Republics
Cicero: a Roman senator
In a republic, instead of voting directly about what they want to
do, as in a democracy, people instead vote
for people to represent them, and those people decide what to do.
The first republic was the Roman
Republic, which was founded about 509 BC,
just about the same time as the first democracy
in Athens. The rules about who could vote were about the same as in
Athens too: slaves couldn't vote, and neither could women, or children,
or men who were not citizens. In addition, in Rome you could only vote
if you owned land, so a lot of poor men could not vote at all even though
they were free citizens.
The republic was a lot more efficient than the democracy,
because most men who could vote only needed to vote in the big elections,
and the rest of the time they could be at work. Only the Senators, the
elected representatives, had to be voting all the time. And men who
had been elected to be judges or to run the city, those were full-time
jobs: consuls, tribunes, quaestors (KWEE-stores), and praetors (PRY-tores).
(Only people who could vote could be elected, so only free men who were
citizens and owned land could run for office).
But the aristocrats (the rich people) fixed it so that it was pretty much impossible to elect anyone who wasn't already an aristocrat to the senate or to be a consul or a tribune or anything. So this republic was a lot like an oligarchy in that it tended to be run by rich people.
But the aristocrats (the rich people) fixed it so that it was pretty much impossible to elect anyone who wasn't already an aristocrat to the senate or to be a consul or a tribune or anything. So this republic was a lot like an oligarchy in that it tended to be run by rich people.
Hasdrubal, a Carthaginian
general
At the same time, in Carthage
(Africa), there was a very
similar government. It was a republic as well. The chief magistrates
or officials were two shopfets (suffetes in Latin) who were elected
annually on a basis of birth and wealth: this is almost identical to
the Roman system of electing consuls from among the patricians.
Military commands were held by separately elected generals: this
is different from the Roman system, where the consuls were the generals.
In addition to these leaders, there was a powerful "senate" of several
hundred life members, again, as at Rome. The powers of the citizens,
or the Assembly, were very limited: basically they could only vote for
the magistrates. There was also a separate group of 104 "judges" who
scrutinized the actions of generals and other officials to keep them
honest.
After the Romans destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, and the Roman republic collapsed about 30 BC, there was not another one for about a thousand years. Then in the Middle Ages, around 1100 AD, there began to be small republics in various northern Italian cities like Venice, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Genoa, and Milan. Sometimes these cities joined together into the Lombard League, but often they acted independently. Like the Roman and Carthaginian republics, however, almost all the power still was in the hands of rich people, so that these republics were a lot like oligarchies.
States
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