Before the Fall of the Roman Republic

From the Daily Stoic:

'The true end of the Republic did not come with the arrival of Julius Caesar. The sign that things had collapsed came years before, not once but many times. The political process in Rome, which had never been perfect, broke down into throngs of violent street mobs. As Mike Duncan (recent guest on the podcast) explains in his amazing book, The Storm Before the Storm, it started with the crisis of 133, the first time political differences escalated to violence. Over what? A land redistribution bill. The nobles and the aristocrats assembled behind a senator named Nasica and launched an armed attack, killing some three hundred people. Rome had never seen such a massacre, as Duncan writes, it was “one of the bloodiest days in Roman political history.”

This is why the Stoics were so routinely aghast at mobs, why they warned against anger and chaos and hatred. They had witnessed it firsthand. Not just the escalating violence that led to the collapse of the Republic, either. They were themselves the victims of persecutions of philosophers. They saw how Nero, all too easily, was able to scapegoat the Christians as a ploy to distract Romans from his incompetence and evil.

And so it goes in America (and many other nations.) It’s why the horrifying murder of Ahmaud Arbery can’t be dismissed as just some crime that happened in Georgia. It’s why violence against Asians and Jews cannot be tolerated, cannot be ignored. David French (another guest) recently wrote a moving piece titled, Can America Be America When Jews Are Beaten in the Streets? No country can allow anyone to be beaten in the streets, let alone a vulnerable minority with a 2000-year history of persecution. Because when the wolves of hate are loose, no one is safe.

We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot allow our political process to devolve any further, to descend into open violence in the streets. We cannot dismiss these events as isolated instances. We cannot engage in whataboutism. Because if we do—if we do nothing, as Marcus Aurelius said—we are not only committing an injustice by allowing injustice to happen, but we are ultimately imperilling ourselves.

Just as we saw in Rome, as we saw in Germany, as we have seen anywhere that mob violence is encouraged or allowed. '

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