Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

nowadays even its noblest ideals, the ideals of active citizenship that once so moved Thomas Jefferson, have passed out of fashion. Too stern, too humorless, too redolent of cold showers. Nothing, in our aggressively postmodern age, could be more of a turn-off than the classical. Hero-worshiping the Romans is just so nineteenth century. We have been liberated, as John Updike once put it, “from all those oppressive old Roman values.”

The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace. Rather bread and circuses than endless internecine wars. As the Romans themselves recognized, their freedom had contained the seeds of its own ruin, a reflection sufficient to inspire much gloomy moralizing under the rule of a Nero or a Domitian. Nor, in the centuries since, has it ever lost its power to unsettle.

“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.”4