For five centuries Rome had gloried in having driven out its kings and entrusted power to the people and the Senate. But by the close of the second century BC the free republic began to make a god of itself — of the city's glory and the state's might as the highest, self-sufficient value. The fatal change came about almost imperceptibly: the reform of Gaius Marius opened the legions to the propertyless, and the army ceased to be a militia of citizens. The soldier now received his land and plunder not from the hands of Rome but from the hands of his commander — and swore his oath to a man rather than to his country. Thus the sword, forged for the common cause, became the private property of the ambitious.
The reckoning stretched across a century of blood. In 133 BC a mob beat the tribune Tiberius Gracchus to death — for the first time in centuries a political dispute in Rome was settled by murder. After that the blood no longer stopped: the civil war of Marius and Sulla, the dictatorship of Sulla, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49, his assassination in 44, the battle of Philippi, and at last the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, where Octavian crushed Antony and Cleopatra. The republic all but choked to death on its own strife; for decades free citizens butchered one another in the name of primacy.
The outcome proved to be not a cleansing but a quiet substitution. Rome, weary of war, laid down its freedom of its own accord. In 27 BC the Senate bestowed upon Octavian the name Augustus — that year is reckoned the beginning of the empire. But the genius of Augustus lay in this: he did not proclaim himself king. He carefully preserved the entire facade of the republic — the Senate, the consuls, the elections, the ancient words — and filled them with the power of a single man. In form everything remained as it was; in fact the republic was no more.
So the law of history was fulfilled to the end: the idol of glory and of the state-as-its-own-end led not to rebirth but to exchange. Rome bought itself the long-awaited peace — the "Roman peace," the Pax Romana — at the price of Roman freedom. And the device Augustus discovered — one-man rule under republican colors, a dictatorship calling itself the defense of the people — proved immortal. Rulers of the most varied ages would go on repeating it for centuries, each time passing off the loss of freedom as its salvation.