The long death of the Roman republic

Julius Caesar’s murder is often seen as the event that ushered in the age of emperors. Yet structural weaknesses had plagued Rome’s republic long before his death

- SHUSHMA MALIK

Few events in the long span of Roman history were as bold or as shocking as the murder of Julius Caesar. On 15 March 44 BC, in the consecrated space of Pompey’s theatre, the life of the man who had come to utterly dominate Rome’s political landscape in the middle decades of the first century BC was brought to an end in a flurry of assassins’ blades. The repercussions for Rome and its expanding empire were immense.

Historians have been fascinated with the killing ever since – not just because of its audacity, but also because of what it meant for the future of Rome. When Marcus Junius Brutus and his fellow conspirators attacked Caesar on the Ides of March, Rome had been organised around a system of government called the ‘republic’ for almost five centuries. Within 15 years of Caesar’s death, that republic had been transformed by a tidal wave of recriminations and civil war – to be replaced by the age of the emperors.

It is this very reason that Caesar’s death has been seen as a decisive break in Rome’s history: when one period came to an end and another – dominated by men such as Augustus, Nero and Hadrian – began. Yet to ascribe the fall of the republic solely to the upheaval that followed the events of 44 BC would be a mistake. The republic was a system of government already under immense structural pressure from a range of forces, and those forces had begun pulling at the system’s fabric long before the rise of Caesar.

To understand the long roots of the republic’s demise, it is first worth setting out what the republic was. Its name comes from the Latin term