SPQR

One of the epitaphs on Colleoni, who died in 1475 after being Venetian captain general for twenty years, suggested that ‘he who serves a republic serves no one’. This was a common reference to the vacillating quality of leadership in the Italian republics, and it has been suggested that condottieri preferred to serve under princes where they knew w

Two things had ruined the Greek political system: first, the claim of each city to absolute sovereignty; second, the bitter and bloody strife between rich and poor within most cities.

most powerful elite in Rome, would have seen this dynamic play out quite vividly. Nero, the student whose excesses Seneca tried to curb, killed not only his own mother and wife but eventually turned on Seneca, his mentor, too.

Solon had maintained the republican forms; now the people still entertained a blind hatred against these forms of government under which they had seen, for four centuries, nothing but the reign of the aristocracy. After the example of many Greek cities, they wished for a tyrant.