[af_vet_rr]

What is it with people and Rome?

It's both a great lesson in representative politics (as representative as you can get at the time), as well as a great lesson in everything that can go wrong with a government. The Roman Empire (and Greek politics) contributed a lot to our own political system (even if it was "don't do this, the Romans did and it screwed them up).

I'd throw out as well - instead of bread and circuses, think welfare and entitlement programs. The Roman government tried to buy off the people, make them think everything was okay or keep them happy, just as we do now with various entitlement programs, when just as the Roman government could not afford it, we cannot afford it either.

[RobbyS]

Representative Government? The last century of the Roman Republic was an example of oligarchy. The Senatorial class had taken the lion’s share of the wealth gained by Roman conquests and came to own all of Italy. Slaves displaced the people from the land and forced them into town. Veterans were bought off by land grants on the frontier, far from Rome. In Caesar, the Oligarchs reaped what they had sown. All Augustus did was to strip them of a power they had misused in the first place. All in all, the emperors, except for the break down under Nero, gave Romans two hundred years of government that were much better than they what theyt had during the last few generations of the Republic.