The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

by Mike Duncan

The final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires, the introduction of violence as a political tool, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it.

When the Republic began to break down in the late second century it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of mos maiorum.

If you managed to survive the war and not get sold into slavery, life under the Romans was pretty good.

By the end of the Punic Wars the consuls, the tribunes, and Assemblies no longer acted as a check on the Senate, but as an extension of it.

Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury. CATO THE ELDER

So each year the Senate was obliged to raise new recruits and ship them off to the Iberian Peninsula, to serve on campaigns of undefined length against an enemy who specialized in demoralizing skirmishes.

“It is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations, when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty.”

But this was an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.

Like any self-respecting Hellenic king, his father was assassinated by poison in 120, leaving a power vacuum in the kingdom.

Just seventeen days after inaugurating his seventh consulship, with maps of Greece spread out on his desk and plans for a final showdown with Sulla in the works, Gaius Marius died one of the all-time anticlimactic deaths in history.

When the people of Messana protested that the tribunals were illegal, Pompey snapped, “Cease quoting laws to us that have swords.”

“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.”