Did the First Triumvirate Destroy the Roman Republic?

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there’s this great moment where one character asks how he went bankrupt. The answer? “Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.” That’s pretty much how the Roman Republic collapsed—decades of slow erosion, then suddenly Caesar stood on top, with no one strong enough to stop one-man rule.

Historians still argue over the ca…