I think Demetrios is quite right to focus on the expansion of the Roman military beyond the traditional sources of manpower, namely Romans with property and means. By recruiting men in poverty or with meager means into the legions, Marius transformed not only a military standard, but also a social one. Together with Rome's loss in the Social War, we see the ingredients for revolutionary transformation interacting.

First, as Demetrios points out, agitation for land disbursements now had the backing of many more veterans, men who previously might never have had the chance at owning land. There must have been many who saw this as essentially beneficial for the preservation and strengthening of agrarian society -- but the outcome was, of course, dramatically different. Rather than seeing a landscape of prosperous small farmers take shape, Romans saw rich landowners concentrating holdings into larger and larger farming estates -- latifundia. Rome's slave economy permitted their operation for substantial profit. And, of course, many or probably most veterans turned out to be terrible farmers!

Second, Rome's loss of the Social War resulted in the expansion of citizenship across a much larger geographic area of Italy than ever before, certainly encompassing many of the places where Marius had also recruited for the legions. Do we know how this changed Roman politics and government? For radical change there must have been ...

The tribes used in the voting assemblies swelled in numbers, and there was, of course, the debate about assigning urban plebs throughout the tribes or concentrating them in but four. The make-up of the urban plebs must also have undergone significant change at this time, incorporating newcomers from the countryside, failed farmers, veterans, and thousands more drawn to Rome's urban vitality. So the most likely voters in the assemblies, those citizens living in and around Rome, certainly changed in their identity. Generally speaking, I would venture that they were more inclined to support the populares than the optimates.

We know from Quintus' advice to Marcus about campaigning for the consulship that candidates solicited voters far afield from Rome. So we have some tantalizing evidence about how Roman electioneering changed after the Social War and Marius' recruiting reforms. I would also speculate that it was Cicero who understood at the time that this general expansion of Roman citizenship made possible the concept of a res publica founded on concordia (harmony of the orders) and on tota Italia (a state significantly larger and different from a Roman city-state).

Any opportunity for Cicero's vision to become reality was fleeting. Rather we see the concentration of political power in the hands of a few: Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, much to the denigration of republican forms of government and Senatorial rule. And while it is true that the Senate was well inhabitated by optimates, the conservative oligarchs who saw themselves as the embodiment of the res publica and the primary recipients of its benefits (wealth, power, fame), we ought also to remember that the Senate was the primary institution of the res publica. It was the existence of the Senate as a body that had previously checked any one man's ambition for absolute authority, which, in any event, was anathema to an old Roman's alegiance to republicanism.

Polybius, I believe, deserves credit for sketching out the fate of any republic that became the arena in which a few men contended through jealousy, ambition, power and wealth for absolute mastery of Rome. "Setting out to seek power, and unable to gain their objectives by their own resources and through their own qualities, they dissipate their property, using every means to bribe and corrupt the masses. Then again, when they have rendered the many receptive and greedy for largesse through their insane appetite for prestige, the essential character of democracy is destroyed, and it evolves into a state of violence and government by force. The populace, once it is accustomed to feed off the property of others, and expects to live off the property of their neighbors, and when it finds a champion who is ambitious and daring, but is excluded by poverty from political rewards, brings the rule of force to completion, and gathering together, carries out murders, exiles, and redistributions of land -- until having come to live in the manner of beasts, it finds once again a master and monarch."

What better description of the end of the Roman Republic and the ascent of Octavian? Can we not see in Polybius' words the outlines of Marius, of Sulla, of Pompey, of Caesar, of Catiline, of Clodius, of Antony, of Lepidus, of ... Augustus?