[SunkenCiv]

William Broadhead, an associate professor of history at MIT [Photo: Dominick Reuter]

[sima_yi]

...a powerful general goes to the population and says, 'Will you all fight with me?'

If my memory serves, was it not Gaius Marius who first instituted this system, and is this not already widely known? This was before Sulla became the Dictator

[dog breath]

Goes to show that privatizing the military is a bad idea. You really don't want your generals having their armies loyal to them above the state. There were cohorts assigned just to the Emperor and Rome, they could also be sent to crush rebellious legions. Other legions were not allowed into Rome. All of that was a pretty solid counterbalance except for the fact that people take bribes. Once people figured out that you could bribe the Emperor’s own guard to kill him, stability goes out the window. I do sometimes think that a good novelist could make a fantastic book out of a coup in the United States where a general bribes the Secret Service to kill the President.

[RoadTest]

Why did the Romans speak Latin and not Roman, and who were the Latins, the tribe dwelling near the city of Rome?

[Vide]

A piece of news last week made me think of the fall of Rome itself (500 years after the switch from Republic to Empire): thieves stole the copper sword from Lincoln's tomb.

How close to societal collapse are we?

[DJ MacWoW]

Did You Know?

The Current FReepathon Pays For The Current Quarters Expenses?

Now That You Do, Donate And Keep FR Running

[marsh2]

My understanding was that in the Roman-ruled colonies, such as Britain, regulations became so restrictive, so micromanaging and inflation so high that it crumbled as people picked up and moved in large migrations.

[Erasmus]

Heck, not just the Italic provinces, but all over the empire, in its latter days. Iberia, Cisalpine Gaul, parts of Austria and the Balkans, if memory serves.

And detente and occasional (shaky) alliances with the Huns, etc., once the Romans could no longer keep them out of western and southwestern Europe.

With such a diversity (hmmmm!) of so-called allies, troops and lower-level commanders, the occasional rogue element could be expected to arise. (cf. the first Caesar.)

[GenXteacher]

“Broadhead has crafted a novel hypothesis about how Caesar — as well as Sulla a few decades before, and Augustus several years later — could march on Rome with his own legions.

“My interpretation is a demographic one,” Broadhead says”

Why is it historians somehow cannot accept the fact that a republic can be toppled by a handful of greedy men lusting after power, especially when they essentially have their own private armies? If you want to explain the fall of the Roman Republic, one needs to look no further than ambition.

[pabianice]

>>Population movement led to the personal client army of the late republic, which has long been recognized as a key to understanding its fall."

Recently, the History Channel examined the history of the Roman soldier. He went from a high-trained, massively-equipped Roman professional at the time of Caesar to a provincial joke of a mercinary with straw armor and no training at the time of the fall 400 years later. Coincidentally, this is what Obama is trying to do to our military.