[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
There is much to like about this volume. It originated in a conference in Melbourne in July 2023. If the papers are anything to go by, that must have been a stimulating event. The resulting, open access volume (part of De Gruyter’s new Studies in Ancient Civil War series) attempts three things. Part I, broadly speaking, interrogates the concepts used to discuss the end of the Roman Republic. Parts II and III offer studies of specific aspects of the fall of the Roman Republic: legal, economic, social, conceptual, and more. Parts IV and V explore other historical case-studies of democracies dying: the likes of Venice, Spain, Austria, and the contemporary USA. The guiding thread is a commitment to putting historical examples of democratic backsliding—primarily the history of the late Roman Republic—in dialogue with contemporary political theory on the subject, in the hope they prove mutually illuminating.
For historians of the Late Republic, Parts II and III will be the most useful. The papers cover well-trodden ground, but they are invariably thorough and often acute. For example: Tim Elliott’s chapter on populist rhetoric in Sallust identifies important, thematic similarities between Lepidus’, Macer’s and Memmius’ speeches; Jeff Tatum’s chapter (also focused on the speeches in Sallust’s Historiae) makes a subtle argument about how appeals to libertas could serve authoritarian ends; Christian Hjorth Bagger’s chapter gives a rich account of the fate of matronae in the Late Republic; James Tan’s chapter offers a detailed survey of debates around the role of economic forces in the Republic’s demise. Viewed as a whole, Parts II and III evince the value of an ecumenical approach to this rich and often puzzling period. Parts IV and V are more eclectic. It is less clear, to me at least, who will most benefit from these chapters or quite what they have in common. But they too are valuable and enjoyable. In Part IV, for instance, Ronald T. Ridley’s chapter gives a stimulating re-reading of the Res Gestae, searching for traces of Augustus’ revolutionary past; in Part V, Annelien de Dijn’s chapter offers a sharp and succinct intellectual history of populism. Federica Carugati’s short afterword is useful and insightful (it may actually be better read first, as a foreword); I will return to it below.
What really matters in this volume, though, is the attempt at dialogue with contemporary literature on—and experiences of—democratic backsliding. The centrality of this aim is explicit from the opening paragraph of the preface (p.vii):
The aim of the conference was inherently comparative, that is, seeking to compare the Roman case both to other historical epochs and also to the contemporary global political moment. This endeavour was in part motivated by a desire, however naïve it may seem to some, to demonstrate the ongoing relevance and importance of history. The modern social and political ‘sandbox’ is undoubtably different from that of the ancient world but many of the challenges faced, the threats made, and solutions applied by human beings, ancient and modern alike, remain analogous and can reasonably help to inform our understanding of both.
There has been a spate of edited volumes published recently which attempt something like this (see, for instance, Riedwig, Schmid, and Walser (eds.), Demokratie und Populismus in der griechischen Antike und heute (2023), reviewed in BMCR 2025.06.37). More can be expected. Histories of moments such as the end of the Roman Republic have rarely been far from their authors’ presents (one thinks, above all, of Syme’s Augustus). The theoretical literature on democratic backsliding is fast-growing and often quite accessible. What is quite distinctive about this specific volume is i) the extended discussion of the value of such a project and ii) the wide-ranging attempt to implement it.
In their opening chapter (‘New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems’), Dart, Rafferty, and Vervaet give their rationale for this kind of history: to help better understand similar circumstances in the present (not least in the USA), to correct harmful misconceptions about the late Republic, and to take the opportunity afforded by the burgeoning theoretical literature to foster collaboration between the two disciplines. That is all clearly commendable. They also defend the premise on which this project relies, which is the view—most influentially articulated by Fergus Millar in The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (1998)—that the Roman Republic should be treated as a kind of democracy. That is reasonable, though not uncontroversial, and perhaps deserved greater elaboration. Less convincing is the argument that the enduring influence of Greco-Roman political concepts, language, and symbolism constitutes grounds for comparative analysis. That is a genealogical argument, which warrants instead the sort of study found in another of Millar’s books, The Roman Republic in Political Thought (2002). There is some discussion of difficulties posed for comparative study by differences between the Roman Republic and the modern state (esp. p.7). But some of the most challenging differences—the differing levels of enfranchisement; the differences between direct and representative democracy; even the differences in scale, which already seemed insurmountable to Constant—are largely passed over. These certainly deserved more discussion. It is significant that, in The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic, Millar ends (p.226) by asking what differentiated Republican Rome from an Ancient Greek democracy. If we wish to compare it with modern democracies, the task is considerably harder.
Some of the challenges of such comparative research become clear in the different approaches individual chapters take. Vervaet, Dart, and Rafferty’s own, detailed chapter on ‘reform unwillingness’ (the conscious attitude among elites of resisting constitutional change) as a cause of conflict in the late Roman Republic represents one approach: it draws deeply on contemporary studies such as Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s and integrates them fully. The result is a robust argument, which challenges Christian Meier’s thesis that those elites lacked the imagination to make the necessary reforms. But elsewhere in Parts II and III, such comparative models are usually considered only in the conclusion, if at all—and when they are, it is with varying degrees of specificity. Some chapters in Parts IV and V are inherently comparative, such as Francisco Pina Polo’s study of civil war in Spain and in the late Republic; but again, most papers link their case-studies back to the Roman Republic at the end, or not at all. In one sense, all that is fine. As both the preface and the afterword suggest (pp.vii–viii, 532–533), part of the value in an edited volume such as this one is the juxtaposition of various approaches, and thus the facilitation of interdisciplinary dialogue. But what emerges quite strongly from the diversity of the contributions in Parts II and III, especially, is just how far the end of the Roman Republic seems sui generis: just how many unique, contingent factors fed into its demise.
In her acute afterword, Carugati reflects on this tension between historical detail and contemporary theory. In doing so, she gets to the heart of the matter. I think Carugati is right to conclude that “…it is in the details that the historian and humanist thrives. What we gain from this volume is a truly multifaceted, multicausal, and complex view of republican death, especially in Rome” (p.532). One lesson from this volume, indeed, may be that republican death is much more multifaceted—much messier, perhaps—than social-scientific theories sometimes allow. I am less sure, though, that “Republican Rome then emerges from the volume as an important case to be filed alongside others in historical political economy evaluating the structures sustaining desirable political and economic outcomes” (p.532). Yes, in some respects, late Republican Rome emerges as a case-study with similarities to more recent examples of democratic backsliding. But no less often, it emerges as something radically different—something which does not fit neatly into contemporary models. And that, for the purposes of comparison, has its own kind of value.
The most subtle paper in the volume, I think, is not actually about Republican Rome at all. In his chapter on Ancient Greek demagoguery, Matt Simonton argues that, while most Ancient Greek writers—like many modern theoreticians—were generally concerned about democracy devolving into tyranny, in practice it was much more likely to be replaced by oligarchy. Those labelled ‘demagogues’ were in fact an important feature of ancient democracies—they were leaders who genuinely empowered the people—and not, as so often supposed, a deadly bug. Their danger came, as Aristotle observed, when they made the dēmos into a kind of tyrant itself. Simonton’s analysis is persuasive. But within this volume, what is distinctive about Simonton’s paper is that it stresses the apparent dissimilarity of Ancient Greek democracies from our own. Simonton argues popular participation in ancient democracies was ‘under-mediated’, unlike today; would-be tyrants were not the real threat to democracy, unlike in contemporary backsliding theory; Cleon, that most famous of ancient demagogues, was largely unlike the modern leaders with whom he has been compared. Simonton’s analysis remains comparative—but it uses the distinctive features of Ancient Greek democracy to question modern theory, to suggest different perspectives on the present. That is an equally, if not more, promising approach. As Nietzsche observed in his second ‘Untimely Meditation’, it is precisely when Classics acts counter to the present that it can act for the benefit of the future.
One of this volume’s virtues is its desire—articulated from the very beginning (p.vii)—to put ancient history in dialogue with urgent questions in political science. Such dialogue is of great importance. Democratic backsliding, for many readers, will be more than an academic concern. My one suggestion would be that, in such projects, we should not be afraid to push back against contemporary models, nor to stress the oddities of the ancient societies we study. We should not equate similarity with relevance. But pursuing such relevance in a thorough, detailed way, as this volume does, is itself deserving of praise. We should certainly hope for more collaborative projects like this one, probing such complex political crises—both past and present.
Authors and Titles
Part 1: The Death of the Roman Republic – Concepts
- Christopher J. Dart, David Rafferty, Frederik Juliaan Vervaet: New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems
- Matt Simonton: How Did Ancient Greek Democracies Die? Not (Normally) by Demagoguery
- Amy Russell: Consensus Breakdown: Or, How Cicero Was Wrong About Rome, and We Might Be Wrong About America
Part 2: The Death of the Roman Republic – Causation
- Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, Christopher J. Dart and David Rafferty: Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic
- James Tan: The Role of the Economy in the Fall of the Roman Republic
- Tom Hillard and J. Lea Beness: Alternative Visions and Fractured Allegiances: The Role of Disillusion, Alienation and Disengagement in the Late Roman Republic
- Kit Morrell: Enabling Laws, Rule of Law, and the Transformation of the Roman Republic
- Tim Elliott: Dominari illi volunt, vos liberi esse – Populist Reason and Rhetoric in Sallust
Part 3: The Death of the Roman Republic – Effect
- Nicholas George: The View from the Periphery: Local Elites, Roman Elites, and the Western Provinces during Rome’s Crisis of the 80s BCE
- Christian Hjorth Bagger: In the Wake of Autocrats: The Plight of Matronae in the Late Republic
- Jeff Tatum: Just Another Word? The Lure of Libertas in the Seventies
- David Rafferty, Frederik Juliaan Vervaet and Christopher J. Dart: Competitive Authoritarianism on the Eve of Empire: Pompeius’s New Republic of 52 BCE
- Thibaud Lanfranchi: Caesar and the Tribunes of the Plebs: Process and Events
- Tonya Rushmer: Who Counts as the Roman People? Caesar’s recensus and Discriminatory Populism
Part 4: From the End of the Roman Republic to the Modern World
- Ronald T. Ridley: Augustus’ Res Gestae as a Revolutionary’s Manual
- Catherine Kovesi: With a Bang or a Whimper? Reflections on the Fall of the Venetian Republic
- Peter McPhee: A New Catilina or a New Cromwell? Napoleon Bonaparte and the Death of the First French Republic, 1794–1804
Part 5: The Roman Republic and the Modern World
- Annelien de Dijn: From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History
- Cristina Rosillo-López: Dealing with Uncertainty: Cicero, Victor Klemperer and How to Cope with the Present in Moments of Crisis
- Francisco Pina Polo: The Civil War in Spain (1936–1939) and the Civil Wars in Late-republican Rome as Cases of Political and Ideological Polarisation
- Angel Alcalde: The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain
- Lisa Hill: How Republics Die: The Corrosive Effects of Election ‘Conspiracism’
- Federica Carugati: Afterword: Lessons from the Graveyard