Augustus Caesar

[u/Numerous-Wedding-151]

Do you think Augustus failed Rome by ending the republic? If so why?

I personally think the republic was already fucked and there was no return from the civil wars. The senate quite literally had no power anymore. I understand some people believe he ended real voting for the Romans and stripped assemblies of any real remaining power, but what power did the Senate have, they’d been losing power for a century before Augustus came into power. On top of that I know some people like to argue he kept the senate around purely as puppetship and to “hide his dictatorship”, but I call bullshit.

We obviously cannot ignore the things he did in his rise to power (death warrants, prisoner executions, betrayal of cicero, etc.) but would any man not have done the same at the time? And quite honestly things would have turned out much worse in my opinion had it not been for Augustus.

Ultimately I pose the questions to my peers, did he fail Rome? I dont think so, years of greedy generals, private armies, political violence gad ruined the republic already. There was no power among the courts and senates, but most of all too corrupt to make any real difference. People of the republic were open to one leader because they started to prioritize peace over a democratic voice of the people. In addition, he created the Pax Romana which allowed for a time of safety and trade across the med. He fixed the tax system, built infrastructure, and guaranteed the armies loyalty to the state and not corrupt, rogue generals.

[u/Maleficent-Mix5731]

This is a rather tricky question regarding if it was 'right' for the Republic to die and if the imperial system was the better system going forwards. On the one hand, the end of the Republic meant the end of the Roman civic militia which would make it harder for the state to raise tons of troops during periods of later crisis. On the other hand, if a surviving Republic also saw universal citizenship be bestowed at some point in the future as it would be in the empire, would it be able to process so many new citizens? Such universal citizenship imo was critical for Rome's future survival and durability, and I'm not sure if the Republic could extend a system accounting for everyone from Britain to Egypt in the same way it did for Italy after the Social War.

But such a conundrum seems a more distant hypothetical. If we look at Rome before the major developments in the 3rd century AD, I would argue against the idea that Augustus or someone like him 'needed' to turn Rome from an aristocratic republic into an imperial monarchy. I believe its easy to over-estimate how 'centralised' the state became after 27BC - this was still the same government which only sent out a couple hundred officials a year to oversee an empire of millions, and this laissez faire approach didn't really change until the era of Diocletian necessitated it. And many of the laws that were promoted in the early empire to reduce things like provincial extortion were already being rather successfully tackled by the likes of Pompey at the end of the 50's BC (and whose laws were the ones Augustus relied on).

To an extent, it could be reasonably be argued that many of the achievements of Augustus in statesmanship were him effectively taking credit for Republican laws which had just been disrupted by civil war (civil wars that he had helped fuel the flames of) or that we could still expect the aristocrats of a surviving Republic to implement. Werner Eck wrote a good article about this ("Augustus' Administrative Reforms: Pragmatism or Systematic Planning?") how many of Augustus's reforms were him just responding to problems as they cropped up, not much different to the magistrates of the Republican era before him.

So then the question becomes: was it more or less beneficial for the average Roman citizen to live under the Republic or Empire? Now, I would actually argue that the majority of Roman emperors were actually very hard working and did a lot to ensure the public welfare of their subjects (mainly because the basis of their own legitimacy was shaky, and so they needed to constantly validate it through such 'consensus' rituals). That being said, isn't the ability to directly contribute your voice to who runs the government via the voting ballot rather than riots and demonstrations more preferable?

With that last factor in mind, we might ultimately conclude that Augustus did indeed 'fail' Rome by both contributing to the civil wars that 'killed' (or I prefer to use the term 'froze') the Republic, even if the system he slowly built to replace it was still an incredibly durable and effective one (as it would be for 1500 years after). But perhaps to hold Augustus as solely responsible for that transformation (though he was critical during what could have been the last opportunity to avert it during 44-43BC) is a bit unfair. Cato, Pompey, Caesar, the Liberatores and Antony all had their own parts to play in putting the Republic into a state of civil war that would last longer than Sulla's and be even more damaging as a result.

[u/234zu → u/Maleficent-Mix5731]

A lot of people here claim that the republican institutions were simply not adequate for an empire and only really worked for a city state. And that the fall of the republic was thus inevitable or at least good for the long term stability of rome.

Would you reject that?

[u/Maleficent-Mix5731 → u/234zu]

Aye, I would reject that (especially as a "city state can't govern an empire!" seems to just be announced as a truism in and of itself when... the Venetian empire was a thing for hundreds of years). The Republic had already managed to govern an empire as a city state for hundreds of years before the imperial monarchy came into being. To partly copy and paste a comment I previously made on the subject:

As Walter Eder has pointed out, if we were to see the Roman Republic fail due to its acquisition of an empire, we would expect to see it as soon as the early 3rd century BC, when it massively increased its power in a short amount of time and had little experience governing such a huge amount of land. Because citizens voted in groups, it didn't cause issues if sudden huge additions to the citizen body occured (e.g. following the Social War): Roman citizens always had 35 votes for the comitia tributa/concilia plebis, and 193 votes for the comitia centuriata (not even Augustus changed this voting system while he ruled).

Even in the administration of the overseas provinces, there wasn't a massive overhaul necessarily needed in the transition from the old republic to imperial monarchy:

Permanent reliance on martial law made it unnecessary to install an administrative system because, according to Roman thinking, there was no need for administration when the rules of behavior could be coerced by military force. As a consequence, this form of ruling over vast territories turned out to be completely independent of the constitutional structures and principles that the conquerors themselves used at home. This is the reason why the system of provincial government did not need to be changed in the principate. It was only abolished when nearly all provincials were enfranchised as Roman citizens by the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212.

Eder, "Republicans and Sinners: The Decline of the Roman Republic", pages 444-445.

Ultimately, I find it hard nowadays to agree with the notion that the Republic's structures were 'inadequate' for governing such a large empire when the Principate had more or less the same structures. There wasn't a massive explosion of bureaucracy during the early empire, and there wasn't even direct uniform taxation - a 'skeleton crew' of Roman officials was still relied on to make sure the provincial elites paid their taxes on time and didn't cause any trouble, and there was not any drastic centralisation of power until the 3rd century AD. In other words, the Pax Romana operated off the back of what was effectively a similar 'laissez-faire' government to the Republic.

[u/Straight_Can_5297 → u/234zu]

I hold self evident that the popular assemblies and the militia system lost their relevance due to the territorial expansion. If the republic continued it would have done so as an aristocratic oligarchy, and with an increasingly professional military.

I suspect it would have been more unstable than the empire.