Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

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,

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

good. The Romans recognized no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both.

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. Gruelling and implacable though the contest to excel invariably was, there could be no place in it for ill-disciplined vainglory. To place personal honor above the interests of the entire community was the behavior of a barbarian—or worse yet, a king.

When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found. Rubble left behind by the legionaries could always be distinguished by the way in which severed dogs’ heads or the dismembered limbs of cattle would lie strewn among the human corpses.3 The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.

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.

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. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.

In the Republic there was no distinguishing between political goals and personal ambitions. Influence came through power, power through influence. 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.

The corruption that resulted from this was all the more insidious because it could never be acknowledged. Even as they raked in the cash, senators still affected a snooty disdain toward finance. The contempt for profit was even enshrined in law: no publicanus was allowed to join the Senate, just as no senator was permitted to engage in anything so vulgar as overseas trade. Behind the scenes, however, such legislation did little to fulfil its aims. If anything, by prescribing how governor and entrepreneur could best collaborate, it only served to bring them closer together: the one needed the other if they were both to end up rich. The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex.

The Athenians never forgot—nor let anyone else forget—that it was they who had saved Greece at the Battle of Marathon and had once been the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. Resplendent still upon the Acropolis, the Parthenon stood as a permanent memorial to the years of Athenian supremacy. All gone, though; long gone. In the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, composed in the century after Alexander’s death, the Parthenon was conspicuous by its absence. It was too small, too out of date, reflecting the presumptions of an age in which empires as well as monuments had grown gigantic. Compared to the super state of Rome, Athens was a provincial backwater. Her memories of empire were nostalgia, nothing more. Any ideas above their station, any hints that the Athenians still imagined themselves a great power, were regarded by the Romans with hilarity. During the Republic’s campaigns against Macedon Athens had presumed to give her support, declaring war with a masterpiece of rhetorical invective. The Romans were not impressed. “This was the Athenians’ war against the king of Macedon, a war of words,” they sniffed. “Words are the only weapon that the Athenians have left.”

Now that Athens was no longer in arms against him he could display his respect for her cultural legacy in the traditional manner of victorious Roman generals—by pilfering it. The columns of the temple of Zeus were pulled down ready for transport to Rome. Athletes were rounded up, showpieces for Sulla’s triumph, leaving the Olympic Games so denuded of its stars that only the sprint could be staged. Most gratifying of all to Sulla’s sense of humor was the wholesale looting of Athenian libraries, which were stripped of their holdings. Henceforward, if anyone wanted to study Aristotle, he would have to do so in Rome. Sulla’s revenge on Athenian philosophy was sweet.