In Our Time - The Roman Republic

Episode Date: December 30, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rise and eventual downfall of the Roman Republic which survived for 500 years.Around 550 BC, Lucretia, the daughter of an aristocrat, was raped by the son of Tarquin, the King of Rome. Lucretia told her family what had happened to her and then in front of them, killed herself from shame. The Roman historian Livy describes what was believed to have happened next:"Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief; drew out the knife from Lucretia's wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, "By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!". The King was duly expelled from the city and the Roman Republic was founded and lasted for 500 years. But in what form did this republic evolve, what were its values and ideals and what ultimately caused the end of the world’s first true experiment in constitutional government?With Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University; Catherine Steel, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow; Tom Holland, historian and author of Rubicon: the Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uket, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, around 550 BC, Lucretia, the daughter of an aristocrat, was raped by the son of Tarquin, the king of Rome. Lucretia told her family what had happened to her,

and then, in front of them, killed herself from shame. The Roman historian Livy describes what was believed to have happened next. Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief, drew out the knife from Lucretia's wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you gods to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus,

and his wicked wife, and all his children, with sword, with fire, I with whatsoever violence I may, and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome. The king was duly expelled from the city, and the Roman Republic was founded and lasted for 500 years. There were to be no more kings. But in what form did this republic evolve,

what were its values and ideals, and what ultimately caused the end of the world's first plausible experiment in constitutional government? With me to discuss the ideals of the Roman Republic, Greg Wolfe, Professor of Ancient History at St. Andrews University, Catherine Steele, lecturer in classics at the University of Glasgow, and Tom Holland, historian and author of Rubicon, The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic.

Greg, well, can you tell us about Tarquin and how the Roman Republic is said to have come into being in the first place? Romans believed that the Republic was an antidote to tyranny, that it was the opposite of monarchy, and that with overthrowing Tarquin, the last king of Rome, that Rome then moves into a period in which, from the point of the aristocracy, at least, they have enormous freedom and that this freedom is what allowed them to go on over the next 500 years to conquer the world, to become the premier power in the Mediterranean basin.

By the time Livy's writing, the word you started with, that's over. He's already living under the first Roman emperor. And so the Republic is that 500 year gap between one kind of monarchy and the other. It's quite a gap and it's a very fertile gap. Was what they were attempting in their public overall, before we get into detail, a new thing? It was new. They were trying to find a way of keeping a state together without having a king at the top of it. And there's a cluster of institutions which together would do the jobs that kings would do, would lead, would control, would marshal the state, would build the community of citizens together and take them out there,

but without ever allowing it to slip back into tyranny or despotism. Was this expedited by what could be called a division of, powers? Yes, one of the solutions the Romans have is to divide powers between groups. So they have two supreme magistrates at the top rather than one king, the magistrate change every year, those magistrates are answerable to a Senate, other magistrates to other functions. There's a sense in which all of these jobs that have been combined in one person beforehand, in one sovereign, are then split up and shared out, not shared out by everyone, but shared out among the aristocracy. about Tarquin in the 6th century BC. When did this stuff about the beginning of Republic

start to be written down? When do you have evidence that you would call hard evidence on which you could base some of the generalisations you've made? Our first really good evidence comes from nearly 300 years later. We have Greek writers for observing Rome. Not many of their earliest works survive. From the late 3rd century, the early 2nd century, we begin to get comprehensive accounts of what's going on. But the original period, the very origins, are much mythologised, and

it's really not until the age of Cicero, that they reach agreement among themselves about the dates and the sequence. So do you think it might be a much more fumbling affair in the early days than it has been presented? I think it's certainly a lot less neat and clear than later historian representative. And we are at the beginning

talking about a small insignificant city, which by the end it's become a world power through the period known as the Republic. That's right. It's a tiny city which is historically invisible. It's contemporaries, classical Athens, the Persian Empire, hardly seem to know about its existence. By the end of the period, it dominates every kind of source we had. Greg has referred to myths, Tom Holland,

and it had its myths about what it meant to be a Roman, as distinct, what it meant to be king, they're gone, and one of the great myths was Horatius on the bridge. Now, can you tell us what happened there and why that was so important? Well, it is, of course, a fantastic story because the Romans have a passionate addiction to tales of this kind, tales of heroism, endurance and bloodshed. And the story is that once...

Which date are we on note? We are now 508. So the year after Tarquin has been expelled, he goes and asks help from a local Etruscan king, who agrees. The Romans are surprised. They flee towards the Sublittian Bridge. And it looks as though the Etruscans are going to be able. able to burst in, but fortunately a granite-faced Roman hero steps forward, holds the breach,

two others ashamed into joining him. They hold off the Etruscan forces while behind them. The Romans are busy hacking away the bridge. Two of them run over. Horatius stays as the bridge crashes into the tiber. He then jumps into the tiber, full armour, arrows, missiles raining down on him, makes it to the other side, and even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. and it's all thrilling and heroic and passionate, and that, of course, is why the Romans tell it. But it's also interesting because it sums up something that is very important to the Republic,

which is this idea that alongside the hero who steps forward and achieves great things, the people are joining in and backing him up. And in fact, we're told in Livy that when Horatius gets back, the poor of Rome have a whip round to try and build him a statue. And it's this idea of heroism, of individual heroism, joining with community that is the key to the Republic's ideology. It does seem rather meaning me to spoil such a wonderful story with the question like this,

but is there any hard evidence for that at all? No, absolutely none. But I mean, I think the fact that the Romans tell it is in itself significant. I mean, it could possibly have happened. And is it interpreted as a story that says, to be a Roman citizen, you must put Rome before your own life, and Rome comes first? Is that the reason it's told with such sort of graphic power?

Yes, I think so. And I think, as I say, it's about the fact that the key for the Republic is the fact that heroism must be tamed. On the one hand, you must encourage your individual citizens, and particularly your aristocrats, to achieve great things. But on the other hand, you have to rein them in. It's oppositional, isn't it, in its beginnings. Greg has pointed out that the constitution, as it were, let's call it that, for the sake of this discussion, was non-king, that was its starting point. And the way that the Republic and Rome defined itself was, we are not going to. going to be overcome, and that was very important for them to win wars, to define themselves against Hannibal, for instance. What part did Hannibal, as it were, although he murdered

many Romans, what part did he play in hardening the Roman Republic's idea of itself? I think there is a key moment in the war against Hannibal that illustrates what an extraordinary state the Roman Republic was, and it comes after... The data we're talking about now. 218. The Romans have sent the largest army they have ever sent into the field. Hannibal wipes it out completely. More people die on this day than in any battle until the first day of the Battle of the Somme it has been estimated. Really? By any conceivable standard of diplomatic behaviour, the Romans should have at least negotiated, should have at least opened diplomatic relations

with Hannibal at this point and sued for terms. They don't. And more than that, they commit an act of what even to the Romans is unspeakable barbarity. They commit a human sacrifice in the forum to give a public statement that there is no expedient they will not consider to stand up and fight. They bury four people alive. They do. And how is it that they can recover their forces with Hannibal, a great general, he'd won three great battles against them?

What is it in the Roman organisation? It has been presented in a way as willpower, the destiny of Rome and so. There must have had more men or something. Hannibal's plan in going into Italy is that, that he assumes that the Italian states will rise in support of him and they want to be freed from Roman control. But the Romans have, once they have conquered,

tend to offer the conquered favorable terms and the promise of engagement in the riches that Roman power is bringing into Italy. And so therefore, the Italian allies of Rome don't really see that Carthaginian rule is going to be better. And after Caney, it's true, a few cities do switch sides. but by and large Italy stands behind Rome and that is really the source of the Roman's ultimate victory. We're galloping through the centuries, Catherine Sier,

but we're getting to Polybius, who is a Greek general, who was exiled to Rome, and he landed up an house of Skippy Afrikaannis, the man who defeated Hannibal. But he wrote a history of the Romans in which he said, we all must be amazed at how far this place has travelled in such a short time to become, to dominate the whole of the inhabited world, he says.

Is this a surprise to him? What do we make of Polybius' view there? Is he just fluttering them? What has happened by then by about 150 BC? Polybius is genuinely astonished. The period he picks out is 53 years between 220 and 167 in his analysis. The Romans conquered the known world.

And what Polybius is trying to do in his work is explain that to other Greeks, whom he has reason to think, did not fully understand the nature of the Roman power, and in particular the way in which they might wish to deal with those whom they had conquered. So it's trying to explain what is distinctive about this state, which has suddenly arisen, and is now a major force in the lives of the Greek states. But it's further taking up what Greg said at the beginning of this programme,

that Rome was unknown to the great powers, Athenian powers, the Persian powers. And he's almost sort of saying, look, what's happening here, isn't it? And it's also taken up rather what Tom says, is that he's been accepted in as a quasi-citizen into the House of Scipio, and he's allowed to write this history, and Lee won't presume, a fairly free life. So it's already, in himself, he is, as it were, representing what the Republic's going towards, isn't he?

Well, I wonder about that. I mean, by the time Polybius is writing, the Greek world knew all about the Romans. The Romans have defeated Macedon, they've crossed an army over into Asia Minor. And Polybius was, in a sense, a prisoner of war. I mean, he was one of the thousand Greeks who were taken to Rome after the Battle of Pidna and basically held under house arrest. It was Polybius' good fortune, however, that he ended up in Rome rather than in one of the other cities in Italy, which were used to house the hostages,

and therefore had privileged access to members of the aristocracy. when he says it's a wonder of the world that they've arrived at this place in history in such a quick time, is he giving us his reasons the development of the army, the development of military techniques? What reasons does he give for this?

Well, in book six of his history, at the point in the narrative just after the Battle of Can I, Polybius feels he needs to explain how it was that Rome didn't just collapse at that point. And his explanation has two parts. He does have a lot to say about the Roman military system, which he regarded as extremely efficient.

But he also picks out the Roman constitution as an element in why they were so stable. He uses the familiar categories of Greek political theory to come up with the, or at least to articulate fully the idea that Rome is a mixed constitution. So that although it has turned its back on tyranny, nonetheless it now has within it, he says, elements which are monarchical, elements which are monarchical, elements which are aristocratic and elements which are democratic and it has incorporated all those into an extremely stable system

where those three elements operate a system of checks and balances. Greg, what would you say? How did you, do you want to take that on from what Catherine said, how it achieved this power in that last 50-odd years spurt? I think it has done, it has done exactly as Catherine says and created this balance of forces which are able to reproduce themselves. a virus that replicates, groups are brought into Rome. They're brought in through clientage, they're brought in through conquest, and that added to this state. And that structure that

Catherine summarised there from Polybius' description is one that can be extended outwards and more and more people can be brought in. So one of the successes of Rome is that when it wins a victory, it then consolidates that by drawing others into the Roman state. So by the end of the Republic, there may be five million Roman citizens. The whole of the Italian Peninsula, more or less, as citizens of this city of Rome. At the beginning, it's a tiny fraction of that, maybe only 10,000 citizens right there at the beginning of the Republic, maybe even less.

And so I think it's the capacity of this constitution to grow and expand, and where necessary, to innovate and to change and to vary the mix that makes it so successful. But nevertheless, they're winning great battles against massive and traditionally extraordinary powerful enemies. So are we already talking about a Roman military system? system which is markedly well developed or even differently developed from others.

Tom Holland. Well, Polybius points out that one of the things that makes the Romans so lethal as a military force is the fact that everyone fighting feels that they have a stake and more than that will probably have voted for war. I mean, it's interesting that right at the beginning when Rome first engages in war with Carthage, the Senate is sort of hesitant about this. It's the people who do it. And again, it's the people who vote to send the ultimatum to Carthage

that results in the war against Hannibal. And against that, the monarchies of the East, the Macedons and so on, are being led by kings. They have to say so. But Polybius is very, very clear that it is the Roman people in arms, as in fact are the Romans themselves. Can any young fit male join the army? Not only can has to.

You are summoned to war. You have to go. Do they have an economic stake in their country? when they join the army? Do they, are they given or do they have a bit of land? Do they have a good pay? It is an absolute fundamental principle of the Roman state that war has to pay its way.

They will go, they will conquer, they will impose an indemnity, they will loot whatever. But war has to be made to pay. And obviously the individual citizens who comprise the legions will have a part in that. Greg. That's right, but they don't all have the same part in that, that there are people who have no property at all.

They're called the Kapiti Kensis, those who have to be counted by their heads because you can't count them by what they're worth because they're not worth anything. And it's various stages up as you get wealthier in the assemblies. Your votes count for more. And if you enter the question order or the Senate, it's almost certainly you have to be already one of the wealthy groups. So you have this, it's very unlike the Athenian democracy where absolutely everyone who's a citizen of any rank or status background education gets to pay an equal part. In Rome, you play a part in proportion to your wealth. and the wealth you are the bigger part you play.

There's an implication of what Greg said, in fact more than an implication, Catherine, that because of the constitution of the republic, because it was formed, it had representations from different parts of society, because the people, Tom said, voted for. The constitution itself gave it, as it were, a great, as it turned out, military strength.

You see a connection there? I think so, and I think the other point one has to toss in here, picking up what Greg said earlier, was that the Romans were unusual among ancient states in the generosity with their citizenship, and they were also extremely effective in marshalling those other states within Italy which they conquered into providers of military manpower.

And one of the things that Polybius, again, when he talks about the army, is extremely impressed by, is the contribution that the Allies are expected to make in terms of providing troops, as well as the organisation within the Roman state. So that one of the reasons why Rome was so military successful was the enormous resources of manpower, had. Let's turn to the values and ideals of this republic. Now, Greg, Republic, Rezpublic,

our public matters, let us say. What did that mean to the Romans? Can we take a median time in this 500-year stretch when it's settled down or maybe it meant something from the beginning? What did the public matters, republic, mean to the Romans? I think it begins as almost a sort of accident defined negatively. It means things that belong to the people, to the populace. And as time goes on, the content changes. By the very end of the process, when the Emperor Augustus, as First Emperor, says, I've restored the Republic. What he means by Republic there is I've just restored the affairs of state. But already, people are beginning to look back and say, the Republic is equivalent to freedom from tyranny. It's equivalent to a period of liberty. So

Reis Publica is a moving target, what it means changes over time. But does it also mean that you have a duty as a Roman to serve the public, to serve in the public arena of your state? Does it lay an obligation on you that you are a Roman citizen by virtue of serving in the public interest? One of the difficulties we have is when we look at the ideas, the values, is that we see the mostly in text written right at the end of the process by Cicero and his contemporaries. 500 years after it was founded more. That's right, yes. And so at that point, Cicero is already trying to define an order that is coming under huge threat. And his is only one view.

For example, Cicero thinks the Senate should be by far the most important part of the state. And it's clear they're a rival tradition, to think the people should be much more important. At one point, the Senate was simply a group of councillors chosen by the consuls for that year. By Cicero's time, it's become a legal hereditary body or quasi-hereditary body. And so the actual content of it, of these Republican ideas, is something that's really formulated right at the end. Captain Stiel, can I ask you about,

can we explore more of this notion of extending citizenship? It could be thought of as mere cynical recruitment. You make them citizens, so they are bound to come in your army. But people seem to have wanted to become citizens. Yet we're talking about people that generally have been defeated. They're going to go into somewhere where they'll be under the authority, although not the tyranny, authority of persons other than they were before.

Why was it so highly regarded or sought after? Is this a successful propaganda on the part of the Romans, or there are other reasons? I think it's an issue which varies during the course of the Republic. I mean, there's a story in Livy about the end of the fourth century, about the Iquy, who go to war because they don't want to have citizenship forced upon them. They talk about the citizenship. Where are the Iquois? To the east of Rome.

I mean, it's a point where Rome's operations are still very small scale. And they talk about citizenship being pro-poena. It would be a penalty to have to become citizens. In the period where most of our source material relates to, citizenship has become very much a desirable thing for those in Italy who don't have it. And its desirability is very likely to be associated with the expanding empire. One would have thought that the rewards of having access to an expanding empire, and are so great, that that overrides the desire for maintaining one's local community. So it's a way to increase your personal fortune, at putting it at its most basic. Yeah, I guess for the Dominoble.

the leading members of the other Italian communities, then there are real advantages to citizenship. And it's been argued, too, that as the Romans become concerned about the land which they own in Italy and start wanting to redistribute it and so on, then the Italians feel themselves in need of a voice at Rome in order not to be exploited by this process

of land acquisition, or at least land redistribution at that point. If you want to make a link between the military success and the Constitution, One way to put it, perhaps, would be to say something like the Roman constitution is why Rome's victories matter more than its defeats. Rome has huge defeats, as Tom pointed out. But those defeats somehow don't seem to signify. But the victories then lead into these additional processes of consolidation and state growth, community growth. And that constitution is, in a way, it gives Roman edge a comparative advantage over other states.

What about this notion inside the Republic, maybe Tom can pick this up of, or are you, Greg, Most Majorum, the way of the elders. Now, is this something that comes in when people write about it four or five hundred years after it has been initiated? Or is this a thread we can see running through the mythology as well as the history? I think one of the really intriguing... What does it actually mean? I just said the phrase. How would it be interpreted there?

It means the customs of the ancestors, the traditions of the ancestors. But it means also that they're much better than we have to do. Well, yes. The way we used to be. it's this idea that the most extraordinarily revolutionary measures can always be justified by appeals to the past. And we've been talking about how the Roman Republic evolves, and it does to an extraordinary degree.

But every time the Romans undertake a major change, they can always dredge up some proof or evidence from the past to prove that they're actually fulfilling what was the way that things always used to be. So it's at once a very revolutionary and a very conservative society. There does seem to be something developing as the Republic goes on there. that the idea of having a godlike figure can't be let go and the generals winning battles enter Rome and they're gods for a day or two,

even though some at their shoulder is whispering, remember you are mortal, but they're painted like gods and so on. Why do you think this strand persists? Well, one thing you could say, I suppose, as Rome goes through these changes, is that it needs to find some way of making sense of them. And one way is to look back,

it's to look back to the ancestors in the same way that the Tory party in Britain adopts the label conservative in the early 90th century at exactly that moment where change really starts. So appealing back to the ancestors is a way of stabilising yourself, it's a consciousness of change. Now, an alternative device people use to make sense of Rome's world power was to look forward, if you like, to models of kingship and divine kingship

that are already out there in the Greek world and to try and develop their generals into something like the kings of the Greek East. What about these triumphal interests, though, Tom Holland? Can you just give us some idea of what they were? We've seen them represented in Hollywood movies and other movies. What is happening there? Well, under the Republic particularly, armed men are not allowed inside Rome. Rome is a sphere outside the military zone.

And the only time that you can do that is as a triumphal general. And often you have cases where generals will come back. There will be disputes in the Senate about whether to give them a triumph. And they can stay sort of parked and disconsolately out. inside the city walls for up to five years, waiting to be allowed in. And then when they do, they come in with their armies, they parade their loot, they will bring in some prisoners who will either be pardoned, but more probably dispatched, and they enjoy the thrill, the privilege.

Weasel Orwellian word, dispatch. Throtted. Throttled. And for a day, they are allowed to partake of the ecstasy of being a god, a king, and then that moment goes. And it's this idea that glory must be tasted fleetingly, that again is a sort of fundamental underpinning of the Republic. We've talked about how you hold a magistracy for a year,

you hold a triumph for a day. It's also evident, even in the fabric, the architecture of the Republican city. Rome, right up until the end of the Republic, is distinctive by, for instance, by not having a theatre built of stone. Even the most pipsqueak Italian cities have this, but Rome doesn't.

Instead, what it will have is extravagant Trump-eye, Fantasia's thrown up in the streets, which will then be pulled down again. Can we discuss this? For a moment, Catherine, can you develop it? It was a city which, visitors from other cities looked down on,

even though this great city was growing, this great republic, a conquering city, people could make disparaging remarks about it with ease and frequency. Yes, it didn't have the fantastic visual impact that the cities of the Greek East did. Can we get on to Cicero,

which is towards the end of the, of the Republican. He is the great mediator of Republican ideas. Catherine, can you tell us what he thought of the three elements in constitutional life and how he divided them into three and what his view of these three was. He was a great orator. He was a great intellectual. He had his academy and so and so forth. Well, he very much wants to accept, in formal terms, the threefold analysis and identify kingship, aristocracy and democracy as elements which need to be kept in balance. and in terms of his theory at least he gives room to democracy.

He doesn't eliminate it completely, although a lot of his remarks elsewhere are extremely contemptuous of the Roman people as they were. Interestingly, when he's thinking about constitutional matters, which he does in the Republic, he does accept or does very much believe that the Roman constitution is best because it's mixed. But if you have to go for a simple form of the constitution, He doesn't really have any time for democracy, but he puts kingship marginally ahead of aristocracy.

And there's a sense in which the hard evidence we have about the republic is that the aristocracy is holding on very, very successfully when the Gracie brothers try to sort of bring the plebeians to bear on the issue much more, they're executed, although they're themselves, as I understand it, are aristocrats. So we can idealise this a little bit too much. Is that right, Greg? I think that's right. There's a sense in which the three bits that Catherine's talked about,

the Pilibeus talked about beforehand, are more or less there all the time, but their relative strength varies over time. And so aristocracy maybe comes to be more of a contested value as time goes on. By the time of the Gracie at the end of the second century BC, you have some members of the aristocracy who are trying to bring the people back into, power and they're claiming that they're acting according to a tradition and looking back to

antecedents of that the struggle of the plebeians against the patricians and so on and you've also got other people saying no the traditional ways for the aristocracy to be in charge and we're presumably also got some people who are thinking well i'd like to see myself in a line of quasi-monarchical general heroes that go back and it's rather like an old house which the rooms stay the same but they're reused in each generation in slightly different ways but they're big arguments, as it were, let's just to take a completely inappropriate term, but to sort of help it along, the middle classes

who don't have the benefits that they think they ought to have, the wealthy, the new Burish, at one state say that they will move out of Rome and stop contributing to it unless they get the powers that they think they deserve. That's right, and this has allegedly happened within 15 years of the

beginning of the Republic, that no sooner of the Republic arrived by throwing out kings, within 15 years of it, the first on the first occasion, when the plebs say, we're going to go and set up a quite separate city of our own, just on the other side of the big valley. And this happens again throughout history,

and later struggles are then reinterpreted in these terms. The Republic begins to break up when the empire begins to kick in. Is that right, Tom Holland? They have this big empire, the business of changing every year, generals coming back to be magistrates for you, the cozy swapovers and divisions of powers, however, ineffectively they work there.

still there in place, they can't be managed because generals are far too far away and they're also getting far too powerful. Is there something you make? Well, obviously, if you're having an annual turnover, it's tricky if you're the governor of Syria. And so what happens is that pro-consuls tend to have longer and longer stretches of power. And you're right that that then gives them more and more opportunity to get richer and richer, and they then start to put the fabric of the Republican Constitution into their shadow. And the Romans themselves have a problem with wealth. They interpret it in moral terms, and they see the decline of the Republic in moral terms,

that the influx of wealth brings about a breakdown of the ancient simplicities and orders of the Republic. And I think that there is quite an element of truth in that, actually. Kastrow, would you like to develop that? Yes, I think the other factor, though, one needs to toss in is not just the resources of empire and the ambitions which they then generated among generals who had opportunities to develop powers over periods of years, but ultimately the willingness of soldiers to turn against the state. Now, that's interesting. That's a key thing. Why did that happen at this time? Well, one of the factors in it was surely the Senate's reluctance to come up with a consistent policy of rewarding soldiers. at the end of their service.

And if we can come back to an earlier point about the need of all citizens to serve in the army, one of the things that happens towards the end of the second century is that any form of property qualification for entry into the army is abolished. Marius says he will enroll anybody. And this marks a fundamental change. The old myth was the citizen soldier, well, the farmer soldier. He had his little plot like Cincinnati.

He went off and he fought for the state. And at the end of the campaign he went home. many picked up again, which is fine if you're only campaigning in Italy. Of course, that begins not to work as soon as you've got overseas campaigns and you have to have your soldiers away from their homesteads for however many years. And one of the things that the Gracie were worried about was a perception that this class of soldier farmers was coming under threat for economic reasons. And Marius was wanted that by enrolling anybody. But once you've got there and you can't assume that your soldiers are property owners

in any small way, you then have to think about what do you do with them when they have finished their term of service? And one of the hot potatoes of the late republic is debates over land laws about making that type of provision. And so you get to a position where if the Senate won't do it, then perhaps your general will.

Well, that's right, isn't it, from the point of view, we talk about the crisis of the late Republic. But if we were living, if we were Romans who were living 50 years before, we'd have a different crisis. In a sense, it's the latest of a series that for the Gracki, they see a problem in the 130s, the 120s. If we were to go back earlier, Polybius says, well, I'm going to describe the Roman

Cotter as it was at the Battle of Can I, when Hannibal was at the walls, because... 70 years earlier. Exactly, because now it's all going down the chute. And presumably, if we had earlier sources, they'd be saying, well, before Apius Caikas, it was okay. Everything starts going wrong 70 years earlier. Maybe the people in the 5th century saying, we should have the kings back, really. they made the change run on time.

We're in the first century BC and we're up against Pompey and Caesar and this is, I mean this is the change when things change partly because of the power and influence of these two. So can you Greg, can you introduce us to the

why they may have been significantly more powerful in what way they were and why that mattered? As Rome expands it needs bigger and bigger armies, its generals need to more powerful. Pompey can sweep the Mediterranean pirates in a matter of months because he has huge resources, huge numbers of subordinates and so on. For Rome to succeed, it needs to create these super figures and it needs huge armies who don't come home to vote. And it's the failure of the Republican constitution to find a way to bring those armies back into the citizen body and to bring

those generals back into the political elite. They finally finished with that print. of distributing power among themselves very frequently. So when Pompey comes back from the wars, he's been treated like a king by Greeks and others out there, and yet he's expected to go back and join the back benches and take his turn, and of course he doesn't, and Caesar doesn't. And so using their armies who are alienated from the state

and using their gangs of friends who can rely on them for wealth, these generals periodically fight out with each other or gang up and effectively suspend civil government. Now just as at the beginning, Tom described Horatius on the bridge as a defining myth. Caesar crossing the Rubicon as a defining fact, isn't it? So can you tell us why that is such a defining fact? We've got a lot more evidence for this than we had for Horatius. Well, we've talked about Pompey.

What he has been given was a grant to go out and organise the East, which had been collapsing into a state of anarchy. He basically lays the foundations for what will become the Empire in the East, direct rule. And this, as Greg says, gives him enormous wealth, enormous prestige. He comes back and he is a colossal figure. And Caesar, I think, wakes up to the fact that in the future, there are going to be one, two, maybe three figures who are qualitatively more powerful than their peers. And he wants a part of it.

And so he enters into an alliance with Pompey and another aristocrat called Krasis to basically carve up the constitution. And he wins for himself a five-year period as governor in Gaul, which at that point the Romans are only really important. in control of the south of what is now France. But Caesar goes out there and completely illegally starts a war that not only results in him conquering gall, but takes him over the Rhine, takes him to Britain.

He then wins himself a further five-year extension. And he is a figure of supreme ability, talent and achievement, and he has an enormous number of battle-hardened legions, and they are parked on the northern frontier of Italy. And so his peers, understandably, back in Rome, are a bit nervous and jumpy about this. they have been looking to get him, to bring him down, ever since the illegalities of Caesar's alliance with Pompeian Crassus.

And so they force him into this corner where they say either you give up your legions now or you are declared an enemy of the state. And so Caesar has this choice that he can either give up all he's worked for and stay within the law, or he can cross the Rubicon, which is the frontier that got dividing Gaul in Italy and essentially declare civil war. Sorry, this is where the two values clash, and the individualistic value that each Roman aristrate wants to be like Horatius on the bridge, saving the state on his own,

clashes with the idea that we will all work together for the benefit of the state. And as Caesar says, I'm invading because my dignitar, my worth demanded it, and he invades his own country for the sake of his own individual, esteem and value. And is that the plunger that goes in that blows the thing up, really? I think it is, because, the consequence of that is civil war. Pompey now taking on the side of the Constitution, supposedly. Pompey loses. Caesar ends up in supreme power, and they give him the role of dictator, which is an ancient Republican magistracy in moments of particular crisis. The dictator

is given supreme power over the state for six months. It's very, very six months. Caesar ends up making himself dictator for life. And so this then blocks off all hope that his peers have that they will be able to attain any power comparable. And so this then forces them into a corner and the result is the Iads of March. We also have the assassination of Cicero, the exile assassination of Cicero, the great spokesman, mediator, philosopher for the Republic. How significant at about the same time, in terms of which we've been talking very much about the same time around the 40s BC. How significant was the death of Cicero? What did it mean? Well, it came to be seen as a defining moment, partly because of what Cicero had done in the 18 months after

Caesar had been assassinated, because the assassins of Caesar did hope in some sense to resurrect the Republic. And although Cicero wasn't part of the conspiracy, he became a spokesman for it in the sequence of speeches against Anthony, called the Philippics. And it was as a result of the Philippics that Anthony, once he and Octavian and Nepetus had established a second trium for it, It was Anthony who puts Cicero's name on the list Because he had been On the prescription list, yes Because he had become the spokesman

For the Republic And freedom in particular is a constantly Repeated motif in the Philippines That that is what is now at stake They murdered him in a particularly A horrible way His hands were cut off, his heads were cut off And Mark Anthony's wife

drove a pin or a nail through his tongue. I'm really, and that's gory, but this is the difference of an execution and torture. In what order did they do that? They killed him first, and then they mutilated the body. And they pinned it up on the speaker's platform,

the head and the hand or hands, on the speaker's platform in Rome. So they saw, do one second, Tom, so they saw it, the people who did it saw it as a demonstration of what? They saw it as a demonstration partly of revenge for the insult that Cicero had done

to Anthony and to Hisworth by the constant invective. But also as a sign that they'd won. And there he was. And there. This is what happens if he loses. And he's silenced, isn't it? The end of free speech. And also his hand is important because it wasn't just the fact that he delivered the Philippics' speech.

It was that he wrote them down and they were disseminated. So he stopped, yeah. Yes, it's pretty, it doesn't allow for much room for maneuver. There are public service, isn't it? Well, I suppose this rose death is seen as... That's what it comes to be seen as. And it is, you know, it's his silencing. It's the end of freedom of speech.

And freedom of speech is seen as being a crucial part of Republican freedoms. Then just a few years later, writing under the beginning of the empire and empress, Livy is absolutely bemoaning the decline of all this, the moral decline, that they feel that a great deal has been lost, was in fact a great deal lost, Greg. I think you could say that from the point of the aristotle, They lost their freedom to dominate the state by their wealth, to dominate its politics through their speech. For many others in the state, Italians, plebeians, slave, provincials, maybe not so much was lost. Tacitus famously said the Republic was so corrupt that most people didn't mind that it went, that they're happy to see the back of Republican governors.

Now we can look back and we can say, well, the Republic is constantly changing, constantly adapting, and maybe having a permanent head of state, state who controls all the armies is just the latest adaption. Maybe Augustus is right that the raised publicer, the affairs of state of the Romans, had been put back on a solid footing after all in its new guise with having a permanent monarch rather than a temporary Pompeo or Caesar. It lasts for another thousand years. I suppose you could say that the key point then is when it turns out that Augustus has produced something that somebody else can inherit. Yes.

So maybe it's the point at which Tiberius becomes the second emperor that you, You've demonstrated a fundamental shift. Or the point where they assassinate Claudius and... The point where they assassinate Calicula and fail to restore a republic. Yes, yes. And yet I think something noble is lost. I think that however sluede and waited, the people's votes did count. And there's a sort of wonderful perfection in the fact that Augustus rebuilds the voting pens in marble.

And then these voting pens are increasingly used for staging sort of amazing spectacles like people will exhibit enormous monsters in them. And the rest of the time it's generally used for shopping. And so what has been the nerve centre of the democratic aspect of the Republic just becomes a sort of shopping mall. Finally though, Catherine's deal, do you see the Republican idea trickling through

and somehow enduring inside the Roman Empire and being available to be used, plundered, taken up by later countries seeking for non-Kings, non-tyrants? Well, it does provide perhaps one of the most accessible models of non-kingship and in a form that's possibly less alarming than Athenian democracy. For the Romans of the Empire themselves, of course, given their propensity to look to the past for what is good,

it does become an idealised system, particularly when you're reading the writings of aristocrats. It's after the American and French revolutions, when people want to find an opposite to absolute monarchy. It's to Roman models that they look. And not Greek. Well, thank you very much, DeCatherine Steele, Greg Wolf and Tom Holland,

and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com. com.com.