Fortinbras wrote:

The word "Republic" makes it all better? All of Caesar's big campaigns happened in the Republic era, and the conquest of Greece (where Archimedes was killed by a soldier) happened in that period too. Remember Carthage? The Republic was fairly brutal dealing with those guys, I recall.

I don't include anything past Sulla as part of the republic era, and it was Caesar who brought the whole system crashing down, so no, I wouldn't say so.

The word"Republic" designates it as having some semblance of the rule of law. You're focusing only on the issue of treatment of non-citizens and enemies of the state. The Tribunes of the Plebs had both the power to accept or reject laws suggested by the senate, and the power to protect people from being executed by a magistrate, as well as veto power over city officials. There was an entire social principle of having the military separated from the civil power, no armies were allowed within the city limits of Rome. One of the two consuls elected had to be a pleb. I'll spare you the moral relativistic schtick that I can't judge a society existing in BCE by todays standards, though to single out Rome's treatment of its enemies as compared to Athenian democracy or SPARTTTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA is like burning an American flag and protesting imperialist policies in Red Square. National Socialism was just as unpleasant to its own citizens as it was to those outside its political borders, and that's how I demarcate between the two.

If we were to judge a states worth solely by its foreign policy I'd never hear the end of it, being not only an American, but a Texan.