Dr Joseph Hughes Segment ten A: Introduction.

It was the end of the Roman Republic as they knew it,

but nobody felt fine. War after war, political maneuver

after political maneuver, scandal after scandal

the Republic was to burn out rather than fade away.

The real question was: how would Romans know

for sure when the Republic was dead and

what would they find to replace it?

In segment ten B: Life During Wartime, Rome refused to

grant citizenship to her Italian allies, thereby

tipping off the utterly avoidable Social War of ninety

one through eighty eight BC. Rome's first real civil

war would have lasted longer, were it not for the

murder of eighty thousand Roman nationals in eighty

eight BC, which took place on one night. There was

no question that Rome had to deal with the instigator,

King Mithridates of Pontus. But first Marius and Sulla

had to fight it out for the privilege of fighting

Mithradates. In eight seven BC, Sulla was the first

general to march his client army upon Rome.

Marius fled, but once Sulla left to fight Mithradates

he came back and started his own reign of terror with

his own client army. You get the picture. The era was

also marked by blanket grants of multi-year proconsular

imperium which was needed to wipe out legitimate

threats such as Spartacus or the Pirates but was also

a breeding ground for the development of dangerous

client armies. Segment ten C: The First Triumvirate,

covers the last full decade of the Roman Republic,

from 60 BC to 50 BC, when the Roman world was dominated

by three men, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. The so-called

First Triumvirate was not a legal or even formal

arrangement, merely an agreement that Rome's three most

powerful men would help look out after each other's

best interests. The Senate and especially the optimates

could only sit and watch and try not to

get killed walking out in the streets.

Caesar got to raise a client army which he used to

conquer Gaul. Pompey got a lucrative command in Spain,

and Crassus got himself killed trying to conquer

Parthia. Once the triumvirate had shrunk to two men,

it became possible for the Senate and the optimates to

win Pompey over and provoke a civil war with Julius

Caesar. In segment ten D: Fall of the Roman Republic,

the Roman Republic falls. Caesar killed it by defeating

Pompey in forty eight BC. After two years of mopping up

resistance, Cesar confronted the question of how he

should reorganize the Roman state. For the first time

in his life, Caesar had run out of ideas. It seemed

as though he was trying to establish himself as King of

Rome. Even though the old Republic had clearly failed,

some Senators led by Marcus Junius Brutus decided that

it was worth another try, and that Caesar had to go.