Quick questions on The fall of the Roman Republic - power, authority and historiography 78 to 42 BC: HSC Ancient History

Annual, collegial magistracies suited a compact state. Governing provinces from Spain to Syria required long commands, standing armies and the handling of enormous wealth, none of which the one-year system could supervise. The state met each crisis by granting extraordinary commands to individuals - Pompey received sweeping imperium against the pirates by the lex Gabinia (67 BC) and against Mithridates by the lex Manilia (66 BC).

The recruitment reforms traditionally credited to Marius (c. 107 BC) opened the legions to the propertyless. These landless soldiers depended on their general to win them a discharge bonus, above all land, so their loyalty shifted from the state to the commander.

As the stakes rose, aristocratic competition stopped accepting limits. The First Triumvirate (60 BC), a private pact between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, simply bypassed the Senate to carve up elections and commands. Provincial wealth funded electoral bribery (ambitus) on a massive scale, while the optimates-populares struggle (a clash of political METHODS - working through the Senate versus working through the assemblies - not organised parties) hardened into deadlock.

The dominant ancient explanation is moral. Sallust, in the Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Iugurthinum, argued that Rome stayed virtuous only while it feared a great external enemy; once Carthage was destroyed (146 BC) and that "fear of the enemy" (metus hostilis) was removed, luxury (luxuria), greed (avaritia) and ambition (ambitio) corroded public life and concord gave way to faction. Livy's preface strikes a similar note of lament, and Cicero, a contemporary participant, mourned the loss of the res publica and theorised (in De Re Publica) an ideal balance and concordia between the orders that events were destroying.

A second ancient current, seen above all in Plutarch's paired Lives (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Cato, Brutus, Antony), explains the age through the character and choices of outstanding individuals. Appian's Civil Wars supplies the continuous narrative and frames the collapse as an escalating chain of political violence beginning with the Gracchi (from 133 BC). Both strands - moral decline and great men - tend to treat the fall as the working-out of character and virtue, and lend themselves to reading the collapse as, in some sense, deserved or inevitable.

Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (1939) is the pivotal modern work. Using prosopography - reconstructing power by tracing individuals through the networks of family, marriage and faction that actually controlled office and command - Syme argued that Republican politics was always the competition of a narrow oligarchy behind the constitutional forms. The "fall" was therefore a revolution in which one governing class was violently replaced by another (the Caesarian-Augustan party), and the later "restored Republic" of Augustus was a facade for the domination of one man and his faction.

Erich Gruen's The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974) pushed hard against the whole "decline and fall" tradition. Examining the institutions on their own evidence, Gruen argued that the courts, elections and Senate were functioning more or less normally down to the late 50s BC, so the Republic was NOT rotting from within. On his reading the causation runs the other way: it was the outbreak of civil war in 49 BC that destroyed the Republic, rather than a long-declining Republic that caused the civil war.

Between these poles sit others. Christian Meier (Res Publica Amissa, 1966) called the late Republic a "crisis without alternative": the structures were failing, yet no legitimate replacement order was conceivable to contemporaries, so structure and contingency fuse. P.A.