A confident, hegemonic republic somehow begins to careen into chaos and civil strife. Its ruling class has been steadily concentrating the republic’s immense wealth in its own hands, ignoring the growing precarity of the less well-off. As instability rises, this class, which had also largely monopolized political offices, begins to lose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the populace. Demagogues, arising out of the ruling class but exploiting the popular hatred against it, flourish. At the same time, political corruption runs rampant, and political trials become frequent. Yet they often prove to be more a vehicle for entertainment or vindictive score-settling than a forum for justice. Transitions of power become fraught, irregular, and marked by violence. The dangerous logic of one-upmanship means that violations of laws and norms by one side all but guarantee worse violations by opponents when the political tides inevitably turn.
This is how Josiah Osgood depicts the last decades of the Roman Republic, clearly suggesting many worrying parallels between it and the contemporary American one. In his Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, he uses the rhetorical career of Rome’s greatest orator and philosopher-statesman, Cicero, to illustrate Rome’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Rising from obscure birth to the consulship on the strength of his rhetorical skills and political acumen, Cicero also witnessed the final fall of republican liberty and fell himself in the rampant extrajudicial killings that marked it. His severed head, displayed on the rostra from which he had so often held crowds spellbound with his speeches, was a fitting signal that in Rome the era of rule by law and persuasion had been replaced by the rule of force.
Though much of the book is focused on illuminating the way late republican trials worked and the art by which speakers like Cicero could move audiences, Osgood also attempts to diagnose the causes of the republican order’s collapse. As the subtitle of the book subtly implies, he correlates Cicero’s ascent with Rome’s descent. Osgood is not heavy-handed about this: he does not assign Cicero a great deal of personal blame for Rome’s fall, and he even depicts the statesman in a semi-sympathetic light. But he does suggest that Cicero resisted the reforms that were needed to address Rome’s economic divide. Worse still from Osgood’s point of view is that, despite Cicero’s general principle of opposing political violence, he appears to have endorsed extrajudicial killings when the outcome suited his desires. To Osgood, this makes Cicero complicit in—and emblematic of—the blindness and hypocrisy of Roman elites.
Written in an accessible manner of a good storyteller, the book is an easy and engaging read. Bearing the marks of its origin as a set of true-crime stories of ancient Rome, almost every chapter of the book focuses on a different trial in which Cicero was involved. Osgood relates the salacious details that emerge in these trials—affairs, poisonings, bribery, treachery—with evident gusto. But he also uses these elements as jumping-off points to inform the reader about Roman history, institutions, and famous personalities. For anyone wishing for an easy but also informative and engaging introduction to the world of the late Roman Republic, this book would be excellent.
It appears less aimed at scholars, who would learn less from Osgood’s accessible presentation, and into whose controversies he rarely wades. Osgood’s diagnoses of the causes of Rome’s fall, summarized in the first paragraph of this review, largely tread well-worn ground. A partial exception to this is his focus on the wild nature of Roman trials and the Roman court system more generally. His narrative illustrates compellingly the ways in which Roman trials violate what we would today consider basic legal principles: flagrant appeals to emotion, nasty character attacks, outrageous counter-accusations to deflect blame—all often without the slightest shred of what a modern court would consider reasonable evidence. Lawless Republic shows how Cicero himself was a master of many of these tactics.
Expanding beyond biography, though, Osgood often points to these trials as both indicators and indirect causes of Rome’s decline, painting a picture of institutions fraying and collapsing. He also frequently calls attention to the more structural injustice inherent in them: the privileging of elite testimony over that of commoners and Romans generally over foreigners, the treatment of women and slaves, and how these trials often exonerated those obviously guilty of great cruelty and corruption.
Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior.
Osgood certainly has a point. Rome’s trial norms would never pass modern muster, and Rome’s treatment of those outside the circle of elite male citizens is morally unjustifiable. But he also somewhat downplays how, from a world-historical perspective, the Roman trial system was a tremendous achievement for justice and liberty. After all, the principles of a fair criminal trial are not self-evident, and the Romans made great strides in developing what we would today call due process. For instance, the Romans held sacrosanct the idea that no Roman citizen should be put to death without a jury trial and an appeal to the people (provocatio). Roman trials had (admittedly flawed) rules of evidence and procedure. And although Rome’s oppression of those subjugated to it is appalling, one looks in vain for another ancient empire that established a court specifically to try those of its own ruling class who had mistreated its subject peoples. Indeed, one would find few modern examples of such consideration of foreigners’ interests, either. But that is exactly what the Roman extortion court—flawed as it was—did. Cicero’s successful prosecution of Verres in that court showed that at least sometimes, Rome would do justice by her subjects.
This is no small thing. Rome is perhaps the first great polity in world history to systematically attempt to restrain its own abuse of power—both of its elites against its ordinary people, and of the political community as a whole over others. The attempts at self-restraint were clumsy, inconsistent, hypocritical, and ultimately failed. But that Rome even tried distinguishes it from most historical analogues. Cicero himself would contribute to this project of self-restraint, articulating a theory of just warfare to limit the use of force, refusing the numerous opportunities to unjustly enrich himself when governing Rome’s provinces, and condemning unconstitutional concentrations of power at peril of his life.
The spirit of self-restraint, however imperfect in the Roman case, would be a good model for emulation in a modern hegemonic republic. This is especially so if Cicero’s own diagnosis of Rome’s decline is to carry any weight with us today. According to him, Romans began to lose their freedom as soon as Rome stopped upholding the principles of freedom and justice with others. In On Duties, Cicero contrasted the contemporary period of corruption and self-interested rapacity with a time when Rome functioned as “protectorate of the world,” when “the Roman people maintained itself by acts of service, and wars were waged for the sake of allies or for the safety of our realm[,] … the ends of which were marked by clemency.” To Cicero, it was no accident that the Roman toleration of injustice toward others ultimately culminated in injustice at home—no band of robbers can help but eventually start robbing each other.
Osgood shows how the waning Roman Republic was also marked by what some today decry as “lawfare”—the use of courts and criminal trials to attack political opponents. He seems somewhat to disapprove of Cicero’s participation in this culture of lawfare, yet he also shows compellingly that Rome was experiencing profound political corruption very recognizable to modern eyes: bribery, extortion, cover-ups, attempts to interfere with elections, violent resistance to transfers of political power, and more. Osgood also decries Cicero’s other, less frequent reaction to this: reluctant endorsement of political violence ostensibly to halt other political violence or to overthrow a tyrant. But as he himself notes, increasing violence brings one ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature. So, what is one to do when peaceful political processes give way to armed mobs roaming the streets? Without trials or violence, one’s only recourse would seem to be surrender.
In fact, we might say that Osgood’s narrative and the history of the late Roman Republic illustrate that, as long as republican politics is going to produce conflict that extends beyond the ballot box and senatorial debate, it is far better that it be lawfare than actual warfare. What seems to have eroded the stability of Rome’s institutions is not so much that its elites were subject to politically motivated trials, but that they so frequently evaded justice nonetheless. Consuls could sell Rome’s foreign policy to bribe-bearing potentates from abroad, candidates for office could stir up mobs to obstruct election results, and tribunes could exercise their vetoes to protect obvious wrongdoers. The immunity to prosecution afforded by holding public office made gaining office a near-necessity for crooked elites, for which they might kill. And this security could in turn be compounded by using that office, once won, to enrich friends, rig juries, and otherwise ensure that even when a term of office expires, their corruption and malfeasance could go unpunished.
Osgood’s book is timely and very persuasively illustrates the way violations of political norms and principles of justice form a vicious cycle. When one candidate disburses a few bribes to win office, it justifies and incentivizes the next to offer bigger ones. When one candidate resorts to political violence and retribution against enemies, it only ensures that when his opponents gain power, they will do the same and worse. The book stands as a warning against that kind of tit-for-tat politics, and the tu quoque reasoning that so often justifies it.
Moreover, Osgood’s narrative of Rome’s decline serves as a powerful reminder that republican institutions cannot long persist if their elites can regularly evade accountability for their behavior. The power of rhetoric and demagoguery in any popular republic should give us reason to doubt that elections will serve as a sufficient check on elite misbehavior. We should count ourselves lucky to have a more developed and thick set of judicial norms and procedures than did Rome. We should zealously and scrupulously protect and revere these rules. They have a chance to save us from Rome’s fate.
A broad respect for the rule of law means that it is less likely (though not impossible) for an innocent politician to be convicted in a proper trial. And for this reason, we should perhaps be less squeamish about the idea of subjecting our political leaders to them when evidence of corruption or political misbehavior arises. To try a popular leader for political crimes may be dangerously destabilizing. But as the example of Rome shows, to allow popular leaders to get away with political crimes is in the long run far more dangerous.
