The End of the Republic

Abstract

Virgil first read his Georgics, or “farm poem,” to the first Roman emperor, Augustus, on his way back from the battle at Actium – where Augustus had put an end to the Roman republic, and established one-man rule. Virgil’s natural history was bad: he thought that queen bees were kings, among other things. But the point he was making was good. Communis natos, he wrote: in Rome, as in Apis mellifera hives, sterile workers and soldiers would help raise the young of their emperor, or queen. Like dominant members of eusocial species – bees, ants, wasps, gall thrips, termites, aphids, beetles, sponge-dwelling shrimp, and naked mole-rats – Roman emperors had enormous reproductive success. They had sexual access to hundreds or thousands of women, who may have borne hundreds or thousands of children. And they got help defending their territories, and provisioning their families, from millions of facultatively sterile workers and soldiers, and from thousands of eunuchs – who made up an obligately sterile caste. This example from human history illustrates the unusual flexibility of human reproductive strategies.