Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 28 taking stock.

For 350 years, the Roman Republic had grown, contracted, grown again, survived, and thrived.

Through it all, the Romans never turned away from their most basic founding principle,

but no king shall reign in Rome.

Every year men stood for election, and every year free ballots were cast by free citizens.

The winners won and the losers lost, and power was transferred peacefully between them.

At no point did the great and ambitious leaders of Rome step outside the bounds of the system

to seize control of the state.

It is a remarkable run, and the Republic's track record was, and is the cause of much

justifiable envy.

Nonetheless, the Romans, for all their strength on the battlefield and all their moral rectitude,

could not stem the tide of greed and ambition that lurks in the hearts of men in all times,

in all places.

Roman success would be the undoing of the Roman Republic, and after the symbolic dual

sacking of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, the dam holding back the dark side began to

crack visibly.

Just in a century later, the dam would break, and in defiance of all that had once been

held as good and true by the Romans, a single man would ascend to the throne of power.

And though he was wise enough not to call himself king, we all know that arose by any other

name would still smell as sweet.

For all these years, the Republic had survived for two major overarching reasons.

The lower class publicians had not been so impoverished that they were driven of violent

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