Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

once bound them together: their honor, their love of glory, their military ardor. Freedom had betrayed them. The Republic had lost its liberty, but worse, it had lost its soul. Or so the Romans feared. The challenge—and the great opportunity—for Augustus was to persuade them of the opposite. Do that and the foundations of his regime would be secure. A citizen who could restore to his fellows not only peace but also their customs, their past, and their pride would rank as august indeed. But he could not do it simply by legislating, “for what use are empty laws without traditions to animate them?”29 Decrees on their own would not resurrect the Republic. Only the Roman people, by proving themselves worthy of Augustus’s labors, could do that—and therein lay the genius and the greatness of the policy. The new era could be cast as a moral challenge of the kind that the Romans had so often faced—and risen to triumphantly—in the past. Augustus, claiming no more authority than was due to him by virtue of his achievements and prestige, summoned his countrymen to share with him the heroic task of revitalizing the Republic. He encouraged them, in short, to feel like citizens again.