Discarding political norms and increasing violence spells the end of republicanism. 

Disclaimer: This is an unfinished draft and might be inaccurate at parts.

Mike Duncan has long been one of my favorite podcasters. His series The History of Rome and Revolutions were both constantly playing in my earbuds for months on end, multiple times. So when I found out he was writing a book about one of my favorite periods in Roman history, I was quite excited. However, I was a bit disappointed with the book. One of the best parts of Duncan's podcasts is his ability to narrate a story, in somewhat textbook fashion, while keeping the "plot" interesting and exciting. Yet the book felt flat, maybe uninspired. The utter insanity of what was going on in Rome through this period - which I will outline below - doesn't come through the text, which reads more like a Wikipedia rundown of the historical episode than a published volume. OK, that sounds a bit harsh. I think Duncan might have been aiming for a "popular history" style, easy to read and easy to follow, but I was wishing for more insight, historical connections, and construction of a novel document. Instead we are left with a retelling of the same story anyone who took Latin in high school heard. Duncan is an amazing podcaster, but I think his storytelling style did not work as well in a longer format like this book. On to the story.

The book is about the storm before the storm, i.e. the beginning of the end of the Roman republic (oh yeah I forgot to mention my issues with this TITLE). Duncan's reason for retelling this episode is just - many books, movies, and TV shows have covered the actual end, meaning Caesar essentially, but far fewer have covered the likes of the Gracchi brothers, Marius, and Sulla. Between ~250BCE and ~150BCE, Rome fought a series of wars against Carthage, a city on the north coast of Africa in modern Tunisia. Rome emerged after this the sole ruler of the Mediterranean, controlling vasts amounts of territory, soldiers, and wealth. Of course this wealth ended up concentrated in the hands of the elite few, despite the fact that a lot of land was technically ager publicus, public land owned by the state. Many rural plebs owned little to no land and/or worked as tenant farmers on large estates, and Tiberius Gracchus saw an opportunity. He gathered support for a bill that would assess the public land and dole it out to rural plebs, thereby giving rural plebs what they wanted, increasing the number of conscriptable men (there was a land requirement), and developing a large base of political support in the rural plebs. One issue with this was that the public land had long been essentially ignored by the state, and various Italian communities and families had continued to use it over the centuries, meaning Tiberius' plan would require taking away some peoples' land. Another issue was that elites in the Senate didn't like the idea of Tiberius getting thousands of voters on his side. Despite this, Tiberius managed to get a lot of rural plebs to show up to vote on the measure (voting in the republican empire took place in Rome only, one way of maintaining Roman supremacy), ending up being able to pass it. However, there was a political office in Rome called the tribune, which was established sort of as a check on the Senate, and could veto any bill. Tiberius held this role, but there were multiple positions and one of his opponents vetoed the bill. This was slightly against political norms, or mos maiorum, but nothing too crazy. However, Tiberius thought he could also throw out custom: he riled up his supporters to simply vote the tribune out of office and pass the bill. Now this really scared the Senatorial elite - the demagoguery of the people was their worst fear. This point is where I take some issue with Duncan's, and the traditional, account. It's often said that "Romans had a deep culture of hating Kings and monarchy," but I wonder if what is really meant is Roman elites? Essentially all written record comes from the perspective of the elite, so we really don't know what the average Roman citizen thought. When storytellers like Duncan buy in wholeheartedly to these accounts, they accept the elitist perspective too easily, I think. Anyway back to the story. Tiberius, his term as tribune up, sought reelection, which was illegal based on Roman law. Yet Tiberius pulled the populist trick again and got the people to overwhelm tradition by vote, a large F you to custom but not totally unprecedented, as the general Scipio Amelianus (Tiberius' uncle) had done this for consulship previously. This is where the reaction became grave - a gang put together by members of the Senate went and killed Tiberius and his supporters, and threw his body off the Tarpean Rock. :(

That seems pretty bad - and when we draw comparisons between the fall of Rome and the current state of America, sometimes we see the discarding of political customs as a grave similarity. However, the senate isn't committing public massacres of their enemies (yet- also, I'd argue the U.S. government establishment behaved much closer to this in the 1920s and 1950s, jailing and sometimes executing political dissidents and ethnic groups with impunity). 

(2024/07/15)