[vbmoneyspender]

The author is a bit unclear on what led to the rise of the Gracchi. The problem wasn't that farmers were having a hard time operating as farmers - the problem was that Roman citizens were having to serve in the Roman army for 20 years at a time. As a result, their wives and children had to run their farms while they were away. The ones who weren't able to do this would sell their farms to well-funded patricians who gradually cobbled together huge estates. This led to plebians migrating to Rome where they coalesced into the plebian mob that the Gracchi and others used to go after patricians they disliked.

The principal reform the Gracchi sought was land reform so that soldiers who had come back from the various wars Rome had been fighting since the days of Hannibal would have a livelihood they could rely on.

[Brugmansian]

Good anaylsis but Obama isn’t a populist. A least not in the tradition of Democratic Party populism. The “Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan campaigned against the financial interests who back Obama. As classical liberalism morphed into its opposite—socialism—so has populism morphed into its opposite—fascism.

[DISCO]

Did the Romans take to the streets and demand the Republic be reinstated? Were the citizens armed? Our constitution allows the people to throw these corrupt politicians out of office. It’s time for the nuclear option. Lets hope that the colb becomes the ones archilles heal.

[givemELL]

Thanks for posting this one. Reading Livy’s The War with Hannibal now, and, will look for parallels, although this piece is quite good and has had 5 good additive comments already...I imagine POTUS is short on Roman or Greek history.

[bushfamfan]

There was warning enough when he had the Roman columns for his DNC convention speech. The Demonrats are instruments of evil.

[lentulusgracchus]

There are many parallels between the career of the Roman Republic and our own.

Sir Ronald Syme wrote the manual history of the end of the Republic some 50 years ago, The Roman Revolution. Syme took a prosopographical approach: that is, he tracked down as many of the actors in that revolution as he could, consulted their biographies, studied all the leading personalities closely, and only then, very gradually, began to tease out what he saw as "reasons" and "causes" of the Roman Revolution.

Which, by the way, when the House of Julius Caesar had arrived at supreme power over the State .... simply stopped. Octavian turned on his own constituency, did his deal (concordia ordinum was the term of art used) with the moneylenders, bankers, and big property-owners, and sold everybody in the Caesarian Party out. In the end, the Caesarian Party, in its triumph, was revealed to be a Party of One.

Fancy that.

[broken_arrow1]

ping

[GiovannaNicoletta]

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