The 3 Falls of Rome

Do the ancient Romans have anything to tell us?

In 2023, social media discovered that American men think about ancient Rome. That seemed to surprise women; they wondered: ‘Why?’ 

But the better question may be: ‘What?’ What exactly are men thinking about Rome? Because if so many men are thinking about it, it might be important. Are they thinking about the fall of Rome, perhaps? It’s an interesting subject. Maybe we should give some thought to it.

Rome was colorful in the fall. The crimson of Caesar’s blood on the senate floor of the Curia of Pompey. The changing foliage, as six thousand rebellious slaves were crucified along the tree-lined Appian way in 71 BC. The triumphal parades of lavish conquered wealth headed by purple-clad Sulla, Marcus Gaius Marius, and others were pretty colorful and spectacular, no doubt. By 64 AD, Roman citizens could take evening strolls under streetlamps consisting of burning crucified Christians.

The Three Falls of Rome

It seems that Rome fell three times. Or maybe it’s best to say that it fell, it fell again, and its third fall was the technical knockout.

The first fall of the Roman Republic, between 130 BC and 80 BC. Because while Rome was indeed an empire in 130 BC, it was not ruled by an emperor. It still really had a republican form of government.

At that time, Rome was the greatest empire in the history of the world and possessed immense wealth. But many segments of Roman society had become resentful and unhappy. Because almost all of the wealth was controlled by a small group of mostly dynastic elites (“dynastic” in that most of the power and wealth were passed from parents to their children). A small group of families had, for centuries, comprised the upper caste of Roman society.

The two opposing political groups then were the Optimates (which in Latin meant the “Elites”), and the Populares (meaning, of course, the populists). The Optimates wanted the elites in the Senate to retain and gain power. The Populares wanted the common people to have more power, they said.

The power struggle between the Optimates and the Populares was back-and-forth, and factionalism and partisanship increased. But when the leaders of the Populare won victories, the people did not end up getting more power. What really happened was that when lesser elites, such as Gaius Marius, sided with the Populare, and used the Populare, to win victories, the elites then took more power for themselves. (We might call those elites the PINOs, Populare in Name Only.) And the Optimates also gained more power from their victories. So power and control became more and more concentrated in the hands of a few elites, the PINOs and the Optimates, whoever won elections, Optimates or Populares.

Goodbye Term Limits

The most powerful government office in Rome was consul, held for one year. And no one was supposed to hold the office of consul more than once. As power became more concentrated, and the republic began to tip over into oligarchy, Gaius Marius — the “FDR of Rome” — was consul for seven terms. (In America, Franklin Roosevelt was U.S. president for eleven years, and it would have been who knows how much longer, had he not died in office).

Clearly, for those who are interested in America in the 21^st century, ancient Rome in the falls provides us with a lot to think about.

Societal evolution took a wrong turn when Rome vanquished Carthage, and instead of a commercial society, militaristic statehood gained the upper hand. More than two thousand years of Caesarism have made the belief widespread that there is no alternative to politics and the state. Hierarchy and authoritarianism have come to be seen as the natural way of societal organization, not recognizing that such orders are imposed.

Antony P. Mueller, "The Path to True Freedom is Systematic Privatization" Mises Institute (2023)

Government power in Rome continued to become bigger and more centralized, and by about 80 BC, the republic was gone, having been gradually replaced by an oligarchy of elites. (In the U.S., the unaccountable, unelected “deep state” began to replace the republic-system in the U.S. in 1940s, when the first parts of the Administrative Practices Act began to be passed, as we discuss in “Did the Deep State Overrule the Republic?”) 

And, in Rome, the concentration of power in an oligarchy (that is, ‘rule by a small set of powerful people’) set the stage for one of those powerful oligarchic elites — Octavian — to finally emerge as dictator and emperor of Rome, in 31 BC. And the oligarchy was replaced by a dictatorship.

For a long time after the representative government was gone, Romans pretended that Rome was still a republic. And eventually the Roman Empire famously fell in the second half of the fifth century AD. But that second fall of Rome was itself not the final fall of Rome, because in the 5^th century, the Roman empire actually consisted of two parts: Western and Eastern. Only the Western one fell then.

So, what happened to the East side of the Empire? The end of that story also turns out to be interesting from our perspective here in the 21^st century, and we discuss it about that in “Decolonize Constantinople”.

The Democrat-Republican Uniparty means that we really have a one-party political system. And unelected bureaucrats, not elected representatives, make most of the U.S. laws. Are we living in an era, as did the Romans, of being in denial about what kind of government really rules the empire in the 21^st century?