The founders of the United States thought a lot about the Roman Republic as they pondered what sort of nation they planned to construct. And as students of history, they were painfully aware that the republic ended badly.
Madison history podcaster Mike Duncan addresses the run-up to that failure in The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (PublicAffairs). For Duncan, the reasons behind the republic’s inversion into empire form “a question that is perhaps more relevant today than ever.” History doesn’t repeat itself identically. However, people and societies confronted by similar problems across the millennia tend to choose from the same short list of responses.
In comparing the U.S. 2017 with Rome circa 180 BCE, Duncan notes that the ancient Romans experienced “rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, endemic social and ethnic prejudices, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires…” The Storm Before the Storm reads like The New York Times on any given day.
The fall of the Roman Republic began after its triumph over Carthage in a long struggle for great power supremacy. Writing for the general public but aware of the scholarship, Duncan chronicles the crises that led to the collapse of the checks and balances that had supported Rome’s political order. After a while, the form of the republic was allowed to remain but the substance became tyranny.
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One of the republic’s implacable foreign enemies during its glory years, Hannibal, is the subject of legend. The Carthaginian general led an army spearheaded by elephants, the tanks of ancient times, from North Africa across Spain and France and through the Alps to attack Rome from the rear. His tactics are still studied in military academies today, even though he was eventually forced to retreat after repeatedly winning on the battlefield but losing the war of attrition.
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New York Times bestselling author John Prevas followed in the general’s steps, literally, in composing Hannibal’s Oath: The Life and Wars of Rome’s Greatest Enemy (Da Capo). The title refers to Hannibal’s uncompromising nature: He swore to the gods that he would wage unending war until defeating the hated Romans. Despite his great ability as a commander, able to inspire his allies and strike fear into his foes, he was “incapable of compromise or accommodation and doomed in the end to lose his struggle.” Prevas speculates that Hannibal, like many of history’s “great men,” was motivated by “a complex blend of the worst and a little bit of the best in human nature.”
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