Mary Beard

Yeah, I think that's right.

But I think that what is crucial about it, particularly when you then think about how it compares to the one-man rule of the emperors, which is going to come later after Julius Caesar and so on, what is crucial is that...

It's a power-sharing system.

The Roman Republic, and they think of it as being invented in order to prevent there being kings ever again.

Heaven knows how it was really invented, but that was their story.

The absolutely fundamental idea, well, there's two of them.

One is that nobody who gets elected to office, and there are a series of elected officials from consuls down, elected by these hierarchical assemblies.

The absolute key is that nobody ever holds office on their own.

Now, we think of it, I think, often a bit sort of a bit quirky that the Romans had two consuls and how many praetors and tribunes that they had.

But that is the point.

Nobody holds power individually.

And in principle, sometimes broken, but nobody holds power for longer than a single year.

So you have a series of elected officials, all of them drawn from the rich elite, and they're elected to offices that they always hold with somebody else and only for a year.

Now, you know, you start to see then that why it's kind of hard to fit Rome into traditional structures, because most Romans, not all, but most Romans would have been absolutely horrified at the idea that what they were living in was a democracy.

I mean, democracy was for many, if not most Romans, an appalling version of mob rule.

But there was a sense of power sharing, communality, which divided up power over time in the end.

Nobody, the Roman elite is kind of notionally a group of equals who hold power but share it.

It is the real big puzzle about revolution.

Can you solve it now, please?

I'll try.