Crisis System
The crisis of the Roman Republic: an extended period of political instability and social unrest culminating in the advent of the Roman Empire.
The crisis of the Roman Republic was an extended period of political instability and social unrest from about to 30 BC that culminated in the demise of the Roman Republic and the advent of the Roman Empire.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- thatgamecompany
- Director
- Jenova Chen
- Release year
- 2009
- Genre
- Exploration; Flow
- Core mechanic
- Wind-guided petal movement and bloom propagation
- Tone
- Atmospheric
- non-violent
- meditative
Lore & Background
The crisis was rooted in deep structural tensions—chiefly the breakdown of the political code known as the mos maiorum, widening inequality among wealth and land, and class conflict between the traditional aristocracy (optimates) and those who sought power by championing the cause of the common people (the populares). These factors were compounded over time as leaders like Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Julius Caesar established armies personally devoted to them rather than the state. Traditionally, the expansion of citizenship was viewed negatively by the contemporary Sallust, the modern Edward Gibbon, and others because it caused internal dissension, disputes with Rome's Italian allies, slave revolts, and riots. However, other scholars have argued that because the Republic was conceived as a res publica – the essential thing of the people – the poor and disenfranchised cannot be blamed for trying to redress their legitimate and legal grievances. More recently, Harriet Flower, in 2010, proposed a different paradigm encompassing multiple 'republics' for the general whole of the traditional republican period with attempts at reform rather than a single 'crisis' occurring over a period of eighty years. Instead of a single crisis of the late Republic, Flower proposes a series of crises and transitional periods. Each different republic had different circumstances and while overarching themes can be traced, 'there was no single, long republic that carried the seeds of its own destruction in its aggressive tendency to expand and in the unbridled ambitions of its leading politicians'. The implications of this view put the fall of the republic in a context based around the collapse of the republican political culture of the nobiles and emphasis on Sulla's civil war followed by the fall of Sulla's republic in Caesar's civil war.
Reader's Guide
After the Second Punic War, income inequality increased significantly. While the landed peasantry was drafted to serve in increasingly long campaigns, their farms and homesteads fell into bankruptcy. Significant mineral wealth was distributed unevenly to the population; the city of Rome itself expanded considerably in opulence and size; the manumission of slaves brought to Italy by conquest massively expanded the number of urban and rural poor. The republic, for reasons still debated by historians, in 177 BC also stopped regularly establishing Roman colonies in Italy. One of the major functions of these colonies was to provide land for the urban and rural poor, increasing the draft pool of landed farmers as well as providing economic opportunities to the lower classes. The tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC led to a breakup of the long-standing norms of the republican constitution. Gracchus' main aim was land reform and he was successful in passing legislation to pursue it. Gracchus' legislation would challenge the socio-political power of the old aristocracy, along with eroding their economic interests. This was only after an unconstitutional attempt by Marcus Octavius, a tribune in the same year as Gracchus, to veto proceedings overwhelmingly supported by the people. Octavius' actions caused Gracchus to take similarly novel norm-breaking actions, that would lead to even greater breakdowns in republican norms. Gracchus attempted to secure for himself a second term as tribune, which may have been illegal. This led to a backlash that would lead to his assassination by the then-pontifex maximus Scipio Nasica, acting in his role as a private citizen and against the advice of the consul and jurist Publius Mucius Scaevola. The Senate's violent reaction also served to legitimise the use of violence for political ends. Political violence showed fundamentally that the traditional republican norms that had produced the stability of the middle republic were incapable of resolving conflicts between political actors. As well as inciting revenge killing for previous killings, the repeated episodes also showed the inability of the existing political system to solve pressing matters of the day.
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