Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Despite repeated punishing encounters with the armies of the Republic, such an assumption never entirely died, and in 168 BC Roman patience finally snapped. Abolishing the monarchy altogether, Rome first of all carved Macedon into four puppet republics, and then in 148, completing the transformation from peace-keeper to occupying power, established direct rule.

It was two brothers of impeccable breeding, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who finally made the fateful attempt. First Tiberius, in 133 BC, and then Gaius, ten years later, used their tribunates to push for reforms in favour of the poor.

Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.

And so it had always been. Rare was a high achiever who had not been oppressed by the resulting sense of tension. The ideals of the Republic served to deny the very hunger they provoked. As a result, the fate of a Roman who had tasted the sweetness of glory might often be a consuming restlessness, the gnawing, unappeasable agony of an addict.

But Sulla did have reason: his hatred of his rival, his fury at the frustration of his ambitions and his utter belief in the justice of his case all helped him to contemplate a uniquely audacious and dreadful possibility. No citizen had ever led legions against their own city. To be the first to take such a step, and to outrage such a tradition, should have been a responsibility almost beyond a Roman’s enduring. Yet it seems that Sulla, far from havering, betrayed not the slightest hesitation.

Rome was numinous with the presence of gods, but there were few spaces more holy than the pomerium, the ancient boundary that marked the furrow ploughed by Romulus, and had not been altered since the time of the kings.

Nor was this mere hypocrisy. If Sulla was a revolutionary, then it was very much in the cause of the status quo. Hostile towards any hint of innovation, he had all of Sulpicius’ legislation declared invalid.

With Italy riven by war, however, and an alliance with the all-conquering Mithridates in the bag, Aristion did not expect too much trouble from the Romans. To the ecstatic Athenians, independence and democracy alike appeared secured. Then, in the spring of 87, Sulla landed in Greece.

Sulla, whose enjoyment of comedians had its limits, responded to Aristion with a few pointed insults of his own. He ordered the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught to be chopped down and used to build siege engines.

Most gratifying of all to Sulla’s sense of humour was the wholesale looting of Athenian libraries, which were stripped of their holdings. Henceforward, if anyone wanted to study Aristotle, they would have to do so in Rome. Sulla’s revenge on Athenian philosophy was sweet.

A young man stood waiting, his golden hair swept up in a quiff, his profile posed to look like Alexander’s. He hailed Sulla as ‘Imperator’ – ‘General’ – and Sulla then greeted him as ‘Imperator’ in turn. This was an honour that it usually took even the most accomplished soldier many years to earn. Gnaeus Pompeius – ‘Pompey’ – was barely twenty-three.

Only nineteen, a young man whose family connections should have ensured him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an experience he would never forget. In future years he would prove himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune. No less than Pompey, the young Julius Caesar emerged from the years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.

In an attempt to counteract Pompey’s glory-hogging he ordered all the prisoners he had captured to be crucified along the Appian Way. For over a hundred miles, along Italy’s busiest road, a cross with the body of a slave nailed to it stood every forty yards, gruesome billboards advertising Crassus’ victory.

As a result, rather than working together for the good of the Republic, as consuls were supposed to do, Pompey and Crassus were soon openly at each other’s throat.

The supply of everything, from slaves to grain, duly dried to a trickle and Rome began to starve. Still the Senate hesitated. Such had been the growth in piracy that it was clear that nothing less than a Mediterranean-wide command would prove sufficient to deal with it. This, to many senators, seemed to be a proconsulship too far. In the end, a second Marcus Antonius, the son of the great orator, was awarded the command in 74 BC, but his chief qualification was certainly not any hereditary talent for fighting pirates.

Cicero, who admired Cato deeply, could nevertheless bitch that ‘he addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus’.

It was clear to everyone that if he wanted to break the logjam that Cato and Crassus had so skilfully constructed, then he would need an ally in the consulship, and not just any ally, but a heavyweight capable of facing down Cato. There was one obvious candidate for this role, but in the spring of 60 he was far away, in Spain.

Cato, outflanked, found all his defences being turned. It quickly began to dawn on him that, while Pompey and Caesar on their own might have been withstood, the addition of Crassus to their alliance made his enemies the effective masters of Rome. The three men would be able to carve up the Republic as they pleased, ruling as a troika, a ‘triumvirate’. No wonder that Caesar had appeared so blithely self-assured.

On the day of the public vote Bibulus appeared in the Forum to announce that he had observed unfavourable omens in the sky, and that the vote would therefore have to be suspended. The response of the pontifex maximus to this news was to have a bucket of dung emptied over Bibulus’ head.

Then suddenly, in the spring, Metellus Celer succumbed to his illness and Caesar was given the opportunity to lay his hands on a third province – for Metellus’ death had not only removed a thorn from Pompey’s side, but left Transalpine Gaul, on the far side of the Alps, without a governor.

Seemingly against the odds, a great horde of tribes in northern and central Gaul had begun to negotiate a compact, burying their differences in the face of the common foe. The organiser of this alliance, and its undisputed leader, was an imposing nobleman by the name of Vercingetorix.

Now at last Pompey’s moment had come. Even Cato, gazing at the charred shell of his ancestor’s monument, had to accept that. Anything was preferable to anarchy. He still could not bring himself to accept a dictatorship, but proposed as a compromise that Pompey should serve for the year as sole consul. The paradoxical nature of such an office was indication enough of the monstrous nature of the times.

Twenty days of thanksgiving were voted by the Senate, while Caelius, in his role as tribune, proposed a complementary bill of his own. By its terms Caesar was to be awarded a unique privilege: rather than being obliged to arrive at Rome in person to stand for the consulship – as he had had to do, for instance, in the previous decade – he was to have the right to run for election while remaining in Gaul.

At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable – for only a private citizen could be brought to trial. No sooner had Caelius’ bill been passed than Cato was fulminating against it. The criminal actions of Caesar’s first consulship had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. For almost a decade his enemies had been waiting for the opportunity to bring him to account. Now that the chance was nearing they had no intention of being denied their prey.

Caesar himself, however, while his men were setting out, passed the afternoon by having a bath, then attending a banquet, where he chatted with guests as though he had not a care in the world. Only at dusk did he rise from his couch. Hurrying in a carriage along dark and twisting byways, he finally caught up with his troops on the bank of the Rubicon. There was a moment’s dreadful hesitation, and then he was crossing its swollen waters into Italy, towards Rome. No one could know it at the time, but 460 years of the free Republic were being brought to an end.

When Pompey, in the war of attrition that followed, aimed to starve his opponents into submission, Caesar’s legions dug up roots and baked them into loaves. These they flung over the enemy barricades as symbols of defiance. No wonder that Pompey’s men found themselves ‘terrified of the ferocity and toughness of their enemy, who seemed more like a species of wild animal than men’;

There, a welcoming gift on the harbour quay, was Pompey’s pickled head. Caesar wept: no matter how relieved he may secretly have felt at the removal of his adversary, he was disgusted by his son-in-law’s fate, and even more so when he discovered the full background to the crime.

Only a month previously Gaius Octavius, the dictator’s great-nephew, had been in the Balkans, stationed with the expeditionary force for Parthia. When the news of Caesar’s murder had reached him he had sailed at once for Brundisium. There he had learned of his formal adoption in Caesar’s will, becoming, by its terms, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and being mobbed by crowds of his adoptive father’s veterans.

Between the rival Caesarian leaders, unchallenged masters now of the entire Western empire, there was to be no war. Instead, on an island in a river near Medina, with their armies lined up on either bank, Antony and Octavian met, embraced and kissed each other’s cheek. Then, along with Lepidus, they settled down to carve up the world and pronounce the Republic dead.

In the summer of 32 BC, tipped off by a renegade, he even took the supremely sacrilegious step of raiding the temple of Vesta, where Antony had deposited his will, and seizing the document from the hands of the Vestal Virgins. The contents, eagerly pored over, duly proved as explosive as Octavian had anticipated. Stern-faced and censorious, he listed them for the benefit of the Senate. Caesarion to be legitimised; Cleopatra’s children awarded vast legacies; Antony himself, on his death, to be buried by Cleopatra’s side. It was all very shocking – perhaps suspiciously

One year later Octavian closed in for the kill. In July 30 BC his legions appeared before Alexandria. The following evening, as twilight deepened towards midnight, the noise of invisible musicians was heard floating in a procession through the city, then upwards to the stars. ‘And when people reflected on this mystery, they realised that Dionysus, the god whom Antony had always sought to imitate and copy, had abandoned his favourite.’22 The next day Alexandria fell. Antony,