Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy
Banned
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to bring back a republican form of government for Rome by AD 200 with a POD after the death of Augustus.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to bring back a republican form of government for Rome by AD 200 with a POD after the death of Augustus.
Preliminary question: why would anyone want to restore the Republic?
By the time of Cicero the Republic was functionally no different than the Empire. Augustus, in some respects, provided the antidote to years of civil war even though he suppressed the Senate.
The Republic was no more than an oligarch-kleptocracy. The gulf between the plebs and the patricians even in the 3rd century BCE was just as wide as during the height of the pax romana. Any idealization of the Roman Republic as a precursor to liberal democracy is quite misguided.
I was under the impression the Pleb councils had significant power they didn't have under the empirePreliminary question: why would anyone want to restore the Republic?
By the time of Cicero the Republic was functionally no different than the Empire. Augustus, in some respects, provided the antidote to years of civil war even though he suppressed the Senate.
The Republic was no more than an oligarch-kleptocracy. The gulf between the plebs and the patricians even in the 3rd century BCE was just as wide as during the height of the pax romana. Any idealization of the Roman Republic as a precursor to liberal democracy is quite misguided.
An aside: Oliver Cromwell portrayed himself as Julius Caesar (complete with laurel) on the limited Commonwealth mintage. He had it right. The brutality of the English Commonwealth military dictatorship mirrored many aspects of the Roman Republic.
I was under the impression the Pleb councils had significant power they didn't have under the empire
I was referring more to the 3rd century BC period that the previous post mentioned.
I distinguish between political institutions including pretty much all Roman Plebians and military establishments involving only a minor portion. One seem to give more political power to the the average person than the other.
The gulf between the plebs and the patricians even in the 3rd century BCE was just as wide as during the height of the pax romana.
It is gravely mistaken to identify the distinction between the patricians and plebeians as the defining social divide between the élite clique of the aristocracy on the one hand and the masses of the poor on the other. In reality, the distinction was only particularly relevant during the first centuries of the ancient res publica; formal equality with the patriciate was achieved in the early third century B.C., and by the mid-second century B.C., [...] the plebeians had effectively supplanted the ancient patriciate within the aristocracy. By the first century B.C. there were few notable distinctions between the patricians and the plebeians, [...] Indeed, by the late Republic the so-called “gulf” between the plebeian order and the patriciate was largely non-existent.
By the conclusion of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the Augustan aristocracy and the ancient patriciate was almost extinct [...] to the extent that by the beginning of the second century the eminent and prestigious rank was far more a mark of imperial favor and membership in the nucleus of the senatorial élite, and had lost most, if not all, of the social distinctiveness of the ancient patriciate of the res publica. [...] the “gulf” between plebeians and patricians was largely a question of titles and rare privilege, not a discernable social divide. [...] As to the question of a restoration of the res publica, as Cornelius Tacitus wrote of the late Augustan Principate: “quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset?” [How many men remain who have yet seen the res publica? (proximefactum trans.)] [...] Restoring the res publica would imply that it had formally ended, while generally, the inauguration of the Augustan ‘New State’ was perceived as a re-confirmation and restoration of the res publica, and an end to factionalism and the politicking of the dynasts. Even last late as the reign of Nero Claudius Cæsar Germanicus, the Princeps was still generally primus inter pares in a system that was largely Republican. What was there to restore?