The Roman Republic
How a city's constitution built an empire and then broke under the weight of it: from the kings to Actium, and the four centuries in between.
The city the kings made
What the Republic inherited from the monarchy it overthrew, and how to read a story first written down three centuries after it happened.
A constitution without a document
How a king's powers were split between colleagues, capped at a year and hedged with vetoes, and why the Senate ran everything without holding a single formal power.
The struggle of the orders
Two centuries of pressure from below that opened the offices, put the law in writing, and ended by producing a wider aristocracy rather than a democracy.
How an election was actually won
Group voting, an assembly that could be decided before the poor were called, and a canvass built on debt and favour, which is why the same families kept winning.
The conquest of Italy
How Rome turned defeated neighbours into soldiers instead of subjects, and built the manpower reserve that made everything afterwards possible.
The first war with Carthage
Twenty-three years over Sicily, a land power that built fleets it did not know how to sail, and the first territory Rome had to govern from outside Italy.
Hannibal and the test of the alliance
Three Roman armies destroyed in three years, a state that would not negotiate, and the Italian settlement holding under the only pressure that could have broken it.
The empire nobody planned
Fifty years of eastern wars, provinces governed by whoever happened to be free, taxes sold to contractors, and the year Roman citizens stopped paying tax.
What conquest did to Italy
Slaves, land and long service abroad, the census figures that record the strain, and the difference between what the reformers said was happening and what the evidence shows.
The Gracchi
Two tribunes who used the assembly's legal powers against the Senate's informal control, and the discovery that the constitution had no way to settle the argument except killing.
Marius and the army that followed a man
Recruiting soldiers who owned nothing solved the manpower problem and made every veteran's future depend on his general's standing in politics.
The Social War and Sulla's march
Italy went to war for the citizenship and won it, and the armies raised to fight that war showed a Roman commander that Rome itself could be taken.
The age of extraordinary commands
The empire's problems needed commands no annual magistrate could hold, and the men who held them grew larger than the offices that were supposed to contain them.
The Rubicon and the dictatorship
A legal quarrel that almost nobody wanted to fight, a civil war won in four years, and the discovery that killing the dictator changed nothing that mattered.
Actium and the Republic that could not return
Thirteen more years of civil war, a settlement that used every republican word to describe a monarchy, and the argument about what actually failed.
The whole subject