How Republics Unravel: From Rome to. . . America?

 A great state can fall apart when the rule-breaking of one man inspires his enemies to break the rules, too.

Earlier this month, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle was apprehended on a South Florida golf course. He was allegedly planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second attempted assassination against Trump in two-and-a-half months.

It’s likely that the gunman, Ryan W. Routh, was acting alone. But he is not alone in his hatred for Trump. In the eyes of many Americans, the 45th president is an existential threat to our republic. And ever since he won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, his opponents have treated him as such. They have also been repeatedly stunned by the fact that Trump breaks the norms of modern politics. From the minor—commenting on the size of his manhood—to the unprecedentedly major—denying that he lost the 2020 presidential election. 

The dynamic between Trump and his haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked the country by leading rallies where his adoring fans chanted, “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Eight years later, crowds at Kamala Harris rallies belt out a similar chant, calling for Trump’s imprisonment. 

In this respect Ryan Routh is part of a larger problem tearing our country apart. When the other side is considered completely beyond the pale—a threat to our very system of government—it’s worth breaking the norms of political decorum to stop them getting into power. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an “extinction-level event.” If Kamala wins, our country will become, in Trump’s words, “Venezuela on steroids.”

One escalation begets the next, until politics goes past the point of no return. We take it for granted today that we settle our elections with voting, not shooting. But republics don’t last forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows. Because the stakes are so high, it’s essential to ask: What leads a republic to choose the gun over the ballot? 

To try answering that question, I looked back to ancient Rome, a republic that not only fell but fell because of the rule-breaking of one man—and the response of his enemies. His name was Tiberius Gracchus. Like Trump, he was a member of the elite who turned on the elites, who channeled the resentments and anger of the common people against a system that had turned against him. Like Trump, he disregarded the unwritten political rules of his era. And like Trump, Tiberius prompted his enemies to disregard the norms themselves.

“You see this escalation very quickly with Tiberius Gracchus,” Adrian Goldsworthy, a historian of ancient Rome, told The Free Press. “He crosses some lines, sets some precedents, and then they suppress him in a way that sets an even worse precedent.”

Imagine January 6 in reverse: A mob of angry senators rioting after an election, breaking the legs off their chairs to fashion clubs, attack the people who supported a populist leader—who had just won an election. That is how Tiberius met his end.

In America, we remain a republic unbroken, but this episode of history offers salutary lessons. We have endured Trump’s most serious norm violation: his efforts to steal back an election he claimed was stolen from him by the forces that smeared and defamed him during his presidency. His attempts to send slates of fake electors to Congress to delay the certification of that election. His supporters breaking into the Capitol, menacing legislators.

And yet the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents continues to strain our foundations like no political crisis since the Civil War. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed—and eventually, the death of the republic itself. Is this a blueprint for America’s future?

 

You probably know about last year’s trend of American men confessing on TikTok how often they think about the Roman Empire. I’m a bit different. I’m obsessed with what preceded the empire, Rome’s republic. Empires are a dime a dozen in human history. They rise and fall, from Babylon to the Soviet Union. But republics—a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the people—these are orchids: rare, precious, and fleeting. If you take the long view of human history, tyranny is the norm. A system that checks the power of its leaders and legislators and makes them accountable to citizens? That’s special. 

Few republics of significance existed between ancient Rome and America’s founding.

Of course, there are differences between the two. In America, we have one chief executive: the president. Rome’s republic had the equivalent of two presidents known as consuls. In Rome, the powerful senate, composed of elites known as the patricians, were also the republic’s military leaders. In the U.S., there’s a bright line between soldiers and politicians.

We have a constitution. In Rome, many rules were handshake agreements between gentlemen, understood as part of the long-standing traditions by the ruling class.

But the similarities are nonetheless striking. Both the Roman and American republics emerged initially out of revolutions against kings. Both republics were stained by slavery. The Romans didn’t have political parties the way we do, but they did have politics. There were great debates over how powers and privileges were divided across society. And in both the Roman and American republics, the rights of the regular citizens expanded over time. 

Between 494 and 287 BCE, the Roman republic went through a period of reform known as the Conflict of the Orders. For more than 200 years, the have-nots pressured the haves to expand liberty to all men (though not, notably, women). The plebeians—the largest community in Roman society—wanted political representation. Eventually they prevailed, gaining legal authority as tribunes, officials who could veto legislation and introduce laws. Tribunes could make citizen arrests. The 10 tribunes that represented the plebeians were the common man’s voice inside the republic. It was strictly forbidden to do any violence to a tribune if he was inside the city of Rome. 

The Rome that Tiberius was born into had a peculiar problem, not unlike the one America faces today. It was a victim of its own success. As it swept through the known world with one military conquest after another, Rome became so rich that by 167 BCE it stopped taxing its citizens. There was no need. Every few months wagons filled with silver, ivory, and gold would come into the city, a portion of which would go to the republic.

This was glorious for the patrician elite. But the wealth flowing into Rome did little for the plebeians—just as globalization has enriched America’s coastal elites, leaving factory workers, truck drivers, and heartland Americans behind. And this endless flow of treasure relied on endless warfare. A massive military was needed to invade, hold, and plunder foreign lands. The republic relied on conscription. Citizen farmers were drafted into the army for years at a time. Often, when they returned home, their neglected farms were in disrepair, and wealthy patrician elites would swoop in and pay below-market prices for the land. Desperate farmers would have no choice but to accept these terrible terms. And it got even worse. The patricians didn’t hire the farmers to work the land they once owned. It was far more profitable to use slave labor instead.

For the everyman small farmer, this was an unbearable situation, and it was a political problem for the republic because Rome relied on these men to fight their forever wars, to borrow a phrase from today. They needed the plebes invested, not rebellious. 

And so, just like our politicians today, the patrician Senate sat around and argued over what to do about it. One faction wanted the status quo, claiming that since small farmers received a portion of the booty from Roman conquests abroad, there was no real problem. Another faction argued for reform. Soldiers would not fight if it meant losing their farms. The idea was to apportion public land to the plebes. You might say it was the socialism of antiquity. And Tiberius would become its champion.

 

Before he was a politician, like most Roman elites, Tiberius had been a soldier. Three decades after Rome stopped taxing its citizens, Tiberius was part of a campaign against a tribe known as the Numantines in today’s Spain. There he served under an incompetent Roman commander, Mancinus, whose army fell into a trap: 20,000 Roman soldiers were surrounded, certain to die. And would have, had Tiberius not interceded. He went over the head of Mancinus to negotiate a truce with the Numantines. The Numantine tribe ransacked the Roman camp, as you would expect, but allowed the legion to depart for Rome unscathed.

One might think this was a triumph of military pragmatism from the young Tiberius. But none of this played very well back in Rome. As the ancient historian Plutarch wrote in his volume of biographies, Lives: “On his return to Rome, the whole transaction was greatly blamed as dishonorable and disgraceful.” The Senate voted to strip Mancinus of authority, put him in chains, and send him back to the Numentines—and, though they did not officially censure him, they also heaped abuse on Tiberius. 

For an ambitious young Roman, this was a major setback. Yet there was a silver lining that would shape his future as a populist. The families of the soldiers whose lives Tiberius saved rushed to his defense. He was their hero. Tiberius earned contempt from the conservatives in the Senate, but bolstered his reputation with the plebes. It would become a pattern.

Tiberius was clever and ambitious and had a plan. If he was loved by the people, he would build his political career upon those very people, and he would do so as a tribune, representing the plebes. Most tribunes rarely made waves because they were bought off by the patricians. Tiberius would be different. 

He was genuinely troubled by the treatment of Rome’s dispossessed farmers and their terrible living conditions. On a journey through Tuscany, Tiberius observed the political graffiti scrawled on sign posts in the countryside, raging that the farms of plebeian soldiers were being snatched up on the cheap. The young Roman was outraged, and his indignation would lead him to challenge the establishment of Rome as no one had before.

It began with a land bill known as Lex Agraria, which proposed that public lands be apportioned to small Roman farmers. The law also allowed for compensation to the wealthy Roman families that had effectively taken over these public lands. So it was in many ways a compromise.

Tiberius introduced the legislation in the people’s assembly. His speech on its behalf is a stem-winder for the ages. This is the version recorded by Plutarch:

 “The wild beasts of Italy had their dens and holes and hiding-places, while the men who fought and died in defense of Italy enjoyed, indeed, the air and the light, but nothing else: houseless and without a spot of ground to rest upon, they wander about with their wives and children, while their commanders, with a lie in their mouth, exhort the soldiers in battle to defend their tombs and temples against the enemy, for out of so many Romans not one has a family altar or ancestral tomb, but they fight to maintain the luxury and wealth of others, and they die with the title of lords of the earth, without possessing a single patch of earth to call their own.” 

Now Donald Trump could never dream of hitting that level of eloquence—it’s one of history’s great speeches. But if you go back to Trump’s inaugural address, you can see the similarities. “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day that the people became the rulers of this nation again.” American citizens, Trump likes to remind us, are being deprived of their birthright by the moneyed elites. And you could say Tiberius wanted to make Rome great again. This high-octane populism scared the togas off of the conservatives in the Senate.

The Roman system, like our own, relied on unwritten customs in addition to formal law. These standards, which were known as “the way of the elders,” helped keep the delicate republic in balance. And Tiberius Gracchus was about to steamroll these norms in order to ram through his land bill.

But there would be consequences. The senators opposed to the land bill found a more pliant tribune, Marcus Octavius, to be their proxy inside the people’s assembly, and Octavius vetoed the introduction of the bill time and again.

Tiberius at first tried to reason with Octavius in debate. He even offered to compensate him for any loss of property he might incur personally. But none of it worked. So he took a drastic step, arguing that when a tribune defied the will of the people he was no tribune at all. He called for a vote to strip Octavius of his office. That had never been done before.

The plebes voted to give Octaviuss the boot, and Tiberius dispatched one of his bodyguards to physically remove him from the orator’s platform, a humiliating spectacle. And in the fracas, as the plebes chased Octavius away, one of his slaves had his eyes gouged out.

 

Imagine that you are a blue-blood senator, and you’re watching all this. You’re horrified. Never in Rome’s history had a tribune used his power like this.

But it worked. With Octavius gone, the land bill passed easily and became Roman law. Tiberius then created a commission that would be distributing public land to dispossessed farmers. Conveniently, it was comprised of himself, his father-in-law, and his little brother, Gaius Gracchus. There is a fair argument that Tiberius was not acting entirely out of noble conviction. If the Gracchus family controlled the distribution of public lands, the beneficiaries would be indebted politically to Tiberius and his brother.

The Senate’s conservatives seethed. Their next move was one that any contemporary politician would find familiar. They couldn’t stop the land reform bill from becoming law, so they did the next best thing: They starved the land commission of funding.

And that would have been the end of the land bill had Tiberius not experienced a stroke of good fortune. Attalus, the king of a wealthy territory called Pergamum in modern day Turkey, had just died. And in his will he bequeathed his entire kingdom to the people of Rome. Tiberius argued before the assembly that the money should go to land reform because Attalus left his fortune to the Roman people, not to Rome.

This shattered another norm. According to Roman custom, it was the senate—not the people’s assembly—that voted on Rome’s finances and foreign policy. When Tiberius put the matter of Pergamum to the people’s assembly, the patricians were incensed. “The Senate met in a furious session to denounce Tiberius as a reckless demagogue aiming to make himself a tyrannical despot,”  Mike Duncan wrote in his history of this period, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.

Sound familiar? Recall how leading Democrats, including Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden, have warned that Trump will be a dictator if he is reeelected?

Tiberius confirmed the suspicions of his foes with his next move. He announced that he would run for an unprecedented second consecutive term as tribune of the plebes. Again, if there was a rule against it, it was an unwritten one.

One senator in particular was determined to prevent Tiberius from having his way. His name was Scipio Nasica, and he was also a high religious official, the pontifex maximus. He hated the land reform bill. He hated how Tiberius ran roughshod over the ways of the elders.

As voting got started, Tiberius’s supporters flooded the hill near the Temple of Jupiter where the assembly met, and controlled the area where the votes were to be tallied. Across the plane, in the Senate, Nasica boiled. He implored the consul, Rome’s highest elected official, to stop this affront to Roman tradition.

“Tiberius Gracchus was becoming a king, a tyrant,” he warned. “If he is not stopped, then we will lose the republic forever.”

But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The consul only promised to stop Tiberius if he violated a law, but he would not condone violence against a Roman citizen without a trial. Nasica then said, according to Plutarch: “Well then, as the consul betrays the state, to those who wish to maintain the laws follow me.” 

At this point, Nasica pulled his toga over his head and led a mob of like-minded senators to the hill where the voting was taking place. They broke the legs off tables and chairs, and began filing through the crowd, swinging their crude clubs at the plebes as they approached Tiberius. 

Plutarch writes that Tiberius was attempting to escape the mob when he fell to the ground. As he tried to get up, a fellow tribune clubbed his head with the leg of a bench. Another senator struck him again. Tiberius was beaten to death, along with 300 of his plebeian supporters.  

After the bloodbath, the dead—Tiberius Gracchus included—were denied a proper burial. Their bodies were thrown into the Tiber River. 

This riot was the first political violence in the Roman republic since the Conflict of the Orders. It would not be the last. Nasica broke the prohibition against political violence inside Rome. And that prohibition would never be restored. 

 

The next century for Rome was soaked in blood. The republic was now stuck in a cycle of escalating violence. Nasica was never prosecuted for leading the lynch mob. So it’s not surprising that a decade later, when Tiberius’s brother, Gaius Gracchus, proposed even more sweeping reforms, he was also swept up in a tide of violence that left him dead. Over time, because conscription was becoming more difficult, various warlords arose, commanding their own private militias. The old safeguards against putting too much power in the hands of one man were eroding. Rome would be ruled by dictator-generals for stretches at a time. 

Eventually, a loose alliance of three Roman leaders emerged: Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar. They trampled on Rome’s remaining political traditions and customs. After Caesar, Rome was a republic in name only. The Senate still met, but it no longer had power over affairs of the Roman state. A once-mighty republic was gelded by a century of norm violations.

Savor the irony. Nasica and his allies in the Senate thought they were preventing a king from destroying the republic when they murdered Tiberius Gracchus. And yet it was that murder—that massive norm violation—that planted the seeds for Rome to be ruled by an emperor. 

So, what does this teach us about today?

The main lesson of Tiberius Gracchus is that republics are fragile. The laws as well as the unwritten rules of our politics only work when they are observed by all parties. When one side defies the norms, it’s an invitation for the other side to do the same, even if the rules were violated for the most noble of reasons. American senator Frank Church summed up this idea as follows: “Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free.”

He was warning about the overreach of the national security state during the Cold War, but it applies to the Trump era as well. In Rome, the crisis posed by Tiberius tempted Nasica to lead a mob that murdered him.

In America’s recent history, the crisis posed by Trump tempted Democrats to warp the justice system into a partisan weapon. It tempted the elite media to lash itself to the Democratic party. It tempted the FBI to pursue a meritless investigation into the sitting president long after the flimsy theory of Russian collusion was debunked by the FBI’s own investigators. It tempted state legislatures to try to remove Trump’s name from the presidential ballot. Every one of these norm violations was justified—in their minds—to stop Trump, a dictator, a traitor, an orange monster, especially after the transgressions of January 6. 

So consider this a warning. Nasica’s lynch mob believed their actions were justified to save the republic; instead, they set it on a path to ruin. The Romans went from the rule of law to the rule of the emperor in just over a century.

In two years, our republic turns 250 years old. We’ve survived one civil war. Compared to Rome, our January 6 really wasn’t so fatefully terrible. After the mob was dispersed, Congress finished certifying the 2020 election that evening. We’ve been lucky. So were the Romans, until Tiberius Gracchus.

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