The History of The Roman Republic

According to legend, Rome, the city at the heart of the seven hills on the banks of the River Tiber, was established in 753 BCE by the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus. Allegedly abandoned by their mother as babies and nurtured by a she-wolf, the adult twins later found themselves in a dispute over the location of their soon to be built city. This disagreement escalated to the point where Romulus, in asserting his chosen site, tragically ended his brother's life, thus giving rise to the foundation of the city of Rome.

While the legend of the city’s founding possesses a certain charm, it lacks any historical substance. Recent archaeological investigations have revealed that Rome's origins trace back to numerous smaller villages situated on the seven hills, dating as far back as the eleventh century BCE. These villages gradually expanded and coalesced into a unified political entity, forming the foundational structure of the early Roman state.

In its early days, Rome was ruled as a monarchy, with much of it’s history being shrouded in myth and legend making it difficult to sperate fact from fiction. What brought this monarchy to an end in 509 BCE was the tyrannical rule of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, a king who spent money excessively and  abused his subjects. He was overthrown at the end of the sixth century BCE and in his place a republic was established, which was primarily governed by the Roman Senate.

This early style parliament consisted of members from the wealthier class of citizens within the city, who were known as Patricians. The new republic was governed by several magistrates from this class who were elected to positions in office, known as tribunes and quaestors. These had power over the municipal government but it was the consuls who were the most important officials, two of which were elected each year and effectively acted as dual-prime ministers for the period.

At the time the Roman Republic came into being, Rome was still a negligible, provincial power, controlling only the little land beyond the immediate outskirts of the city in the Latium region. It was overshadowed by the great Greek city states to the south and the Etruscan people to the north, although the situation began to change in the second half of the fourth century BCE.

Around the same time that Alexander the Great rose to power in Greece and began his immense conquests of the Persian Empire to the east, Rome undertook a series of wars against its neighbours on the Italian peninsula. In the course of four different wars fought between 343 BCE and 290 BCE, the Romans reduced the Latins and the Samnites to the status of subjects, thus bringing all of Central Italy under Roman rule.

A sign of the arrival of Rome onto the world stage was witnessed in the year 280 BCE, when the Republic went to war with the Greek colonies of southern Italy. The Greeks there called on King Pyrrhus of Epirus, a ruler of a city state in what is now southern Albania, for aid against the advancing Romans. Pyrrhus arrived in Italy with a large army and did secure several victories. However, these were so expensive in terms of men and resources that he eventually had to abandon the campaign and with this, his name would forever become a synonym for a costly victory, Pyrrhic. After Pyrrhus’ withdrawal, the Romans annexed many of the city states in the south of Italy, such as Tarentum, into their domain. 

With the expansion of Rome's influence into southern Italy, tensions quickly began to rise with the preeminent power of the Western Mediterranean, whose sphere of influence the Republic had encroached upon —the city-state of Carthage. Founded many centuries earlier by the seafaring Phoenicians of the Levant, Carthage exerted it’s control not only across North Africa, but also much of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as large swathe of territory along the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The advance of Rome upon Carthage’s borders quickly brought the two nations into conflict with one another, and the remainder of the third century BCE would bear witness to the two locked in a struggle to become the dominant power.

The First Punic War, fought between 264 BCE and 241 BCE, saw Rome fight the Carthaginians in  Sardinia and Sicily. This war ended in a Roman victory, with the two territories being absorbed into the rule of the republic.

To compensate for their loss of the Italian islands, one of the great Carthaginian aristocratic families led by Hamilcar Barca, initiated a rejuvenation of Carthage’s power by conquering further territory across the Iberian Peninsula. By the early 210s BCE, Barca’s sons, Hannibal and Hasdrubal, believed that Carthage had recovered enough of it’s prestige and military might to wage a war of revenge on the upstart Roman republic. Thus, they initiated the Second Punic War in 218 BCE, with Hannibal famously traversing over the Alps and descending on Italy with his war elephants.

The invasion from the north took the Romans completely by surprise and in the first years of the conflict, they suffered a series of serious defeats, with the city of Rome itself being severely threatened. Eventually however, through military reforms and the deployment of all its resources, Rome was able to fight back, launching its own invasions on Carthaginian territory in Hispania and North Africa. The war came to a climax in 202 BCE when the armies of Rome, under the commander of Publius Cornelius Scipio, defeated the Carthaginians on the plains of Zama, just outside the city of Carthage. With this, the war came to an end in 201 BCE and Carthage was subsequently stripped of all of its territories in Hispania and everywhere else beyond the environs of modern-day Tunis, leaving the Romans as the newly dominant power of the Western Mediterranean.

A brief Third Punic War ensued half a century later, with Rome’s legions attacking Carthage itself. After a three year long siege, the city was raised to the ground and its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery, such was the determination of Rome to eradicate the existence of its longstanding rival to history.

Having secured dominance over its immediate neighbours in the west, Rome then turned its focus  towards the east, where the greatest riches of the Mediterranean world could be found. The empire that Alexander the Great had built between 336 BCE and 323 BCE, had fragmented in the decades following his relatively short life, with Egypt falling under the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Seleucid Empire ruling over much of Syria, the Levant and parts of what is now eastern Turkey. The western half of Turkey had also fragmented into several smaller kingdoms, such as those of Pontus and Bithynia. Whereas Greece and the southern Balkans had seen the establishment of leagues of city states, such as the Achaean League of the Peloponnese.

No sooner had the Third Punic War concluded, Rome entered into a series of seemingly endless conflicts with the Hellenistic states during the early second century BCE. The Macedonian Wars, fought in the first decades of this period, left Rome as the dominant power over much of Greece by 146 BCE, having defeated the Achaean League and levelling the city of Corinth that same year. Many of these regions were not annexed directly but were instead administered as various client states of the republic, whereby the former rulers were allowed to continue their reign, so long as they swore fealty and servitude to Rome. This system provided the republic with the benefit of being able to collect taxes and tributes from these regions, without having to expend large amounts of money and energy administering the territories directly.

Despite all the successes of the Roman republic’s military might and territorial expansion in the second century BCE, there was an increasing level of political and social disunity in the city of Rome. There were growing calls for the equal distribution of the spoils from these conquests amongst the three major classes of free Roman society; the patricians, the equestrians and the plebeians. The latter, who were the lowest of the three orders, were the most vocal for such reforms and their cause was championed by the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius. Both sought to redistribute public land to the landless poor, sparking opposition from the Senate. The resulting political tension and polarisation within Roman society marked the beginning of a turbulent era, which saw the two brothers subsequently murdered for their endeavours.

A further problem for the burgeoning republic was the limited nature of Roman citizenship. Rome had started as a city state and during the time it was fighting the Latins, the Samnites and the Carthaginians in the fourth and third centuries BCE, its armies had been filled with ranks of soldiers drawn exclusively from the Roman citizenry. But as the number of soldiers needed on the battlefield lost pace with the innumerable wars Rome found itself fighting in by the second and first centuries BCE, the republic had to rely to an ever-greater extent on deploying auxiliary troops. These were recruited from the non-citizen subjects who had recently been incorporated into the republic, such as the Latins, Samnites and other peoples of the Italian peninsula. These auxiliaries wanted to become Roman citizens in return for years of faithful service but were becoming increasingly discontent with the refusal of their demands. Subsequently, in 91 BCE the Social War broke out, pitting Rome against it’s hardened military auxiliaries, which effectively became a civil war. The Republic eventually won out, but it did make some concessions. When the war came to an end in 87 BCE the Latins and all other groups in Italy south of the Rubicon River were granted Roman citizenship. With this, one problem was solved, although a much greater problem still existed that had been a long time in the making. Rome’s endless wars were producing generals who were more powerful than the magistrates.

The series of events that led to the eventual downfall of the Roman Republic began with emergence of Gaius Marius and Cornelius Sulla, two politicians and military commanders of the late second century and early first century BCE. Marius was the more senior of the two. He had become the greatest of Rome’s commanders in the 110s and 100s BCE, fighting conflicts against the Numidians in North Africa, as well as against the Cimbri, a Germanic tribe who invaded northern Italy. The state of emergency created by the Cimbric invasion led Marius to initiate a series of reforms of the Roman military in 107 BCE which had long lasting consequences. Up until this point, the armies of Rome had been made up of part-time citizen-soldiers, who campaigned for a short period in the army but then returned to civilian life. Marius sought to create a professional standing army, one made up of full-time career soldiers. These changes, known as the Marian reforms, were quickly implemented and also saw the weaponry and armour of the Roman legions change to how we picture them today; with breast plates, short swords, spears and helmets. Despite having achieved victory against the Cimbrians, Marius faced a rival for the title of Rome’s greatest general, Cornelius Sulla.

Sulla, had emerged in the 90s BCE as a champion of the Roman aristocratic classes, the patricians. Whereas Marius had risen to power in Rome based on his popularity amongst the plebeians and the poorer elements of society. The conflict between the two would never fully reach boiling point, for Marius died in 86 BCE, but three years later, war eventually erupted between Sulla’s supporters and a faction led by Marius’s son and a magistrate, Gnaeus Carbo, who had recently been consul. The First Civil War culminated in the Battle of the Colline Gate outside the city of Rome in November 82 BCE. Sulla emerged victorious and seized power in the aftermath, overseeing a massive a purge of the Marians and their followers. The Roman Republic had seemingly acquired its first full-blown dictator, with Sulla assuming the power of dictatores, a constitutional power of the Roman Republic reserved only for in case of political emergencies.

However, just over two years later in 79 BCE, Sulla somewhat remarkably resigned his powers of dictatores and retired from public life, dying shortly afterwards a year later. To his contemporaries, Sulla had used his powers as intended, having relinquished them when the political emergency was deemed to be over. But to other onlookers, Sulla had given up his absolute power all to easily, when he could have chosen to hold on to it indefinitely. Amongst this latter group were two young men; Gnaeus Pompeius, ( or Pompey) a scion of a Roman aristocratic family and a follower of Sulla, and Gaius Julius Caesar, a follower of the Marian faction who had only narrowly avoided being executed in the fallout from the Battle of the Colline Gate. In the twenty years following Sulla’s brief dictatorship and subsequent retirement, Pompey and Caesar, began acquiring the series of Roman political offices known as the cursus honorum and attaining numerous military commands. In the early years, Pompey was much more successful than Caesar, having defeated two of Rome’s remaining major rivals in the Eastern Mediterranean, King Mithdridates VI of Pontus, and the remnants of the Seleucid Empire in Syria. In the 70s and 60s BCE, Pompey conquered these polities, cementing Roman control over the region and earning the title of Pompeius Magnus, ‘Pompey the Great’.

Nevertheless, as time passed, he was soon being eclipsed politically by Caesar and a third figure, Marcus Crassus. Caesar followed the Marian playbook and appealed to the people of Rome for popular support in the 60s BCE, while Crassus used his immense wealth to cultivate power. As the three gathered factions of followers around themselves in their bid to become the successor to Sulla; Pompey, Caesar and Crassus, formed an uneasy alliance with one another. Known as the First Triumvirate, it was a clear sign of the fact that power in the Republic now lay in the hands of these three would-be dictators. This however, would not last long and would soon give way to civil war.

The spark which ignited the new conflict was Caesar’s appointment in 59 BCE as governor of Gaul. Covering modern-day France, the Swiss Alps and the Low Countries, Gaul was broadly inhabited by a mass of independent Celtic tribes, with the Romans only ruling in the south of the territory along the French Riviera, in order to maintain a land bridge between Italy and their territories in Hispania. Caesar set out to eclipse Pompey’s earlier conquests in the east by fully subduing all of Gaul to Roman rule.

In the course of a campaign throughout the 50s BCE, he led 40,000 men against dozens of Celtic tribes across the region and even ventured across the English Channel to Britain, to reconnoitre the land for a possible conquest in the near future. On the back of this, Caesars popularity soared in Rome, whilst at the same time, Crassus was killed in 53 BCE at the Battle of Carrhae whilst attempting to subdue the Parthian Empire in the East. With Crassus dead and Caesar’s status on the ascent, Pompey began to panic in Rome, urging the Senate to support him as a counterweight to the dictatorial ambitions of Caesar. They agreed to do so, viewing Pompey, like Sulla before him, as the conservative defender of the privileges of the patrician Senatorial class. Caesar responded in kind, having his own supporters in Rome stir up popular support for his own advantage. Then in 49 BCE, Caesar marched south from Gaul with his legions, crossing the Rubicon River, the northern boundary beyond which Roman generals were forbidden to bring their armies any closer to Rome.

With this provocation, the Second Civil War or the Civil War of Caesar and Pompey, broke out. It was however, to be decided by a single battle. Pompey and his supporters quickly abandoned Rome in the face of Caesar’s advance and headed for Greece to begin gathering legions there. Caesar quickly pursued them and on the 9th of August in the year 48 BCE, the two armies met at the Battle of Pharsalus in central Greece. It was here that Caesar showed his tactical brilliance, defeating Pompey’s significantly larger army and forcing them to flee. Pompey headed for Egypt, a country still quasi-independent of Rome, but when he arrived ,he was murdered on the orders of the local king, Ptolemy XIII. The civil war would drag on for several more years, with groups of Pompeians claiming pockets of territory in regions like Hispania and on the island of Sicily, but they never posed a real threat and the civil war effectively died out.

Upon his triumphant return to Rome, Caesar had his power of dictatores renewed, having first claimed it when he crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE. Despite Pompey having been defeated and the political emergency ended, Caesar refused to relinquish his powers. He also pressured the Senate to grant him further powers and began to enrich his followers, appointing them to magistrates all over the city, as well as the provinces. But there was a growing disquiet, even amongst those who had supported and fought for Caesars cause, particularly when he began having coins minted with his image on one side. These growing signs of a shift towards absolutism became all too clear in February 44 BCE, when Caesar convinced the Senate to confirm him as dictatores perpetuo, or ‘perpetual dictator’.

Plans to overthrow the would-be king accelerated thereafter, with two of his former allies, Marcus Brutus and Cassius Longinus, leading the conspiracy. On the Ides of March 44 BCE, an important day in the Roman calendar, Caesar was set upon and attacked by a mob of senators whilst making his way across the Senate floor. He was stabbed 23 times. With his death, Rome faced the biggest crisis it had yet faced in its history. Would the last vestiges of the republic survive or would another would-be king in the guise of Caesar emerge to take his place?