Historically speaking, what caused the collapse of the republic?

Communism

Yes but another solution would have to be found to the huge urban crowd in Rome following the Punic wars.

Without the ability to own land or work it, you're going to have a restless populace with nothing to do and that is a dangerous prospect.

Marian reforms gave them a purpose and got them out of Rome with promise of loot and land.

You're thinking too narrowly. Without the army's loyalty there would have been no empire in the first place. The Principate was always a military junta with a thin coat of monarchism over it. However without the Marian reforms they would have needed some other way to address the social pressure of constant warfare and growing inequality or risk a total collapse.

Nice meme duder

Fuck Drumpf and fuck white "people"

Also, without the Marian reforms Rome's expansion would likely grind to a halt, seeing as how the old system basically ran out of soldiers by that point.

Inner fighting, over-extended territory, barbarians.

Society no longer supported each other the way oligarchies are supposed to. They feared each other, making the senate fight people they labelled as dictators. They would usually lose, but the dictator would be forced to resign ir be killed by some force of men. So, by the time augustus came around they had already had 3 dictators who murdered senators, and the senate could not stop them. So, rather than be subject to more civil war, the elected Augustus as emperor. This would prevent further disunity in the republic because the Emperor would protect everyone.

Why did the small landowner class collapse?

the republic fell because there were people who were more powerful than the senate itself, ruling over provinces, commanding armies and owning huge fortunes while the senate couldn't even keep the angry mobs inside the city of Rome under control.
it was only a matter of time until someone declared themselves Emperor

The extremely rich happened.
They would buy up relatively tiny family owned farms by the dozen and turn them land into massive agricultural plantations, worked entirely by slaves.

Lacking both land and any hope of employment in the increasingly slave dominated rural areas, the former small landowners fled into the cities.
Most of which becoming a permanent underclass of urban poor, surviving off of the grain dole.

They formed the bulk of Rome's citizen armies. As Rome's military adventures grew, they found themselves increasingly called to serve and unable to work their land. Eventually their harvest would fail and they would have no options but to sell their land to a rich fatcat and move into the cities where they received bread from the state.

I wonder, would Rome have survived without Augustus's total victory?
If the endless spiral of civil wars had continued eventually it would have ended up weak enough it's enemies could start chipping at the borders, dissident recently conquered people started taking their chances at rebellion and what not.

When people referred to roman law by technicalitis and exact definitions rather than in the spirit of what the laws were trying to do and people screwing up the republican government during political struggles.

Deforestation.

There must have been outrage that men who had served in the army were forced to sell their farms because their time serving had prevented them from attending to those farms. Why did this outrage not immediately cause a redistribution of power toward something more equitable?

The Gracchi messing with the unwritten rules and the Marian Reforms/the civil war.

It wasn't an immediate process. It took quite a while for it to be recognized as a social problem. Once it was a number of agrarian reforms were attempted, but the Senatorial class who were the ones grabbing all the land were a bunch of stubborn bastards who resisted any land redistribution to their dying breath. It's one of the (admittedly many) things that got Caesar shanked.

Titus Pullo

Ricimer backstabbing Majorian because he was jelly of his success

>Why did this outrage not immediately cause a redistribution of power toward something more equitable?

They tried, the guy who wanted to implement it was murdered by the senate for trying to reform

Victory destroyed the republic. The twin victories over Carthage and Macedon yielded vast sums of treasure, far more than had ever been acquired in the consolidation of the Italian peninsula. Patricians became even more avaricious for government office on the frontier, as it presented the best opportunity for greater wealth. Everyone wanted to outdo the great Scipio Africanus.

Things came to a head in Africa with the Jugurthine Wars, when a militarily weak enemy successfully bribed multiple Senatorial committees and Roman generals. The final sign of the degradation was when he successfully carried out the assassination of his cousin, the rival claimant, within Rome itself.

It took capable generals who were beyond bribery to defeat Jugurtha. Generals like Metellus, Marius and Sulla.

They beat Carthage and the Greeks.

anyone think collapse of rome was a good thing because now we have a god like civilization to look back on

Just think you could have been a Libritor aboard a Lucius Aemilius Regillus class navis lusoria gunning down gooks with Fulminata rounds.

It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son,

Slavery to put it simply
Slavery caused the land to be consolidated into the richer classes leading to recruitment shortages and the bread dole to be implemented, which heavily strained the Roman economy and made the people dependent on the government.

If anything we have gone backwards socially since those times. Philosophy, warfare and economics were at their absolute peak. When I refer to economics I mean tangible wealth, resources that were actually traded and had use, not numbers on a screen.

Degeneracy caused by the Jews

stinky teutonic snow apes

They were addressing real problems with society though, but the Senate was too incompetent/comfortable with the status quo to do anything but aim to kill everyone who disagreed with them

>The Gracchi messing with the unwritten rule

It was legitimately the only way to get needed reform and that they were assassinated shows just how clueless the Senate was.

Without reform the republic would have fractured. The Gracchi brothers attempted to push reform through legally and were assassinated. This made Caesar's rise an absolute guarantee as plainly counting on the Senate to do something about land reform was an impossibility.

Then Caesar was assassinated and the senators were so out of touch, they thought they would be hailed as heroes for slaying the tyrant. Nobody in history has ever misread a political climate as poorly as they had and were driven from Rome as villains, paving the way from Augustus to neuter the Senate and establish the principate.

The Senate would have been better off just letting the Gracchi brothers push reform through.

Loss of faith in the senate, wishing for less bureaucracy (=faster wheat gibs), love of Caesar because of the benefits he bestowed.

These are all symptoms of the problem, not the root.

This is such bullshit i can't believe people still say it. Lead oxidizes really quickly, so when it's lead oxide it's very stable. Lead plates and dinnerware would be much more likely to cause problems

Augustus didn't nearly neuter the Senate as much as you'd think. He learned his lesson from Caesar well and was very careful not to anger them too much. Hence why land redistribution was never again attempted.

That's just plainly not true. By the time Augustus was done consolidating power the Senate was a token and everybody knew it. By the time of Caligula, he seriously spent his free time discovering new ways to tell and show the senators just how neutered they were.

The Senate was useless for so long when they actually had an opportunity to return to dominance, they chose a new emperor because neither they not the people particualry cared for the Senate anymore.

Plebs...
Nuff said.

The eternal Boomer.

>work the land I inherited even into old age and pass it on to my son to continue my legacy, or
>sell it at a high price and retire to Hispania and spend my old age in hedonism fucking slaves and drinking the finest grape, my sons can surely figure it out like I did if they work hard enough

I thought the lesson to learn from Caesar was "don't let your enemies live because it will come back to haunt you"

The republican empire got too large. You can have governors of the next city over who have to report to the senate constantly. But with the travel time for messages, people, etc, you can't have a governor of Syria, Bithynia, who doesn't basically have dictatorial control over his province. He can do what he likes, raise armies and funds, make friends. Even invade his neighbours, or sponsor sides in a civil war. I think this happened with Herod. Now you've got local rulers who owe you favours. Difficult to shift once he's there too. In Appian's Civil Wars there are lots of occasions where various senators just refused to give up their governorships once being relieved of them.

You might like Appian but if anyone has any suggestions or criticisms?

From what I best can understand:

The rise of the Roman state as being the world superpower progressively taxed the political system's framework as the borders grew farther and farther. What may work for a 25 km city-state may not work for a multi-continential empire. The military system began to be taxed under the manipular system, so the only logical response was to institute a professional army based around the full time devotion of protecting Rome's interests. However, this leads to a progressive shift from "Loyalty to the state" to "Loyalty to my commander", a big deal when it comes to the imperator-politicians of the 1st century BC (Caesar, Pompey, Sulla, Marius etc.), and the army becomes a culture and entity unto itself.

At the same time, the influx of a massive amount of wealth when Rome conquered the Carthaginians and the Hellenistic kingdoms created a social disparity that placed excessive burden on the common people. Slaves displaced many workers, the men who were called on to serve in the manipular legions often found their land taken over as their deployments were made longer and served farther from Italy. Disgruntled citizens lead to the rise of populist politics, which put the nail in the coffin of the republican system (and I tend to agree with Ronald Syme, where the Republic was usually in the hands of a morphing oligarchy).

The characters of Pompey and Sulla and the Caesars gradually acclimated the Roman populace into being dominated by one - man. The civil wars and the rise of Augustus began to lead the Roman people into seeking some sort of stabilizing figure, ie the Princeps, while the Senate needed to be appeased at least superficially by the Princeps into the illusion of their continued power (which was still actual power, which shrank gradually over time).

Thats' from my understanding anyways.

>Roman republic collapses
>Roman Empire never spreads across Europe and the Near East
>Christianity either never occurs or never manages to spread without the aid of the empire
>Indigenous European pagan religions are never destroyed
A perfect world.

Augustus' consolidation lasted another decade after Actium, during which he took care not to alienate the Senate.

Regardless of the body's legislative impotence, the Senators were still the wealthiest and most influential people in the Empire. Augustus' entire legitimacy in the early years rested on the thin illusion of him restoring the Republic. That shit would have collapsed like a house of cards had the Senators started speaking out and organizing people against him.

>Indigenous European pagan religions are never destroyed
and european is not a race and you are forgetting that if roman empire never decline that means you wont exist as romans would have kill all germanics and slavics

Eat shit, pigskin

I'm quite aware Europeans aren't a race, but there were many gods and religions there that were uprooted by Christianity. If there never a Roman empire past the peninsula, there would never have been a network for Christianity to spread through Europe, and western paganism would not be (as) dead as it is today.

i think it would spread thanks to trade routes

Augustus was all about the show, a charade which played into people's sense of self-importance which allowed him to work unmolested behind the scenes, and that included for senators. His dying words were "Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit"

He was like the Food and Beverage manager at a shady, mafia-run casino. Officially, he was just another guy keeping the place running. But anybody who was even remotely familiar with the inner workings of their government knew that he was the real power, and everybody else was just a front guy.

The lessons he learned from Julius was don't show clemency to your enemies but make examples out of them, and don't advertise your power if you don't want people to make a bad guy out of you

>By the time of Caligula, he seriously spent his free time discovering new ways to tell and show the senators just how neutered they were.
Caligula threatening to appoint his horse to the senate was exactly for this reason: he was bragging about how irrelevant they had become

>European pagan religions are never destroyed
/pol/ is so fucking dumb glorifying nigger tier "religion" instead of the foundation of western europe. With Christianity europe would have crumbled under Islam or any other foreign monotheism

>Thinking Christianity didn't spread through force
O boy

Caligula was under constant threat from Senatorial conspiracies, as were Claudius, Nero and Domitian after him, and they did end up removing Domitian.

Forget that we're talking about the Senate as a legislative body. The Senate was an assembly of Roman aristocracy, and no ruler, no matter how absolute, can just dismiss and bully aristocracy without pushback.

by the time WRE was destroyed, there were still many people that was pagan, christianity as the official religion didnt mean that everyone was christian

My dick caused the latin american independence wars

>men who were called on to serve in the manipular legions often found their land taken over
how did they get away with it?

And it's fairly likely Europe would've been swallowed up fairly easily by the caliphate in the 8th century then.

tyrants

... Frank?

Laws tend to favor people with the wealth and favor enough to influence them.

Size.