Optimates win the Roman civil war

Probably republic would just continue existence bit longer and if not get some strongman who can enforce reforms to needed, there might be new civil war and perhaps destruction and dissolution of Roman Republic.
 
The first few Emperors come from Pompey's [1] family instead of Caesar's.

The titles "Kaiser" and "Tsar" are replaced by others deriving from his name.

[1] Or from the family of whichever general wins the war for the Optimates, if that's someone other than Pompey.
 
The first few Emperors come from Pompey's [1] family instead of Caesar's.

The titles "Kaiser" and "Tsar" are replaced by others deriving from his name.

[1] Or from the family of whichever general wins the war for the Optimates, if that's someone other than Pompey.

Caesar's Civil War wasn't exactly power struggle between Caesar and Pompey. Pompey didn't want to be exactly such dictator as Caesar and it is possible that he would had retired after the war. Or then he could had be powerful man behind of senate.
 
If we're assuming Pompey wins, then he's not going to pull a Caesar. Some form of the republic will be restored-there will probably be proscriptions like those following Sulla's victory, and some ongoing resistance in other places, again similar to the first civil war.

What happens in the next generation of the republic is up to whoever is writing the timeline, honestly.
 
Caesar's Civil War wasn't exactly power struggle between Caesar and Pompey. Pompey didn't want to be exactly such dictator as Caesar and it is possible that he would had retired after the war. Or then he could had be powerful man behind of senate.


Will Pompey's son necessarily see it the same way? Or whatever other general may emerge?
 
What would be the impact if the Optimates won the Roman civil war

You would have to explain how eleminating Caesar will end the phaenomenon of powerful governors/generals use their popularity with the legions to march on Rome and seize power. Sulla did it, Caesar did it (and loses) - but what will stop the next generation of ambitious men from doing the same?
The next major wars of the Republic would be the war against the Parthians in the 30s, and the war against the Cantabrians in the 20s. Furthermore, the Senate will have to set up a defensive force in newly-conquered Gaul. These operations will involve large concentrations of troops under a proconsul, and the opportunity of great victories. Victories mean booty, loyal troops and popularity with the plebs. The Roman Republic had problems to cope with Scipio Africanus; the Republic couldn't stand Caesar; now imagine how a proconsul having conquered Mesopotamia from the Parthians, returning to Rome in triumph with the loot of Babylonia, would influence domestic politics!

The Roman Republic was conceived to govern a city state of some thousands citizens. As long as every man was at the same time peasant, soldier and citizen, the system worked very-well. As a peasant, he could earn his living and didn't challenge the leading role of the Roman aristocracy. As a soldier, he was disciplined and experienced enough to protect his city against foreign aggression; but when he was on military duty, he never forgot that he was a citizen, that all his officers were elected by the people's assembly and that they had to obey the laws. Social tensions were reduced by the loot distrubuted among the warriors and the founding of coloniae.
This systems effectively collapsed in the 1st century BCE. Domestic politics were now influenced by a large number of impoverished citizens who had more interest in economic relief than political reforms; the discontent masses could be used as a weapon against the senatorial aristocracy. At the same time, political participation decreased significantly. In 70 BC, there were almost one million Roman citizens. Only a fraction of them, maybe up to 100,000, participated in the assemblies. I assume that there was almost no popular attachment to the republican government. Why should they cherish and defend political rights they couldn't/didn't use? If anything, the political life took place in the many civitates, municipia and coloniae. Local politics attracted a lot of interest (see Pompeii). But I doubt that many Roman living outside of Rome were very eager to defend some abstract political system they didn't participate in.
At the same time, you can observe the rise of monarchical ideas. Even Cicero said that, besides the Roman mixed constitution, the monarchy is the best constitution. Unsurprisingly, people become more willing to accept a single ruler if they can't rule themselves. If soldiers fight in Gaul for tens year under a human, charismatic general who give them their share of booty; if they never participated in elections in their life; if they know that most senators despise them - why should they side with the Senate against Caesar? It's more than obvious that the Republic had lost a lot of legitimacy in the eyes of simple citizens.
That's why the people of Rome didn't protest when Tiberius "transferred" the elections from the people's assemblies to the Senate, as Tacitus writes.

Now how can the Roman Republic reform? Honestly, I don't know. None of the reforms undertaken by Pompeius in 52 BCE (for example the law providing for a period of five years between a magistrature and a promagistrature) had the potential to stop the vicious circle I descriped above.
 
Honesty, the Roman Republic was at a dead end by this point. If not Caesar, then someone else will become Emperor within the next generation.

What happens to places like Ptolemaic Egypt would be interesting to see.
 
Honesty, the Roman Republic was at a dead end by this point. If not Caesar, then someone else will become Emperor within the next generation.

On the other hand, why did the Emperors manage the situation better than the Senate did? I mean, it's a serious question. Both the Senate and the Emperor were a government that had to deal with aristocrats commanding armies; but why were there so little usurpers against the Emperors of the Principate, whereas powerful generals were a constant threat for the Senate in the last decades of the Republic?
 
Will Pompey's son necessarily see it the same way? Or whatever other general may emerge?
This is like saying "will Sulla's generals see it that way". Of course they would-the people on Pompeys side in the civil war were those who benefitted from the system it was in.
 
You would have to explain how eleminating Caesar will end the phaenomenon of powerful governors/generals use their popularity with the legions to march on Rome and seize power. Sulla did it, Caesar did it (and loses) - but what will stop the next generation of ambitious men from doing the same?
Would one of them crown themselves king or would they go for the Imperator or dictator for life
 
What happens to places like Ptolemaic Egypt would be interesting to see.

Probably Egypt would be still eventually annexed by Rome. Whilst it was rich nation, it was in constant instatibiliness and palace coups and even civil wars were common. And Egypt was already practically puppet state of Rome. Rome intervened much to Egyptian domestic politics and pharaoh needed approval of Rome being pharaoh. There had even some talks about annexation of the kingdom even before Caesar's war in Gaul.
 
Probably Egypt would be still eventually annexed by Rome.
Probably not. Not to say that the Romans would not love to annex Egypt but first, you have to consider that whoever is allowed to pull that off is going to have immense power and wealth-they will become, with a stroke, the most powerful person in Rome bar none. In Republican Rome nobody wants to let anyone else get that power, which is one of the reasons it never happened IOTL.

The other reason of course is Egypt may be particularly difficult to hold. The Romans would face a lot of resistance, something that was not the case after Cleopatra leveraged the kingdoms resources to try to help Antony. Augustus really encountered a perfect confluence of factors in his favor.

It's far better to just have the Ptolemy's as client states, which was indeed how the Roman Republic preferred to govern much of their Asian holdings-indirectly.
 
This is like saying "will Sulla's generals see it that way". Of course they would-the people on Pompeys side in the civil war were those who benefitted from the system it was in.

Did all those officers and men fight for Pompey because they were loyal to the Senate - or because they were loyal to their illustrious general?

I suspect it was mostly the latter. And I can quite imagine a son or nephew of Pompey questioning why he and his soldiers should take orders from that bunch of greybeards in the Capitol.
 
Would one of them crown themselves king or would they go for the Imperator or dictator for life

Difficult to say. The Senators and even the masses despised the royal title. This was part of the Roman heritage (even if only the Senate had capitalized on the expulsion of the Tarquinians). When rumor had it that Caesar wanted to restore the monarchy, he was murdered. That's one of the main reasons why Octavian imagined the Principate system.

It was just easier to govern with the Senate than to have to force through your royal ambitions against his will. Thus, it's not impossible that some Roman ruler adopts the title rex (basileos for the Greek provinces), but he would have to enforce it in a reign of terror, provoking even more hatred for the title.

As to dictator perpetuus, well, the title has all the disadvantages of the kingship (incompatibility with the res publica), but none of its advantages (royal dignity and insignias, prestige of the royal title in the east).
 
Last edited:
Imo they needed to reform the public assemblies. Specifically, they needed to scrap the centuriate assembly and rejigg the tribal and plebian assemblies to take its place.

You're right that the assembly by tribes was more democratic than the assembly by centuries, but that's not the point.

The problem was that both assemblies, tribal and centuriate, could only work in the context of a city state like Athens; as long as the great majority of Roman citizens lived close to Rome, they had the chance to participate in the assemblies. Once Rome had extended it's citizenship to the point that all Italics were Roman citizens that system stopped to work as intended. A large majority of citizens now lost all hope to ever attend the people's assemblies.

With the expansion of empire and citizenship in the 2nd and 1st centuries, those institutions of direct democracy lost all of their legitimacy. Especially the tribal assembly ceased to be a Roman assembly and started to be an assembly of citizens living in the town of Rome, which is something very different. Violence dominated these assemblies, which supported powerful men against the majority of the Senate.

If you want my opinion, a surviving Roman Republic would have to scrap the popular assemblies. They made sense in the old days, but they had lost their function in the first century BCE.

The Roman Republic needs its version of the Serrata del maggior consiglio. Limit the right to vote to Senators and Equites. Abandon all pretentions of democracy. Some thousand upper-class Romans will make a choice more benificial to the Republic than the uneducated masses.
 
Top