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

by Mike Duncan

By the age of Augustus, the population of Rome had ballooned to 750,000. During the imperial Golden Age in the 100s AD, it went over a million. The growth of Rome is partly attributable to expansion of the grain dole. The subsidized grain supply introduced by Gaius Gracchus became a permanent feature of Roman municipal policy.

The war with Mithridates had never really ended. Undeterred by his earlier defeat, Mithridates launched a series of major wars against Rome that lasted all the way until his death, at the hands of Pompey the Great, in 63.

With Mithridates finally defeated, Pompey took the legions on a grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean, organizing the east into a network of allied client kingdoms. When Pompey returned to Rome, Caesar successfully reconciled Pompey and Crassus and together they formed a secret alliance called the First Triumvirate that would dominate Rome for the next decade.

After crossing the Rubicon in 49, Caesar defeated all his enemies and had himself declared dictator for life. Mocking Sulla by saying that “Sulla did not know his ABCs when he laid down his dictatorship,” Caesar clearly did not plan to relinquish the Dictatorship, so a gang of senators led by Brutus and Cassius murdered him in 44. After the Ides of March, Caesar’s heirs Octavian and Mark Antony* combined to defeat the remnants of the Senate, and then waged a civil war against each other for control of the empire. Victorious over all his enemies, Octavian transformed himself into Augustus in 27, and the Roman Republic transformed into the Roman Empire.