I’ve pondered similar questions before, but I think this particular question deserves a different answer than I came to before, since it’s asking for a very specific route.
Presumably, we’re talking about this happening well after the Principate — the Emperor’s actual office of “first citizen” which was part of the legal fiction of permanent consulship that Tomaž Vargazon describes — had been established, since any restoration within living memory of Augustus would have been much easier and thus not worth writing about. “Restoring” the Republic in the sense of undoing this Principate, was obviously something that any Emperor could have done. And yes, it could have been done “within the lifetime of a single Emperor”.
The trick, of course, is getting it to stick.
Let’s also stipulate that this is happening before Constantine defeated the Praetorian Guard. After that event, although Rome did have a good century of recovery, the political structure and internal politics of the Empire had changed so much that a restoration of the Republic would have been a much more complicated question. Despite being the Emperor’s personal guard, they were more like his captors towards the end of their existence. They were more than willing to immediately depose any Emperor who tried to undermine their power, which is why Constantine eventually had to destroy them.
Finally, beyond the legal fictions of the Principate, there’s another, even bigger fundamental misunderstanding most Rome fanboys have about the Roman Empire: the noble elites didn’t go anywhere after the fall of the Republic. They survived the Late Republic’s various purges and proscriptions.
What Julius and Augustus actually achieved in establishing the Principate was to reconcile the bitter political struggle between the Populares (liberal reformers) and Optimates (conservative elites). Julius started the process by pacifying a public dissatisfied with growing inequality, with his grand spectacles — the infamous “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses). Augustus joined this popular power with control over the Senate to create the Principate. In subsuming the powers of Censor (among other offices) with those of Consul, Augustus controlled who could run for Senator, thus guaranteeing himself a loyal Senate filled with cronies bought off by his vast fortune. This fortune then became essentially a privatized segment of the public treasury: a personal estate, passed from Emperor to Emperor via adult adoption and inheritance, replenished by profits from imperial conquests and sweetheart business deals.*
* These deals were made in a quasi-public-interest. On the one hand, they exploited the government’s ability to create lucrative monopolies or privileges, thus making the Emperors insanely rich. On the other hand, this was mostly done in the service of maintaining panem et circenses: an insane amount of wealth would be needed in order to keep spending so lavishly while not actually spending down the entire fortune.
Basically, imagine if Jeff Bezos flooded the airwaves with billions of dollars in ads that propelled him to the Presidency while buying off enough Senators to have a supermajority and abolish his own term limits; and then rigged the stock market to make himself the first multi-trillionaire, with which he’d be able to personally pay for his own private welfare system AND buy out both Disney and the NFL (to keep people happy), all while being hailed as having saved America from the scourge of the Democrats and Republicans and the harms of their bitter partisan war. Neither party, nor those elites, would really have gone anywhere, they’d just be playing an entirely different game: hashing out the details of whatever new legislation Bezos wanted them to rubber-stamp, all while hustling for money and power over their rivals. Congress would still exist, and being elected to it would still be rather important, but it would be important because it served this enormous self-sustaining money machine that grew every day to supplant what we previously thought of as “the state”, not because of pretty things like “democracy”. The entire time, though, Bezos would be preening as if he were accountable to the people (and in an indirect way, his power would rely on popular support!), and he’d actually be pretty popular because of it all.
Come to think of it, Putin’s Russia isn’t actually too far off the mark, either. But the Bezos example does give us a good grounding.
Anyways, breaking the Principateis what an Emperor would have to do in order to actually restore the Republic.
On top of that is the military problem. The further away in time you get from Augustus, the more of a threat breakaway provinces become. The basic challenge was that as the lone superpower of Europe, the Empire was always having border problems, which necessitated a large military presence at the borders; as the Empire grew physically larger, those border provinces were increasingly isolated from the central government, and in their isolation their generals would frequently get delusions of grandeur. The problem got worse later in the Empire, as no one provincial general could actually manage the job of pacifying the entire Empire, and multiple generals would compete at a time for the Principate.
Moreover, the military itself as an institution played a large role in this dysfunction. Both the regular military and the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard would frequently “elect by acclaim” their own Emperors — IE, take some popular commander and cheer for him like a movie scene these tended to fail dramatically at actual governance, but they kept popular enough with the military to avoid being overthrown.
So, you have to break the Principate to restore the Republic, but also keep every two-bit general from rushing to fill in the power vacuum, and sideline the military itself.
Fortunately, breaking the Principate to some extent helps reduce the magnitude of the power vacuum — if there’s not much of a throne left to fight for, few will fight for it. But it’s still tricky. How do you ensure that your plan gets executed when the plan is to destroy your own power to execute it?
My answer is that you do it in stages. Each change needs to set up the next, without revealing it.
As we stipulated earlier, since the Praetorian Guard are still around, we start distributing some of the Principate’s vast holdings to them. They’re already equites, meaning citizens rich enough to provide their own horse in battle, but just below rich enough to be Senators. So, you give them enough money to become Senators - or just short of it! The Senatorial class at this point has been sitting fat and happy for so long that they’ve mostly forgotten how to govern; this move puts some new sharks into the pool with a bunch of fresh chum. The Praetorian Senators will happily fight any old guard who oppose them, and those old guard who don’t oppose them will be happy for the new allies. In turn, the business of governance will keep the Praetorian Senators busy actually governing.
The next goal is to diversify the Senate at a critical juncture in its history. During the Mid-Late Empire, one of the fatal developments of domestic politics was a turn towards xenophobia, especially among the elites. In previous eras, Rome had deep traditions of incorporating outsiders which made it stronger. These were by no means motivated by the same fluffy, bleeding-heart sentimentality as today’s immigration doves, but rather a way to channel the ubiquitous xenophobia of the age into a system of extracting cheap, reliable, and flexible military service out of desperate or subjugated peoples. Anyways, the result of the new xenophobia was that when the Huns later drove the Goths to Rome’s borders, they didn’t get the same offer as previous supplicant peoples had, and the ensuing mistreatment and corruption blew up in the Romans’ faces in an epically bad way.
In order to head this off, we need to sow the seeds of diversity. The actual Mid-Late Emperors never really bothered with this; instead, their constitutional reforms further sidelined the Senate and endlessly partitioned and reorganized the Empire. For all its supposed genius, the vaunted Tetrarchy didn’t even last through one measly succession! This was panickedly rearranging deck chairs, not considered constitutional reform.
At the same time, due to the Crisis of the Third Century, a new class of elites were beginning to develop a sense of independence and self-governance throughout the Empire’s provinces. These were Christian clergy, local garrison leaders, and various Roman noble expats intermingled with whatever local elite families were left in power from the original imperial conquest.
So, our plan will be to (1) replicate the Republic’s system of plebeian constituent assemblies and noble Senates throughout the provinces, (2) subordinate those institutions to the Roman Senate, and (3) have them send delegates to the Roman Senate. The first part builds on Caracalla’s 212 AD expansion of citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire to generate real buy-in from those citizens, who after Caracalla still lacked any real political say in how their provinces were managed. What the second and third parts do is point all this local power directly back to Rome, while also stacking the Senate with voices from outside of the ossified, increasingly xenophobic Roman nobles.
A careful balance has to be kept here. Some Praetorian Senators will not be happy about the new competition — which is why we wouldn’t introduce it immediately after the Praetorian Reform, but rather some time after; 5–10 years would give the Praetorians plenty of time to consolidate their Senatorial power bloc. Others, however, will already see the xenophobic old guard as their enemies, and will welcome the new allies, just as those of the old guard who chafed under their stodgy seniors welcomed the Praetorians. Our goal is to maximize the latter faction, and pacify the former.
In following with what we did with the Praetorian Guard, we’re going to expand the liquidation of the Principate’s wealth to include the provincial elites, mainly all those garrison commanders. Give them an estate to manage, an assembly to voice their concerns in, and a goal of being elected to the Roman Senate, and they’ll fight for *that* instead of mounting an insurrection.
The last key here is to give the provinces a carrot to stay within the Empire besides the stick they’ve already got. With all this self-governance and these empowered local elites, it’s entirely possible the Restored Republic will just fall apart like the Empire did! The real-world course of events was that the constant political instability at the top — IE, constant fighting over who would hold the Dominate (the name of the later stages of the Principate) — led to the provinces growing more and more independent and self-sufficient from the central power of Rome. Without centralized control - and therefore need to supply - of the military, the vast supply network on which the Empire’s market economy rested began to atrophy from lack of need and erode to piracy, and the Empire fragmented into a thousand feudal fiefs as local elites stepped into the security vacuum it left.
What we want is to prevent this, at least for the foreseeable future. You can’t stop any of this by letting yourself get distracted by each challenge and calamity that the Empire actually faced, you have to look at how stable the system actually was, and what was undermining it, which again was the political instability.
The carrot here is… well… carrots. Not precisely carrots, but more or less… “carrots”. What I mean is, we expand the traditional Roman grain dole to all the provinces. In the real world, this was never done officially, although some provinces probably had their own doles. By expanding the dole, though, we not only stabilize but strengthen the trade spine that drives the entire empire’s economy, refocus the military on protecting the massive shipments of grain and other supplies that will need to be shipped (as opposed to fighting each other over the throne), and establish something that the provinces need from The City (Rome): administration of the dole. It’s impractical to set up the entire shipping route to only through Rome (thus being controlled by it), since the Empire is quite spread out by this point, but we CAN put the headquarters of the dole system in Rome; in fact, it makes sense to take advantage of the expertise already there, and this gives an extra employment boost to the capital! While we can clearly expect that in the long term, centers of administration will develop in the provinces, this does give us short- and medium-term stability for the Empire. We can’t solve *every* long-term problem, after all, and this “unintended effect” is something that’s far more manageable than the crises we’ve already addressed.
So that’s it! That’s my plan for restoring the Republic.
From Quora: Restoring The Republic
From Quora: Restoring The Republic
From Quora: Restoring The Republic
I’ve pondered similar questions before, but I think this particular question deserves a different answer than I came to before, since it’s asking for a very specific route.
Presumably, we’re talking about this happening well after the Principate — the Emperor’s actual office of “first citizen” which was part of the legal fiction of permanent consulship that Tomaž Vargazon describes — had been established, since any restoration within living memory of Augustus would have been much easier and thus not worth writing about. “Restoring” the Republic in the sense of undoing this Principate, was obviously something that any Emperor could have done. And yes, it could have been done “within the lifetime of a single Emperor”.
The trick, of course, is getting it to stick.
Let’s also stipulate that this is happening before Constantine defeated the Praetorian Guard. After that event, although Rome did have a good century of recovery, the political structure and internal politics of the Empire had changed so much that a restoration of the Republic would have been a much more complicated question. Despite being the Emperor’s personal guard, they were more like his captors towards the end of their existence. They were more than willing to immediately depose any Emperor who tried to undermine their power, which is why Constantine eventually had to destroy them.
Finally, beyond the legal fictions of the Principate, there’s another, even bigger fundamental misunderstanding most Rome fanboys have about the Roman Empire: the noble elites didn’t go anywhere after the fall of the Republic. They survived the Late Republic’s various purges and proscriptions.
What Julius and Augustus actually achieved in establishing the Principate was to reconcile the bitter political struggle between the Populares (liberal reformers) and Optimates (conservative elites). Julius started the process by pacifying a public dissatisfied with growing inequality, with his grand spectacles — the infamous “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses). Augustus joined this popular power with control over the Senate to create the Principate. In subsuming the powers of Censor (among other offices) with those of Consul, Augustus controlled who could run for Senator, thus guaranteeing himself a loyal Senate filled with cronies bought off by his vast fortune. This fortune then became essentially a privatized segment of the public treasury: a personal estate, passed from Emperor to Emperor via adult adoption and inheritance, replenished by profits from imperial conquests and sweetheart business deals.*
Basically, imagine if Jeff Bezos flooded the airwaves with billions of dollars in ads that propelled him to the Presidency while buying off enough Senators to have a supermajority and abolish his own term limits; and then rigged the stock market to make himself the first multi-trillionaire, with which he’d be able to personally pay for his own private welfare system AND buy out both Disney and the NFL (to keep people happy), all while being hailed as having saved America from the scourge of the Democrats and Republicans and the harms of their bitter partisan war. Neither party, nor those elites, would really have gone anywhere, they’d just be playing an entirely different game: hashing out the details of whatever new legislation Bezos wanted them to rubber-stamp, all while hustling for money and power over their rivals. Congress would still exist, and being elected to it would still be rather important, but it would be important because it served this enormous self-sustaining money machine that grew every day to supplant what we previously thought of as “the state”, not because of pretty things like “democracy”. The entire time, though, Bezos would be preening as if he were accountable to the people (and in an indirect way, his power would rely on popular support!), and he’d actually be pretty popular because of it all.
Come to think of it, Putin’s Russia isn’t actually too far off the mark, either. But the Bezos example does give us a good grounding.
Anyways, breaking the Principate is what an Emperor would have to do in order to actually restore the Republic.
On top of that is the military problem. The further away in time you get from Augustus, the more of a threat breakaway provinces become. The basic challenge was that as the lone superpower of Europe, the Empire was always having border problems, which necessitated a large military presence at the borders; as the Empire grew physically larger, those border provinces were increasingly isolated from the central government, and in their isolation their generals would frequently get delusions of grandeur. The problem got worse later in the Empire, as no one provincial general could actually manage the job of pacifying the entire Empire, and multiple generals would compete at a time for the Principate.
Moreover, the military itself as an institution played a large role in this dysfunction. Both the regular military and the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard would frequently “elect by acclaim” their own Emperors — IE, take some popular commander and cheer for him like a movie scene these tended to fail dramatically at actual governance, but they kept popular enough with the military to avoid being overthrown.
So, you have to break the Principate to restore the Republic, but also keep every two-bit general from rushing to fill in the power vacuum, and sideline the military itself.
Fortunately, breaking the Principate to some extent helps reduce the magnitude of the power vacuum — if there’s not much of a throne left to fight for, few will fight for it. But it’s still tricky. How do you ensure that your plan gets executed when the plan is to destroy your own power to execute it?
My answer is that you do it in stages. Each change needs to set up the next, without revealing it.
As we stipulated earlier, since the Praetorian Guard are still around, we start distributing some of the Principate’s vast holdings to them. They’re already equites, meaning citizens rich enough to provide their own horse in battle, but just below rich enough to be Senators. So, you give them enough money to become Senators - or just short of it! The Senatorial class at this point has been sitting fat and happy for so long that they’ve mostly forgotten how to govern; this move puts some new sharks into the pool with a bunch of fresh chum. The Praetorian Senators will happily fight any old guard who oppose them, and those old guard who don’t oppose them will be happy for the new allies. In turn, the business of governance will keep the Praetorian Senators busy actually governing.
The next goal is to diversify the Senate at a critical juncture in its history. During the Mid-Late Empire, one of the fatal developments of domestic politics was a turn towards xenophobia, especially among the elites. In previous eras, Rome had deep traditions of incorporating outsiders which made it stronger. These were by no means motivated by the same fluffy, bleeding-heart sentimentality as today’s immigration doves, but rather a way to channel the ubiquitous xenophobia of the age into a system of extracting cheap, reliable, and flexible military service out of desperate or subjugated peoples. Anyways, the result of the new xenophobia was that when the Huns later drove the Goths to Rome’s borders, they didn’t get the same offer as previous supplicant peoples had, and the ensuing mistreatment and corruption blew up in the Romans’ faces in an epically bad way.
In order to head this off, we need to sow the seeds of diversity. The actual Mid-Late Emperors never really bothered with this; instead, their constitutional reforms further sidelined the Senate and endlessly partitioned and reorganized the Empire. For all its supposed genius, the vaunted Tetrarchy didn’t even last through one measly succession! This was panickedly rearranging deck chairs, not considered constitutional reform.
At the same time, due to the Crisis of the Third Century, a new class of elites were beginning to develop a sense of independence and self-governance throughout the Empire’s provinces. These were Christian clergy, local garrison leaders, and various Roman noble expats intermingled with whatever local elite families were left in power from the original imperial conquest.
So, our plan will be to (1) replicate the Republic’s system of plebeian constituent assemblies and noble Senates throughout the provinces, (2) subordinate those institutions to the Roman Senate, and (3) have them send delegates to the Roman Senate. The first part builds on Caracalla’s 212 AD expansion of citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire to generate real buy-in from those citizens, who after Caracalla still lacked any real political say in how their provinces were managed. What the second and third parts do is point all this local power directly back to Rome, while also stacking the Senate with voices from outside of the ossified, increasingly xenophobic Roman nobles.
A careful balance has to be kept here. Some Praetorian Senators will not be happy about the new competition — which is why we wouldn’t introduce it immediately after the Praetorian Reform, but rather some time after; 5–10 years would give the Praetorians plenty of time to consolidate their Senatorial power bloc. Others, however, will already see the xenophobic old guard as their enemies, and will welcome the new allies, just as those of the old guard who chafed under their stodgy seniors welcomed the Praetorians. Our goal is to maximize the latter faction, and pacify the former.
In following with what we did with the Praetorian Guard, we’re going to expand the liquidation of the Principate’s wealth to include the provincial elites, mainly all those garrison commanders. Give them an estate to manage, an assembly to voice their concerns in, and a goal of being elected to the Roman Senate, and they’ll fight for *that* instead of mounting an insurrection.
The last key here is to give the provinces a carrot to stay within the Empire besides the stick they’ve already got. With all this self-governance and these empowered local elites, it’s entirely possible the Restored Republic will just fall apart like the Empire did! The real-world course of events was that the constant political instability at the top — IE, constant fighting over who would hold the Dominate (the name of the later stages of the Principate) — led to the provinces growing more and more independent and self-sufficient from the central power of Rome. Without centralized control - and therefore need to supply - of the military, the vast supply network on which the Empire’s market economy rested began to atrophy from lack of need and erode to piracy, and the Empire fragmented into a thousand feudal fiefs as local elites stepped into the security vacuum it left.
What we want is to prevent this, at least for the foreseeable future. You can’t stop any of this by letting yourself get distracted by each challenge and calamity that the Empire actually faced, you have to look at how stable the system actually was, and what was undermining it, which again was the political instability.
The carrot here is… well… carrots. Not precisely carrots, but more or less… “carrots”. What I mean is, we expand the traditional Roman grain dole to all the provinces. In the real world, this was never done officially, although some provinces probably had their own doles. By expanding the dole, though, we not only stabilize but strengthen the trade spine that drives the entire empire’s economy, refocus the military on protecting the massive shipments of grain and other supplies that will need to be shipped (as opposed to fighting each other over the throne), and establish something that the provinces need from The City (Rome): administration of the dole. It’s impractical to set up the entire shipping route to only through Rome (thus being controlled by it), since the Empire is quite spread out by this point, but we CAN put the headquarters of the dole system in Rome; in fact, it makes sense to take advantage of the expertise already there, and this gives an extra employment boost to the capital! While we can clearly expect that in the long term, centers of administration will develop in the provinces, this does give us short- and medium-term stability for the Empire. We can’t solve *every* long-term problem, after all, and this “unintended effect” is something that’s far more manageable than the crises we’ve already addressed.
So that’s it! That’s my plan for restoring the Republic.