Rome and America: A Shared Fate?

Rome and America: A Shared Fate?

07/04/14

Robert W. Merry

History, United States, Italy

We aren't talking about the death of empires, but the tragic demise of democracy.

In 509 B.C., the leaders of ancient Rome abolished their 244-year old hereditary monarchy, banished their last king and his family, and set in motion the establishment of a constitutional republic. Executive power, once held by the kings, was given to a dual authority of two praetors (later called consuls), whose authority was divided to prevent governmental abuse and tyranny. The executives were proscribed from imposing death sentences without legislative approval. The power of the patrician assembly, or Senate, was curtailed by a new council of plebeian magistrates called tribunes, which could nullify noxious actions of the consuls.

The plebs soon demanded definite, written and secular laws. Before, as Will Durant tells us, patrician priests had been the recorders and interpreters of the statutes, had kept their records secret, and had exploited their power monopoly to thwart social change. But now, because of the pleb agitation, the customary law of Rome was codified into the famous Twelve Tables, displayed in the Forum for all to see. “This seemingly trivial event,” writes Durant, “was epochal in Roman history and in the history of mankind; it was the first written form of that legal structure which was to be Rome’s most signal achievement and her greatest contribution to civilization.”

As Americans begin their 241st Fourth of July celebration, commemorating our Founders’ courageous decision to escape the tether of kingly rule and create a new kind of constitutional republic, it might be an appropriate time to cast just a little thought back to the similar creation of the Roman republic. It was a remarkable achievement that created a governmental structure that was to endure for 467 years.

For more than 350 years of that span, the Roman republic brought to its people a formidable degree of civic stability. There were, of course, wars, internal struggles, scandals, class frictions and various threats from within and without. The republic was the creation, after all, of human beings.

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