Publisher Description
Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed — and how it could have continued to thrive — with this insightful history from an award-winning author.
In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean’s premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise.
By the 130s BC, however, Rome’s leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars — and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus.
The death of Rome’s Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.
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Lucid, fast-paced, and well informed. Edward Watts’s history of the failure of the Roman Republic is the tale of how greed and self-interest undermined the ancient world’s most successful democratic superpower and caused Rome’s people to vote in a dictatorship. Beginning with Rome’s confrontations with Pyrrhus and Carthage, and a relatively simple state based on reasonable equity, Watts takes us into a world of the super-rich who undermined the very system that gave them their wealth, driving it downwards into civil war and mass murder. The elective tyranny of Augustus proved to be the only answer. This is both a splendid introduction to one of the most dramatic periods of history and a book for our times.
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David Potter, author of Constantine the EmperorÂ
