Talk:Crisis of the Roman Republic

This article was nominated for deletion on 1 February 2011. The result of the discussion was keep.

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2022 and 6 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): BsKulp (article contribs).

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kywhalen0817.

Above undated message substituted from

I've wikified this article, but haven't done any fact-checking or cross-referencing with the other related articles, as I lack expertise on the subject. Someone who is familiar with it may want to do some moving between here, Roman Republic, and Roman Empire. - Che Nuevara: ^{Join the Revolution} 13:34, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The cruelty and ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world, especially Rome, can not be overstated, and its iniquity was a reason that the Republic always seemed to be in crisis

What the hell is that? 24.42.93.217 (talk) 04:37, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think we may have an instance of our modern moral horror imposing an interpretation on political events of antiquity. I'm not aware of any historians of antiquity who would assign this much weight to the institution of slavery in the collapse of the Republic—obviously, since the Empire lived long and prospered for centuries after, without any abatement of slavery, and a possible increase. Do we actually have RS that put forth this thesis? I'm going to tag the section, and if there are no objections, I'll move it to Slavery in ancient Rome, which needs good-quality material. The dominant thesis seems to be quite missing: that Roman expansionism enriched a few "great men" such as Pompey and Caesar, upset the republican balance of power, and created a political crisis. After all, this is not an article about the fall of Rome, but a shift from a republican form of government to the rule of the emperors. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:43, 28 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have added back some removed text, cites, and quotes, but have edited those down quite a bit. We need to add more, as suggested by Cynwolfe, on Pompey and Caesar, as well as other points of view. Bearian (talk) 10:52, 20 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I deleted the slavery section (again) as off-topic and giving undue weight to an extent that's actively misleading. It describes the condition of slavery, and offers no explanation or theory of why Rome's republican form of government collapsed and was replaced by an imperial autocracy. It may well be that some scholars (such as G.E.M. de Ste. Croix) find the stresses of slavery to be a factor. However, I'm pretty sure that they address this in the context of the agrarian crisis, where the small independent farmers who were the bedrock of the republic are gobbled up by a rich elite who farm their latifundia with slaves. This creates displaced free people, a significant number of whom move to the city. The urban population (the theory goes) is more susceptible to "bread and circuses" and surrenders their political liberty.

The other element is that the owning of large amounts of land, and converting what had been public lands available for use by small farmers to private property, is one indication of a major factor in the transition from republic to empire: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Historians on the left see this as indicating that a society can only withstand a certain degree of wealth inequality before it buckles under the stress of the have-nots. Historians on the right emphasize the dangers of demagoguery, since instead of a republic governed by "good" landowning people who just want the state to leave them alone, you have leaders such as the Gracchi, Clodius Pulcher, sometimes Pompey (the flipflopper), Julius Caesar, and Augustus who rise to power through appeals to the masses who (as it was expressed recently in the U.S.) just want "stuff" (see

As has often been remarked, in fact the Servile Wars and the rebellion of Spartacus accomplished not a single thing toward improving the lot of slaves. Legislation under Augustus and later emperors limited the size of work groups, to lessen the opportunities for organized mass rebellion. Imperial law emphasizes the ruthless tracking down of fugitive slaves. It limits the number of slaves a wealthy person can free in his will. If the Servile Wars had any effect on the collapse of the republic, it was only because the defeat of Spartacus enhanced the military reputation of Marcus Crassus, who would go on to form the political alliance with Pompey and Caesar, whose civil war brought down the republic.

In short, this emphasis on slavery just seems a misguided modern notion that since slavery is an evil and immoral practice, it must have been a cause of the republic's failure (the analogy with the American Civil War probably influences this thinking). Now, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, for instance, makes an argument that extreme social injustice and inequality (of which slavery is one aspect) is an element in the decline of the Empire (not Republic). I suspect that Dupont, on whom so much of the deleted section was based, drew on this argument. (Dupont's book is called Daily Life, so I'm also not sure it's the best source for political history.) The deleted section, however, made no political argument, and just kept iterating what a bad thing slavery was. That's why I call it a description of the conditions of slavery, and not an analysis of political transformation. I suspect that the argument has been somewhat misunderstood, because if the institution of slavery were so stressful that it caused the republic to collapse, then why under the political form that replaced it did slavery continue, tempered only by the Pax Romana that dried up supply lines?

It just seems that this article wants to define "crisis" as "moral crisis", and from a modern perspective of "oh how terrible those Romans were". But the nature of the transition from republic to empire is social, political, and constitutional. Ancient sources emphasize the moral decline of the aristocracy as a cause—but owning and abusing slaves is not among the moral failings they see. (Astonishing blindness to the plight of slaves is familiar to readers of the New Testament as well.) The first chapter to The Cambridge Ancient History: The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B.C., vol. 9, is called "The Crisis of the Republic: Sources and Source-Problems", in which Andrew Lintott states clearly that in the ancient sources:

As for the period that began the crisis of the late Republic, some great issues—the land-problem, the relations between Rome and Italy and between the Senate and the equestrian order—stand out … . [T]he power struggle between the demagogic politicians and the bulk of the Senate is made to overshadow everything by the sources.(p. 4). …

From p. 6 onward, we get an excellent summary of how the ancient Romans and Greeks themselves explained the crisis of the republic, but unfortunately the pdf links above cuts off just after starting a review of modern theories. This would be a good source to get an overview by means of which to structure the article, if one could obtain this preface and the epilogue in full. The epilogue, BTW, states flatly:

Deep divisions certainly existed in Roman society between slave and free, rich and poor, citizen and non-citizen; but none of them was a direct cause of the fall of the Republic. The slave revolts that occurred during our period, though traumatic in their time, did not shake Roman society in the long term (p. 771).

One strain that the CAH epilogue presses is militarization (the Marian "reforms" that led to a standing professional army instead of an army of citizen called up for a limited campaign to defend immediate national interests) and imperialism (the failure to adapt republican forms to the demands of governing a far-flund empire). Surely the article means to be about what caused Rome to change from a republic to an empire, not a recitation of what we enlightened moderns understand as all the ills of ancient Roman society. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:16, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I re-inserted a new section about one theory of how slavery was a cause of the "crisis", which I carefully edited from the old one, at Crisis_of_the_Roman_Republic#Slavery. I would like to add in more criticism as noted by User:Cynwolfe et al. on this talk page. I don't thionk this article should be a morality play on slavery, but it should address the issues involved in the academia. What do other folks think? Bearian (talk) 17:24, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Show me ONE sentence in that section that explains the socio-political transition from a republican to an imperial form of government. Completely undue weight on a single scholar. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:53, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please read, for instance, the following:

• C.F. Konrad, "From the Gracchi to the First Civil War (133–70), and W. Jeffrey Tatum, " in A Companion to the Roman Republic (Blackwell, 2010), pp. 167–212.[1] A substantial amount of these chapters is available online; I think the only mention of slavery is that Marius was accused of using or allowing violent gangs of slaves to take over the streets.
• Andrew Lintott, "The Crisis of the Republic: Sources and Source-Problems," in The Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge University Press, 1994, 2005), vol. 9, p. 1ff.[2]

There is no "academic dispute" of the sort you imagine. Scholars emphasize various factors in their theories of the crisis, and discount others, but I'm not aware of any ancient historian or classicist who attributes the crisis mainly to the existence of slavery, which was pervasive as a social condition throughout the ancient world. I'm not sure we even know of any societies in antiquity that didn't practice slavery. You are describing social ills from a modern humanitarian perspective, not causes for the crisis or collapse of the Roman Republic. You seem not to understand that slavery continued unabated into the early Imperial period; if it had caused the collapse of Roman political stability, then how was political stability restored, given that slavery continued to exist?

As I said above, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix was a proponent of a view that extremes of social inequality was a major factor, but this is quite different from slavery, which you seem to conflate with the conditions in which the free urban poor or plebs lived. Slavery contributes to this: the use of slaves on the

latifundia was a factor in pushing small farmers and agricultural laborers off the land and into the city. Slaves performed work that otherwise might've been paid work for free people of the lower classes. But your section doesn't view slavery as a factor in social unrest. It pronounces on the evils of slavery without any logical cause-and-effect connections to the transition from republicanism to one-man rule. Dupont's is a Daily Life generalist book that isn't about the causes of the Republic's collapse. Your material belongs at Slavery in ancient Rome, not here. I really don't see how we can have a useful discussion until you read the two sources I've linked above in the versions available online, and can frame slavery within the mainstream views they represent. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:39, 20 June 2013 (UTC)[reply

]

• This section needs to go. The use of slaves in large plantations, thereby driving the small independent farmers out of work, was a factor, but this section doesn't address that at all and whatever point DuPont is trying to make is fuzzy at best in this regard. Numerous RS's exist that address the agrarian issues that slavery caused, and thereby creating a large mass of discontented plebs looking for a political figure to give them what they wanted.HammerFilmFan (talk) 13:51, 13 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Removed it for more or less the same reasons given by HammerFilmFan. Plus the entire section was cited from an illustrated book written by a french feminist(not being sexist but it definitely calls into question the objectivity and bias of the source). A book with the very broad focus of "life in ancient rome" that does not appear to focus on the crisis of the republic at all. The article probably should have something somewhere that actually comments on how slavery exacerbated the displacment of the freeman tenant farmer, but the article as it was had to go. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.83.97.213 (talk) 06:14, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In this line: The start of the Social War (91–88 BC), when Rome fought her nearby Italian neighbours, may be thought of as the beginning of the end of the Republic.[15][16] Fields also suggests that things got much worse with the Samnite War around 82 BC.[17]

Usually the involvement of the Samnites in the Civil Wars of Sulla and Marius aren't considered a part of the overall older Samnite Wars of the Roman Republic. I'd believe rewording it to mention it as part of the Civil Wars of Sulla makes more sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vondur (talk • contribs) 16:32, 11 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A simple, 3-way Venn Diagram could be used to give readers a visual representation of what historians agree and disagree were contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Republic.he article would probably receive a better rating if it had also had a concluding paragraph that summed up the final gasp of the Roman Republic and how it transformed into the Roman Empire, it seems to just tail off in the middle of the article if left untouched. I also had one small issue with one sentenced that read, "Some of Gaius's followers caused the death of a man,..." This sentence, while technically grammatically correct leaves the reader feeling confused about what the author is talking about, I had to re-read a few times. I would remove the "manslaughter" link on "death of a man" and reword the sentence to include something about how his followers were accused of manslaughter instead of using the clunky, confusing phrase "caused the death of a man." Overall, the article was written well but just a few more citations, a visual representation, and a concluding paragraph briefly discussing the Roman Empire would make it a "good" Wikipedia article.

Kywhalen0817 (talk) 00:15, 26 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

At the end of the section on Pompey, I inserted information from the reputable History Channel website explaining his assassination and inserted the citation #61. While this may at first seem irrelevant to the entirety of the article, I think it is important to give readers the full context of what happened to Pompey and this conclusion explaining his death wraps up the article rather well. The lack of a conclusion is what I listed above as my critique of the article and I hope this helps fix that while providing interesting and relevant information at the same time.

Kywhalen0817 (talk) 21:41, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It is not always obvious which source from Harriet Flowers is being referenced, although the format may be technically correct maybe it would be better to make it more clear somehow.

Article really needs a rework; a review of the three main theories on the fall of the republic should definitely be included. It definitely does not help that this article ends at Pompey and doesn't talk at all about the "fall" of the republic with Caesar etc.

See generally Morstein-Marx, R; Rosenstein, NS (2006). "Transformation of the Roman republic". In Rosenstein, NS; Morstein-Marx, R (eds.). A companion to the Roman Republic. Blackwell. pp. 625 et seq.