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successful military generals to amass too much power, always at the
expense of the government, which steadily lost influence and power.
The winner of the last of a series of bloody civil wars took full
advantage of the widespread chaos and despair that had come to grip
the Roman nation. Cleverly, he maneuvered himself into a position
of absolute authority, in the process creating a new, more autocratic
governing system. This marked the birth of the renowned and phe-
nomenally successful Roman Empire.
The Roots of the Problem
The biggest weakness inherent within Rome’s republican system was
for a long time not apparent, even to the smartest Roman political ob-
servers. It concerned the military, which for centuries was strong and
reliable and could be counted on to patriotically support the central
government. Among the many crucial elements within the military,
particularly key to its effectiveness was the command structure. Rome
long benefited from a series of highly skilled, dependable generals who
were unwaveringly loyal to the nation and its people.The commander
of a large army clearly had much power at his disposal. More impor-
tantly, if he decided to use that clout
against
the government, rather
than in support of it, the nation would be potentially in serious trouble.
In a nutshell, that is the scary situation that in the early first centu-
ry BCE began to threaten the republican state.The trend had multiple
causes. One of the chief ones consisted of a desire for personal power
among some Roman generals, coupled with their loss of confidence
in the government. Historians are not completely certain why this
came about. One theory is that certain economic policies the Republic
had adopted in the previous century reduced the fortunes of many in
Rome’s wealthy landed nobility. In this view, some generals, who came
from these lofty social ranks, wanted to reverse that trend by exerting
their own authority over lawmakers.
Whatever the generals’ motivations may have been, another root
of the problem lay in some specific needs of the soldiers themselves,
which the government had long failed to meet. In particular, the Re-
public did not usually reward military veterans with pensions when
they retired. Yet there was a definite need for such rewards. By the
