Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

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.