How did the Roman Republic fall?

A republic that won too much

Rome’s Republic did not fall to a foreign enemy. It came apart at the height of its power. Conquest poured silver and captives into Italy, and rich senators bought up farmland for vast estates worked by enslaved people. The small farmers who filled the legions came home from years of war to find their land gone. Many drifted to Rome, landless and angry.

133 BC: the first blood

Tiberius Gracchus, a young noble and a grandson of Scipio Africanus, was elected tribune in 133 BC. He proposed sharing out public land among the poor. When he stood for a second year in office, senators and their supporters came for him with clubs. He was beaten to death with the leg of a bench, along with some three hundred followers, and the bodies were thrown into the Tiber.

In 121 BC his younger brother Gaius, who had taken up the same reforms, was killed too, after the Senate declared an emergency and armed the consul against him. Both sides had learned that a political fight could be settled by force.

Marius and Sulla: soldiers loyal to a man

Then came the generals. Gaius Marius, consul a record seven times, opened the legions in 107 BC to men who owned nothing, a change the historian Sallust records. These soldiers depended on their commander for pay, plunder and a farm when they retired, and their loyalty slid from the Republic to the man who led them.

In 88 BC the consul Sulla lost his eastern command to Marius’s allies, and did the unthinkable: he marched his legions on Rome itself. He won the civil war that followed, made himself dictator in 82 BC and posted lists in the Forum of men anyone could kill for a reward. Begged to spare young Julius Caesar, whose aunt had married Marius, he gave in with a warning.

Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.

The last generation

Sulla had shown that an army could take Rome. In 60 BC Pompey, Crassus and Caesar made a private pact to run the state between them. In 49 BC, ordered to give up his army, Caesar crossed the Rubicon instead, won the civil war, and was stabbed as dictator for life in 44 BC. More civil wars followed, until his heir Octavian beat Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC. In 27 BC Octavian made a show of handing the Republic back, and kept the legions and the money. Rome had its first emperor.

Why it fell

Historians argue about where the story starts: with the Gracchi, with the war against Rome’s own Italian allies from 91 BC, or with Sulla’s march. The Roman historian Asinius Pollio began his history of the civil wars in 60 BC, the year of the pact. Most agree on the chain:

• Land. Conquest made the rich richer and pushed the soldier-farmers off their farms.
• Violence. From 133 BC, Romans settled political quarrels by killing.
• Armies. Landless soldiers looked to their general, not to Rome, for their future.
• Civil war. Sulla, then Caesar, then Octavian turned those armies on Rome.

The Republic had lasted from 509 to 27 BC, almost five hundred years. Its rules, with every office shared and held for one year, were made for a city, not for generals whose armies answered to them alone.