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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

I've seen some interest on HN for the Roman Kingdom, Republic and Empire.

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.

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I have to shout out the “Masters of Rome” series by Colleen Mccullough. It starts with “The First Man in Rome” covering Gaius Marius’ rise to power, and proceeds through the fall of the Republic and the establishing of the Empire.

These books are incredibly well researched and informative, but also have SUCH a compelling narrative style and characterizations. It’s very immersive.

And the Historia Civilis series on YouTube.

Dropping my own favorite review of the contributing factors that led to the downfall of the republic and rise of empire:

"Storm before the storm".

That's the book that Mike Duncan wrote following up his work on the History of Rome podcast. The first of the two books he wrote while running the Revolutions podcast, with the second being a biography of Lafayette.

The basic premise I got from Mike Duncan's podcast was that: when Rome ran out of dangerous external enemies to fight (ie Carthage), people in Rome found internal enemies to fight.

That was fine for a few centuries, until external enemies re-emerged, and then it really fell apart.

Eh, kinda. It was more that they overextended themselves and could no longer defend their borders with their citizen-soldiery that expected to be home in time for harvest. Multiyear campaigns and distant conquest required a professional army. Because of that, Marius reformed the army to allow the proletarii in, pay them from the treasury and outfit them from state arsenals and armories. Prior to the reforms, soldiers were patricians and wealthy plebeians who could afford to outfit themselves with equipment and supplies.

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.

Both you and the person you're replying to are correct. These are not mutually exclusive factors. (Well, except the part about egypt: that was assimilated after Anthony and Cleopatra's defeat, not after Pompey's defeat. Caesar allowed Cleopatra to remain a client monarch.)

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.

According to Ms Beard the most basic cause for the Roman republic downfall was the establishment of private armies.

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.

You're replying to a comment about a book that details the events prior to Julius Caesar, who was at the very end of the republic, not its cause.

The cause of what? We don't know much about the cause of the republic because any records of that were lost in the first sack of Rome. As for the cause of the fall of the republic, Julius Caesar did not cause those factors to exist, but in him we see the culmination of a hundred years of learning how to abuse the flaws in their civic constitution. He wasn't the first, but he put all the pieces together.

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.

I don't disagree with the central thesis, and you can argue all sorts of moments for the fall of the Republic, but the establishment of client armies started with Marius, not Caesar. Even then, it was in response to political, economic and military issues which predated even Tiberius Gracchus whose tribunate many use to mark the beginning of the end. Rome's constitution was a marvel, as noted by Polybius, and it granted stability for a long time. But by the time of Sulla (who marched an army into Rome decades before Caesar), all pretence of a government that intended to give equal voice to all factions had disappeared. The idea that Ceasar or Octavian dismantled a functioning or even salvageable republic seems fanciful to me.

I would go back even farther, all the way to the end of the Second Punic War. Scipio Africanus was the one who expanded the practice of client-patron relationships to a geopolitical scale to build an independent power base. He was also the innovator of the cults of personality that would become common. He never tried to overthrow the republic, but some of the political practices used to destabilize the late republic can be traced back to his innovations.

How were Caesars' legions “private”? Are you sure you're not confusing with the fall of the Roman Empire, with autonomous military leadership in the provinces (but even then, calling them “private armies” would still sound anachronistic)

They’re loyalty was to Caesar or their general to give them a share of the loot they were conquering.

This started with the Marian reforms.

> 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 most relevant quote I could easily find: "Rewarding soldiers with loot and using conquered lands to form colonies wasn’t new and Marius doesn’t standardize it, Augustus does."

> How were Caesars' legions “private”?

The Roman state authorised the raising of legions. But the (pro)consuls raising them were responsible for paying them. Think: Prighozhin.

Check out the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan if you haven't already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast)

I've got total respect for the scholarship of Mary Beard.

She got into a recent online argument with one of my other intellectual heroes Nassim Taleb about the genetic makeup of Roman Britain.

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