The Roman Republic was not abolished in 27 BC; it was declared restored, by a man who kept every legion, and almost nobody who mattered was in a position to disagree.
The previous lesson ended with Caesar dead, his acts confirmed, his murderers amnestied and every army in the empire attached to an individual. This lesson covers the thirteen years that resolved that, the settlement that followed, and the question the whole course has been building towards: what actually failed, and was it bound to?
The heir
Caesar's will adopted his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, aged eighteen, who took his name and, more usefully, his veterans' loyalty and his money. Cicero, leading the Senate against Mark Antony, thought the young man could be used and discarded, and said so in a phrase that got back to him.
In 43 BC Octavian fought for the Senate against Antony at Mutina, and when the Senate declined to reward him, he marched on Rome with eight legions and took the consulship by force. He was nineteen years old, twenty-three years under the legal minimum, and had held no office of any kind.
Then he changed sides. In November 43 he met Antony and Lepidus and they had a tribune carry the lex Titia, which created the three of them as tresviri rei publicae constituendae, a board of three for settling the Republic, for five years, with the power to make law, appoint magistrates and govern the provinces.
Example. Compare the arrangement of 43 BC with the private agreement of 60 BC and say which was more dangerous to the Republic.
The one that was legal. In 60 BC three citizens agreed privately to combine their resources and then obtained what they wanted through the ordinary machinery, which left the institutions intact and hollow. In 43 BC a law of the Roman people conferred on three named men the powers of the state for a term of years, including the right to legislate and to appoint the magistrates who were supposed to check them. The Republic did not fall to a coup here. It voted itself out of existence in a properly carried statute, which is why the second triumvirate, unlike the first, is a magistracy that historians can date and cite. A constitution with no procedure for amendment turns out to have a procedure for surrender.
Now you. The triumvirs opened with proscriptions on the Sullan model, and Cicero's name was on the first list. What was different this time?
Answer
That it was done by the state rather than against it. Sulla proscribed after winning a war, as a victor imposing terms; the triumvirs proscribed under a law that made them the government, so the killings were the acts of magistrates in office. Appian's figures, 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians, are of the same order as the Sullan ones and the meaning is worse: the money was needed to pay the armies, and the enemies were removed for the coming campaign against Brutus and Cassius. Cicero, whose head and hands were nailed to the speakers' platform he had used for forty years, is the appropriate symbol. The last politician who thought the Republic could be argued back into existence was killed by a legal instrument of it.
The end of the republican cause
Brutus and Cassius had taken the eastern provinces and raised nineteen legions. At Philippi in Macedonia in October 42 BC they were beaten in two engagements and both killed themselves.
Philippi matters more than Actium for understanding what happened to the Republic, because it is the last time an army took the field for the Republic as a cause. Everything after it is a quarrel between Caesarian commanders over which of them would hold the state: Octavian against Antony's brother in the Perusine war, then against Sextus Pompeius over the grain supply until Naulochus in 36, then Lepidus discarded in the same year, then the long divorce between Octavian and Antony.
That is why the propaganda of the 30s BC is so revealing. Octavian could not present the final war as republicans against Caesarians, so he presented it as Rome against Egypt: Antony had been captured by a foreign queen, had given Roman provinces to her children at Alexandria in 34, and had left a will (which Octavian seized from the Vestals and read aloud, in itself an outrage) directing his burial in Egypt. War was declared in 32 BC on Cleopatra and not on Antony, so that a civil war could be fought as a foreign one.
They met at Actium off the west coast of Greece on 2 September 31 BC. Antony's fleet was blockaded, his army deserting; Cleopatra's squadron broke out, Antony followed, and the rest surrendered. Alexandria fell the following August, Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves, and Egypt became Roman as the personal possession of the victor.
The settlement
Octavian was now the only man with an army, and he had about sixty legions. He reduced them to twenty-eight, a cut of 53 per cent, and settled the discharged men in colonies, paying for the land in cash, which he was careful to record in his own account of his reign.
On 13 January 27 BC he came before the Senate and gave up his extraordinary powers. In the Res Gestae, the summary of his achievements published after his death, he wrote that he transferred the Republic from his own power to the discretion of the Senate and the Roman people. The Senate responded by voting him a command over Spain, Gaul, Syria, Cyprus and Egypt for ten years, and three days later by giving him the name Augustus.
Example. Test the claim of restoration against the distribution of the armies.
The provinces Augustus kept in 27 BC were precisely the ones with legions in them, and the Senate received the peaceful ones. By the end of his reign the empire had 28 legions, and exactly one, the third legion in Africa, stood in a province whose governor the Senate appointed: 96 per cent of the army answered to him. Every republican form was in place, consuls were elected annually, the Senate met, the assemblies voted, and the man who controlled 27 of 28 legions held them by a provincial command that a grateful Senate renewed whenever it expired. The claim of restoration is not a lie about the institutions, which were genuinely revived and functioning. It is a claim that omits the only variable that had decided every political question since 88 BC.
Now you. Augustus's own account says he had greater auctoritas than anyone else, but no more formal power than his colleagues in each magistracy. Is that true?
Answer
Formally, close to true, and that is the point of saying it. He held consulships, then tribunician power, then a proconsular command, each of them a real republican instrument that other men also held, and he took care never to hold an office with a name Romans could not accept, having watched Caesar die for one. Substantively it is a description of a monarchy: no other Roman had a decade-long command over the armed provinces, the wealth of Egypt as private property, the loyalty of veterans he had settled and paid, and the name of the deified Caesar. The sentence is the most skilful in Latin political prose, and it is true in exactly the way that makes it misleading, which is the skill.
What failed
Now the question the course has been circling. The Republic ran for 482 years and broke down over the 106 years between 133 and 27 BC. What went wrong?
Five structural answers have been assembled along the way, and they compound.
Commands got too big. An empire needs multi-year operations by large forces, and the constitution could produce them only by suspending its own rules, so every solution created a man larger than the offices.
Armies stopped belonging to the state. A soldier with no property depended on his general for land at discharge, and no institution filled that role until Augustus created a military treasury in AD 6.
Disputes stopped having endings. From 133 BC the answer to a deadlock was violence, first by mobs, then by armies, and no court, veto or vote could produce a ruling that the losing side accepted.
The city could not govern the empire. Ten senior magistrates a year, no bureaucracy, tax farmed to contractors, and governors who could not be effectively supervised.
And the citizens could not physically be consulted. After the Social War the electorate ran the length of Italy while the voting enclosures stayed in one city, so the assemblies represented whoever was in Rome that day.
Structure or accident
Against all of this stands a serious objection, argued most fully by Erich Gruen: that the institutions were working reasonably well into the 50s BC, that most crises were resolved by ordinary politics, and that what destroyed the Republic was the civil war itself rather than any long decay. On that view the fall was contingent, the product of particular men and particular mistakes, and a different decision in 50 BC gives a different century.
The ancient writers had a third answer, and it should be reported rather than adopted. Sallust and Livy explained the collapse by moral decline: wealth from the conquests corrupted a people whose virtue had been sustained by poverty and by fear of Carthage. As history that is weak, since it explains a specific institutional failure by a general change in character and cannot say why the failure took the form it did. As evidence it is valuable, because it tells you how the governing class understood itself, and men who believe their state is dying of luxury make different decisions from men who believe it has a design fault.
Example. Ronald Syme argued that what happened was a revolution in the governing class, an old oligarchy replaced by a new one under a leader. Erich Gruen argued that the Republic was not visibly dying and that the war caused the fall. Can both be right?
Largely, yes, because they answer different questions. Gruen is describing the health of the institutions year by year, and his evidence is good: elections were contested, laws passed, courts sat, and most disputes ended without bloodshed even in the 50s BC. Syme is describing who ended up holding power and how, and his evidence is equally good: the consular families of the late Republic are substantially replaced within two generations by Italian and provincial newcomers attached to the ruler. A system can be functioning and fragile at once. The most defensible position is that the structural pressures made some breakdown likely and did not specify which one, and that the shape of what emerged, a monarchy in republican dress with a new elite, was decided by individuals.
Now you. What would have had to be different for the Republic to survive in a recognisable form?
Answer
At minimum, a way of paying and discharging soldiers that did not depend on their commander, and a way of holding long commands accountable, which together mean a treasury with permanent revenue and some standing body able to remove a governor. Both are conceivable: Augustus built the first, and the second is roughly what the imperial administration became. Notice what that answer implies. The reforms needed to save the Republic look very much like the machinery that replaced it, and would have concentrated exactly the powers the aristocracy had spent five centuries dividing. A constitution built to stop any one man from holding a king's power was poorly equipped to build a state that could restrain such men, which is the deepest irony in the story and the most useful thing in it.
What survived
It is easy to end at 27 BC with the Republic dead, and the ending is misleading in an interesting way.
The forms did not go. Consuls continued to be elected and to give their names to the year for nearly six centuries after Actium, the last of them in AD 541, which is 1,049 years after the first pair in the fasti. The Senate sat for as long. The vocabulary of the Republic, res publica, senatus populusque Romanus, magistracy, provocatio, went into the political language of Europe and has not come out: every modern republic, every constitution with a senate, a veto, a term limit or a rule against holding two offices at once, is quoting this one.
What was lost is precise. Not the institutions but the thing they existed to prevent: after 27 BC there was one man whose position no vote could end, and the question of who governed Rome was settled by his household, his adoption of an heir, and the army. That question had been answered by the citizens, badly and unequally and in a rigged assembly, for nearly five hundred years.
The last word belongs to the man who won. What Augustus claimed to have done was give the Republic back, and he chose that claim over any other because it was the only thing his Romans would accept. A regime that has to describe itself in the language of what it replaced is paying that thing a compliment, and the compliment is the most reliable evidence we have of what the Republic meant to the people who lost it.