The Roman republic survived for 500 years as a territorial political community governing a bordered-bonded-bound society through formal procedures for political participation, multilayered functional separations of powers, and a top-level binary division of executive powers. Rome not only remained afloat, it thrived as a society.
With its political innovations Rome made up for not having what we would normally recognise as a unified structure of state organisation. However, the epithets of ‘city state’ and ‘republic’ (graduating to ‘Empire Mark 1’) that historians commonly use to categorise Rome prove not to have been adequate type descriptors for the purpose of comparing Rome with other societies and forms of governance over the whole of history. ‘City states’ differed greatly, and ‘Republics’ differ/ed greatly. What we find in Rome (perhaps Athens too) can hardly be subsumed alongside every other entity of political community that is ‘not a monarchy, therefore is a republic’ or ‘not…