Slavery was responsible for the downfall of the Roman republic

The Punic Wars with Carthage came to a final end in 146BC, but the devastation still remained. Hannibal had rampaged through Italy half a century earlier, and the Italian farms had not fully recovered, creating poverty. The Roman armies, who had hitherto been taking their food from the colonies of Sardinia and Sicily, returned to Rome, and the grain followed. The mass influx of foreign grain of better quality reduced the price of grain, which further reduced the wealth of Italy significantly. Wealthy Romans began to speculate on the vast reaches of land Rome had conquered, which further exacerbated the divide between rich and poor.

The entire Roman economy hinged on grain prices. Their deterioration, coupled with some snubs from elite Romans, angered the Latins in Italy, and created a perfect storm of economic circumstances that could end in only one way for the city of Rome. Revolution. But there was another factor - one far more important:

Although slavery had a different social function in Roman times, its economic function was identical - reduced price of labor. More slaves in the city means a greater pool of workers for the local farms and such. That in turn meant a greater supply of labor with no change to demand, hence lower prices.

All this huge influx of labor was soon bought up by the wealthy Romans, who started for the first time to establish large estates with their armies of slaves doing all the hard work. They took over the public land, that in reality nobody owned but in practice everybody squatted on. Soon the small farmers found that without the capital advantage of millions of slaves, they could not compete in farming.

In this way the Italian farmers were rapidly forced off their land entirely. They went to Rome, seeking work, and finding extreme poverty. A huge mass of the ultra poor crowded the city, desperate for any opportunity they could get, and starving terribly. By 136BC, Roman census records show the population of Italy reaching a record low of just below 20,000, and that in turn made the military power of Rome exceptionally weak. As I shall show, these slave-run estates (latifundia) eventually literally destroyed the republic.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine a Rome with no slavery - a Rome that had conquered Carthage and let it be, like Rome had not enslaved the Italians. In such a Rome, the Italian farmers would have eventually rebuilt their farmsteads. The provinces would have given them time to recover as they would have to supply the newly founded colony of Africa. There would be little opportunity for land speculation and certainly not for slave-run estates. With the survival of the common farmer and the backbone of the Roman economy, the republic would have been safe. Bear this alternative in mind as I continue.

Two people who attempted economic reform in response to this problem were the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, who essentially used various political loopholes to reduce the power of the senate and increase the power of the poor mob. Both were killed by mobs of rich senators, who wanted the masses to remain largely poor because it was to their benefit.

Nonetheless, the legacy of the brothers was that they forced the senate to address the question through a land distribution council (who mostly were engaged with stealing land from the Latins). Many of the poor in Rome, in this way, gained a second chance to make a living, which massively prolonged the downfall of the republic and boosted the Italian population once more to many hundreds of thousands. Gaius established colonies overseas for the first time, which of course sowed the seeds for the capitalist senators to make more "public land" claims in the rest of the world too. And the senate, in response to all these concerns, passed for the first time a special resolution empowering it to "protect the republic" (senatus consultum ultimum), which basically meant all their actions were justified in the name of protecting the republic, and of course was the political power needed to just about break the whole Roman system for those who would later abuse the resolution to their own purposes.

So we see that as a direct result of slavery and the associated taking of economic power by the senate, the ruling elite of the republic also immediately asserted social and political power.

The senate were actually pretty alright at managing all this power. They stopped the distribution of public land to appease the Latins, granted tenancy to all landholders, took a rent from public land that was used to feed the starving masses in Rome, and if a settler in a colony found their farm wasn't working out, the senate would arrange for somebody else to come in and have a go at farming the land instead (and apparently this wasn't corrupt at all). But it was not long before all kinds of individuals wanted in on this power.

The next big war Rome fought was against Jugurtha in Numidia. One of the generals in this war, Gaius Marius, returned to Rome in the middle of the war and with no prior political experience, boastfully argued his way into getting elected to the top political position in Rome, the consulship. He then used the same tactics the Gracchi used (out of necessity) to his own benefit instead - he used the mob to overrule the senate and make him the main commander of the war against Jugurtha. And then he recruited an army from the remainder of the poor mob in Rome, who were super glad to find work after some decades in poverty. In this way Marius controlled Rome's military, economy, policy and society - something that would have been impossible had the influx of slaves not generated this terrifying series of events.

These mobsters, whom Marius quickly turned into soldiers, had a real strong sense of entitlement for all the work they did for their general, and expected their general to scratch their backs in return. This was in contrast to the old system, where the soldiers were generally loyal to the state. Marius won the consulship a record number of times and won against the Germans and against Jugurtha. Marius' solution to the problem of the soldiers was to simply distribute land to them.

Though Marius was the first to gain this power for his personal advantage, effectively stealing it from the senate, he did not use it significantly because he did not realize the importance of controlling the estates. Nevertheless his assumption of power merely shifted where the power lay, as total proof that the intricate republican system of checks and balances through the assemblies and courts had already been replaced by the oligarchical senate, whose power was primarily driven by slavery.

Soon one of Marius' lieutenants came to the fore - Sulla. And it happened because of the slavery.

Latins in Italy already had it tough, but other Italians had it even tougher. Their lowly rights were exceeded in their meagreness only by their lack of wealth caused by the slave estates. In 90BC, they revolted in what would become known as the social war. Sulla, previously Marius' brilliant lieutenant, won the war essentially by allowing everybody in Italy to become a Roman citizen (about time). This social equality moved the loyalty of the people from the old social order (optimates) to that of the popular dictators (populares).

Meanwhile Marius seized Rome with his army and spent five days killing everybody. Not long after, Marius died. His colleague, Cinna, tried to revive the economy. But for Sulla, the allure of power was too great. After beating Mithridates he came back and totally butchered everybody in Italy. He particularly went after the rich senators and merchants whom he believed could be a threat to him. All the property he confiscated was used to pay his army, triggering a sort of wage inflation where soldiers began demanding more and more from their generals, while simultaneously ruining farms which would increasingly cut into the general's ability to pay. Few of these soldiers actually proved good farmers, and they began to grow restless.

Sulla instilled himself as dictator of Rome, and added new members to the senate to ensure he was kept there. By controlling the estates and the slaves that drove them, Sulla obtained direct control of Rome, rather than the indirect control of Marius. He could also easily pay his soldiers, even if the net result was more poverty.

Exactly as Sulla's reign would have predicted. Generals increasingly had to seize more and more estates through killing their owners to maintain the ever-increasing demands of their armies, creating ever greater poverty and thus greater impetus for more generals to come in and seize even more. This vicious cycle did not end until Octavius seized so much power and killed so many people after five brutal wars primarily against other Romans, that there was no more power to seize. He was the emperor, and took on the title Augustus, a century after the Gracchi brothers. This was the Pax Romana - the end of the vicious economic cycle of Romans killing each other.

It might seem strange that a shock to the labor market, significant though it was, would create so many profound changes. It illustrates why employment management is just as important on the supply side as it is on the demand, as the only people in Rome with any understanding of the economic forces at work were often among the first to be killed by the generals, who didn't want to share the bad news with their loyal armies.

But this consequence was inevitable. The republic was founded on the ideal of separation of powers, that guides every republic today. Without that, the whole republic is destroyed. Slavery provided the critical imbalance that toppled the scales of the balance in favor of one side, which soon - quite fatally - allowed it all to end.

The resolution is affirmed.

In my opponent's view, it was the loyalty of the armies that destroyed the republic. In mine, this was a consequence of slavery. If I thus prove that the reforms of Marius were driven by Rome's slavery laws, I win the debate.

Yes, they were a factor, but they were not the most significant factor by a long shot, for a number of reasons.

The same reforms could also be utilized by the senate. Pompey the Great, for example, who frequently utilized the reforms, opposed Julius Caesar in his campaign to take Rome, in an effort to protect the republic. The reforms did make armies more effective, but having a more effective military does not necessarily mean a decline in social or political order. Today's world is quite stable, at least compared to the Classical Era, despite improvements to military technology happening all the time. So while the Marian reforms were significant to history, they were not significant to the demise of the Roman republic. Military loyal to a general rather than a state would be a problem only if the generals themselves were disloyal to the republic.

Con defends that particular claim with his "privatization of the military" argument. In fact, technically, armies were still only recruited for one campaign (or one series of campaigns, such as Marius being called by the senate to fight both Jugurtha and the Germans) at a time - only that after the campaign, the general would inspire sufficient loyalty in his troops to be able to call upon them again if needed. This is why soldiers were still largely paid in land - so that they could have a place to settle and farm afterwards. That in turn was the impetus for the problem of good soldiers not always being good farmers, not disputed by con. Military was thusly not really privatized, but rather "privatization" is a convenient modern term to represent this loyalty. This is why, for example, when Pompey was charged with defending Rome, many of the soldiers who fought under him were veterans of Caesar's.

The main difference is in the mode of pay. Since pay would be given by the general and not the state, as recruitment had also been done by the general directly, the loyalty did shift somewhat to the general. But this, too, was a consequence of slaves.

First, slaves were the reason why people needed pay in the first place. Previously they had been living happy lives as farmers, and probably did not want to fight in the military. Now they had no choice as they had been driven from their places of work.

Second, slaves provided the means with which the soldiers could be paid. By seizing these estates the generals seized economic power.

All the important aspects of the Marian reforms were inspired directly by the problems associated with slave-run estates and a reduced price of labor.

There were a number of reasons, but the foremost among them was because of greed. If there was power to be taken from an elite, the generals had incentives to take it. It was not always this way.

A short time earlier, before the development of the system of latifundia, mighty generals like Cato had ample opportunity to march on Rome and yet did not. Before the slave-run estates almost every single general was loyal to the republic, and yet afterwards, almost every single general was disloyal. So when Marius did his power-grab, that was a natural consequence of the fact that power could now be taken simply by controlling the senate. The Gracchi and their loopholes had proven that the assemblies no longer controlled any real power. The fact that power was concentrated by the senate some decades previously and consolidated through the laws of economics, directly gave the generals some power to seize that literally had not been there previously. It would be as though, in modern America, Congress asserted sole power to rule the US, taking away any real power held by the senate, the courts, the executive branch etc etc to run the country. As I mentioned, by the time of Marius the republic had already collapsed in all but name to an unstable oligarchy.

This is important. Generals had controlled armies before, but only after slaves became a huge issue for Rome did the rules change to allow power to be seized by them easily. And that happened before Marius, with the senate's assertion of control and protection over the republic at the time of the Gracchi brothers, which was itself because they were able to do so. And for that, you have slavery to thank. The most important cause should be the first one, not further consequences that are related to the original.

A further reason, as I mentioned last round, was because seizing latifundia was required so that the generals could pay their armies. Because of the wage inflation, literally none of the great generals from the era were not guilty of this. Sulla's invention of proscriptions further solidified this.

Even if the army had never been reformed by anybody (which I don't believe - enabling the reforms made carrying them out a natural progression), the collapse of the republic was inevitable. Let me explain, because this is simple economics.

With the rise of latifundia, competition for primary goods became more imperfect in Rome, so that it became what economists call an oligopoly - the market being dominated by a smaller number of larger players. Senators already control economic and political power, with the latter (via precedent) being mostly premised on the former. Economic theory thus holds that the number of senators with any real economic power would gradually shrink to around three, due to the Rule of Three (which states all oligopolies will tend towards where the market is most efficient, which is usually at three producers). Even if nobody killed anybody and the military never got involved, economics strongly suggests that the republic would have been ruled by three people sooner or later. Probably the triumvirate. Now try to justify to me how putting control of the whole country into the hands of so few is in any way a republic.

There are some other complicating factors. If not for Marius, what would the mob in Rome have done? Would the issue of settlement ever be settled? Would they have joined some slave revolt, as that of Spartacus, or perhaps destroyed Rome from the inside during the Social War? These complex externalities are difficult to account for, and can't be explained by a statistical model in the way economics can. Nevertheless it's important to note most of these alternatives also result in the collapse of the republic. Having a large mob with a good reason to dislike the way things are is usually a good way to bring down a government. The conditions for the republic's collapse were already set right long before Marius by the power of slavery.

The resolution is affirmed.