This is the sixth part in a series on the Repetition of history. The first part dealt with Europe and Ancient Greece, the second part with France and Athens, the third with Germany and Macedon, the fourth with the rise of Roman and American Republics, and the fifth with the entrance into the Late Republican period.

"Of ourselves, this Roman story is told." -Will Durant

Roman society decayed as it left behind its traditional values, relied on foreign labor, and became urbanized and government-dependent, setting the stage for demagogues to manipulate the masses by promising them everything to gain power. Persuasive orators consolidated power by pitting sides against each other in class warfare, tearing at the fabric of the Roman Republic.

The already shaky Rome was destabilized further by the "reforms" of the Gracchi brothers, who were Ancient Roman versions of progressives like President Obama.. This section will draw extensively from the Roman history site unrv.com, which is admin'd by two authors of books on Ancient Rome, which distills information broadly enough to be suitable for a short blog entry.

Manipulating the 'head count' or the 'mob' with popular ideas was a powerful political tool, but none before had used it as effectively as the Gracchi, " we read on the UNRV website. "The Populares party took root in this Late Republican period, and the 'causes of the common man' (or political ambition guised by such causes) became a constant factor in the political wrangling of the capital."

The Populares were Rome's version of the Democratic Party, and their opponents, the Optimates, were the Republican faction.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus saw an opportunity not only to achieve their own political power, but to stabilize the inequality through reform and new laws benefiting the common people. Reasonable and noble concepts on the surface, however, were underlying with their own contempt for the Senate and optimate party. What could be seen on one side as an attempt to rectify a dangerous and debilitating social system was viewed on the other as nothing more than a power grab and a flagrant attack on the Republican institutional ideas of the time.

Ripped out of today's headlines.

Tiberius Gracchus, upon achieving the office of Tribune, proposed a limit on how much land one could own and the redistribution of excess lands to the poor. Flaunting custom, he took the bill to the citizen assemblies rather than the Senate. It was opposed, and Tiberius enacted measures "effectively shutting down the government until his own bill could be dealt with."

The bill was approved but proved expensive, so Tiberius proposed raising taxes on the wealthy.

The Senate once again opposed the concept, but was not willing to risk Tiberius taking the matter before the Plebes. Reluctantly, this issue was passed, and Gracchus' continued direct challenges to Senatorial authority was backing himself into a corner. He used the people as his mob, threatening the Senate into supporting his bills.

In other words, he was engaging in class warfare.

Despite being termed out, he ran for tribune again. He was accused of seeking a dictatorship and violating the Roman constitution. Enraged by his "constant mocking of Roman law and tradition" the Senators took up arms against him and killed him.

His brother, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus took up Tiberius's causes.

In the position of harnessing the power of the Roman masses, Gaius had far wider reaching plans for administrative reforms and social equity issues.

He won over the mob by renewing Tiberius's land confiscation laws and extended the grain dole to the poor urban masses.

"It was a measure shocking to old Roman ideas of self-reliance, and destined to play a vital role in Roman history," Durant writes. "In any case, the law turned the poor freemen of Rome from client supporters of the aristocracy into defenders of the Gracchi, as later of Marius and Caesar; it was the foundation stone of that democratic movement which would reach its peak in Clodius and die at Actium [when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire]."

Just as President Obama resorted to stimulus bills in the wake of the financial crisis, Gracchus "enriched contractors and reduced umemployment, by a program of road building in every part of Italy."

The conservative party saw Gracchus as "a demagogic tyrant extending his personal power through the reckless distribution of state property and funds," a charge that is leveled by modern conservatives against our president.

In a stunning comparison to our modern times, like Obama, Gracchus then sought to extend citizenship to non-citizens. Gracchus wanted to extend it to Latins, and Obama to Latinos.

...Gauis next proposed a law to incorporate all the Latin rights citizens into full citizenship. Unfortunately for Gaius and his allies, this move was extremely unpopular with not only the Senate, but the head count of Rome as well. The lower classes of Roman citizenship would be forced to share their land allotments with the Italians, and the Senate saw an opportunity to strike at Gaius. A senate backed Tribune, Livius Drusus, began to propose laws far more liberal and beneficial to the Roman head count, while decisively against the Italian allies. While not a position traditionally backed by the Senate it was at least not as harmful as complete inclusion of the Italian tribes would have been. It had the added benefit of keeping the Roman mob happy, while temporarily replacing the Gracchus status of popular champion with their own man, Drusus.

Gracchus lost his next election and led a protest in the streets of Rome. It turned into an armed revolt, was suppressed by the military, and he ordered his slave to kill himself.

The city mob that he had befriended made no protest when his corpse, and those of his followers, were flung into the river; it was busy plundering his house.

"With the fast rise and fall of the Brothers Gracchi, the state was set for the rise of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and the eventual last dictator, Gaius Julius Caesar," the UNRV website states.

We found ourselves about midway through the Gracchi saga in the repeated history of Rome. Our fractured society is taken advantage of by demagogues who manipulate the "mob" with appealing promises. Like the Gracchi brothers, President Obama appeals to the masses through redistribution of wealth and seeks to extend citizenship to noncitizens. He flaunts law and the Constitution, even declaring that American citizens don't have a right to a trial by jury before being summarily executed.

If history is any guide--and it is--we can imagine America's fate by examining how the Roman Republic died.

This is the fifth part in a series on the Repetition of history. The first part dealt with Europe and Ancient Greece, the second part with France and Athens, the third with Germany and Macedon, and the fourth with the rise of Roman and American Republics.

"Of ourselves, this Roman story is told." -Will Durant

By 146 BC, Greece came under Roman hegemony. But while Rome conquered Greece physically, Greece conquered Rome mentally, transmitting its religion, art, and philosophy into the Roman mind. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. "Greece, although captured, took its wild conqueror captive," the Roman Horace famously tells us. The Greek Zeus became the Roman Jupiter, Ares became Mars, and Athena became Minerva.

Similarly, Europe passed to America its Christian heritage and philosophic base.  Early Americans were typified as individualist, rugged farmers, just as Ancient Roman republicans were. The Romans first imported stoicism, then died in Epicureanism, just as Americans are now dying.

Will Durant tells us:

This Greek invasion, in literature, philosophy, religion, science, and art, this revolution in manners, morals, and blood, filled old-fashioned Romans with disgust and dread.

One only needs to replace Greek with European and Roman with American to see the parallel to our day.

One man typified the conservative opposition to decaying Roman morals--Marcus Porcius Cato.

Cato "showed all the old Roman qualities," Durant writes in Caesar and Christ. "[He] loved the soil, worked hard, saved carefully, lived with conservative simplicity, and yet talked as brilliantly as a radical."

Cato, whose name has been borrowed by the modern-day libertarian think tank, and other conservatives decried the "replacement of mos maiorum (the old ways) with Greek ideas and ways."

For Roman society was changing. It was becoming more urban and relied more and more on foreign slave labor, who "displaced peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns."

While not forced labor, modern America has its own working subclass--illegal aliens, who do the jobs formerly done by citizens. We'll see later that the matter of extending citizenship to non-Romans was a destabilizing influence in that society.

The average Roman had financial difficulties as well. "The little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay," Durant writes. "Slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums."

Any of you have underwater mortgages our student loan debt?

Rather than till the fields, Romans preferred to "watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheatre, receive cheap corn from the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promise, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass."

Instead of amphitheatres, we have television, instead of the corn dole we have welfare, and many people still sell their votes to the highest promiser.

Ancient Romans found that it was "almost as profitable to be idle as to toil." Just as now, many people put off looking for a job because unemployment or welfare makes it easier to stay at home rather than work all day.

Thus the stage was set in Rome for demagogues to manipulate the masses for personal gain, which is the point we find ourselves in modern America.

This is very different than the culture that had been developed by the Ancient Greeks to the East. There, in the Greek polis, the state was crucial in the Greek character. All of he Greeks worked together for the good of the state. It was the state that would raise children and make them citizens.

But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman State.

This is the third part in a series on the Repetition of history. The first part dealt with Europe and Ancient Greece and the second part with France and Athens.

We last left off:

The Delian League, the Aetolian League, and the Peloponnesian League gave way to the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. As Sparta and Athens interrupted their wars with a joint defense against Persia, France fought England for a Hundred Years, then united with it twice to repel an existential threat from a fellow nation on the Continent.

That threat was from Germans, who Durant tells us are the new Macedonians. Philip II of Macedon systematically invaded city-states in Attica--tribes in Illryia, Thessaly, Thrace, and Thebes, before uniting the region under his rule (except for Athens' rival, Sparta) with the eventual defeat of Athens. Twenty-three centuries later, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Denmark, before solidifying all of Europe (except for France's rival, England) under his rule with the defeat of France. Philip's son, Alexander the Great, initiated the decline of his the empire by plunging eastward into Persian and India, just as Hitler's empire began to crumble with his defeat by Russia on the Eastern Front.

In 200 BC, Rome declared war on Macedon to liberate Greece, winning three years later only to withdraw their forces. In 1941 the United States went to war with Germany, liberating Europe three years later, only to withdraw their forces.

That brings us to our third great comparison. Athens is France, Macedonians are Germans, and the Greek peninsula is modern-day Europe.

"We are the Romans," Durant said. "We are the Romans who imported Greek civilization; we imported European civilization."

Rome was heavily influenced by Greece, its cultural mother. She learned from her, looked up to her, took care of her when she was poisoned by her excesses, sought independence from her, yet ultimately became her. Rome's undoing was the ultimate Greek tragedy--a life simultaneously given vigor and decay by the same Greek virtue.

Before Rome could fall, however, it needed to be created.

This is the second part in a series on repetition of history. The first part compared Europe and Ancient Greece.

When we think of Classical Greece, we usually think of Athens, the most enduring city-state of the time. Athens--the cradle of Western Civilization, the birthplace of democracy, and the mother of philosophy. This is where Durant's comparison of Ancient Greece to modern France begins--it was the French that laid the framework for Europe and gave birth to the Enlightenment, paving the way for another overseas republic to save its cultural mother.

Just as we think of France as the epitome of culture and sophistication, the ancient world regarded Athens--home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--as the center of the Western culture. Athens gave the ancient world democracy, and France--through Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu--revived it in the present. Interestingly, both French and Athenian democracy descended into despotism at the hands of twice-exiled dictators--Peisistratos and Napoleon.

The French defined Europe. The basis for the modern borders of Europe was created by Charlemagne, the king of the Franks (from which we derive "France"). He reformed Europe from the ashes of Roman civilization into its own empire in 800 AD. It was divided upon his death, forming the foundation of modern France and Germany. Up to the present time, the French and Germans, along with the English, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, Flemish, Scandinavians, and every other polity on the continent engaged in recurring alliances and wars.

Athens also vacillated between warring and allying with its many neighbors that occupied the Attic promontory that juts into the Mediterranean, many centuries before the French William the Conqueror fought the English King Harold, Philip II fought John, Philip VI fought Edward III, Charles d'Albret fought Henry V, Louis XII fought Henry VIII, and Napoleon fought the Duke of Wellington. France warred with Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, Russia, and Sweden, and just about every other European nation. Both Athens and France allied with neighbors to fight other neighbors in a game of constantly shifting alliances. The Delian League, the Aetolian League, and the Peloponnesian League gave way to the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. As Sparta and Athens interrupted their wars with a joint defense against Persia, France fought England for a Hundred Years, then united with it twice to repel an existential threat from a fellow nation on the Continent.

In the next part in this series, we'll see how the Macedonians posed the same threat to Greece as Germany did to Europe in the 20th century--with the same results.