More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What had simply been the name of one aristocratic family–and a fairly obscure one at that–became effectively a title symbolising supreme and legitimate power.
He was an active and energetic imperialist, but having said that he was not the creator of Roman imperialism, merely one of its many agents.
Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival. It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war.
To protect the Republic, normal law had been suspended and violence was crushed by greater violence.
The expression res publica, from which we have derived our word republic, literally means ‘the public thing’ and can perhaps best be translated as ‘the State’ or the ‘body politic’.
The looseness of the system permitted considerable flexibility, which for centuries proved a source of strength. At the same time its very nature ensured that any new precedent or law, whether good or bad, could easily modify forever the way that things were done.
At Rome there was nothing even vaguely resembling modern political parties–although given the stifling impact of these, this may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today–and each candidate for office competed as an individual.
Auctoritas endured after an office was laid down, though it could be diminished by a man’s subsequent behaviour or eclipsed by that of other senators.
In 264 BC the Romans sent an army outside Italy for the first time, provoking the long conflict with the Carthaginians, who were of Phoenician origin, hence the Roman name of Poeni (Punic).
Victories won in the eastern Mediterranean were especially lucrative, and during the second century BC a succession of generals returned from such wars to celebrate more lavish and more spectacular triumphs than had ever been seen before.
Over the generations, an exceptionally high proportion of Roman men served in the army. Not until the government in Revolutionary France introduced mass conscription did a state of comparable size mobilise so much of its manpower over so long a period of time.
It was an important stage in the transition from a militia army conscripted from a cross-section of the property-owning classes, to a professional army recruited overwhelmingly from the very poor. The change was not instant, but its significance was to be deep and contributed much to the end of the Republic.
Later during Caesar’s dictatorship the month would be renamed Julius in his honour, hence the modern July.
Caesar’s aunt, sisters and daughter were all called simply Julia, as indeed was any female member of any branch of the Julian clan. If a family had more than one daughter, in official contexts their name was followed by a number to distinguish them. This disparity between the sexes says much about the Roman world.
(Sulla gave the slave his freedom and then had the man thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock for disloyalty to his former master. Such a severe gesture was well in keeping with Roman traditions of respect for both law and duty.)
If Sulla’s seizure of Rome had been shocking, the brutality of this second occupation was far worse.
