Giving Compass' Take:

• In an interview with Lorraine Boissoneault, Mike Duncan explains how income inequality and xenophobia contributed to the fall of Rome and what the means for modern societies. 

• How can funders work to address these fundamental issues? What cultural barriers exist that make it difficult to tackle these problems? 

• Learn about ways to defeat income inequality. 

Long before Julius Caesar declared himself dictator for life in 44 B.C., essentially spelling the beginning of the end to the Roman Republic, trouble was brewing in the halls of power.

The warning signs were there. Politicians such as Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus (together known as the Gracchi brothers) were thwarted from instituting a series of populist reforms in the 100s B.C., then murdered by their fellow senators.

Old and unwritten codes of conduct, known as the mos maiorum, gave way as senators struggled for power. A general known as Sulla marched his army on Rome in 87 B.C., starting a civil war to prevent his political opponent from remaining in power. Yet none of these events have become as indelibly seared into Western memory as Caesar’s rise to power or sudden downfall, his murder in 44 B.C.

“For whatever reason, nobody ever stops and says, if it was this bad by the 40s BC, what was it that started to go wrong for the Republic?” says Mike Duncan, writer and podcast host of The History of Rome and Revolutions. “Most people have been jumping into the story of the Late Republic in the third act, without any real comprehension of what started to go wrong for the Romans in the 130s and 120s BC.”

This was the question Duncan wanted to examine in his new book, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. To learn more about the events that preceded the fall of the Republic, and what lessons the modern world can learn from it, Smithsonian.com spoke with Duncan.

One topic you describe at length is economic inequality between citizens of Rome. How did that come about?

After Rome conquers Carthage, and after they decide to annex Greece, and after they conquer Spain and acquire all the silver mines, you have wealth on an unprecedented scale coming into Rome. The flood of wealth was making the richest of the rich Romans wealthier than would’ve been imaginable even a couple generations earlier. You’re talking literally 300,000 gold pieces coming back with the Legions. All of this is being concentrated in the hands of the senatorial elite, they’re the consuls and the generals, so they think it’s natural that it all accumulates in their hands.

At the same time, these wars of conquest were making the poor quite a bit poorer. Roman citizens were being hauled off to Spain or Greece, leaving for tours that would go on for three to five years a stretch. While they were gone, their farms in Italy would fall into disrepair. The rich started buying up big plots of land. In the 130s and 140s you have this process of dispossession, where the poorer Romans are being bought out and are no longer small citizen owners. They’re going to be tenant owners or sharecroppers and it has a really corrosive effect on the traditional ways of economic life and political life. As a result, you see this skyrocketing economic inequality.

Read the full article about the fall of Rome by Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian Magazine.