The Constitution

Politics of the Late Republic

In this course, Dr Ed Bispham (University of Oxford) explores several aspects of the politics of the Late Republic. In the first module, we think about the extent to which structural deficits within the Republican constitution were responsible for its collapse. In the second module, we think about the tension between the optimates and populares – who they were and what they stood for – before turning in the third module to the influence of Sulla on the political culture of the Late Republic. In the fourth module, we consider the role of the (so-called) First Triumvirate in dominating and deforming Republican politics before turning in the fifth module to consider why agrarian reform is such a controversial and emotive topic in this period. Finally, in the sixth module, we think about the importance of Cicero as a historical source and the ways we can look beyond his evidence to gain a wider, more nuanced picture of what’s going on in the Late Republic.

The Constitution

In this module, we think about the extent to which the structure of the constitution of the Roman Republic may have contributed to its collapse in the first century BC. In particular, we consider: (i) the idea of the Republican constitution as a “mixed constitution”, in which there was a balance of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements; (ii) the problems associated with an annual rotation of magistracies; (iii) the tendency for the Roman political class to see election to the consulship as an end in itself; (iv) the ultra-conservatism of the Roman senate; and (v) the inadequacy of a four-hundred year old constitution for a territory as large as the Roman Empire in the first century BC.