Julius Caesar & the Fall of the Republic

The Roman Republic was designed to prevent one man from seizing absolute power. Two consuls checked each other. The Senate deliberated. Tribunes defended the people. Term limits kept ambition on a leash. For centuries, the system worked well enough. Then it stopped working.

The problem was success. Rome's conquests across the Mediterranean in the second and first centuries BCE flooded the city with wealth, enslaved populations, and displaced soldiers who returned from years of campaigning to find their farms bought up by aristocratic landholders. A new class of super-rich senators accumulated estates the size of small countries. The urban poor swelled Rome's streets, landless and restless. The Republic's institutions had been built for a city-state; they were now trying to govern an empire, and the machinery was not designed for this load.

The first cracks were violent. Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune, proposed redistributing public land to the poor in 133 BCE. The Senate had him beaten to death on the steps of the Capitol. His brother Gaius met the same fate a decade later. Political murder, once unthinkable, became a tool of governance.