The Last Generation of the Roman Republic [Paperback]

Erich S. Gruen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1995

Available for the first time in paperback, with a new introduction that reviews related scholarship of the past twenty years, Erich Gruen's classic study of the late Republic examines institutions as well as personalities, social tensions as well as politics, the plebs and the army as well as the aristocracy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A monumental study which, though it concerns itself with a familiar topic, challenges the reader to reassess a crucial period in Roman history and determine whether the image of a 'Roman revolution' has not obscured the importance and persistence of conventional behavior in Republican Rome." -- John E. Rexine, History

"An important, informative, and exhaustive contribution to the study of the political history of the always exciting and intriguing last generation of the Roman Republic, which commands respect as much as it excites disagreement." -- D. L. Stockton, Gnomon

"[An] important book. . . . It underscores the need to look again at the history of Rome in the late Republic from more than a narrowly political point of view in order to help us understand better the transition to imperial autocracy." -- A. J. Christopherson, The Classical Journal

About the Author

Erich S. Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (California, 1984).

Product Details

• Paperback: 596 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (February 28, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520201531
• ISBN-13: 978-0520201538
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #308,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It will change forever the way you see the Republic., September 5, 2002

By 

Graham Henderson - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Paperback)

This book is probably the most important book to have been written on the history of Republican Rome. If you have serious interest in the subject, you must have it. Having said that, it is not "light reading". Weighing it at just over 500 pages it is an exhaustively researched, densely written work of scholarship and erudition. Yet for all of its density, the style reasonably non-scholarly and it is possible to skim the more difficult passages and still capture the essence of what is being said.

Gruen thesis is that the Republic was not breaking down in its last generation and that there was nothing "inevitable" about what happened even up to the final months preceding the civil wars.

"The Ciceronian era, he writes in his introduction, "will here undergo examination in several different aspects. An unexpected portrait emerges: conventions were tenacious; no cascading slide downhill to destruction is evident; links to the past were more conspicuous than heralds of the future; tradition, not "revolution" predominated."

It should become apparent here that the principal target of this is none other than Ronald Syme whose magisterial work from the 30s, "Roman Revolution" so influenced succeeding generations. It was Syme's view (dubbed a "glib pronouncement" by Gruen in his conclusion) that the city-state was incapable of governing an empire; the imperial holdings had reached such a proportion that government and society required a fundamental overhauling. For Syme the fall of the Republic was inevitable - even desirable.

Gruen tenaciously refutes this view. He canvasses the historical record with an eye for detail that is almost supernatural. There are Chapters on Consular Elections, Legislative Activities, Criminal Trials, The Plebs and the Army, and Discontents and Violence. In each case the evidence is marshalled and often re-interpreted to prove his central thesis - nothing particularly out of the ordinary was happening - at least as far as the Romans were concerned. Gruen believes that we have arrived at our modern view of the period because we are so influenced by the result. "Events," he writes, "tend to be refashioned into a pattern pointing inescapably to the final collapse." Speaking of the year 52, he writes, "Romans would not have described the events of 52 as a breakdown of the Republic." And again, "Hindsight has caused modern obsession with the background of civil war. It has too long clouded perception of a central fact: the remarkable conventionality of Roman behaviour."

Along the way Gruen offers some startling new insights and interpretations. For example, it is widely believed that Caesar could not afford to return to Rome as a "privatus", because he feared he would be immediately prosecuted and eliminated from political life. "That analysis", he writes, "has found its way into virtually every work on the subject, an article of faith unquestioned by the keenest critics." He proceeds to utterly demolish this analysis and in so doing removes one of THE central underpinnings of the thesis that war was inevitable.

Another surprise is the treatment accorded C. Scribonious Curio. Usually considered a stooge of Caesar's, a puppet of the Big Men, Curio emerges from these pages as a brilliant and talented, but reckless, ambitious and perverse man -- a man with entirely his own agenda, to split Caesar off from Pompey; NOT to advance Caesar's cause, but rather his own. It becomes abundantly clear that he unleashed forces larger than himself, forces that he was unable to control, forces that ultimately contributed to the civil war.

At the very least I would urge anyone with even a passing interest in the Republic to read the introduction and the conclusion. They are pithy and lucid and pretty much tell the story. I have been reading about the Republic for much of my adult life. I am sorry that I came upon this work so late. It will change forever the way you see the Republic. And it absolutely MUST be read as a companion to "Roman Revolution".

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sweeping revisionism, July 9, 2004

By 

T. J. Graczewski "tgraczewski" (Burlingame, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Paperback)

This impressive history isn't for everyone. In fact, it is targeted to a rather select audience: those with a deep understanding of the Age of Cicero. If you are not intimately familiar with the chronology and the "conventional wisdom" explaining the demise of the Roman Republic much of Gruen's work will be impenetrable and the gravity of his conclusions will be lost.

The author's thesis is simple: all previous secondary histories of the era are contaminated by a heavy reliance on the overblown rhetoric of a few ancient authors and a strong tendency to view the events of the period from the enlightened vantage point of the future. Gruen claims that an objective and dispassionate review of the period with no attempt to divine patterns of demise will show that the 70s, 60s, and 50s BC were largely business as usual. Whereas modern authors have described the last decades of the Republic as leading inexorably to civil war and revolution, Gruen claims that a Roman of that period would not have seen things that way.

Gruen doesn't limit his challenge to the traditional orthodoxy to a few examples. Rather, his revisionism is sweeping in scope. For instance, Gruen argues: 1) what has generally been construed as the moral rot of the last few decades was actually a common theme in Greek and Roman literature not confined to the Age of Cicero; 2) the ruling oligarchy did desperately cling to power as is often argued, but that didn't prevent a robust although non-interconnected string of reform legislation from being introduced throughout the period; 3) Republican Rome was dominated by individuals and small groups from its inception and a close review of the electoral returns at all levels show that the last years of the Republic show no major departure from precedent; 4) there is no evidence to suggest that the evaporation of the middle class led to a large and unified disgruntled constituency of urban poor bent on social revolution; 5) the armies of the Late Republic were no more "professional" or beholden to individuals than was usually the case (it should be noted that I found Gruen's evidence in this particular case to be exiguous and far from convincing); 6) Rome's system of imperial administration may have been undeveloped and exploitative, but that does nothing to explain the collapse of the Republic as the provinces stayed loyal to Rome before, during and after the Civil War; and 7) there has been far too much focus on the explanations proffered by Cicero and Sallust, whose work was largely the result of personal gripes and set forth for propaganda purposes. In other words, Gruen addresses and attempts to refute every commonly held belief on the decline and fall of the Republic. In some cases he makes a convincing case (challenging the notion that the Triumvirate utterly dominated the Republic from the 59 BC forward is one good example), while others appear to be more of a stretch (the aforementioned argument of the changing nature of the army is most notable is that regard).

In closing, "The Last Generation of the Roman Republic" is one of the most important and influential scholarly works on the period to appear in the past half-century. However, the book is not without its credible critics. One prime example would be the highly critical review by Michael Crawford ("Hamlet without the Prince" The Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 66 (1976) pp. 214-217), which this reviewer would suggest that all prospective readers consult.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Clarifying Retrospective Of The Late Republic, February 28, 2005

By 

Octavius (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Paperback)

The Roman Republic was strangely a very dynamic as well as rigid institution in which the causes of its demise have baffled scholars until the present day. Erich S. Gruen's scholarly work is one of the most concise studies on the politics and society of the Late Roman Republic. Throughout the book, Gruen exhaustively reviews the socio-political spectrum of Rome from Marius to Caesar and points to certain issues that collectively led it to its downfall. The book is also a challenge to previous works, particulary Syme's, claiming that the Romans clearly knew that the Civil War was coming.

Having no written charter or constitution to guide it, the Roman Republic relied on tradition and ad hoc enactments as precedent. Unlike the democracies of today, Roman suffrage was collectively manifested by two voting assemblies representing either 35 geographical classes (tribes) or votes by defined classes organized on the basis of wealth (i.e. the less money your class had, the less its vote counted.) Each assembly voted on certain ranges of legislation and were further segregated by a caste structure distinguishing commoners and the elite patrician nobility whose family clans originated from the earliest days of the Republic or the Monarchy. When the time to vote did come, suffrage was limited to the physical confines of Rome in the Forum or the Campus Martius: if you were poor and lived over 50 miles away from Rome, you probably voted little.

This system worked well in Rome for so long because, until about 90 B.C., the Roman citizenry was limited to those who lived in Rome and its colonies in Italy and overseas: other cities in Italy were treated merely as allies (socii) who had limited privileges in Roman society and no voting rights. The Roman aristocratic oligarchy thus had few problems in manipulating the needs and sentiments of these voting blocks. Those dynamics changed after Rome was forced to enfranchise all of Italy to settle a bitter insurrection by its Italian allies around 90 B.C. This resulted in a sudden surge in the size and power of the traditional voting blocks which, despite their attempts to organize them to their advantage, began eroding the traditional allegiances and methods of Rome's ruling families. The changing political dynamics gave populists and demagogues such as Clodius and Caesar much greater flexibility in projecting mass popular will on given agendas. Although corruption, plebicites, political trials, and outright violence to pass legislation was not new to Romans, these changes along with more subtle ones made them evermore common occurrences near the end of the Republic and, to a great degree, made the leadership of charismatic populists like Caesar to many an appealing solution to the woes of a failing republican system.

Through statistical analysis and references to classical texts, Gruen shows that Rome's elite seemed quite unaware of the big picture that Syme claims was so evident and, that these major changes were seen more as business as usual. Gruen shows how all of the important political offices such as the Consulship continued to be filled by either plebeian nobles or patricians as usual and that there were no major changes or concessions made during that time. By accurately and concisely reviewing the composition of magistracies, senatorial rolls, and tribunes from the time of Sulla to the Civil War, Gruen offers a compelling insight as to how the optimate and patrician oligarchy was continuing to do business as usual until the Republic's final years. Gruen covers every aspect of Roman politics involving each class composing Roman society from patricians to plebeans, foreigners, and slaves. He studies all conceivable social institutions, how they were used by such classes and what their implications were in the broad context.

As with any study of this period, Gruen covers much detail on the development of the First Triumvirate and its principal actors: Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. He shows how each continued their political aims in methods that were a common staple to Roman republican politics such as strong-arming, bribery, nepotism, and patronage. Gruen's argument focuses on how the consequences of enfranchising all of Italy into the Roman citizenry after the Social Wars may have overextended the traditional stability of the nobilitas' oligarchy and yet not altered their perception of the new political reality. Gruen suggests that these new political dynamics may have fragmented traditional family alliances and their systems of rival clientelae to such a degree that it made their effective administration of the Republic impossible. Gruen also doesn't ignore the adverse effects of Rome failing to address the dangers of its professional legions whose allegiances were only to their commanders and not its political institutions.

Altogether a brilliant scholarly work that is indispensible to the study of this most important period of not only Roman History, but of our present history as well. In addition Gruen's work, Fergus Millar's "The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic" parallels the dilligent research and analysis on this subject with a stronger sociological emphasis on the location of the Forum as a political institution. This book is a study in erudition and I wouldn't recommend it as an introductory text on Roman history as its depth and scope would already require some advanced knowledge of the subject. I would strongly recommend both books to anyone who has more than a fleeting interest on this subject.