Fall of the Roman Republic

西方文化入门作业(二)




























姓名：谢劲萱
年级专业：2011级英语04班
学号：20110974













Fall of the Roman Republic


    Everyone seems to write about the fall of the Roman Empire. I guess they think the end of the Empire is very important because it marks the end of a thousand years of Roman power and the onset of the Dark Ages. I, however, would rather study the fall of the Roman Republic because it is much more interesting. First of all the Republic is a classic governmental form like the democracies of Greece. The Empire, by contrast, was a corrupt totalitarian system which was bound to collapse at some point under its own weight.


    The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization when the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 509 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and advised by a senate.


    Roman society was hierarchical. The evolution of the Constitution of the Roman Republic was heavily influenced by the struggle between the patricians, Rome's land-holding aristocracy, who traced their ancestry back to the early history of the Roman kingdom, and the plebeians, the far more numerous citizen-commoners. Over time, the laws that gave patricians exclusive rights to Rome's highest offices were repealed or weakened, and a new aristocracy emerged from among the plebeian class. The leaders of the Republic developed a strong tradition and morality requiring public service and patronage in peace and war, making military and political success inextricably linked. During the first two centuries of its existence the Republic expanded through a combination of conquest and alliance, from central Italy to the entire Italian peninsula. By the following century it included North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Greece, and what is now southern France. Two centuries...