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Notes -
I'd say the Roman Republic was destroyed by a lack of political control over the military, not by the inability of one element of the political leadership to check and balance another. The key points of failure all seem to involve a general whose troops were more loyal to him than the Republic marching on Rome before he could be fired by the civilian ruling institutions.
My informed layman's view is that the system in the Middle Republic worked because the Centuriate Assembly weighted votes in rough proportion to the military utility of the different classes of citizen in the conscripted army, so the people who elected the consuls and the people who formed the consuls army were functionally the same people. Whereas following the so-called Marian reforms you have a long-service professional army drawn from the proles who are effectively excluded from the Centuriate Assembly and don't feel obliged to respect the consuls it elects.
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