Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Babylonian astrologers were endlessly being expelled from the city. So too Egyptian gods. Even in the frantic months before Caesar crossed the Rubicon one of the consuls had found time to pick up an ax and personally start on the demolition of a temple of Isis. But the Jews and astrologers always made their way back, and the great goddess Isis, divine mother and queen of the heavens, had far too strong a hold on her worshipers easily to be banished from the city. The consul had been forced to lift the ax against her only because no laborers could be found to do the job. Rome was changing, lapped by tides of immigration, and there was little that the Senate could do to hold them back. New languages, new customs, new religions: these were the fruits of the Republic’s own greatness. Not for nothing did all roads now lead to Rome. Caesar, who had always been unafraid of the unthinkable, and had anyway long been a virtual stranger to his own city, could see this with a clarity denied to most of his peers. Perhaps he had always seen it. After all, as a boy, Jews had been his neighbors, and he had offered them his family’s protection. Far from alarming him, the presence of immigrants in Rome had served merely to buttress his conceit.