Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

By the first century BC, there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself. And then Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded, and none was left at all.

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

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.

In Roman history to search for details of anyone outside the ruling class is to pan for gold.

In the century that followed its establishment, the Republic was repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued constitutional reforms—and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change. Novelty, to the citizens of the Republic, had sinister connotations. Pragmatic as they were, they might accept innovation if it were dressed up as the will of the gods or an ancient custom, but never for its own sake. Conservative and flexible in equal measure, the Romans kept what worked, adapted what had failed, and preserved as sacred lumber what had become redundant. The Republic was both a building site and a junkyard. Rome’s future was constructed amid the jumble of her past.

Praise was what every citizen most desired—just as public shame was his ultimate dread. Not laws but the consciousness of always being watched was what prevented a Roman’s sense of competition from degenerating into selfish ambition.

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

Unlike the Republic after Cannae, he preferred not to risk his city’s obliteration. Despite this, the Romans never forgot that in Hannibal, in the scale of his exertions, in the scope of his ambition, they had met the enemy who was most like themselves. Centuries later statues of him were still to be found standing in Rome.

the Republic did not behave at all in the manner of a conventional imperial power. Like lightning from a clear sky, the legions would strike with devastating impact, and then, just as abruptly, be gone.

Abolishing the monarchy altogether, Rome first of all carved Macedon into four puppet republics, and then in 148, completing the transformation from peace-keeper to occupying power, established direct rule.

To have civitas—citizenship—was to be civilized, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide. A citizen defined himself by the fellowship of others, in shared joys and sorrows, ambitions and fears, festivals, elections, and disciplines of war.

Plebs sordida, they were called—“the great unwashed.”

In 367 BC a law had been passed that permitted any citizen to stand for election to the great offices of the state—previously a prerogative of the patricians alone.

The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity.

In 367 BC, with the abolition of legal restrictions on their advancement, wealthy plebeians had lost all incentive to side with the poor. High-achieving plebeian families had instead devoted themselves to more profitable activities, such as monopolizing the consulship and buying up the Palatine. After two and a half centuries of power they had ended up like the pigs in Animal Farm, indistinguishable from their former oppressors.

No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as to affect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. “Populares,” the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.

There was always a risk that a tribune might end up going too far, succumbing to the lure of easy popularity with the mob, bribing them with radical, un-Roman reforms. And, of course, the more that the slums swelled to the bursting point, and the more wretched the living conditions for the poor became, the greater that risk grew.

Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy.

What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents, and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny or barbarism—these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall.

And why, after all, should the Romans not cling to an order that had brought them such success? Frustrating, multiform, and complex it may have been, yet these were precisely the qualities that enabled it to absorb shocks and digest upheavals, to renew itself after every disaster.

“They will sink into a swamp of decadence: men will sleep with men, and boys will be pimped in brothels; civil tumults will engulf them, and everything will fall into confusion and disorder. The world will be filled with evils.”

Without rivalry, they demanded, how would Rome’s greatness ever be maintained?

Consul though he was, Sulla now found himself powerless to resist Sulpicius’s demands, for it was the tribune’s mobs, not the fasces, who ruled Rome.

As flames began to crackle and spread down the line of the city’s highways Sulla himself rode along the greatest of them all, the via Sacra, into the very heart of Rome. Marius and Sulpicius, after a futile attempt to raise the city’s slaves, had already fled. Everywhere, mail-clad guards took up their new posts. Swords and armor were worn outside the Senate House. The unthinkable had happened. A general had made himself the master of Rome.

A consul butchered by his own soldiers: Rufus’s fate might seem to confirm 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.”

For all the trauma of Sulla’s march on Rome, no one could imagine that the Republic itself might be overthrown, because no one could conceive what might possibly replace it.

In an economy run by and for the super-rich the wealthier a minority of citizens became, the more the resentments of the majority seethed. This was true of every society in the ancient world, but in Athens—the birthplace of democracy—perhaps uniquely so.

Mithridates, knowing that the game was over, was desperate to keep hold of his kingdom. Sulla, nervous of his enemies back in Italy, was eager to head home. In return for accepting controls on his offensive capability and the surrender of all the territory he had conquered, the murderer of eighty thousand Italians was rewarded by Sulla with a peck on his cheek. No one had ever emerged so unscathed from a war with the Republic before. Beaten he may have been, but Mithridates still sat on the throne of Pontus. The time would come when Rome would regret that he had not been finished off for good.

The Republic’s ancient history did indeed provide examples of citizens who had wielded absolute power without being elected. In moments of particular crisis the authority of the consuls had sometimes been suspended and a single magistrate nominated to take control of the state. Such an office fitted Sulla’s requirements perfectly. The fact that it was a constitutional fossil worried him not in the slightest. By dropping heavy and menacing hints, he persuaded the Senate to dust off the antiquated office and appoint him to it. The result was not only to legalize his supremacy, but to give it the patina of tradition. After all, how could the Romans consider themselves threatened by a magistracy as authentically Republican as the dictatorship?

Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: “Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?”

because Marius had married into the Julians, the heir of that ancient patrician family found himself on the run.

In the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport.

“Atticus” was not the only wealthy citizen to have witnessed a decade of violence and political collapse and decided that there might be no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.

“Rugged fortitude; frugality; a lack of attachment to material possessions; a religion wonderful in its devotion to the gods; upright dealing; care and attention to justice when dealing with other men.”22

I realised that the Roman people are prone to deafness, but that their eyesight is keen and observant, and so I stopped worrying what people might hear of me, but made sure that they saw me in person every day.

Now that the days of sacking Greek cities were over, the world’s first art market had developed to plug the gap. Prices had duly spiraled, and dealers made fortunes.

Clearly, as a prosecutor, Cicero relished what he found, but as an aspiring statesman he was simultaneously appalled. Verres’s corruption struck at two of his most passionately held convictions: that Rome was good for the world, and that the workings of the Republic were good for Rome.

a prosecutor had the right to claim the rank of any criminal he successfully brought to justice.

After routing the Marian armies in Africa he had crossed back to Italy and refused a direct order to disband his legions—not

Having helped Catulus to put down the armed revolt that had followed Sulla’s death, he had then pulled his favorite stunt of refusing to disband his troops.

In 73 BC, the year in which Crassus became praetor, Pompey was busy extinguishing the final embers of rebellion and settling Spain to his own immense advantage.

As the Republic’s empire expanded throughout the second century BC so recourse to proconsuls had become ever more common.

The ancient ideals of the aristocracy had always provided the Republic’s empire with its conscience, but in the figure of Lucullus the traditional paternalism of a senator combined with a radical new interpretation of Rome’s globalizing mission. His passion for Greek culture enabled him to see clearly that Roman rule had no long-term future in the east unless the Greeks were given at least a stake in it.

The sight of “a countryside almost depopulated, with a virtual absence of free peasants or shepherds, and no one except for barbarian, imported slaves,”5 was what had shocked Tiberius Gracchus into launching his reform project. He had warned his fellow citizens that the foundations of their military greatness were being eroded. Every peasant who lost his farm had meant a soldier lost to Rome.

To people racked by the twin plagues of political impotence and lawlessness, the pirates had at least brought the order of the protection racket.

If the Republic, rather than staying true to the aristocratic ideals that Posidonius so admired, permitted its global mission to be corrupted by big business, then he feared that its empire would degenerate into a free-for-all of anarchy and greed. Rome’s supremacy, rather than heralding a golden age, might portend a universal darkness. Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.

Pompey was granted the unprecedented force of 500 ships and 120,000 men, together with the right to levy more, should he decide that they were needed. His command embraced the entire Mediterranean, covered all its islands, and extended fifty miles inland. Never before had the resources of the Republic been so concentrated in the hands of a single man.

If Syria were left as it was, a festering sore on the flank of Rome’s possessions, then there was the constant danger that its poison might infect a new Tigranes, a new generation of pirates or rebellious slaves. This, to Pompey, was intolerable.

Wherever Roman business interests were threatened, the Republic would intervene—and, if need be, impose direct rule.

The great achievement of Pompey’s proconsulship was to demonstrate that the concerns of business could truly be squared with the ideals of the senatorial elite. It established a blueprint for Roman rule that was to endure for centuries.