The Roman Republic

In the Roman Republic the consuls had to work with the senate, which was initially an advisory council of the ranking nobility, or patricians, but grew in size and power over time. Other authorities of the Republic included praetors, aediles, and quaestors. These were called magistrates. The magistracies were originally restricted to patricians, but were later opened to common people, the plebeians. Republican voting assemblies included the centuriate assembly, which voted on matters of war and peace and elected men to the most important offices, and the comitia tributa (tribal assembly), which elected less important offices.

Whenever the Roman Republic was attacked by neighboring tribes, the Romans reacted and beat them back, gradually subduing peoples on the Italian peninsula in the process, including the Etruscans and the Samnites. In 390 BC, the Romans suffered a Celtic invasion; before they could effectively get organized and counterattack, the Gauls defeated the Romans at the Battle of Allia River and then sacked their city. The last threat to Roman hegemony in Italy came when Tarentum, a major Greek colony, enlisted the aid of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 281 BC, but this effort failed as well. The Romans secured their conquests by founding Roman colonies in strategic areas, establishing stable control over the region.

In the second half of the 3rd century BC, the Roman Republic was threatened by Carthage in the first of three Punic Wars and the Romans came out victorious. During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian General Hannibal invaded Italy and attempted to destroy Rome, but was finally defeated by Publius Cornelius Scipio at the Battle of Zama. Thus, the Punic Wars resulted in Rome’s first overseas conquests, of Sicily and Hispania, and the rise of Rome as a significant imperial power. After defeating the Macedonian and Seleucid Empires in the 2nd century BC, the Romans became the dominant people of the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the years, senators in the Roman Republic became rich at the provinces’ expense, but soldiers, who were mostly small-scale farmers, were away from home for longer periods of time and could not maintain their farms, losing them to the rich class, and the increased reliance on foreign slaves and the growth of latifundia (slums) reduced the availability of paid work. Income from war booty, mercantilism in the new provinces, and tax farming created new economic opportunities for the wealthy, forming a new class of merchants, the equestrians.

The Senate repeatedly blocked important land reforms, refusing to give the equestrian class a larger say in the government. Violent gangs of the urban unemployed, controlled by rival Senators, intimidated the electorate through violence. The situation came to a head in the late 2nd century BC under the Gracchi brothers, a pair of tribunes who attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the major patrician landholdings among the plebeians. Both brothers were killed, but the Senate passed some of their reforms in an attempt to placate the growing unrest of the plebeian and equestrian classes.

The denial of Roman citizenship to allied Italian cities led to the Social War of 91–88 BC. The military reforms of Gaius Marius in 107 BC resulted in soldiers often having more loyalty to their commander than to the city, and a powerful general could hold the city and Senate ransom. This led to civil war between Marius and his protegé Sulla, and culminated in Sulla’s dictatorship of 81–79 BC.