The Roman Way to Trash a Republic

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

In about 80 years, roughly the same length of time between the end of World War II and now, the Roman Republic was transformed into a dictatorship. If you had told a Roman senator at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. that his grandchildren would willingly hand over governance to a monarch, he would not have believed you. Like the American one, the Roman Republic was founded on the rejection of a king. Rome had a representative government that, though flawed, was based on the rule of law, with freedom of speech and rights to legal recourse for its citizens.

The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years, about twice as long as Americans have had theirs. As was surely true for the Romans, most Americans can hardly imagine that their system of self-government might break and be replaced by an imperial dynasty. That is why considering what undid the Roman Republic is useful today—if we can learn from the Romans’ mistakes.

Augustus was Rome’s first emperor. In so becoming, he dismantled the republic and founded a monarchy that would last for more than a millennium. In Rome, most aristocratic men were also senators and usually held that position for life. In the later republic, some of those men—notably, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—grew so extraordinarily rich and influential that they began to ignore the constraints of the Senate and the law. In the first century B.C.E., decades of aristocratic overreach and the authoritarian violence of Augustus’s predecessors   Sulla   and Caesar brought Rome to the brink more than once, but Augustus pushed it over the edge.

He took control of the government gradually but completely, with the support of those wealthy aristocrats who valued fortune above principle and with the complaisance of a population exhausted by conflict and disillusioned by a system that favored the rich and connected. Perhaps most salient for us today, Augustus consolidated his power with the institutional blessing of the Senate.

At first, the Senate let Augustus bend rules and push boundaries. It allowed him to accumulate domestic powers and bring unqualified members of his family into government. The Senate stood by while Augustus removed enemies from his path, and supported him when he put a self-serving spin on recent actions. Even when elections were held under Augustus, he often handpicked state officials.

The senators never called him emperor in his own day, but as   primus inter pares , or first among equals, Augustus was allowed to pretend he was part of the republican system even as he destroyed it. Those who praised Augustus and those who failed to fight back, despite their misgivings, created a king by another name. They may have believed they were securing their own positions by doing so, but their acquiescence to Augustus meant the practical end of their power, forever. In their defense, Rome’s senators legitimately feared death if they broke with him; Augustus certainly had a lot of people killed. Our American senators apparently have only primaries to fear—yet they and their congressional colleagues have shown little inclination to rein in their leader or assert their own constitutional powers.

An ambitious and ruthless political operator such as Augustus provides opponents with only so many chances to stop him. The Framers of our Constitution drew on ancient Greek and Roman history when they established our republic and sought to protect it from the inevitable threat of dictatorship. When they discussed ways to avoid despotism, the Romans served as a cautionary tale. The checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution look very much like those that were in place in Rome before Augustus. There were none after him.

All of this might raise a flag over the love for ancient Rome expressed by our contemporary elites. Mark Zuckerberg’s admiration of Augustus is famous. He recently gave up his “Caesar” haircut for young–Marcus Aurelius curls and wears big T-shirts printed with Latin slogans. Elon Musk has donated several million dollars to support the study and “ appreciation of Greek-Roman culture .” Steve Bannon regularly cites Roman history, in a selective and idiosyncratic way, as a guide for modern politics. During Donald Trump’s first term, Bannon helped found a “gladiator school” at a former monastery near Rome, where students would be trained in a curriculum designed to save Western civilization.

Like the wealthy elites of ancient Rome who aligned themselves with a dictator so that they could increase their fortunes, the richest and most influential men in America seem willing to let our republic fall apart as long as they believe that its demise is in their interest. And they might prosper by it. Or not. That’s the thing about capricious one-man rule—no one, not even billionaires with spaceships, can be sure they won’t get on the bad side of the emperor and suffer as a result. Thanks to the Senate that enabled him, Augustus—and every Roman emperor who followed—was a brutal dictator.

Some might argue that the empire that rose from the ashes of the republic brought peace and stability to the world for centuries to come. But this ignores the costs. The Romans were nearly always at war; their celebrated expansion was achieved by military subjugation of foreign lands and harsh repression of those they conquered. Augustus alone ordered the extrajudicial killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of domestic enemies. The supposedly stable dynasty he founded gave Rome Caligula and Nero; the latter’s death was followed by a bloody civil war. More mayhem followed, and not until a century after Augustus did the Senate finally reassert itself—by appointing another emperor and initiating a new line of succession. Some emperors made sure the roads were safe and the water clean, but these more admired rulers—Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius—were nonetheless dictators. Even for the most privileged Romans, the empire could be a terrifying and unpredictable place in which a single man held absolute, arbitrary power.

The United States, too, may endure as a great power for centuries to come. The ultimate lesson of the Roman Republic’s fate is that once you’ve allowed one man to rule as a monarch, even if you pretend he doesn’t, you are past the point of no return. When Augustus died in his bed at a ripe old age, the Roman Senate made him a god. This seems an honor that even the most sycophantic U.S. senators would be unlikely to suggest for our president. But as they cede ever more of their power to him, our own era of Roman-style imperial rule may be drawing closer than we think.