Roman Republic, which took place over a century from the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC to the establishment of autocracy and military dictatorship under Julius Caesar after 45 BC, and then Octavian-Augustus from 31 BC, one of the most important questions would be: what were the main causes for its failure? There are no simple answers to that, of course, although almost certainly socioeconomic factors were critical. Of course, for ancient civilizations, hard and fast statistics about population, demography, distribution of wealth and incomes and social castes and classes are few and far between. Historians have the written evidence of contemporary observers, almost always written from an elite or aristocratic viewpoint, and even then many of these records have survived the last 2,000 years in only fragmentary form. In the ancient world, the existing evidence indicates that life was indeed nasty, brutal and short for most people,...
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