Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Long after the Roman Empire itself had collapsed, the opposites delineated by the Rubicon—liberty and despotism, anarchy and order, republic and autocracy—would continue to haunt the imaginings of Rome’s successors.

In 1922 Mussolini deliberately propagated the myth of a heroic, Caesar-like march on Rome. Nor was he the only man to believe that a new Rubicon had been crossed. “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt,” Hitler later acknowledged. “The march on Rome was one of the turning points of history.”

With fascism, a long tradition in Western politics reached a hideous climax, and then expired. Mussolini was the last world leader to be inspired by the example of ancient Rome. The fascists, of course, had thrilled to its cruelty, its swagger, its steel, but 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.”3 No longer, as they were for centuries, are they regarded as a mainspring of our modern civic rights.

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. Of course, to insist that Roman liberty had once been something more than a high-sounding sham is not to claim that the Republic was ever a paradise of social democracy. It was not. Freedom and egalitarianism, to the Romans, were very different things. 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.

Rome was the first and—until recently—the only republic ever to rise to a position of world power, and it is indeed hard to think of an episode of history that holds up a more intriguing mirror to our own.

Yet parallels can be deceptive. The Romans, it goes without saying, existed under circumstances—physical, emotional, intellectual—profoundly different from our own. What strikes us as recognizable about aspects of their civilization may be so—but not always. Often, in fact, the Romans can be strangest when they appear most familiar. A poet mourning the cruelty of his mistress, or a father his dead daughter, these may seem to speak to us directly of something permanent in human nature, and yet how alien, how utterly alien a Roman’s assumptions about sexual relations, or family life, would appear to us. So too the values that gave breath to the Republic itself, the desires of its citizens, the rituals and codes of their behavior. Understand these and much that strikes us as abhorrent about the Romans, actions that to our way of thinking are self-evident crimes, can be, if not forgiven, then at least better understood. The spilling of blood in an arena, the obliteration of a great city, the conquest of the world—these, to the Roman way of thinking, might be regarded as glorious accomplishments. Only by seeing why can we hope to fathom the Republic itself.

Women, it is true, can sometimes be overheard, but only the very noblest, and even those invariably when quoted—or misquoted—by men.

In short, the reader should take it as a rule of thumb that many statements of fact in this book could plausibly be contradicted by an opposite interpretation. This is not, I hasten to add, a counsel of despair. Rather, it is a necessary preface to a narrative

that has been pieced together from broken shards, but in such a way as to conceal some of the more obvious joins and gaps. That it is possible to do this, that a coherent story may indeed be made out of the events of the Republic’s fall, has always been, to the ancient historian, one of the great appeals of the period. I certainly see no reason to apologize for it. Following a lengthy spell in the doghouse, narrative history is now squarely back in fashion—and even if, as many have argued, it can function only by imposing upon the random events of the past an artificial pattern, then that in itself need be no drawback. Indeed, it may help to bring us closer to the mindset of the Romans themselves. Rare, after all, was the citizen who did not fancy himself the hero of his own history. This was an attitude that did much to bring Rome to disaster, but it also gave to the epic of the Republic’s fall its peculiarly lurid and heroic hue. Barely a generation after it had occurred, men were already shaking their heads in wonderment, astonished that such a time, and such giants, could have been. A half-century later and the panegyrist of the Emperor Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, could exclaim, “It seems an almost superfluous task, to draw attention to an age when men of such extraordinary character lived”6—and then promptly write it up. He knew, as all Romans knew, that it was in action, in great deeds and remarkable accomplishments, that the genius of his people had been most glo...

Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude. Caesar, Gallic Wars Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

From then on, the title of “king” would be regarded by the Roman people with an almost pathological hatred, to be shrunk from and shuddered at whenever mentioned. Liberty had been the watchword of the coup against Tarquin, and liberty, the liberty of a city that had no master, was now consecrated as the birthright and measure of every citizen. To preserve it from the ambitions of future would-be tyrants, the founders of

the Republic settled upon a remarkable formula. Carefully, they divided the powers of the exiled Tarquin between two magistrates, both elected, neither permitted to serve for longer than a year. These were the consuls,† and their presence at the head of their fellow citizens, the one guarding against the ambitions of the other, was a stirring expression of the Republic’s guiding principle—that never again should one man be permitted to rule supreme in Rome.

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.

The good citizen, in the Republic, was the citizen acknowledged to be good. The Romans recognized no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both.

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. 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.

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.

A city—a free city—was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas—citizenship—was to be civilized, an assumption still embedded in English to this day.

According to the legend, both brothers had decided to found a city, but they could not agree where, nor what name it should have. Romulus had stood on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine, both of them waiting for a sign from the gods. Remus had seen six vultures flying overhead, but Romulus had seen twelve. Taking this as incontrovertible proof of divine backing, Romulus had promptly fortified the Palatine and named the new city after himself. Remus, in a fury of jealousy and resentment, had ended up murdered by his brother in a brawl. This had irrevocably fixed the two hills’ destinies. From that moment on, the Palatine would be for winners, the Aventine for losers. Success and failure, prestige and shame—there, expressed in the very geography of the city, were the twin poles around which Roman life revolved.

In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. 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.

For all the ruthlessness of competition in the Republic, it was structured by rules as complex and fluid as they were inviolable. To master them was a lifetime’s work. As well as talent and application, this required contacts, money, and free time. The consequence was yet further paradox: meritocracy, real and relentless as it was, nevertheless served to perpetuate a society in which only the rich could afford to devote themselves to a political career. Individuals might rise to greatness, ancient families might decline, yet through it all the faith in hierarchy endured unchanging.

The aim of even the most poverty-stricken citizens was not to change society, but to do better out of it.

Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant?

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.

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. Programs of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries.

Prior to the cataclysms of 146 there had been some confusion among the Greeks as to the precise definition of “freedom.” When the Romans claimed to be guaranteeing it, what did this mean? One could never be sure with barbarians, of course: their grasp of semantics was so woefully inadequate. All the same, it did not require a philosopher to point out that words might be slippery and dangerously dependent on perspective. And so it had proved. Roman and Greek interpretations of the word had indeed diverged. To the Romans, who tended to regard the Greeks as fractious children in need of the firm hand of a pater familias, “freedom” had meant an opportunity for the city states to follow rules laid down by Roman commissioners. To the Greeks, it had meant the chance to fight each other.

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. In the years following the Pergamene bequest motives of profit and prestige grew ever more confused. The traditional policy of isolationism came increasingly under threat. And all the while the provincials were exploited ever more.

It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honors had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, and its presence there, a lurking toxin, could not easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate—these had previously been the worst that a citizen might have had to dread. But Sulla, in his pursuit of Marius, was pushing rivalry and personal hatred to new extremes. From that moment on, the memory of it would haunt every ambitious citizen—both as a temptation and as a fear.

By washing the Villa Publica with blood he had given dramatic notice of the surgery he was planning to perform on the Republic. If the census were illegitimate, then so too were the hierarchies of status and prestige that it had affirmed. The ancient foundations of the state were unstable, on the verge of collapse. Sulla, god-sent, would perform the repairs, no matter how much bloodshed the task might require.

What is certain, however, is that by casting his victory as god-given, the man who had been the first to march on Rome, and who had devastated Italy with “war, fire and slaughter,”8 aimed to absolve himself of all blame for the Republic’s woes.

The death-struggle with his great rival, the very feud that had brought the Republic to its perilous pass, was reconstituted as a war in the Republic’s defense.

He celebrated the scotching of his enemy’s bloodline by awarding himself the title of Felix—“The Fortunate One.” This had always been a cherished private nickname, but now Sulla decided to broadcast it publicly. By doing so, he signaled that there would be no herding of voters into the Ovile to validate his rule. Luck had brought Sulla to power, and luck—Sulla’s famous luck—would save the Republic in turn. Until her favorite’s work was done, and the constitution restored, Fortune was to rule as the mistress of Rome.

As for Sulla, ever the master strategist, he picked quarrels only as a matter of policy. By slapping down his own ally so publicly, he could represent himself as the selfless cleanser of the Republic, washing it in blood without thought of personal gain.

If, as his propaganda relentlessly insisted, he was guiltless of provoking civil war, then the fault had to lie elsewhere. And if, as his propaganda also insisted, ambition had tempted Marius and Sulpicius into endangering the Republic, then it was the corruption of the Republic’s own institutions that had permitted them to thrive.

Under Sulla’s new scheme of things, however, the real attraction of the praetorship was that

it now served as an obligatory step on the ladder that led, rung after ordered rung, toward the consulship itself. This remained the top, the glittering prize. As always, only a few would ever win it, but the goal of Sulla’s reforms was to ensure that, in the future, the victors would prove worthy of their rank. There were to be no more scandals like the career of the younger Marius. From quaestorship to praetorship to consulship, only a single path to power, and no short cuts.

Quaestors and praetors might dream of the consulship, but not tribunes, not anymore. Their office was to be a rung on a ladder leading nowhere.

There is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry, and private correspondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could feel. The rigors imposed on a child were not the result of willful cruelty. Far from it: the sterner the parents, the more loving they were assumed to be.

To the Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one’s endurance.

Crowd pleasers marked themselves out as populares. Marius had been one, Sulpicius too. Sulla’s entire political program had been an attempt to scotch the popularis tradition—the tradition to which Caesar regarded himself as heir.

In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans to no end to point out how “incredibly muddled—almost verging on the ridiculous—other legal systems are compared to [their] own!”16 In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a

vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirreling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the Cursus had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation, the shameless pulling of strings—anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.

Sulla’s dream—that there should be a single, public conduit to power—was crumbling along with his settlement.

Rather than compete for public honors, as a Roman nobleman was expected to do, he instead wheeled and dealed behind the scenes, bribing, cajoling, and scheming his way to the control of a vast bloc of senators’ votes. This was a political weapon that even the snootiest of aristocrats could respect. Any time an appointment needed fixing or a bill had to be finessed, the midnight visitors would start flitting to and from Cethegus’s doors. The idea that power might be separable from glory in this way was mystifying to most Romans; disturbing too.

More clearly than anyone else in Rome, he had penetrated to the heart of the lesson of the civil wars: that the outward trappings of glory were nothing compared to preeminence among the people in the know. In a society such as the Republic, where envy and malice always followed fast on greatness, supremacy was a perilous status. Only if it inspired fear without undue resentment could it hope to endure. In the art of preserving such a balance Crassus ruled supreme.

To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As

the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies—if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls. Yet this spectacle of savagery, staged in the Forum, the very heart of Rome, inspired emotions of admiration as well as loathing and contempt. The upper classes might like to pretend that the games existed for the benefit of the plebs, but the example of a gladiator’s courage could affect anyone. “Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,” enthused the sophisticated Cicero. “And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the death-blow?”35 Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired. Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme, and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting f...

Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandize, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the center of the empire, there to toil for their new masters. Even the poorest citizen might own a slave. In rich households the labor glut obliged slave owners to think up ever more exotic jobs for their purchases to specialize in, whether dusting portrait busts, writing invitations, or attending to purple clothes. By their very nature, of course, such tasks were recherché. The work of most slaves was infinitely more crushing. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded, and shackled, then set to labor from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive. Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialized in the torture—and sometimes execution—of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could...

To the Romans, it was the intoxicating quality of power that made it so dangerous. To command the affairs of one’s fellow citizens and to lead them into war, these were awesome responsibilities, capable of turning anybody’s head. After all, what else had the Republic been founded on if not this single great perception—that the taste of kingly authority was addictive and corrupting? Except, of course, that with Rome now the mistress of the world and the arbiter of nations, the authority of her consuls far exceeded any king’s. All the more reason, then, to insist on the checks that had always hedged about their office. And yet—the growing extent of the Republic’s reach confronted the Romans with a dilemma. Now that they were the citizens not of a small city state but of a superpower, the demands on their attention appeared limitless. Wars flared up everywhere. The more distant and intractable the enemy, the greater the logistical demands on the consuls. In extreme circumstances, this left the Senate with little choice but to appoint a magistrate who could take their place, who could be, as the Romans put it, “pro consule.” As the Republic’s empire expanded throughout the second century BC so recourse to proconsuls had become ever more common. By the nature of their duties, they might find themselves campaigning for a period far longer than the conventional single year. Pompey, for instance, had spent five years in Spain. The war was duly won, but not without raising conserva...