Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

against the Senate.
    The political institutions forming the core of the Roman Republic were overthrown by Julius Caesar in 49 BC when he moved his legion across the Rubicon, the river separating the Roman provinces of Cisalpine Gaul from Italy. Rome fell to Caesar, and another civil war broke out. Though Caesar was victorious, he was murdered by disgruntled senators, led by Brutus and Cassius, in 44 BC . The Roman Republic would never be re-created. A new civil war broke out between Caesar’s supporters, particularly Mark Anthony and Octavian, and his foes. After Anthony and Octavian won, they fought each other, until Octavian emerged triumphant in the battle of Actium in 31 BC . By the following year, and for the next forty-five years, Octavian, known after 28 BC as Augustus Caesar, ruled Rome alone. Augustus created the Roman Empire, though he preferred the title princep, a sort of “first among equals,” and called the regime the Principate. Map 11 shows the Roman Empire at its greatest extent in 117 AD . It also includes the river Rubicon, which Caesar so fatefully crossed.
    It was this transition from republic to principate, and later naked empire, that laid the seeds of the decline of Rome. The partially inclusive political institutions, which had formed the basis for the economic success, were gradually undermined. Even if the Roman Republic created a tilted playing field in favor of the senatorial class and other wealthy Romans, it was not an absolutist regime and had never before concentrated so much power in one position. The changes unleashed by Augustus, as with the Venetian
Serrata
, were at first political but then would have significant economic consequences. As a result of these changes, by the fifth century AD the Western Roman Empire, as the West was called after it split from the East, had declined economically and militarily, and was on the brink of collapse.

… R OMAN V ICES
    Flavius Aetius was one of the larger-than-life characters of the late Roman Empire, hailed as “the last of the Romans” by Edward Gibbon, author of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Between AD 433 and 454, until he was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III, Aetius, a general, was probably the most powerful person in the Roman Empire. He shaped both domestic and foreign policy, and fought a series of crucial battles against the barbarians, and also other Romans in civil wars. He was unique among powerful generals fighting in civil wars in not seeking the emperorship himself. Since the end of the second century, civil war had become a fact of life in the Roman Empire. Between the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180 until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476, there was hardly a decade that did not see a civil war or a palace coup against an emperor. Few emperors died of natural causes or in battle. Most were murdered by usurpers or their own troops.
    Aetius’s career illustrates the changes from Roman Republic and early Empire to the late Roman Empire. Not only did his involvement in incessant civil wars and his power in every aspect of the empire’s business contrast with the much more limited power of generals and senators during earlier periods, but it also highlights how the fortunes of Romans changed radically in the intervening centuries in other ways.
    By the late Roman Empire, the so-called barbarians who were initially dominated and incorporated into Roman armies or used as slaves now dominated many parts of the empire. As a young man, Aetius had been held hostage by barbarians, first by the Goths under Alaric and then by the Huns. Roman relations with these barbarians are indicative of how things had changed since the Republic. Alaric was both a ferocious enemy and an ally, so much so that in 405 he was appointed one of the senior-most generals of the Roman army. The arrangement was temporary, however. By 408, Alaric was fighting against the Romans, invading Italy and sacking Rome.
    The Huns were also both powerful foes and frequent allies of the Romans. Though they, too, held Aetius hostage, they later fought alongside him in a civil war. But the Huns did not stay long on one side, and under Attila they fought a major battle against the Romans in 451, just across the Rhine. This time defending the Romans were the Goths, under Theodoric.
    All of this did not stop Roman elites from trying to appease barbarian commanders, often not to protect Roman territories but to gain the upper hand