When the winter comes and the fog clears, those of us who live near the Carlsbad coast north of San Diego can see Navy ships traverse the channel separating Catalina and San Clemente Islands from the mainland. The vessels conduct maneuvers in those waters, and even (those in the know sometimes whisper) chase Chinese submarines from our beaches. I have long felt a particular pride watching those ships designed, paid for, and manned by Americans because they represent how all of us, together, contribute to our country’s protection.
I felt something very different when I looked out at the channel during the last weekend of January. The USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault ship, sat off our coast while regular alerts about Alex Pretti’s killing popped up on my phone. As I read about U.S. agents killing another citizen, I wondered for the first time whether our leaders might decide to use the aircraft on the Makin Island against a politically inconvenient group of U.S. citizens whose lives the planes had been designed to protect.
My alarm arose from my work as a Roman historian, which has shown me that a powerful nation can make the shift from protecting to attacking its citizens. And I know it can happen very quickly—as it did in the first century B.C.E., when the angry, ambitious consul Sulla turned Romans against one another to advance his personal political goals.
For nearly 400 years, starting in the fifth century B.C.E., the Roman Republic had refrained from using its armies against Roman citizens, because Romans believed that all citizens were equal political stakeholders in their state. “A Republic,” (res publica), as Cicero once wrote, “is the property of the people … joined to one another by a consensus about law and the common good.” Quite literally, the Latin term res publica meant all Romans owned the state. Leaders had no right to order some Romans to use deadly weapons against others.
As Rome’s economy grew increasingly unequal in the second century B.C.E., a series of political tensions created conditions for that to change. The murders of the populist Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C.E. and his brother Gaius in 121 B.C.E. brought politically motivated violence to Roman life, but that fighting involved civilians rather than soldiers. Then, in the century’s final decade, Romans elected the general Marius to win a difficult war in Numidia. Breaking with centuries of Roman precedent, Marius recruited soldiers who needed money, then used his financial leverage to send them into the streets to intimidate Romans who opposed his policies.
It took less than 20 years for Marius’ brand of intimidation to turn into outright attacks against civilians by soldiers. In 88 B.C.E., Rome awarded the consul Sulla a lucrative military command to fight Mithridates, the king of Pontus, in Asia Minor and Greece, but allies of Marius instead forced a vote to transfer the command to Marius. Fighting broke out, Sulla fled the meeting—and, eventually the city— and the vote went to Marius.
Enraged and terrified, Sulla traveled to his army, called an assembly of his men, “spoke of the indignity put upon him” in Rome, and “urged them to be ready to obey his orders.” The soldiers, the historian Appian wrote, “understood what he meant”—namely, that Sulla wanted them to seize back the power he had lost. Fearing “that they would miss the campaign” that promised them great riches, “they uttered boldly what Sulla desired and ordered him to lead them to Rome.”
The enlisted men’s willingness to attack fellow citizens horrified the officers who served under Sulla; all but one abandoned their posts and fled to the city “because they could not accept leading an army against their homeland.” But Sulla, wanting revenge, cared little for the rights of his fellow citizens or the Republican principles that protected them.
Quite literally, the Latin term Res Publica meant all Romans owned the state. Leaders had no right to order some Romans to use deadly weapons against others.
Reaching Rome, Sulla’s men found a city filled with civilians shocked to see a professional army belonging to all citizens of the Republic daring to attack its center of government. Ordinary Romans barred the city’s gates and fought Sulla’s forces hard, taking up positions on apartment rooftops and bombarding the attackers with projectiles. Sulla “erupted in a passion and, having surrendered to his anger,” ordered his archers to fire burning arrows at the assailants. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Roman citizens lost their homes and lives because of their brave fight for their Republic’s principles.
The city quickly fell under Sulla’s control. He then condemned a small group of his most hated opponents to death and set off for his command in Greece. Almost as quickly, however, his opponents mobilized their own army, marched on Rome, began their own set of mass executions of political opponents, and launched a six-year civil war.
In this war, Roman generals grew comfortable using Republican combat power against other Romans. In 82 B.C.E., for example, Sulla took over the Italian city of Praeneste after a long siege, in which he deployed the full technical and destructive capacities of the Roman army. When the city fell, his generals marched every person out of its gates, pardoned the citizens who had come there from Rome to help in the city’s defense, and then, Appian reports, had their archers “shoot down to the last man” all the Roman citizens who lived in the city and surrounding areas. “The town, which was extremely rich at that time, [Sulla] gave over to plunder.” After looting all moveable goods, Sulla distributed Praeneste’s land and houses to his soldiers.
When Sulla finally recaptured Rome, he summoned the senate to the Temple of Bellona, a shrine dedicated to the goddess who embodied the brutality and destruction of war, to tell the senators he was assuming the office of dictator so he could restore the Republic. They listened in terror as Roman soldiers tortured thousands of Roman citizens to death in the circus adjacent to the temple.
Looking out my back window at the USS Makin Island, a single ship with far more firepower than Sulla’s entire army, this long-ago civil war haunted me. Americans might console ourselves that the killing of a single fellow citizen exercising his rights by agents of our government is different from sending F-35s to attack an American city. But Romans in the 80s B.C.E. also thought that the most fearsome weapons Romans used against others would never be turned on themselves—until Sulla taught them not to expect restraint. His story shows that leaders guided by emotion rather than principle will fight on, using any weapon at their disposal, until citizens stop resisting or soldiers stop listening. Now, and always, the only thing holding us back from the Romans’ fate is a shared belief in our common, collective ownership of the American Republic, created by and entrusted to its citizens. All of them.
Edward Watts is a historian and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Romans: A 2,000 Year History and Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. He also hosts the YouTube channel Rome’s Eternal Decline.
Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard