Julius Caesar - Julius Caesar

They are barbarians, but their system of government is admirable.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 285194 BC),
Greek philosopher and polymath

Imagine a democratic state based on the rule of law. Citizens have equal rights, and contribute to the common wealth according to their means. Private extravagance is frowned upon, and legal safeguards protect the weak from the abuse of power. Now imagine a huge influx of wealth in the space of a single generation. Unprecedented economic inequalities follow. The rich get richer and come to believe that their interests and privileges are what the state exists to protect. Public assets are privatised, with legal safeguards and regulations ignored or evaded. Social tensions become acute. The old ideals of consensus and co-operation seem helpless against the greed and luxury of a powerful few.

That was the state of the Roman Republic when Gaius Julius Caesar was born in what we call 100 BC.

The Romans had been equals from the very beginning. They believed that Romulus, the founder of the city, had divided what little territory he then commanded into equal lots, and thus created maximum equality for all alike. As the years went by there was no shortage of that.

Romulus did not found a dynasty. His successors, like him, were chosen by election and ruled by popular consent until the seventh in the sequence, Tarquin the Arrogant, seized power by murdering his predecessor and dominated the Romans by armed force. This exception proved the rule: Tarquin and his clan were driven out of the city by a popular rising in 507 BC. The leader of the liberation movement was called Lucius Brutus.

Because of Tarquin, the Romans swore they would never have another king. What they put in place was defined as annual magistracies, and obedience not to men but to the laws. We call it the Roman Republic, borrowing the Latin phrase res publica (originally res populica), which meant the Peoples thing. But no sooner had one form of corrupt rule ended than another began.

By 500 BC Rome had become a prosperous city state but her egalitarian ethos was under threat. Some families now defined themselves as patricians, meaning roughly those who know who their fathers were, and this self-appointed aristocracy of birth claimed a monopoly on public office. Patrician magistrates failed to protect plebeians (as the rest were now known) from exploitation and even enslavement by patrician landlords and creditors. The plebeians response was to elect their own representatives, known as tribunes, who would protect individuals and veto any measure they considered abusive. The persons of the plebeian tribunes were declared sacrosanct: anyone offering violence to them would be regarded as an offender against the gods and therefore subject to summary execution.

A long stand-off followed, until in 367 BC the patricians political monopoly was ended in a power-sharing agreement. Greek observers were enormously impressed by the fact that it had been achieved without bloodshed. As one of them put it much later:

The People of Rome and the Senate were often in conflict with each other, both about legislation and about debt-cancellation, land-distribution or elections. But there was no civil violence, only lawful differences and arguments, and even those they settled honourably by making mutual concessions.

What mattered was equal freedom for all, and the achievement of it was what made the Roman Empire possible.

Within four generations of the power-sharing deal, the Romans controlled, by conquest or treaty, the whole of Italy south of the Apennines. Throughout the peninsula, good farming land was divided up into equal lots for Roman settlers. Seven iugera (about 1.7 hectares) was the standard size, and, as one commander put it, wanting more than everyone else got was the sign of a bad citizen.

Three generations later, after two long and terrible wars with Carthage, the Romans controlled the whole western Mediterranean. In the second war they had been up against Hannibal, second only to Alexander the Great as a military genius. The two commanders who did most to defeat him (Fabius and Scipio) were both patricians; but the plebeian historian of those great events made a point of not naming the commanders. It was the Peoples achievement and when Scipio, as consul in 194 BC, instituted privileged seats for senators at the theatre games, it was regarded as an infringement of equal freedom:

For 557 years [since the foundation of the city] the games have been watched by all together. What has suddenly happened to make senators not want to have plebeians among them in the auditorium? Why should a rich man object to a poor man sitting next to him? Its just a new and arrogant self-indulgence.

The Romans still thought of themselves as a community of equals and now they were challenging kings. The great powers of the eastern Mediterranean were the dynastic monarchies that succeeded Alexanders short-lived empire: the Antigonids of Macedon, the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Syria, the Attalids of Pergamum. The first to fall was the oldest, Macedon.

The defeat and capture by the Romans of King Perseus, ninth in succession from Alexander himself, at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC, was a truly epoch-making event. One indirect result of it was the presence in Rome of the Greek historian Polybius, who spent his years of exile writing a history to explain to his fellow countrymen:

by what means, and under what system of government, the Romans succeeded in less than 53 years [220167 BC] in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement without parallel in human history.

The system of government was the key to understanding, and Polybius devoted a whole volume to describing the Roman republican constitution. Its excellence was demonstrated, he thought, by the citizens moral behaviour: they acted in concord for the public good; they sacrificed their own interests to the welfare of the community; in office, they kept their oaths and were scrupulous with public funds.