One may naturally object that if the Republic were still in a full state of health in 50 it ought not to have collapsed in the subsequent civil strife, any more than it did in the 80s. But the difference between these two struggles was vast in extent, scale, and duration. It was not Italy alone that became engaged, but the resources and personnel of far-flung provinces. The foreign clients of Rome's leaders were brought into play, transforming a political battle into a Mediterranean war. The campaigns of Pompeius, of Caesar, and of other Roman conquerors in previous decades had enormously increased the dependents and beneficiaries of leading nobiles [aristocrats]. In Africa, Spain, Gaul, and the East countless numbers were dragooned into action by Roman patrons who summoned repayment on political debts and obligations. The involvement of disparate elements in no way derived from attitudes toward the Roman Republic. But their participation gave to two decades of warfare a massiveness and destructiveness that rendered the old order irrevocable.

Roman behavior was conventional, on the whole, rather than novel. The continuities weighed more heavily than the innovations. The late Republic looked more to the past than to the future. Aristocratic politics had changed little. The noble houses remained at the center of affairs, exercising control through familial connections and expedient groupings. The old games were played not only by so-called conservatives but also by Pompey, by Crassus, and even by Caesar. The jockeying for position and the rival ambitions were standard fare in Republican history. When Pompey amassed a potent lineup of senatorial connections, a reaction set in, as it had so often in the past; groupings re-formed and the Pompeian cause fragmented. Although the arrangement known as the "first triumvirate" gathered considerable influence, it evoked equally formidable opposition and split its own following. The faction of Cato [the Younger] boasted success in checkmating the triumvirs, but could not itself dominate senatorial politics. Overextension of political alliances generally brought greater divisions and splintering. The system itself resisted major groupings. Julius Caesar hoped to circumvent the roadblocks by attracting adherents from among novi homines [new men], equites [equestrians], municipal families, and men from the lower ranks of the aristocracy. That fact and not any revolutionary designs prompted the senatorial stiffening against the proconsul of Gaul.

It will not be inferred that all was sedate and untroubled in the Ciceronian era . . . Of course, there were elements that shared but little in the available benefits . . . : urban dwellers trapped in high-rent tenements, casual laborers dependent on insecure and underpaid employment, small farmers stripped of land and livelihood by civil strife and devastations of the countryside, the indebted classes victimized by an insecure financial structure. Employment in the army, increased pay, and the availability of the donativa [bonus paid to soldiers] and booty relieved some of the distress; so also did governmental action in the areas of grain supply and distribution and the allocation of landed property. But that could not have solved all of the problems. Aristocratic patrons looked out for the interests of their clients, as was politically expedient, but not so as to alter significantly the living standards of the proletariat and the deprived. Economic exploitation of the provincials by Rome's governing class reached a peak of avarice and ruthlessness in the late Republic. Such features make the period rather less than an object of admiration or envy.

Fundamental change did not receive consideration. A reconstitution of the social and political structure was unthinkable for nobiles and plebs [common people] alike. Reforms, when they came, were generally piecemeal and unconnected, prompted by ad hoc situations, often induced by considerations of politics rather than humanity or justice. The result presented a patchwork of decrees, proposals, statutes, and administrative enactments, many of them ineffectual and of brief duration, but also some significant and enduring legislation. In a sense, the most arresting feature of the late Republic is not lawlessness but an obsession with legalisms. From the time of Sulla on, a mass of resolutions and statutory law interpreted and reinterpreted the mos maiorum [ancestral traditions], setting the context for many of the era's political struggles.