Since the founding of their republic, Americans have been fond of comparing it to the republic of ancient Rome.
That comparison now seems timely. The situation of the American republic at the start of 2024 CE evokes, in two non-negligible respects, that of the Roman republic just before 49 BCE.
Around January 10 of that year, Julius Caesar, who was not only governor of Gaul and Illyria but also the leader of Rome’s populares – its populist party, based in its largely working-class plebeian order – crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy with a single understrength legion. Caesar chased his even less-prepared political foes out of Rome within a week and out of Italy within two months.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon because his political foes had prevented him from standing for election as consul without being prosecuted on criminal charges in courts that his foes controlled. Caesar’s foes – whom Cicero like to call the optimes, the party of “the best” – were based in Rome’s ruling-elite orders, the patricians and equites.
On January 7, 49 BCE, Rome’s patrician-controlled Senate enacted a measure forbidding Caesar to stand for election as consul, an office that entailed immunity from criminal prosecution, without first surrendering his provincial governorships, each of which also conferred immunity from prosecution.
Caesar, having the support of most non-elite Romans, was generally expected to win election as consul if he was allowed to stand for that election. However, the patriciate and its clients controlled the courts, and sought either to prosecute Caesar before he could stand for election, or else to keep him from standing for election and then prosecute him when his governorships expired.
The Senate enacted its January 7 measure over the veto of a plebeian tribune, declaring a state of emergency to justify this deviation from Rome’s constitution. During the previous century, the patricians had repeatedly killed populist leaders extrajudicially under cover of such a senatorial emergency decree (called senatus consultum ultimum).
In sum, Rome’s patricians ensured that Caesar was amply motivated.
They failed to ensure that their own military leader, Pompey, was comparably motivated. Pompey faced no criminal prosecutions that could be deferred only by holding public office. Moreover, although no one then could have predicted how magnanimous Caesar would prove in victory, Pompey had no special reason to fear reprisal if Rome’s populists won.
Pompey had amicably shared power with Caesar from 59 to 52 BCE, and had been Caesar’s son-in-law. Moreover, Caesar’s legionaries and plebeian supporters respected Pompey for his many victories in foreign wars and his past support for populist legislation.
By Roman law, no legions were permanently stationed in Italy. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, none of the many legions and ships under Pompey’s command was waiting in Greece or Sicily, ready to deploy pro-patrician troops to Italy quickly. If the prospect of a populist victory had threatened Pompey personally, as the patricians threatened Caesar personally, then Pompey might have not have been so negligent.
Biden vs Trump
Fortunately for US ruling elites, their political leader, President Joe Biden, is no less personally threatened by defeat in the 2024 presidential election than is the populist leader, former president Donald Trump, who is now undergoing criminal prosecution in four distinct politically hostile venues.
Each of the two likely major-party candidates for president of the United States seems at serious risk of criminal prosecution, conviction and punishment if he loses the election. Each seems likely to be far better able to avoid or postpone prosecution, or at least to postpone the consequences of a criminal conviction, if he wins.
This remains true despite Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s recent decision not to prosecute Biden for illegal handling of diverse classified documents over several decades. An attorney general appointed by Donald Trump in 2025 might not share Hur’s disinclination to press such charges.
Moreover, information already collected and made public by the Oversight Committee of the US House of Representatives in its investigation of diverse instances of alleged corruption by members of the Biden family might be used by the Department of Justice in a Trump administration to investigate further and prosecute not only the current president but also some of his close blood relatives.
A presidential election in which each of the major-party candidates seems at far greater risk of imminent criminal prosecution or punishment if he loses than if he wins is something new in US history.
In this respect, today’s diverse, equitable and inclusive America, an ever-more-perfect union brilliantly ruled by enlightened elites, has surpassed not only its own past but also the ancient model with which America has been wont to compare itself. In 2024, America has not one but two Caesars at the Rubicon. This might presage a future with glories of social-justice warfare evoking those of 1861-65.
Appreciating this inspires appreciation of a second similarity between Rome in late 50 BCE and America today, namely the similarity of the socio-economic conditions that fuel benighted populist resistance to benevolent elite rule in today’s America and those that fueled populist plebeian resistance to patrician rule of Rome during the first century BCE.
During the century before 50 BCE, slaves from foreign lands newly conquered by Roman arms were increasingly imported into Italy and employed by Rome’s patricians on their agricultural estates (latifundia).
The inability of free Italian farmers to compete with slave labor in agriculture led to the growth of the patriciate’s Italian latifundia, the migration of Italian peasants into cities including Rome, the depression of wages for free Italian workers, and the growth of Rome’s plebian working class, for many of whom the most lucrative prospective employment was in Rome’s army.
All this aggravated long-standing tension between Rome’s patricians and plebeians and contributed greatly to the demise of the Roman republic.
The foregoing view of the history of the late Roman republic, of which there is no hint in Gibbon, was first developed in the 1830s by Massachusetts historian George Bancroft, who was led to it by observing that enslavement of Africans tended to impoverish free workers in the southern states of the US relative to workers in the slavery-free northern states.
It was more amply developed and more widely disseminated several decades later by Bancroft’s younger friend, German historian Theodor Mommsen, in later editions of his Römische Geschichte, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.
In recent decades, America’s ruling elites have accomplished by free trade with poor countries and mass immigration from poor countries a depression of working-class wages and an alienation of native-born workers reminiscent of those that Rome’s patriciate achieved by foreign conquests and mass importation of foreign slaves.
The unsurprising political consequence has been the formation of an American populist political movement like that led during the late Roman republic first by the Gracchi brothers, then by Marius, and finally by Julius Caesar.
This time, however, the ending may be happier, because Biden, unlike Pompey, is properly motivated.
The only danger is that some time this autumn, after it is too late to replace Biden as the candidate of America’s patrician party, Trump might publicly promise, if elected, to pardon Biden and his immediate family for any federal crime of which any of them might be convicted. Were Trump to show himself no less magnanimous than Caesar, Biden might grow no less inattentive than Pompey.
Fortunately, there seems little risk of that. America’s patricians can look forward to crucifying their uppity plebeians along the Appian Way after reverse-reprises of Pharsalus and Philippi that will inspire social justice warriors for ages to come.