Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

One man’s war criminal was another man’s hero. Barbarian migrations had always been the stuff of Roman nightmares. Whenever wagons began rumbling across the north, the reverberations would echo far away in the Forum. The Republic had no fiercer bogeyman than the pale-skinned, horse-maned, towering Gaul. Hannibal might have ridden up to Rome’s gates and flung his javelin over them, but he had never succeeded in capturing the seat of the Republic. Only the Gauls had managed that. Way back, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, a barbarian horde had burst without warning across the Alps, sent a Roman army fleeing from it in panic, and swept into Rome. The Capitol alone had remained sacrosanct, and even that would have fallen had not the sacred geese of Juno alerted the garrison to a surprise attack. When the Gauls, having slaughtered, looted and burned at will, had withdrawn as suddenly as they had come, they had left behind them a city resolved never again to endure such indignities. This was the steel that had enabled Rome to become the mistress of the world.