Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

by Tom Holland

No longer subjects, they ranked instead as cives, ‘citizens’. Now, at last, they were free to show their mettle. ‘They began to walk taller, and to display their abilities to full advantage – for it is the nature of kings that they will hold good men in more suspicion than the bad, and dread the talents of others.’6 No longer was there any need, in a city liberated from the jealous gaze of a monarch, to veil its citizens’ yearning for glory. The measure of true achievement had become the praise of the Roman people. Even the humblest peasant, if he were not to see himself reflected in the mirror of his fellows’ scorn, was obliged to shoulder his duties as a citizen, and prove himself a man – a vir. Virtus, the quality of a vir, was the ultimate Roman ideal, that lustrous fusion of energy and courage which the Romans themselves identified as their chiefest strength.