Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Prudent men are wont to say—and this not rashly or without good ground—that he who would foresee what has to be should reflect on what has been, for everything that happens in the world at any time has a genuine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.”

Pompey was to prove himself insufferably successful.

responsibilities, capable of turning anybody’s head. After all, what else had the Republic been founded on if not this single great perception—that the taste of kingly authority was addictive and corrupting? Except, of course, that with Rome now the mistress of the world and the arbiter of nations, the authority of her consuls far exceeded any king’s. All the more reason, then, to insist on the checks that had always hedged about their office.

Now that they were the citizens not of a small city state but of a superpower, the demands on their attention appeared limitless.

The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

“it is no great deal, the promotion of those whose power we have no cause to fear.”

The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer. In the eyes of traditionalists nothing could be more scandalous. A city that indulged a dance culture was one on the point of catastrophe.

Alexander had famously died young, at the age of thirty-two. Pompey had already spent a whole decade being thirty-four.