Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace.

Nor is it only the broad contours of geopolitics, of globalization and the pax Americana, that can be glimpsed, albeit faint and distorted, in the glass. Our fads and obsessions too, from koi carp to Mockney to celebrity chefs, cannot help but inspire, in the historian of the Roman Republic, a certain sense of déjà vu.

Scholars learnedly pointed out that the location of the city avoided extremes of heat, which sapped the spirit, and cold, which chilled the brain; it was therefore a simple fact of geography that “the best place of all to live, occupying as it does the happy medium, and perfectly placed in the centre of the world, is where the Roman people have their city.”

Having just been in Rome over New Year’s I agree!

The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny.

What was the Republic, after all, if not a partnership between Senate and people—“Senatus Populusque Romanus,” as the formula put it? Stamped on the smallest coins, inscribed on the pediments of the vastest temples, the abbreviation of this phrase could be seen everywhere, splendid shorthand for the majesty of the Roman constitution—“SPQR.”

In Samnium all was mountainous and austere. Just as the jagged contours of the landscape provided a brutal contrast with the plain below, so too did the character of the people who had to scratch a living from the stony, scrub-clad soil. There were no oysters in Samnium, no heated swimming pools, only lumbering peasants with comical, rustic accents. They practiced witchcraft, wore ugly rings of iron around their necks, and—scandalously—permitted barbers to shave their pubic hair in public. The Romans, needless to say, regarded them with scorn.

As it progressively tightened its grip on government, the institutions that had once maintained Athenian democracy were allowed to wither. However, they were not abolished altogether because, apart from anything else, they were good for the tourist trade. Visiting Romans enjoyed the quaint spectacle of democracy in action. Sometimes Athens offered the pleasures less of a museum than of a zoo.

If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.

Even as the rituals of blood-spilling began to be commercialized by a growing Roman interest in them, gladiators continued to dress in the style of Samnite warriors, complete with brimmed helmets and ungainly, bobbing crests. As time went by and Samnite independence faded into history, so the appearance of these fighters came to seem ever more exotic—like that of animals preserved from extinction in a zoo.

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 more than 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’s victory.

Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace. Morality had not merely caught up with the brute fact of imperial expansion, but wanted more.

It was well known that barbarians became more savage the farther north one traveled, indulging in any number of unspeakable habits, such as cannibalism, and even—repellently—the drinking of milk.

“It’s now definite that there isn’t an ounce of silver in the whole of Britain,” Cicero reported a few months later, “nor any prospect of loot apart from slaves. And even then,” he added sniffily, “it’s hardly as though you’d expect a slave with a decent knowledge of music or literature to emerge from Britain, is it?”

“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.”

Rome was changing, lapped by tides of immigration, and there was little that the Senate could do to hold them back. New languages, new customs, new religions: these were the fruits of the Republic’s own greatness. Not for nothing did all roads now lead to Rome.

Why offend the sensibilities of his fellow citizens by abolishing the Republic when—as Caesar himself was said to have pointed out—the Republic had been reduced to “nothingness, a name only, without body or substance”?23 What mattered was not the form but the reality of power.

This has some chilling parallels

In the beginning there had been kings, and the last king had been a tyrant. And a man named Brutus had expelled him from the city and set up the consulship, and all the institutions of a free Republic. And now, 465 years later, Brutus, his descendant, had struck down a second tyrant.

for this was the challenge he had set himself. No longer to butcher but to spare; no longer to fight but to provide peace; no longer to destroy but to restore.

Once more the Sith will rule the galaxy, and we shall have peace!