IT IS THE PECULIAR GENIUS OF THE OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (THIRD WAY)...:

One topic you describe at length is economic inequality between citizens of Rome. How did that come about?

After Rome conquers Carthage, and after they decide to annex Greece, and after they conquer Spain and acquire all the silver mines, you have wealth on an unprecedented scale coming into Rome. The flood of wealth was making the richest of the rich Romans wealthier than would've been imaginable even a couple generations earlier. You're talking literally 300,000 gold pieces coming back with the Legions. All of this is being concentrated in the hands of the senatorial elite, they're the consuls and the generals, so they think it's natural that it all accumulates in their hands.

At the same time, these wars of conquest were making the poor quite a bit poorer. Roman citizens were being hauled off to Spain or Greece, leaving for tours that would go on for three to five years a stretch. While they were gone, their farms in Italy would fall into disrepair. The rich started buying up big plots of land. In the 130s and 140s you have this process of dispossession, where the poorer Romans are being bought out and are no longer small citizen owners. They're going to be tenant owners or sharecroppers and it has a really corrosive effect on the traditional ways of economic life and political life. As a result, you see this skyrocketing economic inequality. 

Do you see parallels between land ownership in Rome and in the modern United States?

In the Roman experience, this is the beginning of a 100-year-long process of Italy going from being a patchwork of smaller farms with some large estates to nothing but sprawling, commercially-oriented estates. And yes, the United States is continuing to go through a very similar process. At the founding of our republic, everybody's a farmer, and now everything is owned by what, Monsanto?

Moving beyond just strictly agricultural companies, large American corporations are now employing more and more people. There seems to be this move away from people owning and operating their own establishments, and they're instead being consumed by large entities. You're talking about the Amazons of the world swallowing up so much of the market share, it just doesn't pay to be a clerk in a bookstore or own a bookstore, you end up being a guy working in a warehouse, and it's not as good of a job. 

Could the Roman senators have done anything to prevent land being consolidated in the hands of the few?

It doesn't really feel like they could've arrested the process. Fifteen years after some land bill, you'd ask, "Who has the land? The poor?" No, they all just got bought up again. There never was a good political solution to it. The problem of these small citizen farmers was not solved until 100 years later when they simply ceased to exist. 

If the Senate couldn't solve that one problem, could they have prevented the end of the Republic?

There were things that could have been done to arrest the political collapse. People felt like the state was no longer working for them, that the Assemblies and Senate weren't passing laws for the benefit of anyone but a small group of elites. This resentment was threatening the legitimacy of the Republic in the eyes of many citizens.

Even if they couldn't necessarily stop the acquisition of these huge properties or estates, there were other reforms they could've made to transition people from one version of economic reality to another: providing free grain for the cities, providing jobs building roads, trying to find places for these people to do economically meaningful work that's going to allow them to make enough to support their families.

So why didn't they take action and make those reforms?

The Gracchi wanted to reform the Republican system, but they also wanted to use those issues--economic inequality, grain for the plebs--to acquire political power for themselves. [Rival senators] believed this was going be terrible. If the Gracchi had been able to pass all of these popular pieces of legislation, they would have had more influence, and that was something their political rivals could not abide by. It created a desire to defeat the Gracchi above all. Old rules of conduct didn't matter, unspoken norms weren't as important as simply stopping the Gracchi from getting a win.

When Tiberius Gracchus introduced the Lex Agraria [to redistribute land back to poorer citizens], the Senate hired a tribune to veto it. This had never happened before. A tribune was supposed to be a defender of the people, and this was a popular bill. If it came to a vote, it was going to pass. It was not illegal what he was doing, but it was completely unprecedented, and this led Tiberius Gracchus to respond with his own measures, saying, "I'm going to put my seal on the state treasury so no business can be transacted." [Tiberius was later murdered by the senators.] The issues themselves almost ceased to be as important as making sure your political rival didn't get a victory.

This is really what crippled the Senate. It's 100 years of focusing on internal power dynamics instead of enlightened reform that caused the whole Republic to collapse. 

When did this in-fighting start to threaten the republic?

It starts to fail after the imperial triumphs [over rival nations]. With Rome being the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean world, and senatorial families controlling unimaginable wealth, there wasn't any kind of foreign check on their behavior. There was no threat making the Senate collectively say, "We need to stay together and can't let our internal fights get out of hand because that will leave us weak in the face of our enemies." They didn't have that existential fear anymore.

The other big thing is, with a new style of popular politics, you start having way more confrontations. Roman politics until about 146 B.C. was built upon consensus. By the period of my book, it becomes a politics of conflict. People start ignoring the old unspoken ways of doing business and the whole thing rolled down hill till it was warlords crashing into each other. 

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