Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Memories of the looting of Corinth would always be recalled by the Romans with embarrassment. Guilt over Carthage, however, provoked in them something far more. It was said that even as Scipio watched the flames lap at the crumbling walls of the great city, he had wept.

The legend reflected the reality that there had never been a city so generous with her citizenship as Rome. Men of diverse backgrounds and origins had always been permitted to become Roman, and to share in Roman values and beliefs.

the doom-laden judgment of a later generation, that after Sulla’s coup “there was nothing left which could shame warlords into holding back on military violence—not the law, not the institutions of the Republic, nor even the love of Rome.”

Crassus’s father had combined a glittering political career with a most unsenatorial interest in the import—export trade. Not for nothing was his family nicknamed “Rich”: Crassus would inherit from his father the recognition that wealth was the surest foundation of power. Later, he was to be notorious for claiming that until a man could afford to maintain his own army it was impossible for him to have too much money.

Disproportionate voting power was yet another perk of rank.

As a result, there was often little point in the other classes even turning out. Not only were their votes worth a fraction of those of the equestrians, but they would only rarely be called on to register them anyway.

Sulla, sardonically obliging, duly posted a list in the Forum. It featured the entire leadership of the Marian regime. All were condemned to death. Their properties were declared forfeit, and their sons and grandsons barred from standing for office. Anyone who helped to protect them was likewise condemned to death.

Caesar was like a splash of color. “He had a talent for being liked in a way remarkable in one of his youth, and since he had an easy, man-of-the-people manner, he made himself hugely popular with the average citizen.”10 Effortlessly charming though Caesar was, this was still a statement of political intent. Crowd pleasers marked themselves out as populares.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Romans should have had the same word, “actor,” for both a prosecutor and a performer on a stage.

In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies—if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls.

What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.

Rootlessness and suffering served to wither the worship of traditional gods, but it provided a fertile breeding ground for mystery cults. Like the Sibyl’s prophecies, these tended to be a fusion of many different influences: Greek, Persian, and Jewish beliefs. By their nature, they were underground and fluid, invisible to those who wrote history—but one of them, at least, was to leave a permanent mark. Mithras, whose rites the pirates celebrated, was to end up worshiped throughout the Roman Empire, but his cult was first practiced by the enemies of Rome.

Pompey, intrigued by reports of the Jews’ peculiar god, brushed aside the protests of the scandalized priests and passed into the Temple’s innermost sanctum. He was perplexed to find it empty.

Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence.

Most treasured, most relished, most savored of all, were fish.

To affect a lower-class accent had long been a mark of the popularis politician—Sulla’s

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

To many in the Senate, the Gallic adventure appeared both unwarranted and unjust. Not to most citizens, however. One man’s war criminal was another man’s hero.

Why, merely to secure the consulship for a second time, had they resorted to such violent and illegal extremes?

Between them, the three members of the syndicate would now have direct control of twenty legions and Rome’s most critical provinces. The city had often echoed to cries of “tyranny”—but never, surely, with such justification as now.

Posidonius, every Roman’s favorite guru,

Once he had been found guilty in a court of law, Caesar’s great achievements would help him not a whit. To the cheering of pygmies who had never in their lives rallied an ambushed legion, or planted an eagle beyond the icy northern seas, or defeated in one battle two colossal hordes of barbarians, he would be forced into exile, to spend the rest of his life in the company of men such as Verres, his expectations withering to nothing in the sunshine of Marseille.

If Caesar were to return home as consul, then he would have no problem in ramming through legislation that would secure farms for his veterans, and a reservoir of armed strength for himself that would put even Pompey in the shade.

To Caelius, it appeared self-evident that Caesar’s army was incomparably superior to anything that Pompey could muster. “In peacetime,” he wrote to Cicero, “while taking part in domestic politics, it is most important to back the side that is in the right—but in times of war, the strongest.”

All the world had fallen into Octavian’s hands, and now that he had no rivals, bloodshed and savagery had ceased to serve his purpose. “I am reluctant to call mercy,” wrote Seneca almost a century later, “what was really the exhaustion of cruelty.”

“The assurance of every citizen’s property rights” was to be an enduring slogan of the new regime, and one that did much to underpin its widespread popularity.

with the willing collaboration of his fellow citizens, who flinched from staring the truth in the face, he veiled himself in robes garnered from the antique lumber box of the Republic, refusing any magistracy not sanctioned by the past, and often not holding any magistracy at all. Authority, not office, was what counted: that mysterious quality that had given to Catulus or to Cato his prestige. “In all the qualities that make up a man,” Cicero had once acknowledged, “M. Cato was first citizen.”35 “First citizen”—“princeps”: Augustus let it be known that he could wish for no prouder title. The son of Julius Caesar was to be regarded as the heir of Cato too.