Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

It was the last monarch of Pergamum, a Greek city controlling most of what is now western Turkey, who took the resulting spirit of collaboration to its logical extreme. In 133 he left his entire kingdom to the Republic in his will.

The vast sway of the Republic’s power, won in the cause of the honor of Rome, stood nakedly revealed as a license to make money. The resulting gold rush was soon a stampede. Highways originally built as instruments of war now served to bring the taxman faster to his victim;

The Athenian upper classes, their eyes now firmly fixed on the world beyond their city, concentrated on the only measure of achievement left to them—that of becoming millionaires. This was not an option open to every Athenian, of course. 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.

Sometimes, just sometimes, talent might be preferred to a celebrated name. After all, as new men occasionally dared to point out, if magistracies were hereditary, then what would be the point in holding elections at all?15