# How the Roman Republic fell > A century of broken rules, from the Gracchi to Augustus. A free course from Learnfold. 6 lessons, 20–30 min. Web: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/ ## What you'll learn Tell the story of how Rome went from elected officials to one-man rule, and name the unwritten rules that broke along the way. ## Before you start No history background needed. If you've heard of Julius Caesar, that's plenty. ## Outline ### Chapter 1: The rules start to bend How Rome kept any one man from ruling, and the first time its politics turned deadly. 1. [A government built against kings](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/built-against-kings/): The offices and unwritten rules that kept Rome from having a ruler. 2. [The Gracchi and the first blood](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/the-gracchi/): Two brothers try to give land to poor farmers, and the Senate answers with clubs. 3. [Marius and the soldiers' general](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/marius/): A new man from the countryside wins seven consulships and an army that looks to him. ### Chapter 2: Generals take the city Sulla, Caesar, and Augustus, and how a republic ended while keeping its name. 4. [Sulla marches on Rome](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/sulla/): A consul turns his legions on the city, then rules by posting lists of names. 5. [Caesar crosses the Rubicon](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/caesar/): Pompey and Caesar outgrow the system, and the Ides of March fail to bring it back. 6. [Augustus keeps the name](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/augustus/): Caesar's young heir ends the civil wars, keeps every old office, and rules them all. ## Lessons ## 1. A government built against kings Around 509 BC, the story goes, the Romans threw out their last king, Tarquin the Proud. Most of the details are legend, but the grudge was real. For the next five centuries, the worst thing you could say about a Roman politician was that he wanted to be king. So the Romans built a state around one obsession: nobody gets to be in charge for long. This course follows the hundred years, from 133 BC to 27 BC, when that design came apart through choices that each made sense to someone at the time. At the end, Rome still had its Senate and its elections. It also had an emperor. ### The machine Rome had no single written constitution. These were the main parts. - **Two consuls**, elected every year. They commanded the armies and ran the government, and either could block the other. After a year they stepped down and could be put on trial. - **The Senate**, a few hundred former officials who usually sat for life. On paper it only gave advice. In practice it controlled the treasury, foreign policy, and the provinces, and few officials dared defy it. - **The assemblies**, where male citizens voted on laws and elected officials. Votes were counted by groups, and when consuls were chosen the richest groups voted first. Often the poorest were never even called. - **Ten tribunes of the plebs**, elected to protect ordinary citizens from the powerful. A tribune could veto almost any act of government, and his person was sacrosanct. Laying a hand on him was a crime against the gods. - **A dictator**, named only in a real emergency. He held full command for six months at most. Tap each part of the government. Compare who could act with who could stop them. ### The rules nobody had to write down The offices mattered less than the habits around them. Romans called those habits the *mos maiorum*, the way of the ancestors. Some had been written into law at one time or another. What kept them alive was that everyone obeyed them, including the men strong enough not to. - Political fights end in a vote, never in blood. - No citizen is put to death without a trial. - Armies belong to Rome, and a general gives up his command when the war is over. - No army enters the city. A commander who crossed Rome's sacred boundary lost his command at that moment. - Power is brief and shared. You wait ten years before you can be consul again. Ambitious Romans competed hard, but the prizes only meant something while the game held together. For a long time, they played by the rules. ### A century in eight moments Tap a year below to see what happened and which of those rules broke. A rule turns red when it breaks and stays crossed out after that. Notice how often the same rule breaks twice. Tap the dates in order, then revisit an earlier one. The crossed-out rules show which precedents had already been set. ### Where the strain came from By 146 BC Rome had destroyed Carthage and Corinth and dominated the Mediterranean. The plunder flowed mostly to the families who already ran the Senate, while the small farmers who filled the legions spent years away at war. That gap is where the next lesson begins. ### Rabbit holes > How much of the story of Tarquin and the first consuls is legend, and how do historians tell? > What did a Roman election day actually look like, from the voter's side? > What stopped a tribune from vetoing everything and freezing the government? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/built-against-kings/ ## 2. The Gracchi and the first blood For nearly four hundred years, Roman politics inside the city had been loud and bitter but not bloody. In 133 BC that ended on the Capitol, when a crowd of senators and their followers beat an elected tribune to death with clubs and the broken legs of benches. ### A problem with land Rome's soldiers were farmers who had to own property to serve, and long wars kept them away from their fields for years. Many came home to debt. Rich families bought them out, or moved onto *ager publicus*, land the state had taken from defeated Italians. An old law capped how much of it one person could hold. Nobody enforced it, and slaves from the same wars worked the big estates. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, tribune in 133, came from the top of Roman society. His grandfather was Scipio Africanus, the man who beat Hannibal. His plan was to enforce the cap and hand the extra land to poor citizens in small plots, which would also mean more men who qualified to fight. Many senators were sitting on exactly that land. ### Three moves nobody had made 1. Another tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed the bill. Tiberius asked the assembly to vote Octavius out of office, and it did. The veto was the system's emergency brake. Now a majority could simply remove the man holding it. 2. The Senate starved his land commission of money. That year King Attalus III of Pergamum died and left his kingdom to Rome, and Tiberius proposed spending the inheritance on the new farms. Money and foreign affairs were the Senate's business. 3. He ran for a second year in a row as tribune. That was rare at best, and his enemies said it proved he wanted a crown. On election day, Scipio Nasica, Rome's chief priest and Tiberius's cousin, led the senators up the hill. Tiberius and about 300 supporters died. Their bodies went into the Tiber. No one was punished for the killings. Instead, a court went after his supporters. ### The younger brother Gaius Gracchus, nine years younger, was tribune in 123 and 122. His program went further. It offered cheap grain to the city's poor and proposed citizenship for Rome's Latin allies. He also passed a law that no citizen could be put to death without the people's consent. In 121, when he was out of office, a scuffle left one of the consul's attendants dead. The Senate passed a new kind of decree, urging the consul Lucius Opimius to see that the state came to no harm. Later Romans called it the *senatus consultum ultimum*, the final decree. Opimius read it as permission to kill. Gaius had a slave kill him rather than be taken. Plutarch puts the dead at about 3,000, many executed without trial. Afterward Opimius restored the temple of Concord, the goddess of harmony, in the Forum. ### Whose version is this? Most of what we know comes from Plutarch and Appian, Greek writers working more than two centuries later. Cicero, much closer to the events, usually praised the men who killed Tiberius. Historians still argue whether the brothers were reformers or demagogues. Whatever you think of the land bill, the response is what lasted. The Senate now had a decree with no clear limits, and everyone had seen that killing a tribune cost nothing. Press Play or move the slider through the events. Watch a dispute over land become a precedent for political killing. ### Rabbit holes > What did Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, think of what her sons were doing? > Was the final decree legal, or did the Senate invent the power on the spot? > How much land did the commission actually hand out before both brothers were dead? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/the-gracchi/ ## 3. Marius and the soldiers' general Gaius Marius came from Arpinum, a country town southeast of Rome, and no one in his family had ever held high office. Romans called a man like that a *novus homo*, a new man. The old families never let him forget it. ### The war that made him In the 110s BC Rome was fighting Jugurtha, a North African king who kept bribing his way out of trouble. Sallust, who wrote the main account seventy years later and disliked the old nobility, says Jugurtha called Rome "a city for sale." Marius served there as an officer, then went home and won the consulship for 107 against his commander's wishes. The people's assembly gave him the African command, overriding the Senate's choice. Handing out commands had been the Senate's job. Now voters could take one away. ### Volunteers with nothing Marius needed soldiers fast. Instead of drafting men with property, he took volunteers from the *capite censi*, the "head count," citizens too poor to be listed by property at all. They had no farm to go back to. Their pay and a plot of land at the end of service depended on their general, because the Senate kept refusing to provide for veterans. Over the next decades, Roman soldiers learned the lesson. The man who led them was the man who would feed them. ### Five years in a row In 105 BC two migrating peoples from the north, the Cimbri and the Teutones, wiped out two Roman armies at Arausio in southern Gaul. Ancient writers claimed 80,000 Roman dead. That number is probably too high, but the panic was genuine. Italy looked open. Rome's answer was Marius. He was elected consul for 104, then 103, 102, 101, and 100, five years running, when the rule said ten years between terms. He crushed the Teutones in 102 and the Cimbri in 101, and was hailed as the third founder of Rome. The emergency was real. Most of these breaks happened that way, with a good reason attached. ### The year 100 Peace brought a new problem: thousands of veterans wanting land. Marius teamed up with a tribune, Saturninus, who pushed land laws through with help from street gangs. When Saturninus's allies murdered a rival candidate for consul, the Senate passed the final decree again, and Marius, as consul, had to put down his own partner. Saturninus and his followers surrendered and were locked in the Senate house for safety. A mob climbed onto the roof, tore off the tiles, and stoned them to death. ### How much was really Marius? Older textbooks credit him with a whole package called the Marian reforms: volunteers, the cohort as the main fighting unit, an eagle standard for every legion, soldiers carrying their own gear. Many historians now think the package is too tidy. The property bar for service had already been lowered several times during the second century. Cohorts show up in earlier campaigns. Rome had armed the poor in crises before. Later writers liked one hero with one plan. What does look solid is that in 107 Marius openly recruited the landless, and that the armies after him behaved more and more like private followings. Switch between the two recruiting patterns. Follow the route from a soldier's livelihood to the person he depends on. ### Rabbit holes > Did the property requirement for Roman soldiers really fall before Marius, and by how much? > What happened at Arausio, and why did it frighten Rome so badly? > Why did Marius turn on Saturninus after working with him? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/marius/ ## 4. Sulla marches on Rome In 88 BC a Roman consul led Roman legions into Rome. Nobody had ever done that. The man who did it believed he was saving the Republic. ### Two old comrades Lucius Cornelius Sulla came from an old family that had fallen on hard times. As an officer under Marius in Africa, he talked a neighboring king into handing Jugurtha over. Marius got the triumph. Sulla had the surrender engraved on his signet ring. The two men never liked each other again. In 91 BC Rome's Italian allies, who had fought in every Roman war without a vote, rebelled to demand citizenship. Rome won this Social War partly by granting what they asked. Sulla came out of it a consul for 88. ### The command That year Mithridates VI of Pontus overran Rome's province of Asia, in western Turkey, and had tens of thousands of Romans and Italians there massacred on a single day. A war against him promised enormous plunder, and the Senate gave it to Sulla. A tribune, Publius Sulpicius, then had the assembly transfer the command to Marius, who was nearly seventy and hungry for one more campaign. Sulla went to his army in Campania and told the soldiers that Marius would take a different army east, and the plunder with it. The soldiers urged him to lead them to Rome. According to Appian, every officer but one refused and walked away. The soldiers followed anyway. Sulla took the city, had Sulpicius killed, and declared Marius a public enemy. Marius escaped to Africa. He had built armies that looked to their general, and his rival had just shown what such an army would do. ### Revenge, then revenge With Sulla gone, Marius and the consul Cinna took Rome back by force in 87 and killed their enemies. Heads went up on the speakers' platform in the Forum. Marius died in January 86, days into his seventh consulship. Sulla came back from the East in 83 and fought his way up Italy. After winning outside Rome's Colline Gate in 82, he had himself named dictator. Nobody had held the office in 120 years, and it had always come with a six-month limit. Sulla's had none. His title said he was there to write laws and set the state in order. ### The lists Then he posted names in the Forum. Anyone on the list could be killed by anyone, and the killer collected a reward. The victim's property was auctioned, and his sons and grandsons were barred from office. Ancient counts run from about 500 names to more than 4,000. Plutarch tells of a man who found his own name and said, "My farm at Alba is hunting me." Crassus got very rich at those auctions. A young Julius Caesar, Marius's nephew by marriage, went into hiding until friends talked Sulla into sparing him. ### The man who quit Sulla used his power to strengthen the Senate and gut the tribunes. Then he gave up the dictatorship, and by 79 he had retired to the country as a private citizen. He died the next year. Why he quit is still argued over. He meant to restore the old Republic. What Romans remembered was the method. In 49 BC, Cicero wrote that Pompey kept saying, "Sulla could do it. Why can't I?" Play the sequence or scrub between events. Follow how a disputed command became a precedent for taking Rome by force. ### Rabbit holes > Why did Sulla's soldiers follow him into Rome when almost all his officers refused? > How did the proscription lists work day to day, and who got rich from them? > Why would a man with absolute power give it up after about two years? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/sulla/ ## 5. Caesar crosses the Rubicon The next generation grew up on Sulla's example, and two of its men ended up fighting over what was left. ### Pompey, the exception Gnaeus Pompeius raised a private army at twenty-three and brought it to Sulla's side. He celebrated a triumph before holding any office, and became consul in 70 BC while skipping the steps the law required. Then the assemblies voted him huge commands, first against the pirates of the whole Mediterranean in 67, then against Mithridates in 66. Both grants were legal. Both made one man stronger than the system was meant to allow. ### A private deal In 60 BC Pompey, the rich Crassus, and Julius Caesar, an ambitious politician deep in debt, made a private pact. Modern books call it the First Triumvirate, though it was never an office. Caesar was consul in 59. When his colleague Bibulus tried to block his laws, a crowd emptied a basket of dung over his head, and he spent the rest of the year at home declaring bad omens. Caesar passed his laws anyway. Romans joked that it was the consulship of Julius and Caesar. Then Caesar spent nine years conquering Gaul and came out rich, with legions devoted to him. The pact came apart. Pompey's wife Julia, Caesar's daughter, died in 54. Crassus died fighting the Parthians in 53. Pompey drifted toward Caesar's enemies. ### The trap Caesar's command was running out. As a private citizen he could be put on trial for what he had done as consul, so he wanted to run for consul again while still holding his army. Hardliners in the Senate, led by Cato, insisted he give up the army first. In December 50, the Senate voted 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should both give up their armies. The presiding consul ignored the vote. In January 49, the Senate passed the final decree. Two tribunes who opposed it, Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius, fled north to Caesar. Now Caesar had a cause to sell: the sacred rights of the tribunes. ### The river The Rubicon was a small stream where Caesar's province ended and Italy began. Leading an army across it was treason. Around 10 January 49 BC, Caesar crossed with one legion. Suetonius has him say "The die is cast." Caesar's own history of the war doesn't mention the river at all. He had every reason to leave it out. Move the crossing slider, then drag sideways to turn the model. The terrain is schematic: the important feature is the boundary between the province and Italy. Caesar beat Pompey in Greece in 48, and Pompey was murdered as he stepped ashore in Egypt. Unlike Sulla, Caesar pardoned most of his enemies, but early in 44 he had himself named dictator for life. ### The Ides of March On 15 March 44 BC, Caesar was stabbed to death at a Senate meeting in a hall Pompey had built. More than sixty men had joined the plot, and Suetonius counts twenty-three wounds. The leaders, Brutus and Cassius, had both fought against him and been pardoned. "Et tu, Brute?" comes from Shakespeare. Suetonius writes that Caesar died with only a groan, then mentions a report that he said to Brutus in Greek, "You too, child?" The killers called themselves liberators. They had planned the murder carefully and almost nothing after it, as if the old Republic would restart on its own. Within days, a crowd at Caesar's funeral burned his body in the Forum and went looking for the killers' houses with torches. ### Rabbit holes > What does Caesar's own account of the civil war leave out, and why? > Did Caesar really want to be king, or is that his enemies' version? > How did a Senate that voted 370 to 22 for peace still end up at war? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/caesar/ ## 6. Augustus keeps the name Caesar's will named an heir almost no one had heard of: his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, eighteen years old. Historians call him Octavian. Within fourteen years he would rule the Roman world, and he would never call himself king. ### Cicero's mistake Cicero thought the young man could be used against Mark Antony and then dropped. A letter to Cicero repeats his quip that Octavian should be "praised, honored, and raised up." The Latin word for raised up also meant got rid of. Octavian heard about it. In 43 BC Octavian marched his army on Rome and got a consulship at nineteen. Then he joined Antony and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate. Unlike the first, this one was legal, a five-year office created by law. They began with proscription lists, copied from Sulla. Cicero was on one. Soldiers caught him in December 43, and Antony had his head and hands nailed up in the Forum. After beating Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42, Antony ruled the East alongside Cleopatra and Octavian took the West. They fought it out at Actium in 31, and within a year Antony and Cleopatra had killed themselves. After nearly twenty years of civil war, one man held every army. ### The settlement of 27 BC In January 27 BC, Octavian announced he was handing the state back to the Senate and people. The senators, who knew where the legions were, begged him to stay on. He let them persuade him to keep, for ten years, the provinces where most of the armies sat. The grant was renewed for the rest of his life. The Senate gave him a new name, Augustus, "the revered one." Then he left almost everything in place. Consuls were still elected and the Senate still met. He refused to be dictator and called himself *princeps*, the first citizen. In his own account of his deeds, he wrote that after 27 BC he "excelled all in authority, but had no more power than the others who were my colleagues in each office." Word by word, that was close to true. But he held those powers in a combination nobody else could, for life, with the armies behind him. Switch from the surviving offices to the concentration of power. See why keeping familiar institutions did not restore the old balance. ### Did anyone notice? A century later the historian Tacitus asked how many people alive at Augustus's death in AD 14 had ever seen the Republic. Hardly anyone. Tacitus wrote as a senator under emperors, with a grudge on behalf of his class, but he had a point. People who had lived through two rounds of proscriptions wanted peace, and the familiar forms let them accept it without admitting anything had ended. Historians still argue over when the Republic ended: 49, 44, 31, or 27 BC. Your answer depends on whether a republic is its offices or the restraint of the people who hold them. ### The pattern Across the century, each break handed the next person a precedent. | First time | What it proved | Used again | | --- | --- | --- | | 133 BC | A tribune could be killed with no penalty | 100, 91, and 88 BC | | 121 BC | A Senate decree could cover killing citizens | 100, 63, and 49 BC | | 88 BC | A Roman army could take Rome | 87, 82, 49, and 43 BC | | 82 BC | Enemies could be killed from a posted list | 43 BC | None of these men thought he was ending the Republic. Most believed they were rescuing it. ### Rabbit holes > How did Augustus steer elections that were still, on paper, free? > When do historians think the Republic really ended, and what does each date assume? > Why did Cicero misjudge the young Octavian so badly? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/augustus/ --- Read this course in the Learnfold app to ask about any sentence, follow a question into a new lesson, or have it rebuilt around what you already know: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learnfold/id6794672797