The statue shows Brutus holding the knife and swearing the oath, with Lucretia. What is known for certain is that he replenished the Senate to its original number of senators, recruiting men from among the equestrian class. The new consuls also created a separate office, called the rex sacrorum, to carry out and oversee religious duties, a task that had previously fallen to the king.
The two consuls continued to be elected annually by Roman citizens and advised by the senate. Initially, they were endowed with all the powers of kings past, though over time these were broken down further by the addition of magistrates to the governmental system. The first magistrate added was the praetor, an office that assumed judicial authority from the consuls.
After the praetor, the censor was established, who assumed the power to conduct the Roman census. Skip to main content. In 49 B. With Octavian leading the western provinces, Antony the east, and Lepidus Africa, tensions developed by 36 B. In 31 B. In the wake of this devastating defeat, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. By 29 B. In 27 B. He instituted various social reforms, won numerous military victories and allowed Roman literature, art, architecture and religion to flourish.
Augustus ruled for 56 years, supported by his great army and by a growing cult of devotion to the emperor. When he died, the Senate elevated Augustus to the status of a god, beginning a long-running tradition of deification for popular emperors. The line ended with Nero , whose excesses drained the Roman treasury and led to his downfall and eventual suicide. The reign of Nerva , who was selected by the Senate to succeed Domitian, began another golden age in Roman history, during which four emperors—Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—took the throne peacefully, succeeding one another by adoption, as opposed to hereditary succession.
Under Antoninus Pius , Rome continued in peace and prosperity, but the reign of Marcus Aurelius — was dominated by conflict, including war against Parthia and Armenia and the invasion of Germanic tribes from the north. When Marcus fell ill and died near the battlefield at Vindobona Vienna , he broke with the tradition of non-hereditary succession and named his year-old son Commodus as his successor.
The decadence and incompetence of Commodus brought the golden age of the Roman emperors to a disappointing end. His death at the hands of his own ministers sparked another period of civil war , from which Lucius Septimius Severus emerged victorious. During the third century Rome suffered from a cycle of near-constant conflict. A total of 22 emperors took the throne, many of them meeting violent ends at the hands of the same soldiers who had propelled them to power.
Meanwhile, threats from outside plagued the empire and depleted its riches, including continuing aggression from Germans and Parthians and raids by the Goths over the Aegean Sea. The reign of Diocletian temporarily restored peace and prosperity in Rome, but at a high cost to the unity of the empire. Diocletian divided power into the so-called tetrarchy rule of four , sharing his title of Augustus emperor with Maximian.
A pair of generals, Galerius and Constantius, were appointed as the assistants and chosen successors of Diocletian and Maximian; Diocletian and Galerius ruled the eastern Roman Empire, while Maximian and Constantius took power in the west. The stability of this system suffered greatly after Diocletian and Maximian retired from office.
Constantine the son of Constantius emerged from the ensuing power struggles as sole emperor of a reunified Rome in He moved the Roman capital to the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Motivated by a personal desire for military accomplishment, Pyrrhus landed a Greek army of approximately 25, men on Italian soil in BCE.
Despite early victories, Pyrrhus found his position in Italy untenable. Rome steadfastly refused to negotiate with Pyrrhus as long as his army remained in Italy. These conflicts with Pyrrhus would have a positive effect on Rome. Rome had shown it was capable of pitting its armies successfully against the dominant military powers of the Mediterranean, and that the Greek kingdoms were incapable of defending their colonies in Italy and abroad.
Rome quickly moved into southern Italia, subjugating and dividing the Greek colonies. By the middle of the 3 rd century, Rome effectively dominated the Italian peninsula, and had won an international military reputation. The war saw land battles in Sicily early on, but focus soon shifted to naval battles around Sicily and Africa. Before the First Punic War, there was essentially no Roman navy.
The new war in Sicily against Carthage, a great naval power, forced Rome to quickly build a fleet and train sailors. Though the first few naval battles of the First Punic War were catastrophic disasters for Rome, Rome was eventually able to beat the Carthaginians and leave them without a fleet or sufficient funds to raise another. Hannibal then crossed the Italian Alps to invade Italy. Unable to defeat Hannibal on Italian soil, the Romans boldly sent an army to Africa under Scipio Africanus, with the intention of threatening the Carthaginian capital.
As a result, Hannibal was recalled to Africa, and defeated at the Battle of Zama. Carthage never managed to recover after the Second Punic War, and the Third Punic War that followed was, in reality, a simple punitive mission to raze the city of Carthage to the ground. Carthage was almost defenseless, and when besieged offered immediate surrender, conceding to a string of outrageous Roman demands. The Romans refused the surrender and the city was stormed and completely destroyed after a short siege.
After a Fourth Macedonian War, and nearly a century of constant crisis management in Greece which almost always was a result of internal instability when Rome pulled out , Rome decided to divide Macedonia into two new Roman provinces, Achaea and Epirus.
The 1st century BCE saw tensions between patricians and plebeians erupt into violence, as the Republic became increasingly more divided and unstable. The exact dates of this period of crisis are unclear or are in dispute from scholar to scholar. Though the causes and attributes of individual crises varied throughout the decades, an underlying theme of conflict between the aristocracy and ordinary citizens drove the majority of actions. Optimates were a traditionalist majority of the late Roman Republic.
They wished to limit the power of the popular assemblies and the Tribune of the Plebeians, and to extend the power of the Senate, which was viewed as more dedicated to the interests of the aristocrats. In particular, they were concerned with the rise of individual generals, who, backed by the tribunate, the assemblies, and their own soldiers, could shift power from the Senate and aristocracy. Many members of this faction were so-classified because they used the backing of the aristocracy and the Senate to achieve personal goals, not necessarily because they favored the aristocracy over the lower classes.
Similarly, the populists did not necessarily champion the lower classes, but often used their support to achieve personal goals. Following a period of great military successes and economic failures of the early Republican period, many plebeian calls for reform among the classes had been quieted. However, many new slaves were being imported from abroad, causing an unemployment crisis among the lower classes.
A flood of unemployed citizens entered Rome, giving rise to populist ideas throughout the city. Tiberius Gracchus took office as a tribune of the plebeians in late BCE. At the time, Roman society was a highly stratified class system with tensions bubbling below the surface.
This system consisted of noble families of the senatorial rank patricians , the knight or equestrian class, citizens grouped into two or three classes of self-governing allies of Rome: landowners; and plebs, or tenant freemen, depending on the time period , non-citizens who lived outside of southwestern Italy, and at the bottom, slaves.
The government owned large tracts of farm land that it had gained through invasion or escheat. This land was rented out to either large landowners whose slaves tilled the land, or small tenant farmers who occupied the property on the basis of a sub-lease. Beginning in BCE, Tiberius tried to redress the grievances of displaced small tenant farmers.
He bypassed the Roman Senate, and passed a law limiting the amount of land belonging to the state that any individual could farm, which resulted in the dissolution of large plantations maintained by rich landowners on public land. When Tiberius sought re-election to his one-year term an unprecedented action , the oligarchic nobles responded by murdering Tiberius, and mass riots broke out in the city in reaction to the assassination.
Once again, the situation ended in violence and murder as Gaius fled Rome and was either murdered by oligarchs or committed suicide. The deaths of the Gracchi brothers marked the beginning of a late Republic trend in which tensions and conflicts erupted in violence.
The next major reformer of the time was Gaius Marius, who like the Gracchi, was a populist who championed the lower classes. He was a general who abolished the property requirement for becoming a soldier, which allowed the poor to enlist in large numbers. Over the next few decades, he and Marius engaged in a series of conflicts that culminated in Sulla seizing power and marching to Asia Minor against the decrees of the Senate.
The two were elected in 70 BCE and held true to their word. Four years later, in 66 BCE, a movement to use peaceful means to address the plights of the various classes arose; however, after several failures in achieving their goals, the movement, headed by Lucius Sergius Catilina and based in Faesulae, a hotbed of agrarian agitation, decided to march to Rome and instigate an uprising.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the consul at the time, intercepted messages regarding recruitment and plans, leading the Senate to authorize the assassination of many Catilinarian conspirators in Rome, an action that was seen as stemming from dubious authority.
This effectively disrupted the conspiracy and discredited the populist party, in turn repairing the image of the Senate, which had come to be seen as weak and not worthy of such violent attack.
Julius Caesar returned from his governorship in Spain a year later and, along with Crassus, established a private agreement with Pompey known as the First Triumvirate. Crassus was promised the consulship later. Beginning in the summer of 54 BCE, a wave of political corruption and violence swept Rome, reaching a climax in January 52 BCE, when Clodius was murdered in a gang war. Subsequently, a resolution was passed that declared that if Caesar did not lay down his arms by July, he would be considered an enemy of the Republic.
The senators adopted Pompey as their champion, and on January 7, Pompey was granted dictatorial powers over the Republic by the Senate. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. The Roman World. Search for:. The Roman Republic. Learning Objectives Explain why and how Rome transitioned from a monarchy to a republic. A general election was held during a legal assembly, and participants voted in favor of the establishment of a Roman republic. Subsequently, all Tarquins were exiled from Rome and an interrex and two consuls were established to lead the new republic.
Key Terms patricians : A group of ruling class families in ancient Rome. Learning Objectives Describe the political structure of the Roman Republic. Key Takeaways Key Points The Constitution of the Roman Republic was a set of guidelines and principles passed down, mainly through precedent. Roman citizenship was a vital prerequisite to possessing many important legal rights. The comitia centuriata was the assembly of the centuries soldiers , and they elected magistrates who had imperium powers consuls and praetors.
The comitia tributa , or assembly of the tribes the citizens of Rome , was presided over by a consul and composed of 35 tribes. This practise began one year after the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was consecrated and it consisted in fixing a bronze nail to the right of the altar once a year. The first nail was placed in BC. The temple of Jupiter Capitolinus had the cella of Jupiter, as well as the cella of Minerva and Juno. The decade after BC the year when the last King of Rome was dethroned, while he was away from Rome is a dark period and very little is known, only isolated events.
The transition of Rome from a monarchy to a republic led to severe internal social tensions. This lack of control over the city led neighboring tribes to siege the city and reduce its power.
This is why Rome had to ratify its identity in numerous occasions during the first seventy years of the Republic. The early years of the Republic are of political turmoil. The population was divided, certain wanted a monarchy, others a republic, others favored the king of Clusium, Lars Porsenna, and others wanted to form part of the Latin civilization.
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