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How Republics Die

The identification of lessons from the past is ‘core business’ for any historian; it is incumbent upon us if we want our work to matter to any audience wider than other historians. It is also incumbent upon us to probe for deeper and more sophisticated explanations of the past as new techniques become available.

Dart, Rafferty, Vervaet, “New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old
Perspectives on New Problems”, p. 6.

These two statements are the reason this book exists: as historians we want to be useful, and we can (if we look) find better or different ways to do history. Specifically, we think that (ancient) history can speak to political science, and political science can help us better understand (ancient) history.

Our work is a response to the wave of political science scholarship which appeared after Donald Trump’s first election to the US Presidency in 2016, which dealt with the broad concept of “democratic decay”.1 As historians of Rome, we read that scholarship and saw a lot in it that looked like the Late Roman Republic and the early Augustan monarchy (conventionally dated to 133 BCE – 14 CE): terms like constitutional rot, autocratic legalism, and democratic breakdown are all easily applicable to Rome.

Of course, it’s not new to compare modern democracies to Rome, especially the United States of America. One problem is that these comparisons are often pretty superficial, and we didn’t want to do that: nothing in this book is as ‘clickbaity’ as “This Is Why Bernie Sanders Is Like The Gracchi”, or “How Donald Trump is Like Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Augustus”. There is an understandable scholarly scepticism about comparing the Roman political system to modern systems: are they not just too different? But, as we editors argue in the first chapter (“New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems”), comparisons can be made responsibly—if due care is taken. If we are interested in the struggle for power among institutions (and this is what contemporary democratic decay scholarship is largely about), then Rome was a suitably complex institutional environment. More complex than many modern systems, in fact, especially electorally, as the Roman Republic sported several important popular assemblies.

A critic could easily say that Rome was not a democracy; Roman historians routinely tell their students this. But here we should ask: a democracy compared to what? For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, democracy was trying to emerge from oligarchy: at stake was who got to vote and under what circumstances. And this is what historians mean when they say Rome was not a democracy: they think it was an oligarchy instead.

Nonetheless, in this key respect, too, there is ample space for substantive and meaningful comparative exercises. As Levitsky and Ziblatt cogently argue in their 2023 Tyranny of the Minority, even before Trump’s re-election the US Republic was very much a “partial democracy”, granting institutionally entrenched majorities to minority constituencies.2 The composition of the Senate represents the foremost example as the system is designed to grant more rural, sparsely populated, and often predominantly ‘white’ states narrow if critical majorities. Mechanisms for voter suppression and rampant gerrymandering remain rife, are even in the ascendant. For the US to become fully democratic and avoid authoritarian minority rule, or so argue the authors, sustained and comprehensive institutional reform is needed.

Significantly, the Roman Republic, too, was a partial democracy. First, its electoral system was deliberately designed to advantage the older and the wealthy (in that popular assembly electing the consuls, the joint annual presidents of the Republic, as well as other top executive officials like censors and praetors) as well as rural citizens (in that popular assembly electing the powerful tribunes of the Plebs and passing most statute laws, with rural constituencies controlling 31 voting districts/units, as opposed to only 4 for the sprawling capital Rome). Second, the right of political initiative rested with executive officials invariably elected from the well-entrenched Roman landed and financial elite. Finally, voter suppression (women and numerous other citizens lacked the franchise; the freedmen, as well the Latin and Italian allies, accounting for some 60% of Italy’s population, did not acquire the right to vote until very late in the Republic’s history, the freedmen being typically enrolled in the 4 urban voting districts) and gerrymandering (the distribution of citizens across the rural voting districts quite heavily advantaged ‘old’ constituencies vis-à-vis those enfranchised in the Late Republic) were established practice.

But access to voting rights is not the main concern of scholarship on democratic decay: the critical issue is the struggle between a free state and rule by an autocrat, not whether a particular marginalised group is included in the political process. For this purpose, we can uncontroversially count Rome as a democracy: it too was a free state trying not to succumb to autocracy, and ultimately failing violently.

The result of this discussion was a conference in Melbourne in July 2023 and now this book, which is available in Open Access. While the heart of the book is focused on Rome, other chapters take broader historical viewpoints. Starting from this desire to connect history and political science, the authors all went in their own directions.

How Republics Die cover
Vervaet, Rafferty & Dart (eds.): How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond

In the first section, Matt Simonton demolishes the trope (beloved of the US Founding Fathers) that Greek demagogues became tyrants. Actually, he argues, it was the reaction against demagogues which usually brought down Greek democracies, installing an authoritarian oligarchy.

Amy Russell questions the conventional picture of a pre-Gracchan consensus over the basic assumptions of the res publica. Instead, she argues, there were always attempts to do politics outside the formal institutions. And that, maybe, it was the effort to restrict these attempts that was truly damaging to the survival of the system.

The second group of chapters ask big-picture questions of late-republican Rome.

Our own chapter refutes the claim that the Roman elites were unable to conceive of forward-thinking structural reform: they were, and some tried repeatedly to do it. But vested interests time and again got in the way to preserve the oligarchic status quo, paradoxically paving the way for autocracy as per the empirical political science paradigms formulated in Walter’s How Civil Wars Start (2022) and Levitsky & Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018).3

James Tan brings the economy back in. Our understanding of the Roman economy has advanced hugely in recent decades, but that hasn’t (yet) affected how we interpret the politics of the Republic’s fall. He shows some paths to bringing the two together.

Tom Hillard and Lea Beness return to Peter Brunt’s ideas about the Republic’s fall but this time reading them through John Keane’s The New Despotism.4 Too few were devoted to the Republic (either among the elite or in the broader citizenry), meaning it was short of committed defenders when the crises came. Alienation and a crisis of confidence were what marked these decades.

Kit Morrell examines Roman enabling laws, on the model of the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz of the early days of Hitler’s regime. She argues that the persistence of legal forms to cloak dictatorship (autocratic legalism, perhaps?) mattered, even as they made the emergency permanent. Law could entrench monarchy as well as protect democracy.

Tim Elliott draws on current theories of populism to show how we can rightly see Sallust’s popularis tribunes as “populists”. Their speeches in Sallust oppose The People to a lying Elite, and try to cash out the “broken promises” of democracy.

The next group of chapters take a narrower view, finding authoritarian behaviours or harbingers in a variety of late-republican phenomena.

Nicholas George shows how the existence of an empire by the 80s significantly enhanced the civil-war capabilities of opposing Roman political factions: not ideologically, but materially and logistically. The provinces provided a space for losers to regroup and have another try at power in Rome. The local elites also faced problems—and opportunities.

Christian Hjorth Bagger shows how Rome’s elite women experienced civil war. They suffered uniquely from the violence and displacement, but their special position also offered them unprecedented opportunities. Rome’s aristocratic women were surprisingly advantaged and assertive.

Jeff Tatum looks to Marlies Glasius’s idea of authoritarian practices, and detects them in various senatorial actions in the 70s BCE. By appealing to libertas as a universal value, real grievances could be ignored or subdued.

Our third chapter looks at Pompey’s sole consulship in 52 BCE. It’s often presented as a last-ditch attempt at saving or restoring the Republic in the face of spiralling political instability, but, as Tacitus saw, this was not what really happened. Way & Levitsky’s Competitive Authoritarianism (2010) provides another useful conceptual framework to understand Pompey’s New Republic between 52 and 49: it was neither a free democracy nor an outright monarchy but a novel, less democratic and more authoritarian, way of governing.5

Thibaud Lanfranchi examines Caesar’s relationship with the tribunes throughout his career. From his emergence onto the political scene to his final confrontation with the tribunes (as dictator) shortly before his death, this relationship tells us a lot about the existence of (or otherwise) of anything we can call a democracy at Rome.

Tonya Rushmer analyses Caesar’s recounting of the Roman population eligible for free grain in 46 BCE. What had long been considered the populist measure par excellence was limited by the man now in full control of Rome. Those who retained their free grain were now dependent on Caesar: a powerful reminder of how the gifts of those who seek monarchy are often contingent.

The book then looks beyond late-republican Rome, in a series of chapters which explore some of these same dynamics in other times and places.

Ronald Ridley returns again to Augustus’s Res Gestae, that monument to the princeps’ lifetime of achievements. Yet, he argues, far from being a conservative document, the Res Gestae can be read as a manual for revolutionaries: how to take over a free state.

Catherine Kovesi takes a long view of the Venetian Republic: why was it so resistant to authoritarian takeover, for so long, when its sister cities were not? And why did it fall when it did? Was it just French force majeure, or was there an internal rot as well?

Peter McPhee studies how the French Directory regime of the late 1790s was worried about dictatorship, seeing a new Catiline (or a new Cromwell) as a clear possibility. He revisits the question of why the Brumaire coup succeeded, and whether wider scholarly approaches to authoritarianism can help us understand.

The authors of the fifth and final section chapters shift their focus to the twentieth century, to experiences of civil war and dictatorship, looking beyond national boundaries.

Annelien de Dijn takes a long view: how historical worries about populism coalesced into the peculiarly 19th century spectre of ‘Caesarism’. Yet, she shows, populism is a greater threat in theory than in reality. Still, the theory that “populism leads to dictatorship” has real-world effects.

Cristina Rosillo-López presents a fascinating comparison between Cicero’s uncertainty in the face of civil war in 49 and Victor Klemperer’s response to the new Nazi dictatorship in 1933. No hindsight, just two perceptive men trying to make sense of their world being turned upside down, with only ruin ahead.

Francisco Pina Polo draws an impassioned comparison between Sulla’s regime and Franco’s. Both victorious in civil war, neither wanted to heal their country but rather to rub their enemies’ noses in their defeat. The result was generations of division and trauma.

Ángel Alcalde analyses the interwar authoritarian parties as a genuinely international movement, comparing Germany, Austria and Spain. He argues that we understand fascism (and its kin) better if we see the wider forces driving it, not just the national ones.

The final two chapters respond to the book as a whole from more of a social science perspective. They give some ideas for how looking backwards can help give depth to disciplines such as political science which are so often presentist.

Lisa Hill starts with conspiracy theories about stolen elections and shows just how these serve to undermine democracy—and how seeing this through the historical lens throws the danger into sharp relief.

Finally, Federica Carugati surveys the book altogether. She emphasises the usefulness of history for understanding political change: “in the past as today, the drivers of republican death have not significantly diverged.” The problem still remains: how can historians speak effectively to those outside their fields? This book is a start in answering that question. Americans often claim that the US is the oldest democracy, the first beacon of republican liberty. That claim is certainly wrong: the Roman Republic lasted (depending on how one counts) for more than four centuries, and both its elites and people proudly upheld the values of libertas (the core prerogatives being the suffrage and a citizen’s right of appeal) as opposed to monarchy and tyranny, marked by discretionary and often unjust rule. And, more importantly for our purposes, it is the only long-established democracy to collapse from internal causes. Others lasted a long time—Athens and Venice before the modern era, the French Third Republic in modern times—but their end came from external attack. Rome, on the other hand, gradually descended into civil war and autocracy when it was the strongest power in the world, effectively unchallenged from outside. That is a story we desperately need to know as modern democracy seems ever weaker, ever more fragile.

References

  1. Daly, T.G. (2019) Democratic Decay: Conceptualising an Emerging Research Field, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (11), 9-36. ↩︎
  2. Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2023) Tyranny of the Minority: why American democracy reached the breaking point. New York: Crown ↩︎
  3. Walter, B.F. (2022) How Civil Wars Start, And How To Stop Them. New York: Crown. Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2018) How Democracies Die. New York: Crown. ↩︎
  4. Keane, J. (2020) The New Despotism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ↩︎
  5. Levitsky, S. and Way, L. (2010) Competitive Authoritarianism: hybrid regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↩︎

Featured image (c) Vincenzo Camuccini, La morte di Cesare (1804/05). La Galleria Nazionale, google arts & culture

How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart (eds.)

Studies in Ancient Civil War 4, 2025