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Rome and America: the Great Republics: What the Fall of the Roman Republic Portends for the United States [Walter Signorelli] on leondumoulin.nl and political influences on and commonalities between the two republics is fascinating!
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The U. The election of Donald Trump both increased the divide and is a symptom of it. Still, the U. It is also not the first time in recent history the country dealt with divisive issues, with the civil rights struggle and Vietnam War being quite contemporary events especially from a historical perspective.

The country has survived more turmoil, and barring unprecedented measures from the new administration and ineffectiveness of other branches of the government, the U. Credit: Tataryn.

Rome was engaged in regular wars and constantly overspent to keep protecting the borders of its huge empire. But eventually the expansion slowed due to stronger opponents and even pirates like Vandals operating in North Africa.

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This dwindled the supply of cheap slave labor and additional taxes. Roman rich also worked just as hard back in their time to pay less taxes, creating an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Historians also point to a trade imbalance that eventually grew between Rome and China and India.

These factors led to a slowing economy and a decline in Roman power. The military spending in the U.

The Roman Empire: in the First Century. The Roman Empire. Republic to Empire | PBS

In , the Germanic warrior Odoacer led a revolt from within that deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, making him the last Roman emperor to rule Italy from Rome. However, asymmetrical warfare like terror attacks by Islamic fundamentalists or cyberattacks and subterfuge from Russia can cause more gradual decline in American power due to weakening confidence in its leaders and institutions. Still, this is not likely to result in a serious military loss unless a more direct confrontation takes place, which at this point seems impossible. This point is certainly debatable as some would argue the U.

The country is transforming from a Christian and white-majority nation into an ever-more multicultural melting pot. Others have blamed the overspending and dumbing down of Rome via gladiator games and debauchery via crazed emperors like Nero for its decline. This, of course, makes an easy parallel to America's preoccupation with sports and reality tv stars, with the left painting Trump as a latter-day Nero. On the other hand, it can easily be argued that these types of entertainments and politics are nothing new historically and can be found in any century.

As if they didn't have Kardashian-type subjects of everyone's gossip in Renaissance-era Florence of the ruthless Medicis and the Borgias. While the U. With so much attention focused on the political strife, the lasting changes to America and its power are not likely to come from invading barbarian hordes. The coming world of complete automation , major life-extending medical advances and space exploration will transform the U. The Romans did employ and advance the technology of the day but their life was not upended because all the jobs were suddenly staffed by robots, something likely to happen within this century.

How technology changes America and the political entities around the world will not be clear until the singularity hits.

Roman Republic (509 BC – 27 BC)

Still, the political is not to be discounted. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom. Pax Romana , the period of relative peace at the height of Roman power lasted about years. They saw the destabilizing consequences of a slaveholding republic expanding its territory and becoming a vast, regional hegemon.

And they were acutely aware of how, in its final century and a half, an astonishing republican success story unraveled into a profoundly polarized polity, increasingly beset by violence, shedding one established republican norm after another, its elites fighting among themselves in a zero-sum struggle for power. And they saw how the weakening of those norms and the inability to compromise and mounting inequalities slowly corroded republican institutions.

And saw, too, with the benefit of hindsight, where that ultimately led: to strongman rule, a dictatorship. So when, one wonders, will our Caesars finally arrive? Or has one already? But the emergence of Trump adds a darker twist to the tale of imperial overreach and republican decline: that the process is accelerating, and we may be nearing a point of no return.


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Its republic emerged from a period of rule of consecutive kings, elected for life, beginning around BCE, or so later Roman historians claimed. That period lasted a couple of centuries before the last king, a despised figure called Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown.

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A Senate and other assemblies replaced the monarch, and power was more widely distributed. The new offices of state, including the most powerful, the consuls, were all held by at least two people, with strict term limits of one year — and with each officeholder given a mutual veto, to guard against any monarchical pretensions. The power awarded to the consuls and the Senate — representing the landed elite and, increasingly, the business class — was balanced against that of the tribunes there were, at first, two , representing the masses, who had their own assembly with real clout.

But the dictator had a maximum of six months in office, after which he had to step down. It was a republic and emphatically not a modern democracy. Whenever someone seemed to push against these norms, they were demonized as a wannabe king. The erosion of the mos maiorum took a very long time — longer than the entire history of the United States. But a political system designed for a relatively small city had to make some serious adjustments as its territory and prosperity and population exploded. These were decades and centuries of sudden growth in wealth and territory, but also tension.

The forever war required small landowners to leave their farms untended for extended periods to fight. Romans saw many of these small estates fall into decay or ruin and begin to be bought up by wealthier landowners and consolidated into vast estates. Over time, as the population boomed and small agriculture waned, food resources became stretched.

Before too long, there were too few small landowners to qualify for military service, and widening inequality began to generate increasing resentment among slaves and the poor. And into this fraught moment came the first real populists, the Gracchus brothers, who rose — from within the elites, as Trump and many others have in the millennia since — in the s BCE. The first, Tiberius, elected as tribune of the plebs, proposed a set of land reforms to redistribute wealth. Then he tried to get his fellow tribune thrown out of office to avoid his veto, and ran for an unprecedented second term as tribune, at which point several senators, out of procedural tools, organized a small mob, grabbed whatever came to hand, entered the vote-counting arena, and clubbed Tiberius and of his supporters to death.

But look past the violence and the situation seems a bit more familiar: deepening polarization, mutual mistrust, abandonment of norms, and trashing of precedents. Soon, it was possible to speak, very roughly, of two Romes: the rich Establishment and the rising masses, the optimates and the populares, waging a zero-sum war through Roman political institutions.

It was something for everyone but the elites — and hugely resonant among the populares. This time, the Senate responded more deftly by getting a rival and loyal tribune to outbid and undercut Gaius. In a contentious public assembly on the matter, scuffles broke out, a supporter of the optimates was stabbed with a writing stylus, and a riot was avoided only because of a sudden rainstorm. As the turn of the first century BCE approached and wars proliferated, with Roman control expanding west and east and south across the Mediterranean, the elites became ever wealthier and the cycle deepened.

In a telling portent of the celebrity politics ahead, for the first time, a Roman coin carried the portrait of a living politician and commander-in-chief: Marius and his son in a chariot. But Sulla, appalled by the snub, simply refused to follow his civilian orders, gathered his men, and called on them to march back to Rome to reverse the decision.

His officers, shocked by the insubordination, deserted him. Sulla then presided over new elections of friendly consuls and went back into the field. Roman politics had suddenly become a deadly game of tit for tat. When Sulla entered Rome a second time, he rounded up 6, of his enemies, slaughtered them en masse within earshot of the Senate itself, launched a reign of terror, and assumed the old emergency office of dictator, but with one critical difference: He removed the six-month expiration date — turning himself into an absolute ruler with no time limit.

Stocking and massively expanding the Senate with his allies, he neutered the tribunes and reempowered the consuls. He was trying to use dictatorial power to reestablish the old order. And after three years, he retired, leaving what he thought was a republic restored.

What lasted instead was his model of indefinite dictatorship, with the power to make or repeal any law. He had established a precedent that would soon swallow Rome whole. This was no longer a republican culture protected by an austere elite, but an increasingly authoritarian one, with great military leaders and a handful of wealthy men dominating the political scene through money, legions, and military success.

SCARY Parallels Between America And Rome's Demise

The ancient institutions and customs still existed but were slowly losing relevance. The two rivals appealed to both of the factions that had now long since defined the political scene — Caesar was a populist, Pompey a true Establishment figure — and as Caesar prepared to return, the Senate, panicked that another civil war was imminent, overwhelmingly voted that each disarm his forces and deliver them to the state.

Pompey, who was in Rome, simply took no notice. Neither did Caesar, in Gaul, who crossed the Rubicon. These two celebrity commanders had so many soldiers, had conquered so much territory and won such widespread support, that the Senate had effectively become irrelevant. It could vote, and it did, but its votes no longer mattered. He used it on a grandiloquent scale; his parades were beyond sumptuous and displayed the humiliation of his domestic as well as his foreign enemies, as the wider public thrilled to the spectacle.