Augustus Didn't Kill the Roman Republic—It Was Already Dead
- Paul D. Wilke
- Apr 28
- 13 min read
Updated: May 6
Professor Michelle Berenfeld's recent article in The Atlantic blames the Senate for letting Augustus destroy the Roman Republic. Having just immersed myself in Roman history for the last month while writing about Tiberius Gracchus, I feel she left a lot of nuance out in a strained effort to connect those events with what's happening today in the United States.
That said, I recognize that writing for a general-interest publication necessarily demands brevity and broad strokes. How do you cover such a complex topic in 1,100 words? You really can't. Still, even within those constraints, certain truths should not be glossed over, especially when making larger claims about the dangers of autocratic drift that all republics face.
In this case, the brutal realities of Rome's late republican collapse are too important—and too instructive—to be sacrificed for the sake of a clear analogy to the current situation. The Augustus-versus-Senate dynamic she describes is designed to draw modern parallels, but in doing so, she distorts the history and strips away critical context. What we get are oversimplifications that break down when examined more closely.
For example, she writes, "He [Augustus] took control of the government gradually but completely, with the support of those wealthy aristocrats who valued fortune above principle and with the complaisance of a population exhausted by conflict and disillusioned by a system that favored the rich and connected."
There is some truth here. Yes, over two decades, Augustus took over the government and did so with the cooperation of Rome's elites. However, these were his hand-picked elites, not independently elected politicians who could afford to stand on principles. Those types were all gone by then. Anyone who pushed back was purged early on in Augustus's career, if not earlier, by Julius Caesar. Augustus molded the Senate into a fan club of submissive puppet men.
There actually is a modest modern parallel we can draw from this. As we've seen in recent months, someone appointed into a powerful position with no other qualification than unswerving loyalty to the Boss does not need to concern themselves with republican principles. They don't get paid to do that. They're paid to do what they're told. Sound familiar?
Ok, so far, so good.
But Berenfeld implies that the Senate could have done more to stop Augustus, but didn't for selfish reasons, or because they "valued fortune above principle." That drastically underplays how powerless the Senate had become by the mid-40s BCE.
Before he became Augustus in 27 BCE, he was Octavian, the warlord who ruled Rome. And even before Octavian entered the scene, the Senate's power was already in terminal decline. After taking Rome in 49 BCE, Caesar set to work expanding and packing the Senate with men who owed him everything.
Later, through purges and careful appointments, Octavian gradually reshaped it into a smaller, more manageable, and loyal institution. This was no longer the Senate of former times, independent, able to assert itself, and shape policy.
Not even Brutus and Cassius, Caesar's assassins and self-proclaimed saviors of the Republic, could turn back the clock. After murdering the dictator, they discovered, much to their surprise, that the people detested them for what they had done. They fled east and set themselves up as rival warlords to challenge Antony and Octavian. Not for long. By the end of 42 BCE, both were dead after the Battle of Philippi.
Unlike in America, Rome's elites lived under the constant shadow of intimidation and violence, something Berenfeld acknowledges. If you want to imagine what this might look like nowadays, picture an American Congress where enemies are purged by the President and replaced with only those of proven loyalty.
What kind of Republic does that produce? Not a real one. So it was in Rome: a rubber-stamp Senate designed to lend a facade of legitimacy to an emerging autocracy. You obeyed, or else you might part ways with your head in a most unpleasant manner. As bad as it appears today, we are still far from such a scenario.
But just how powerless and terrorized was the Senate, since Berenfeld blames it for not doing anything?
The Role of Terror in Hollowing Out the Roman Senate
In 44 BCE, right after Caesar's assassination, nineteen-year-old Octavian was just another flexing warlord in a landscape teeming with them. Cicero quipped that the boy had nothing going for him but his status as Caesar's heir and access to his vast fortune. He had one other intangible working for him: a brilliant, utterly ruthless, Machiavellian mind for someone so young. Cicero would soon discover this to his regret.
One of the first things Octavian did was get himself a loyal army. Smart move. Rule number one for the enterprising Roman warlord was to raise an illegal army, and then, at sword point, force the government to legalize it. That wasn't difficult. The murdered dictator's angry veterans flocked to his banner. The lavish pay he offered helped as well.
The few senatorial legions in Italy promptly defected when Octavian offered them more pay than the Senate.
Then, backed by thousands of battle-hardened soldiers, he marched on Rome and demanded to be made consul. The Senate had no army and therefore no choice but to do what he demanded. Octavian thus became a consul at the unprecedented age of nineteen.
Now jump ahead a year to 43 BCE, and Octavian has allied with two of his rival warlords, Antony and Lepidus—the so-called Second Triumvirate. The three came together at Mutina in northern Italy and divided the Republic like a pie into three spheres of influence.
And what about the Senate? It was not consulted. Why would it be? It was irrelevant. Not having an army meant no seat at the table. Do you see the recurring theme here?
This was the reality of late republican politics that Berenfeld's article avoids because she's intent on laying the blame on the Senate for not being an effective check and balance. But in truth, at least from the moment Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, that is, six years before Octavian appeared on the scene, brute force dictated policy, not idealized checks and balances or hallowed republican institutions.
After agreeing to terms at Mutina, the triumvirs headed to Rome with their armies and forced the Popular Assembly to ratify this naked power grab into law. Once again, the defenseless Senate could do nothing but wring its hands.
It was about to get much worse. Berenfeld glides over just how much worse it got and the ensuing aftermath, commenting, "In their defense, Rome's senators legitimately feared death if they broke with him; Augustus certainly had a lot of people killed."
That's an understatement. He certainly did kill a lot of people, and this is a key point she doesn't elaborate on beyond this passing comment.
The new triumvirs generated a list of enemies to be killed. Caesar had made the mistake of pardoning his enemies, including Brutus and many of the senators who stabbed him to death. The triumvirs weren't going to repeat that error. Clemency might get you killed. The man you pardoned today might stick a dagger in your back tomorrow. Caesar was Exhibit A for that possibility.
Over three hundred senators and a few thousand wealthy equestrians were marked for death. Being on the proscription list meant losing all legal protections, and those proscribed could be executed on the spot by anyone if caught. It was the Roman equivalent of The Purge.
Bounties of 25,000 denarii—a considerable sum to the average Roman—were paid upon presentation of the victim's severed head to the authorities. Slaves who betrayed their proscribed masters won their freedom. No one was safe. Antony gave up his maternal uncle, and Lepidus his own brother.
Octavian betrayed his old ally Cicero to Antony, who despised him. Bounty hunters soon caught up with the old orator and decapitated him; his head and the hand that had written such insulting things about Antony were nailed to the Rostra. Antony's wife, Fulvia, reportedly took her hairpins out and poked Cicero's gaping tongue with them.
It was a macabre time to be alive.
I think of Cicero, a giant of a Roman and as flawed as the crumbling Republic he represented, as symbolizing the last credible defender of the old order. But I don't want to imply he ever had a chance of turning the tide. He didn't. It was a lost cause by then. It's not a stretch to say that his death marked the end of the Senate as an institution capable of even minimal resistance against warlords like Octavian and Antony.
Terror triumphed. The Senate cowered in impotence; its remaining shreds of authority mounted on the Rostra, a sad row of decapitated and decomposing heads, great Cicero's among them. Game over.
Everything the Senate did (or didn't do) after the proscriptions originated from this position of weakness and intimidation. I'm not alone in this assessment. Historian Ronald Syme, who labeled Octavian's behavior during the proscriptions as that of "a chill and mature terrorist," ends his chapter on the proscriptions with this epitaph for the Republic:
“The Republic had been abolished. Whatever the outcome of the armed struggle, it could never be restored. Despotism ruled, supported by violence and confiscation. The best men were dead or proscribed. The Senate was packed with ruffians, the consulate, once the reward of civic virtue, now became the recompense of craft or crime.”
Augustan biographer Anthony Everitt pegs the Republic's last gasp a year later, in 42 BCE, after Brutus and Cassius lost at Philippi: "Philippi, following hard on the heels of the proscription, marked the end of the Republic.”
Either way, the Republic was finished by 42 BCE.
Reassessing the Roman Senate's Complicity
If you want a modern analogy for what this looked like in practice, think of the Augustan Senate as similar in stature and power to the USSR's Supreme Soviet under Stalin. Was there any scenario where the Supreme Soviet pushed back on Stalin? No—it was ruled by terror and staffed by yes-men, just like the Augustan Senate.
Keep that in mind because Berenfeld also claims, "At first, the Senate let Augustus bend rules and push boundaries. It allowed him to accumulate domestic powers and bring unqualified members of his family into government. The Senate stood by while Augustus removed enemies from his path, and supported him when he put a self-serving spin on recent actions."
What Senate is she referring to? The Senate was in no position to "let" or "allow" anything. She seems to say that the Senate could have chosen to stand in his way. It was only a matter of principle, or lack thereof, that prevented it from doing so. But that was not the case. It simply could not resist anymore; this remained a stubbornly consistent fact from 42 BCE until Augustus's death 57 years later in 14 CE.
Berenfeld goes on to make another dubious comparison between Rome and America: “The checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution look very much like those that were in place in Rome before Augustus. There were none after him.”
So, before Augustus, checks and balances? And after Augustus, none? This is not accurate. Augustus wasn't to blame. He couldn't get rid of something that no longer existed. The golden age of republican administration that the Greek historian Polybius praised in the second century BCE had long ago vanished.
Whatever remaining checks and balances existed by the late Republic were between competing armies, not republican institutions. You have to go back a long way before Augustus's time for her comparison to hold—before Sulla, certainly, and probably all the way back to the Gracchi brothers (133-122 BCE).
The real erosion of republican authority began long before Augustus held sole power, a byproduct of civil war, political violence, and institutional decay spanning a century and culminating in Caesar's dictatorship. Augustus did not break apart a functioning system; he seized a failed one and then reforged it into something else.
In 27 BCE, several years after Antony's defeat left Octavian the sole master of Rome, he magnanimously offered to resign all his positions and restore the Republic. He did not do this in good faith. He had no intention of relinquishing supreme power.
He then orchestrated a carefully staged performance, with his pet Senate begging him to stay on as Rome's leader and protector of the peace. Only he, it seemed, could keep the chaos at bay. By having the Senate plead for his continued rule, he posed not as a tyrant seizing power, but as a reluctant servant of the state, dutifully answering Rome's call.
From this moment, Octavian became forever known as Augustus. One might condemn the Senate for enabling this to happen, but it's like blaming the Supreme Soviet for letting Stalin do what he wanted. What else could it do?
More importantly, few wanted a return to never-ending civil wars and domestic strife that had been the lived reality for Octavian's generation, his parents' generation, his grandparents' generation, and even his great-grandparents' generations. The people were exhausted.
Reassessing the Augustan Legacy
There's an underlying assumption Berenfeld leans into: that a republic is always better than a monarchy. Unless you are an outlier like Curtis Yarvin, most people accept this as a truism today. Therefore, by this modern default, Rome's drift from republic to monarchy must be seen as a descent from better to worse, a cautionary tale comparable to the rise of modern dictatorships like Hitler or Mussolini.
This is an overly simplistic association mixed with a bit of presentism. Even before Caesar's dictatorship, never mind Augustus's, Rome was no longer a true republic. Voting in the Republic's last decades was as rigged as it would later be under the Caesars. In any case, voting is worthless if you don't have basic safety and security. Rome lacked both for far too long, while we take them for granted. We should remember that before getting too judgmental.
Augustus responded to a legitimacy crisis that had plagued the Republic since the Senate murdered Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. In the end, he succeeded where others failed. He was the one, it turned out, who did keep the chaos at bay. He did bring peace and stability—no, not forever, no political order lasts forever—but for two centuries. That's not bad.
Augustus merely stopped pretending that the old Republic could be fixed. That didn't mean he threw it all out and made himself king. Instead, he allowed the republican trappings to continue. Magistrates still served, elections took place (though tightly controlled), and aristocrats still governed provinces—just not the ones with armies, of course.
The unique fix to Rome's dysfunction seems obvious in retrospect. There needed to be one man at the top who held complete power to keep it all glued together. Why? Because Rome's elites had proven time after time after time that they could not govern themselves without trying to kill each other.
Of course, monarchy carries risks. Berenfeld points out terrible emperors like Caligula and Nero, and she's right. I would add Domitian and Commodus to the list. Yet, the Empire was remarkably stable for the first two centuries after Augustus, and most emperors were competent or guided by competent men.
Was the Empire Worse Than the Republic?
Anticipating my unoriginal defense of the new Augustan political order, Berenfeld argues that the Empire he founded was worse than the Republic that preceded it.
"The Romans were nearly always at war; their celebrated expansion was achieved by military subjugation of foreign lands and harsh repression of those they conquered."
Not really. Much of Rome's foreign expansion occurred during the republican period (c. 202–27 BCE), not the early imperial years. Augustus fought wars, it's true. Yet he also stabilized the Empire's borders by the end of his reign, advancing them to the Danube and Rhine in the north, where they locked into place for four centuries. He also annexed Egypt, which became one of the Empire's wealthiest and most stable provinces for over six hundred years. That's about it. Apart from Britain and Dacia (modern-day Romania), the Empire added little after his reign.
The Romans were brutal in war—no argument there—but once the fighting ended, the brutality generally ended with it. Many of the regions they conquered—Gaul, Spain, Britain, Africa, Syria, the Balkans—became not just provinces but flourishing and civilized core parts of the Empire. They stood for centuries as enduring symbols of the Pax Romana.
Provincial governance also improved. During the Republic's expansion after the Second Punic War, annexed provinces were little more than piggy banks for corrupt governors to plunder at will. Under imperial rule, governors were held more accountable to the emperor; the results, relatively speaking, were better.
Most crucially, compared to the collapsing Republic, civil wars were rare during the Pax Romana era (c. 27 BCE–192 CE). Only a few brief periods of internal conflict rocked the Empire during this long stretch—nothing like the relentless parade of factional bloodletting that defined the Republic's last century.
Life during the early Empire was far better for most of Rome's subjects than it had been under the failing Republic. That's what people wanted—peace, security, predictability, and stability. I don't blame them for preferring those over meaningless elections after what they had been through. This should not be a controversial statement.
Modern historians broadly agree that Augustus's reign ushered in a long period of unprecedented internal calm compared to the disorder of the late Republic. For most provincial subjects, the machinery of government—provincial governors, tax collectors, judges, and garrisons—kept functioning regardless of who wore the purple in Rome.
It's also worth noting how, even after the reigns of the worst emperors—men like Caligula and Nero—there was never any serious movement to reestablish the Republic.
They knew better.
Final Thoughts
Augustus deserves the credit for this. He didn't destroy the Republic; he buried it and built something stronger atop its ruins that worked better for the Roman people. Whatever republican ideals had once existed were already gone when he began his long career, corroded by violence, runaway ambition, and systemic failure.
Later, after defeating Antony, he recognized that the old forms could not be resurrected—and so he replaced them with a more stable system that, for all its faults, prospered for generations.
Berenfeld's linking of Augustus's rise to power with modern threats to democracy underestimates the scale of Rome's collapse. It just doesn't work. Augustus was not guilty of killing off a functioning republican state; he stepped into a maelstrom left by a century of institutional decay. He then became the maelstrom before taming it. The Senate that "blessed" his power had long since ceased to be a meaningful check on anything. It had become nothing but a tool to further a strongman's ambitions.
The late-stage Roman Republic bears little resemblance to our own, shaky though it seems today. We still elect our leaders. Our elections are still fair. Normalized political violence remains the exception, not the rule. America has endured one civil war in two and a half centuries, not recurring ones every few years as Rome did in the first century BCE.
Turning to the past can help us better understand the present—I'm all for it—but not this way, not the way Berenfeld does in this article.
Sources
Everitt, Anthony. Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. Random House, 2007.
Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. Yale University Press, 2015.
Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1939.
Watts, Edward J. Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. Basic Books, an Imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, 2020.
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Paul Wilke 28 April 2025
Dry Grove, Il
