Social Sciences and History / Unit 3 SSH 0229 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Comparing Republic and Empire on Five Features
The idea
The exam asks how the Republic and the Empire differed, and five features from the anchor sort almost any item. Executive power: two annual consuls checking each other, or one princeps for life with hereditary succession. The Senate: controlling finances, or maintaining a facade under instruction. Who fought: citizen-soldiers who returned to their farms, or professional legionaries serving twenty years for pay and land. Law in the provinces: provincials under their own law, or citizenship for all free people from two twelve. What held it together: clientage and annual war, or roads, one language and a standing army.
In practice
Given "an emperor adopted the most competent younger man as successor", the feature is succession and the period is the Empire. Given "a tribune vetoed the consuls", executive power checked: the Republic. Given "soldiers received land after twenty years", the Empire, Augustus's reform. Given "the defeated were offered citizenship without the vote", the Republic's expansion.
Where people slip
The trap is the word Caesar. Julius Caesar belongs to the Republic's end, not the Empire's beginning; the anchor dates the Empire from Octavian. And the Senate survived into the Empire, so its existence never distinguishes the two; what it did does.
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