ABSTRACT
In one of his most quoted lines, with charming irony Horace wrote, “Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium.” 1 Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Alaric and the Visigoths, whose invasion triggered (in the mind of one classical historian) a leveling down of Romans more than a leveling up of barbarians as the result of the mingling of two governance systems. But all was not Alaric's fault, for the collapse of republicanism preceded his arrival by more than four centuries. The onset of the Roman dictatorship in the first-century B.C. extinguished the republic not only in Rome, not only in Italy, but also in all those distant lands, including mainland Greece, which Rome had conquered and used to have republics of their own. In its colonies, Rome as conqueror preferred to deal with provincial oligarchs rather than self-governing citizen assemblies. 2 Primary assemblies likely did not reappear in Europe as sovereign bodies ruling over substantial states until the early Middle Ages. That was an unrepublican interval of nine or ten centuries.
