How to Roman Republic, Part IV: The Senate

It's amazing this showed up on Hacker News before it showed up in my RSS reader.

"I'm thinking about it right now!"

This guy has absolutely nailed the nerdy-but-accessible vibe, no surprise his posts are recurring first-pagers.

Point to Charlie Munger, whom I was critical of a few days ago, how is so much written on how the Roman Republic worked, without talking about the most basic of incentive structures that drove its citizens to work like no others in the first place - The Law of Twelve Tables? It gave every citizen property rights that were protected by the State. The system was _the_ get rich game for the common man (after Alexander replaced ancient Greece's Solonian Constitution with his Royal authority). Roman soldiers were citizens looking to make money, it was a so called army of merchants. Joining the empire was an attractive proposition because people saw an opportunity to break out of their own opportunity-poor regimes, so the model spread like wildfire, though obviously resisted by hereditary rulers who stood to lose their cozy positions.