Читать книгу Why Rome Fell - Michael Arnheim - Страница 53

Until Augustus’s accession, the power structure of Roman history conformed to a general pattern shared by many other states, namely monarchy succeeded by oligarchy (minority rule) or aristocracy (hereditary minority rule), minority rule being the “default” form of government throughout history. Some modern writers on the Roman Republic, as we have seen, have managed to misunderstand this whole process, first, by dismissing much of the earlier evidence out of hand and then by going to the other extreme and uncritically accepting a passage of Polybius taken out of context as indicating that the Republic could possibly be regarded as a direct democracy, which is the exact opposite of the true situation.

Seeing the Roman Republic as at all democratic gives one a completely false impression of what it was like. But, as we have seen, modern writers who take this view of the Republic tend to compound their error by also adopting too uncritical a reading of Augustus’s autobiography and misinterpreting that regime as democratic to some extent as well, a view which is wide of the mark, to say the least.