Available for the first time in paperback, with a new introduction that reviews related scholarship of the past twenty years, Erich Gruen's classic study of the late Republic examines institutions as well as personalities, social tensions as well as politics, the plebs and the army as well as the aristocracy.

Erich S. Gruen is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (California, 1984).

"This paperback version of a work first published in 1974 features a new fifteen-page introduction that places it in the context of recent scholarship and offers suggestions for future research."—New Testament Abstracts

"Incisive and persuasive."—American Historical Review

"A monumental study which, though it concerns itself with a familiar topic, challenges the reader to reassess a crucial period in Roman history and determine whether the image of a 'Roman revolution' has not obscured the importance and persistence of conventional behavior in Republican Rome."—John E. Rexine, History

"An important, informative, and exhaustive contribution to the study of the political history of the always exciting and intriguing last generation of the Roman Republic, which commands respect as much as it excites disagreement."—D. L. Stockton, Gnomon

"[An] important book. . . . It underscores the need to look again at the history of Rome in the late Republic from more than a narrowly political point of view in order to help us understand better the transition to imperial autocracy."—A. J. Christopherson, The Classical Journal