How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIa: Starting Down the Path of Honors
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
For a very interesting history of Rome, from the 2 foundation myths (Romulus vs Aeneas) until the end of the "Pax Romana", I strongly suggest the book "SPQR", by Mary Beard.
She is a very respected scholar on Ancient Rome and she has a lot of documentaries on Youtube.
I just started the famous "Decline and fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbons, covering the period after the SPQR book. Still in the beginning, to early for conclusions.
"Storm before the storm".
That was fine for a few centuries, until external enemies re-emerged, and then it really fell apart.
The wealthy of Rome were not willing to pay for all of this, so the practice was for generals to pay their soldiers out of taxes and loot. Thus the legions became loyal to their generals instead of to the Republic, which essentially made them warlords. There were plenty of places left to conquer - Augustus would somewhat famously and disastrously try to conquer Germania east of the Rhine, Egypt was assimilated after Pompey's defeat, etc.
Interestingly, that disasterous campaign you mentioned by Augustus to try to conquer up to the Rhine was done exactly to address the difficulty of defending Rome's extended borders. He felt that it was important for the empire to achieve its natural borders, just the same as France sought to do after the revolution.
However, even had those natural borders been secured, it would have done nothing to address the internecine strife that was was instrumental to the decline and final collapse of the western empire. It is necessary to look at a combination of both internal and external pressures to explain what happened.
Julius Caesar amassed an enormous military power with his private army on his military campaigns on Gaul and used it to just grab the power in Rome.
Truth, it was his nephew Octavian/Augustus that finished and buried the Republic, but he wouldn't be able to do so unless Caesar hadn't given the mortal blow before.
No wonder Putin tried to put a leash on Prigozhyn before it would be too late.
Also, Imran Khan must understand very well what happens when the military isn't under the government control.
In fact, I think he's quite similar to Philip II, who put all the pieces together in Macedon. Alexander the Great was able to reach such heights because he had the way paved for him, the same way Julius Caesar paved the way for Octavian.
This started with the Marian reforms.
Per a post a couple weeks back by the same author as TFA, those weren't a thing actually: https://acoup.blog/2023/06/30/collections-the-marian-reforms...
The Roman state authorised the raising of legions. But the (pro)consuls raising them were responsible for paying them. Think: Prighozhin.
She got into a recent online argument with one of my other intellectual heroes Nassim Taleb about the genetic makeup of Roman Britain.
These books are incredibly well researched and informative, but also have SUCH a compelling narrative style and characterizations. It’s very immersive.
Seems like a form of ancient "affirmative action". I guess it's more likely that were able to just skip a step and jump straight to Praetor and the weren't that many Patricians left by the late republic. Then again it's interesting that these laws were instituted in the first place (IIRC one the Consuls had to be a Plebian as well).
US, on the other hand, now has 158 years without internal military conflict, so it's doing extremely, unfathomably well by roman standards.
There's a big difference here, that he was given a trial and executed within the bounds of the system, as corrupt as that system may have been.
The extra-legal violence with Gracchus was quite new, and much more likely to spiral out of control.
Seems to me that the same undercurrents were always there, they never got resolved, and sure, eventually things blew up. But they would have done so without the Gracchi. I don’t know what the right solution was - obviously agrarian reform led to increased tensions with the socii who were experiencing the same disenfranchisement. But what we ultimately got were the Marian reforms, and that’s what really caused violence to dominate politics for the rest of Rome’s history.
I agree. I don't think the Gracchi brothers were essential to what happened. But they were in the middle of it when it did.
Once it did, it basically guaranteed the later split into Optimates and Populares, and the rise of Sulla/Caesar
Also the first historian to write about Rome and whose history because just a couple of decades after the last plebeian secession doesen't even mention it.
In his book he sees a system of 5 political systems, what he calls regimes. And he argues that they tend to each transition between each other, not out of some revolutionary cause - but because of an abundance of the virtue of each system. In democracy that virtue is freedom, and its transition is into tyranny. He argues that excesses of freedom gradually leads to the decay of social values, norms, and ultimately the rule of law itself. And in the process of this leaders would emerge overtly appealing to the base desires and emotions of masses as arguments for election; ethos and values of times past not even feigned at.
But these leaders themselves are of course also only driven by their own endless pursuit of self indulgence and power. And transitioning from democracy to authoritarianism is but a matter of one man, supported by the masses, turning against the normal system. With the catch, yet to be seen, that this man also eventually turns against the people that supported him - becoming tyrannical and obsessed by the pursuit of his own ideals and virtues, which need not inherently run contrary to the interests of society. Napoleon is the 'classical' example - which came thousands of years after The Republic was written.
The point I make here is that it often feels like we're entering into some wild unknown, in many things. Yet when you look back at things like the classical philosophers and other writings, a lot of what they're saying suddenly seems more apt than ever. And so I think the issue is not that we're entering into some strange and unprecedented era in human civilization, but rather we're just leaving one. The relative era of peace, rationality, and stability that we all grew up in was the bubble, and it seems to have to burst.
[1] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55201/55201-h/55201-h.htm#Bo... (This link is already to the exact 'book' (chapter) which is about what I am referencing. To get to the exact meat of it, search for "And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?")
Today, the US military doesn't need to consider anything about the local resources available, they can just airdrop in food and water while you and your band of rebels slowly starves if you can't live off the land. They can out communicate you and coordinate fighting on the land, sea, air, and space, while you might have a short wave radio if you are lucky that they are also probably monitoring. They can of course out gun you, without even sending boots into harms way though probably dozens and dozens of different technologies and permutations of these technologies and strategies.
I don't think Plato could have conceived of a predator drone, or a military satellite, or an aircraft carrier, or a nuclear submarine packed with ICBMs. The balance of power has never been so historically lopsided with who controls the technology of contemporary war.
In modern times, America has ostensibly the most powerful army on Earth. Yet in Afghanistan we lost to sandal wearing religious radicals primarily equipped with WW2 era weaponry and some improvised explosives. And our "victory" in Iraq was defined as being left constrained to micro-sized 'green zones' we're completely unable to leave without extensively armored and prepped convoys, or otherwise it's like to turn into a one way trip.
Of course the catch is that it's dumb to mock things as 'WW2 era weaponry.' A Talibani armed with a Springfield 1903, or Mauser 1898, numbers indicating their manufacturing date, is not only able to kill literally any soldier, but also from extremely far distances. And until the opportunity emerges said Talibani can simply keep that rifle tucked under his robes, looking just like any other civilian. Unless the e.g. US wants to simply start engaging in mass genocide, it's essentially impossible to defeat these sort of insurrections. Especially when each person you kill suddenly turns their otherwise moderate neighbors, friends, and brothers into the next insurrectionists.
In modern times you only see the restraint you see because of the political consequences of allowing the full force of the military machine to be umleashed. Consider how the military actualy behaved in afhanistan or iraq vs the pacific theater. They would visit villages on foot and use interpreters and attempt to form relationships with the locals, instead of just strategically bombing them flat on the off chance they harbor something important to the war machine. The most intense battle of Iraq, the second battle of Falluja, saw 600 civilian deaths. The battle for Okinawa saw over 100,000 civilians dead, a third of the population. That being said I think it goes to show that if push really came to shove, the new war planning would readily go away for the old war planning of strategic bombing along with atomic weaponry, at which there is no cave that will protect you when we have nuclear warheads designed to penetrate the deepest bunkers. There is no safe haven when the US army can engage you from beyond the curve of the earth.
In modern times you're conflating conventional warfare with insurgent warfare, which are very different. Conventional warfare is largely defined by sizable groups organizing and intentionally making the presence known in a limited region, setting the stage for 'normal' engagements. So for instance Iraq quickly turned into an insurgency but the Second Battle of Falluja was one of the few conventional encounters. Several thousand disorganized insurgents with limited arms and equipment decided to stick around and engage a modern military, multiple times their size, head on. They were obviously, and knowingly, signing on for a one way trip to Allah. That said, even there a heavily outnumbered, out-gunned, and out-teched rabble suicidally engaging in conventional warfare managed to inflict hundreds of casualties - about 5% of the military force.
Imagine a similar scenario in times past where you had a rabble of 4000 peasants equipped with whatever instruments they could manage, against 13,000+ armed and armed soldiers with cavalry and archery support. It's highly unlikely that the army would suffer a single casualty, let alone death.
https://acoup.blog/2023/07/21/collections-how-to-roman-repub...
Of course, you would still need to be born a wealthy plebeian if you wanted to climb the ranks of Roman politics.
Your observation stands as a generality but it's somewhat ironic still, making this complaint about a post by a historian who is very very aware of what you're saying.