Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

and yet excessive achievement, to the Romans, might be a cause for alarm as well as celebration. They were the citizens of a republic, after all, and no one man could be permitted to put his fellows forever in the shade.

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

Freedom and egalitarianism, to the Romans, were very different things. Only slaves on the chain gang were truly equal. For a citizen, the essence of life was competition; wealth and votes the accepted measures of success.

“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.”

“There can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved.”

Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

Praise was what every citizen most desired—just as public shame was his ultimate dread.

When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found.

The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.

Never again would they tolerate the existence of a power capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a preemptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity.

There were no subtle gradations of wealth in Rome, nothing that could approximate to a modern middle class.

For all the gulf that yawned between them, the ideal of a shared community still held firm for millionaire and pauper alike. Both were citizens of the same republic.

In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. Indeed, this, to the Romans, was what liberty meant. It appeared self-evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, toward a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition.

The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked.

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.

As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind.

Like the super-rich anywhere, the Roman aristocracy wanted to keep their favorite vacation destination exclusive, and to this end had begun to buy it up.

From the constitution to the coinage, everything was copied from the Romans. All along, the rickety new state had never been anything more than second best to the Italians’ real ambition—enrollment as citizens of Rome.

There were plenty of Romans who sympathized with the Italians’ demands. After all, what had Rome been founded as if not a city of immigrants?

entirely by chauvinism or arrogance—although plenty were, to be sure—to fear that their city was in danger of being swamped. How were Rome’s ancient institutions to cope with the sudden enrollment of millions of new citizens, dotted throughout the length and breadth of Italy? To conservatives, the threat appeared so desperate that their efforts to combat it had grown desperate in turn.

Inevitably, this served to skew the voting in favor of the rich. To most Romans, this seemed only fair. After all, the rich were the ones who contributed most to the Republic, and so it was generally conceded that their opinions should carry the greatest weight. Disproportionate voting power was yet another perk of rank.

Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it.

the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success.

Ritual and a shared sense of duty and obligation, these were what had defined the Republic for centuries. Unwritten custom had been all.

The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake.

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.

They kept their grip on the reins of power, but that, for a Roman aristocrat, was never enough. He also had to be respected, honored, loved.

“It is disturbing,” Cicero reflected, “that it tends to be men of genius and brilliance who are consumed by the desire for endless magistracies and military commands, and by the lust for power and glory.”

Touched by boldness, perseverance, and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal.

Great though Caesar had proved himself, steel-hard in body and mind, the moral codes of the Republic were unforgiving.