Vastly superior to Tom Holland—and vastly, vastly superior to the likes of Niall Ferguson—on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic: Edward J. Watts: Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465093825: "If the early and middle centuries of Rome’s republic show how effective this system could be, the last century of the Roman Republic reveals the tremendous dangers that result when political leaders cynically misuse these consensus-building mechanisms to obstruct a republic’s functions. Like politicians in modern republics, Romans could use vetoes to block votes on laws, they could claim the presence of unfavorable religious conditions to annul votes they disliked, and they could deploy other parliamentary tools to slow down or shut down the political process if it seemed to be moving too quickly toward an outcome they disliked...
...When used as intended, these tools helped promote negotiations and political compromises by preventing majorities from imposing solutions on minorities. But, in Rome as in our world, politicians could also employ such devices to prevent the Republic from doing what its citizens needed. The widespread misuse of these tools offered the first signs of sickness in Rome’s republic.
Romans had avoided political violence for three centuries before a series of political murders rocked the Republic in the 130s and 120s BC. Once mob violence infected Roman politics, however, the institutions of the Republic quickly lost their ability to control the contexts and content of political disputes. Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war. And, two generations later, Augustus ruled as Roman emperor. When the Republic lost the ability to regulate the rewards given to political victors and the punishments inflicted on the losers of political conflicts, Roman politics became a zero-sum game in which the winner reaped massive rewards and the losers often paid with their lives. Above all else, the Roman Republic teaches the citizens of its modern descendants the incredible dangers that come along with condoning political obstruction and courting political violence...
Pyrrhus now understood precisely what sort of society he had decided to fight. The Roman Republic was simultaneously a powerful state and a frightened one that recognized it could not afford to lose any war it fought. It had a unique ability to build political consensus among leading Romans and Roman allies as well as a great capacity to mobilize armies of citizen soldiers to fight to defend it. It also possessed a powerful system of incentives that rewarded loyalty with honors that the Republic alone could generate. This was a state quite unlike anything that Pyrrhus had ever encountered—and quite unlike anything the world had ever seen. Its citizen armies looked inexhaustible, its aristocracy appeared indivisible, and its leaders seemed unbribeable. Pyrrhus had failed to beat the Romans quickly and he now understood that he could not defeat them through treachery. He had no choice but to fight on...
By 211, the Republic had filled twenty-five legions and deployed armies in Italy, Spain, Sicily, and Greece as well as two fleets positioned to guard against crossings of troops from Africa and Greece. This meant that perhaps 70 percent of the entire citizen population between the ages of seventeen and thirty had enrolled in the army. They did not sign up for a short stint either. Many of these recruits would remain in the army for the duration of the war; in the case of the survivors of Cannae, they were obliged to serve until Rome’s final victory. The Mediterranean world had never before seen a state with so large a population mobilize its citizens so completely...
Within Rome, the elite of the Republic continued to take to heart Appius Claudius’s idea that Rome must fight until it wins the wars it enters. They also embraced Fabricius’s notion that Roman ambition should be channeled toward honorable service as an officeholder and general rather than to the accumulation of wealth....
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