MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, using History to explain the present pretty convincingly

MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny
EDWARD J. WATTS
Basic Books
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed—and how it could have continued to thrive—with this insightful history from an award-winning author.

In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean’s premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise.

By the 130s BC, however, Rome’s leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars—and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus.

The death of Rome’s Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Mary Beard School of Skepticism About Past as Prologue is in session.

The past is no Oracle and historians are not prophets, but this does not mean that it is wrong to look to antiquity for help understanding the present.

This is intensely controversial. I am not at all sure it is true, but after reading this thoroughly researched and well sourced in the facts that we can know book, I'll put a pin in my inclination to doubt. I can enjoy this book on its factual merits quite well enough.

The author focuses his attention on the period between the victory of the Romans over Carthage in the Second Punic War, and Octavian's usurpation of power, effectively beginning the Empire. That time, its unrest and gradual normalization of political gridlock and, ultimately, violence, does bear a resemblance to the current pass in US–and world–politics.

I have no kick with that fact being pointed out. I am pretty confident the author's analysis of what led up to the events, and how what went down made the resolution of the problems seem pretty obvious. The way he has used the chapter order is, pretty clearly, tendentious...a downward slide from functioning, if troubled republic into one-man rule and autocracy just *feels* more and more inevitable as the facts we know are marshaled.

Where I go a little off his carefully laid rails is where he posits his ideas for how the slide was not inevitable, and the autocracy could've been avoided. That is allohistory which, by itself, is fine by me. But this is presented with a very authoritative air, not differentiated from the text based on facts that surrounds it, and that felt a bit like I was being led to agree without any facts or evidence that his conclusions were plausible. There can not be any such evidence or facts because that isn't how things *did* play out. I can't say he's wrong for all the same reasons.

The desire to show us how to fix the ugly, scary passage we're going through by using the past as a model makes a lot of sense. It still shouldn't be presented as being the equal of the fact-based narrative around it.

Your history-loving giftee, your anxious old uncle who just knows The End Is Nigh, will lap up this story. The good thing is that, as the facts pile up, the author hands the reader this double-edged aerçu:

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

That is hopeful, if you believe there is a chance to warn and arm people against what is occurring; and disheartening, because look what happened to Rome.

The author is of the former opinion, and this book is the case he makes for it.