Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Far distant in Rome, what did the shareholders of the great corporations care for the suffering they imposed? Cities were no longer sacked; they were bled to death instead.

The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the publicani, who had proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto. A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles, and provide upwards of forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind.

The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex.

Warmongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive—greed, deep-seated, for empire and riches.”11 This had been the verdict of Mithridates on the Republic and now, in the person of her legate in Asia, he exacted symbolic justice. Manius Aquillius choked to death on gold.

Almost before they knew what had hit them, the Athenians found themselves with five vengeful legions commanded by Rome’s most ruthless general camped outside their walls. Confronted by this nightmare, Aristion’s only tactic was to compose rude songs about Sulla’s face, comparing it to a mulberry topped with oatmeal.

Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. Eight years previously Julius Caesar had been abducted while en route to Molon’s finishing school. When the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar had indignantly claimed that he was worth at least fifty.

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. Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. “Back in the old days,” he thundered, “the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognized the potential deadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.”12 By the standards of that diagnosis, Rome was in peril indeed.

Early every December women from the noblest families in the Republic would gather to celebrate the mysterious rites of the Good Goddess. The festival was strictly off-limits to men. Even their statues had to be veiled for the occasion. Such secrecy fueled any number of prurient male fantasies. Every citizen knew that women were depraved and promiscuous by nature.

Pompey’s blend of pomposity and false modesty presented his enemies with an irresistible target. When he complacently commended the Senate for suppressing Catiline, Crassus was immediately up on his feet, praising Cicero to the skies, lauding him in ludicrously exaggerated terms, claiming that he never looked at his wife or home without thanking Cicero for their continued existence. Cicero himself, completely failing to recognize the irony, was thrilled.

Cato and Bibulus threw themselves into a desperate rearguard action to halt the passage of the land bill. On the day of the public vote Bibulus appeared in the Forum to announce that he had observed unfavorable omens in the sky, and that the vote would therefore have to be suspended. The response of the pontifex maximus to this news was to have a bucket of dung emptied over Bibulus’s head.

“In all the qualities that make up a man,” Cicero had once acknowledged, “M. Cato was first citizen.”35 “First citizen”—“princeps”: Augustus let it be known that he could wish for no prouder title. The son of Julius Caesar was to be regarded as the heir of Cato too.