA 3.0

Antony and Cleopatra

Antony's eastern command brought him into a political and personal partnership with Cleopatra VII of Egypt, whose kingdom's wealth and grain supply made her the most valuable ally available to a Roman general planning further campaigns against Parthia. The relationship, and Antony's increasingly open treatment of Alexandria as a second capital - distributing eastern territories to Cleopatra and the children he had with her in a ceremony called the Donations of Alexandria - gave Octavian, back in Rome, exactly the material his own propaganda needed: not a war against a fellow Roman, which the recent civil wars had made deeply unpopular, but a war against a foreign queen who had, in Octavian's telling, seduced a Roman general away from his own state's interests.

Actium

The senate, worked by Octavian's own campaign, declared war on Cleopatra alone rather than on Antony, allowing Octavian to present the conflict as foreign rather than civil even though every soldier on both sides knew which Roman it was actually fought against. The fleets met off the western coast of Greece at Actium in September 31 BC; Antony and Cleopatra's ships broke off the engagement and fled south, followed by a substantial part of Antony's own fleet, and his remaining land forces surrendered without further fighting within days.

Both Antony and Cleopatra were dead within a year, by their own hands, as Octavian's forces closed on Alexandria - Octavian had Caesarion, Caesar's son by Cleopatra and the one rival with a plausible blood claim to Caesar's own name, hunted down and executed separately, on the reported grounds that too many Caesars was one too many. Octavian was now the last man holding an army that mattered anywhere in the Roman world, twenty years almost to the month since Caesar's assassination had left three men fighting over the position one dead dictator had held alone.

27 BC, from the other side

endDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

Octavian spent the six years after Actium consolidating a position no Roman had ever held without a formal title to match it: sole command of every legion that mattered, sole control of Egypt's grain, and a Roman public exhausted enough by twenty years of intermittent civil war to want almost anything that promised it would stop.

What he did with that position - the powers voted to him individually and by name, a bronze copy of a near-identical later grant to one of his successors that survives to prove the form was maintained rather than merely claimed once, the senate meeting and the consuls being elected for three more centuries afterward - is the story of what the settlement built, and it belongs with the empire that grew out of it rather than with the republic it replaced.

What ended here

What can be said from the republic's own side, rather than the empire's, is narrower and worth stating plainly. In January 27 BC Octavian formally resigned the extraordinary, effectively unlimited powers the civil wars had left concentrated in his hands, and the senate, in response, voted him a specific, itemised set of ordinary constitutional powers instead, along with the name Augustus. No law declared the republic abolished. No office called king, or dictator for life, was created or claimed.

Ankara, Turkey · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

And none of it changed the fact underneath the form. The senate voted what Octavian's own army made it prudent to vote. The consulship, elected annually for four hundred and eighty-two years by citizens choosing between genuinely competing candidates, continued to be filled - by men Octavian's own influence determined, in practice, whenever it mattered to him which men they were. The republic's institutions did not stop existing in 27. They stopped being the place where the Roman state's actual decisions got made, which is a different and quieter kind of ending than a conquest or a collapse, and is exactly why the date is hard to defend as clean: nothing visible broke on the day it happened.

What four hundred and eighty-two years had actually produced

By any reasonable accounting the republic that ended this way was, by 27 BC, unrecognisable as the state a Latin League of client farmers and merchants had governed through annual elections in the fifth century BC. It had gone from a single city defending itself against its immediate neighbours to the government of the entire Mediterranean basin, using institutions built for a city-state and never redesigned for an empire - which is, on the reading several of the preceding chapters have set out, close to the whole explanation for why it could not survive its own success. A system of checks built to stop one man from ruling alone worked, with real interruptions, for most of five centuries. It failed, in the end, not because an enemy defeated it, but because the wars that made Rome dangerous to everyone else eventually produced generals more powerful than the state that had sent them out to fight.

The vocabulary republics still use

afterlifeDrafted from Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015)

The republic's institutions did not survive it. Its vocabulary, and a theory of why its constitution had once worked, both did - and both travelled much further than the state that produced them.

Polybius's own theory

Polybius, writing while the republic he was analysing was still winning its wars rather than losing its constitution, offered a specific explanation for Roman success that later readers found more durable than the republic itself: Rome's government was not a pure monarchy, aristocracy or democracy but a deliberate mixture of all three, with the consuls supplying the monarchic element, the senate the aristocratic, and the citizen assemblies the democratic - each checking the others, so that none could turn its own advantage into unaccountable power. Whether Rome's actual founders had designed the system this deliberately is doubtful, and Polybius's own account of the constitution's late stability did not survive even one more century intact. The theory itself, though, entered Western political thought as a template for how a mixed constitution could be built on purpose rather than discovered by accident.

Italian city republics

More than a thousand years later, the merchant republics of medieval and early modern Italy - Venice, Florence, Genoa, and others - built political institutions explicitly self-described in Roman terms: senates, consuls, tribunes, doges whose title itself descends from the Latin dux. None of them was a literal continuation of Rome's own institutions, and none claimed to be; what they borrowed was a vocabulary and a set of structural ideas - annual or limited terms, divided executive power, a council recruited from a propertied elite - that Roman precedent made available to draw on, and that centuries of surviving Roman texts kept in continuous circulation for anyone who wanted to.

Siena, Italy · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Albarubescens · CC BY-SA 4.0

The American founders

The clearest and most consequential later use of the republic's own vocabulary is the constitutional design of the United States in the 1780s.

The upper house of its legislature is called the Senate. Its founders, debating the new constitution in essays later collected as the Federalist Papers, wrote under Roman pseudonyms - Publius, the name shared by the Brutus who expelled the kings - and argued explicitly from Roman precedent about the dangers of concentrated power, the value of checks between separate branches of government, and the fate of a republic that let military commanders accumulate personal followings loyal to themselves rather than to the state. They had, in Caesar and Sulla, two documented historical cases of exactly the danger they were trying to design against, preserved in Latin texts educated Americans of the period read as a matter of course.

Washington, D.C. · Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) · Photograph: Diliff · CC BY 2.5

What was actually transmitted

None of these later republics inherited Rome's own citizens, territory or continuous institutions - the empire that grew out of the settlement of 27 BC did that. What travelled instead, across two thousand years and from Italian city-states to a republic founded on a different continent, was a vocabulary for describing shared power and a set of specific, well-documented failures - Tiberius Gracchus, Marius's army, Sulla's proscriptions, Caesar's Rubicon - that every later constitution-maker who studied Rome could point to and try to design against. Most of them failed to design against it completely. All of them tried, using words the Roman republic had coined for exactly that purpose and then, in the end, could not save itself with.