The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

Everybody knows the story of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cicero, Cato, Octavian, Brutus, civil war, assassination, the last gasp of liberty, and the foundation of both tyranny and centuries of peace and prosperity. Roman politics are a common metaphor for our own times. In The Storm Before the Storm, veteran history podcaster Mike Duncan (Revolutions, The History of Rome), writes about one of his favorite periods, the Roman Republic between the Second Punic War and Caesar’s Civil War.

As expected, Duncan ably weaves together the lives of his protagonists and their events, to describe a gradual degradation of Roman political norms to mob violence and military force, as the sclerotic Senate proved unable to decisively deal with concerns like corruption in the provinces, the lack of civil rights for Italian allies, transformation of the countryside from yeoman farmers to slave estates, and the ambitions of ‘new men’ without noble pedigrees. The abortive Gracchian agricultural reforms, Gaius Marius’s remaking of the army, and Sulla’s dictatorship are the centerpieces of this book.

Duncan ably uses primary sources (the Romans wrote a lot of history) to provide detail and spice to his world. He’ll admit he’s biased in favor of the Populares and against the Optimates. This is a well-sourced popular history, which is both its strength and weakness. Duncan doesn’t have much theory about the collapse of political norms, and the lives of the figures eclipse some questions I had about how Roman politics normally operated, and the balance between formal bureaucracy, networks of patronage, and the ability of oratory to shift the mob at the right moment.