Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

The ancient ideals of the aristocracy had always provided the Republic’s empire with its conscience, but in the figure of Lucullus the traditional paternalism of a senator combined with a radical new interpretation of Rome’s globalizing mission. His passion for Greek culture enabled him to see clearly that Roman rule had no long-term future in the east unless the Greeks were given at least a stake in it.

To many of them—and some had been serving in the East for almost two decades—home must have seemed the haziest of memories. Yet all dreamed of returning there. It was why they fought: not merely to test themselves, in the approved Roman manner, against the savagery of the enemy and the fear of a violent death, but to reclaim a status that poverty had caused them to lose. The regard of his fellow citizens was as much of an obsession for the outcast as it was for the rich. Only war enabled him to demonstrate what even the most snobbish acknowledged, that “there is no condition so base that it cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory.”3 And—of course—of loot. The armies of the Republic had not always been filled with penniless volunteers. When the citizens assembled for elections on the Campus Martius, ranked strictly according to their wealth, they were preserving the memory of a time when men of every class had been drafted, when a legion had indeed embodied the Republic at war. Ironically, in those nostalgically remembered days, only those without property had been excluded from the levy. This had reflected deeply held prejudices: among the Romans, it was received wisdom that “men who have their

roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers.”4 The horny-handed peasant, tending to his small plot, was the object of much sentimental attachment and patriotic pride. Unsurprisingly, for the Republic had become great on his back. For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their plows left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years. During a soldier’s absence, his property might become easy prey. Small farms had been increasingly swallowed up by the rich. In place of a tapestry of fields and vineyards worked by free men, great stretches of Italy had been given over to vast estates, the “wilderness” through which Spartacus had marched. Of course, it was not truly a wilderness, being filled with chain gangs—but it lacked free-born citizens. The sight of “a countryside almost depopulated, with a virtual absence of free peasants or shepherds, and no one except for barbarian, imported slaves,”5 was what had shocked Tiberius Gracchus into launching his reform project. He had warned his fellow citizens that the foundations of their military greatness were being eroded. Every peasant who lost his farm had meant a soldier lost to Rome. To generations of reformers, the miseries of the dispos...

It was for this reason, perhaps, that the most farsighted critic of the Republic’s hunger for human livestock was not a Roman at all, but a Greek. Posidonius, the philosopher who had celebrated the Republic’s empire as the coming of a universal state, recognized in the monstrous scale of slavery the dark side of his optimistic vision. During his travels he had seen Syrians toiling in Spanish mines, and Gauls in chain gangs on Sicilian estates. He was shocked by the inhuman conditions he had witnessed. Naturally, it never crossed his mind to oppose slavery as an institution. What did horrify him, however, was the brutalizing of millions upon millions and the danger that this posed to all his high hopes for Rome. If the Republic, rather than staying true to the aristocratic ideals that Posidonius so admired, permitted its global mission to be corrupted by big business, then he feared that its empire would degenerate into a free-for-all of anarchy and greed. Rome’s supremacy, rather than heralding a golden age, might portend a universal darkness. Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world. As an example of what he feared, Posidonius pointed to a series of slave revolts, of which that of Spartacus had been merely the

most recent. He might just as well have cited the pirates. Bandits, like their prey, were most likely to be fugitives from the misery of the times, from extortion, warfare, and social breakdown. The result, across the Mediterranean, wherever men from different cultures had been thrown together, whether in slave barracks or on pirate ships, was a desperate yearning for the very apocalypse so feared by Posidonius. Rootlessness and suffering served to wither the worship of traditional gods, but it provided a fertile breeding ground for mystery cults. Like the Sibyl’s prophecies, these tended to be a fusion of many different influences: Greek, Persian, and Jewish beliefs. By their nature, they were underground and fluid, invisible to those who wrote history—but one of them, at least, was to leave a permanent mark. Mithras, whose rites the pirates celebrated, was to end up worshiped throughout the Roman Empire, but his cult was first practiced by the enemies of Rome. Mysterious threads of association bound him to Mithridates, whose very name meant “given by Mithra.” Mithras himself had originally been a Persian deity, but in the form worshiped by the pirates he most resembled Perseus, a Greek hero, and one from whom Mithridates, significantly, claimed descent. Perseus, like Mithridates, had been a mighty king, uniting West and East, Greece and Persia, orders far more ancient than the upstart rule of Rome. On Mithridates’ coinage there appeared a crescent and a star, the ancient...

For the memory of Alexander’s greatness had always served the Romans as a reproach. Even worse, it provided an inspiration to their foes. In the east the model of kingship established by Alexander had never lost its allure. For more than a century it had been neutered and systematically humiliated by Rome, yet it remained the only credible system of government that could be opposed to the republicanism of the new world conquerors. Hence its appeal to monarchs, such as Mithridates, who were not even Greek, and hence, most startling of all, its appeal to bandits and rebellious slaves.

Instead of the Senate’s traditional isolationism, Pompey embodied a new doctrine. Wherever Roman business interests were threatened, the Republic would intervene—and, if need be, impose direct rule. What had once been a toehold in the east was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute.

But while he was happy to identify himself with its interests, he was also careful not to appear its tool. The age of unbridled exploitation was over.

The great achievement of Pompey’s proconsulship was to demonstrate that the concerns of business could truly be squared with the ideals of the senatorial elite. It established a blueprint for Roman rule that was to endure for centuries. It also, not coincidentally, raised Pompey himself to a pinnacle of glory and wealth. The client-rulers who swelled the train of Rome also swelled his own. In the autumn of 64 Pompey headed south from Antioch to bag a few more. His first target was the fractious kingdom of Judaea. Jerusalem was occupied. The Temple, despite desperate resistance, was stormed. Pompey, intrigued by reports of the Jews’ peculiar god, brushed aside the protests of the scandalized priests and passed into the Temple’s innermost sanctum. He was perplexed to find it empty. There can be little doubt as to who Pompey thought was more honored by this encounter, Jehovah or himself. Not wishing to aggravate the Jews any further, he left the Temple its treasures and Judaea a regime headed by a tame high priest.

Could a Roman become the new Alexander while also remaining a citizen?

To the

Roman people who lined the streets to cheer him, he was living reassurance that ambition might indeed be sacred, that in struggling to reach the top and to achieve great things, a citizen was fulfilling his duty to the Republic and to the gods.

Misogyny alone, however, savage and unrelenting though it was, does not entirely explain the vehemence of the abuse that society hostesses such as Clodia provoked. Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing, and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality.

Even as it wallowed in gold, the Senate remained an instinctively conservative body, reluctant to glimpse a true reflection of itself, preferring to imagine itself a model of rectitude still. Politicians able to convince their fellow senators that this was more than just a fantasy might accrue considerable prestige. Sternness and austerity continued to play well.

To surrender to sensuality was to cease to be a man. Just as domineering women such as Clodia might be portrayed as vampires, “sapping”17 the appetites of those who succumbed to their charms, so gilded rakes like Clodius were savaged as creatures less than women.

Fashion served the function it always had: of distinguishing those who followed it from the common herd. In a society as competitive as the Republic this gave it an obvious and immediate appeal. Rome was filled with ambitious young men, all of them desperate for marks of public status. To be a member of the smart set was to sport precisely such marks.

The year of his consulship had been their, as well as his, finest hour. Surely this sense of common purpose could be maintained? What was a republic, after all, if not a partnership of interest and justice? Naturally, Cicero himself, as “the saviour of his country,” would have to remain at the helm, but he graciously accepted that other leading figures, Pompey especially, would also have their parts to play. All citizens—senators, equestrians, and poor alike—would live in harmony. Self-interest would be subordinated to the interests of Rome. As a manifesto, of course, this was a vision of cloud-cuckoo-land. It was hardly as though Cicero himself had been immune to ambition. Liberty—and the opportunity for an outsider to win the consulship—would be stifled by a society in which everyone knew his place. It was a paradox that was to torture Cicero all his life. His blueprint for the future, however impractical, was the product of much agonized reflection. Cicero was proud to consider himself the heir of the Republic’s noblest traditions. Chief among these was the age-old balance between ambition and duty. Should this be upset, then criminals might start to hack

their way to the top, and tyrants to emerge. Catiline had been foiled—but he was bound to have successors. It was essential that they too be destroyed. After all, what hope was there for the Republic if the great were not the good?

To Cicero himself, personal catastrophe was always a crisis for the whole of Rome. On other occasions, however, he would have acknowledged that the savagery of political life was the index of its liberty. Fortunes rose, fortunes fell; alliances were forged, alliances fell apart. These were the rhythms of a free republic. The fact that the gloss of his consulship was rapidly vanishing may have been upsetting to Cicero, but it was a source of quiet satisfaction to most of his colleagues. Achievement in Rome was valued, but excessive greatness was feared. Many could share in

power, but no one man could rule supreme. Only Sulla had done that—and he had soon retired.

For the Romans, the truest monuments to glory were fashioned not of marble but of memories. Spectacle, if it were not to be an insufferable affront to civic values, had to be fleeting, ephemeral, just like the authority of the

magistrate who sponsored it. Forbidden great architecture, the Romans made an art form out of festival instead.

The result, still apparent nearly a century later, was a powerful incongruity: Rome, mistress of the world, lacked what even the most provincial towns in Italy possessed: a theater built of stone.

True, there remained the menace of the third head. Caesar had Gaul waiting for him. A war there, which he was almost bound to start, would provide him with an unparalleled opportunity to rebuild his reputation. All the same, Cato’s tactics had inflicted permanent damage on Caesar too. He would leave behind him in Rome a legacy of hatred and fear. No matter how much glory he won in Gaul, and no matter how much gold, a hard core of opponents would continue to regard him as a criminal. For as long as Caesar remained a proconsul he was safe from prosecution—but he could not remain in Gaul for ever. The five years would pass, and at the end of them Cato would be waiting, ready to move. Justice demanded it, as did the needs of his country. If Caesar was not destroyed, then force would be seen to have triumphed over law. A republic ruled by violence would barely be a republic at all.

All the same, Crassus was not the only man to have dreamed of pushing Rome’s supremacy to the limits of the world. Something was changing in the mood of the Republic. Globalizing fantasies were much in the air. The globe itself could be found on coins as well as triumphal floats. The old suspicion of empire was fading fast.

It was Posidonius, every Roman’s favorite guru, who had argued that subject peoples should welcome their conquest by the Republic, since it would contribute toward the building of a commonwealth of man. Now the Romans themselves were latching on to the same argument. Assumptions that would have been unthinkable even a few decades previously were becoming commonplace. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace. Morality had not merely caught up with the brute fact of imperial expansion, but wanted more.

Nor was Cato, nor was Pompey. Nor even was Caesar. Throughout the centuries of the Republic’s history, its great men had sought to win glory, and to bring their enemies down. Nothing had changed over the years save the scale of opportunities on offer and the scope for mutual destruction that they had brought. To the Romans of a later age, mourning the death of their freedom, this was to be tragically clear. “By now,” wrote Petronius of the Republic’s last generation, “the conquering Roman had the whole world in his hand, the sea, the land, the course of the stars. But still he wanted more.”34 And because he wanted more, he took more; and because he took more, he wanted more. It was almost impossible for appetites so monstrous to be sated within the ancient limits of custom or morality. Pompey and Caesar, Rome’s greatest conquerors, had won resources for themselves beyond all the imaginings of previous

generations. Now the consequences of such obscene power were becoming grimly apparent. Either man had the capability to destroy the Republic. Neither wished to do so, but deterrence, if it were to have any value, obliged both to prepare for the worst.

Pompey, of course, could argue that there were sound military reasons for the surrender of the capital—and so there were. Nevertheless, it was a tragic and fatal mistake. The Republic could not endure as an abstraction. Its vitality was nourished by the streets and public places of Rome, by the smoke rising from

age-blackened temples, by the rhythms of elections, year after year after year. Uprooted, how could the Republic remain true to the will of the gods, and how were the wishes of the Roman people to be known? By fleeing the city the Senate had cut itself off from all those—the vast majority—who could not afford to pack up and leave their homes. As a result, the shared sense of community that had bound even the poorest citizen to the ideals of the state was betrayed. No wonder that the great nobles, abandoning their ancestral homes, dreaded looters and the fury of the slums. Perhaps, if the war proved to be as short as Pompey had promised it would be, none of this would matter—but it was already becoming clear that only Caesar had any hope of a lightning victory. Even as Pompey retreated south through Italy his pursuer was gathering pace. It seemed that the scattered legions summoned to the defense of the Republic might suffer the same fate as Spartacus’s army, pinned down in the peninsula’s heel. Only complete evacuation could spare them such a calamity. The Senate began to contemplate the unthinkable: that it should reconvene abroad. Provinces had already been allocated to its key leaders: Sicily to Cato, Syria to Metellus Scipio, Spain to Pompey himself. Henceforward, it appeared, the arbiters of the Republic’s fate were to rule not in the city that had bestowed their rank on them, but as warlords amid distant and sinister barbarians. Their power would be sanctioned by for...

Even those most identified with the cause of the establishment showed themselves tormented by this question. Cato, contemplating the results of his greatest and most ruinous gamble, did nothing for his followers’ morale by putting on mourning clothes and bewailing the news of every military engagement, victory as well as defeat. Neutrals, of course, lacked even the consolation of knowing that the Republic was being destroyed in a good cause. Cicero, having obediently abandoned Rome on Pompey’s orders, found himself disoriented to the point of hysteria by his absence from the capital. For weeks he could do nothing save write plaintive letters to Atticus, asking him what he should do, where he should go, whom he should support. He regarded Caesar’s followers as a gang of cutthroats, and Pompey as criminally incompetent. Cicero was no soldier, but he could see with perfect clarity what a catastrophe the abandonment of Rome had been, and blamed it for the collapse of everything he held dear, from property prices to the Republic itself. “As it is, we wander about like beggars with our wives and children, all our hopes dependent upon a man who falls da...

It would be unfair to dismiss Caesar’s clemency as a mere tool of policy—Domitius, if their positions had been reversed, would

surely have had Caesar put to death—but it served his purposes well enough. For not only did it satisfy his own ineffable sense of superiority, but it helped to reassure neutrals everywhere that he was no second Sulla. Even his bitterest enemies, if they only submitted, could have the assurance that they would be pardoned and spared. Caesar had no plans for proscription lists to be posted in the Forum.

But such despair was the privilege of a wealthy intellectual. Few citizens could afford to indulge in it. Most sought other ways of making order out of the chaos of the times. There was nothing more upsetting to a Roman than to feel deprived of fellowship, of a sense of community, and rather than endure it he would go to any extreme. But in a civil war to what could a citizen pledge his loyalty? Not his city, nor the altars of his ancestors, nor the Republic itself, for these were claimed as the inheritance of both sides. But he could attach himself to the fortunes of a general, and be certain of finding comradeship in the ranks of that general’s army, and identity in the reflected glory of the general’s name. This was why the legions of Gaul had been willing to cross the Rubicon. What, after nine years of campaigning, were the traditions of the distant Forum to them, compared to the camaraderie of the army camp? And what was the Republic, compared to their general?

Here, in the mingling of the souls of Caesar and his army, was the glimpse of a new order. Ties of mutual loyalty had always provided Roman society with its fabric. So they continued to do in time of civil war, but increasingly purged of old complexities and subtleties. Simpler to follow the blast of a trumpet than the swirl of contradictory obligations that had always characterized civilian life. Yet these same obligations, comprised as they were of centuries of taboos and traditions, were not lightly to be set aside. Without them the Republic, at least as it had been constituted for centuries, would die. The checks and balances that had always served to temper the Romans’ native love of glory, and divert it into courses beneficial to their city, might soon fall away. An ancient inheritance of customs and laws might be forever lost. Already, in the first months of the civil war, the ruinous consequences of such a catastrophe could be glimpsed. Political life still subsisted, but as a grisly parody of itself. The arts of persuasion were increasingly being abandoned as resorts to violence and intimidation took their place. The ambitions of magistrates, no longer dependent on votes, could now be paid for with their fellow citizens’ blood.

Just as striking—and, to a Roman’s eye, bizarre—however, there were some quarters of the city in which there were no images of gods to be seen at all. As well as to Greeks and Egyptians, Alexandria was home to a vast number of Jews; more, almost certainly, than Jerusalem itself. They completely dominated one of the city’s five administrative districts, and despite having to rely on a Greek translation of the Torah, they remained in other ways defiantly unassimilated. Jews entering their synagogue, Syrians camped outside beneath a statue of Zeus, all of them in the shadow of a plundered obelisk—this was the look of cosmopolis. And was it to be Rome’s future too? There were certainly plenty of citizens who feared so. To the Romans, the prospect of being swamped by barbarous cultures had always been a fertile source of paranoia. The ruling classes, in particular, mistrusted foreign influences because they dreaded the enfeebling of the Republic. The world’s mistress, yes, but a world city, no: this, essentially, was the Senate’s manifesto for Rome. So it was that Jews and

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.

That night, after retiring to his bedroom and reading for a short while, he stabbed himself. He was still alive when his attendants found him on the floor, but while frantic attempts were made to bandage the wound, Cato pushed away the doctors and tore at his own intestines. He quickly bled to death. When Caesar arrived at Utica he found the whole city in mourning. Bitterly, he addressed the man who had for so long been his nemesis, newly laid, like Pompey, in a grave beside the sea: “Just as you envied me the chance of sparing you, Cato, so I envy you this death.”17 Caesar was hardly the man to appreciate being cheated of a grand gesture. There had been no one more identified with the flinty spirit of Roman liberty than Cato, and to have pardoned him would have been to destroy his infuriating hold on the Republic’s imagination. Instead, thanks to the gory heroism of his death, that hold had now been confirmed. Even as a specter, Cato remained Caesar’s most obdurate foe.

Having found the time, between his Egyptian escapade with Cleopatra and his victory in Africa, to thrash King Pharnaces, Caesar had boasted of the speed of his victory in a celebrated phrase: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”18 Now, written on a billboard and borne in procession through Rome, the same phrase served to cut Pompey down to size too—for it was Pompey who had made such a big deal out of conquering Pharnaces’ father, Mithridates.

But the Republic itself was now securely in his hands. The Senate, stupefied by the scale of Caesar’s achievements, overawed by the magnitude of his power, had scrabbled to legitimize his victory and somehow reconcile it with the cherished traditions of the past. The strain of this attempt had cost constitutionalists a great deal of pain. Already Caesar had twice accepted the dictatorship: first, in late 49 BC for eleven days when he had presided over his own hurried election to the consulship, and second, in October 48 when he had been appointed to the office for a year. Now, in the spring of 46, he was awarded a dictatorship for the third time—and for the unprecedented span of ten years. Already consul, Caesar was also given the right to nominate all the Republic’s magistrates, and was created—to sardonic amusement—Rome’s “Prefect of Morals.” Never before, not even under Sulla, had there been such a concentration of authority in the hands of one man. Yet the example of Sulla did offer at least a glimmer of hope. A decade was a long time to endure a dictatorship, but it was not an eternity. Bitter medicine had proved restorative before. And who, after all, could deny that the Republic was very sick indeed?

It was Fate that had delivered the fortunes of the Roman people into his hands. If they now refused to support him in his efforts to bind their wounds, then not even the blood already spilled would serve to appease the angry gods. Rome, and the world with her, would be lost to a tide of darkness, and the barbarism would prove universal. When faced with the need to stave off such an apocalypse, what were the sensibilities of a Cicero or a Brutus? What, indeed, was the Republic? Caesar’s impatience with traditions still regarded as sacrosanct by his fellow citizens was growing more palpable by the day. Far from hurrying back to the capital to consult the Senate or put his measures to the people, he lingered in the provinces, planting colonies of veterans, extending the franchise to privileged natives. Back in Rome the aristocracy shuddered at the news. Jokes were told of Gauls peeling off their stinking trousers, draping themselves in togas, and asking the way to the Senate House. Such xenophobia, of course, had always been a Roman’s right and privilege. Almost by definition, it was those proudest of the liberties of the Republic who proved the worst snobs. But Caesar scorned them. He could no longer be bothered to care what traditionalists thought.

Nor, indeed, was he much interested in the traditions themselves. This was just as well, for his policies raised awkward questions about the future functioning of the Republic. If it had been impractical enough for citizens in Italy to come to Rome to cast their votes, then for those in distant provinces, far away across the sea, it would be impossible. The problem was brushed aside. Caesar was not to be diverted by such quibbles. He had the foundations of a truly universal empire to lay—and with it, not coincidentally, a global supremacy for himself. Every native enfranchised, and every colonist settled, was a brick in his new order. Roman aristocrats had always commanded clients, but Caesar’s patronage would extend to the very limits of sand and ice. Syrians and Spaniards, Africans and Gauls, the far-flung peoples of a shrinking world, would henceforward owe their allegiance not to the lethal amateurism of the Republic but to a single man. As a symbol of this future, nothing was more potent than Caesar’s plan for Carthage and Corinth. Flattened by the vengeful legions, these two cities were now to be rebuilt, monuments to a new age of universal peace and to the glory of their patron. Utica, down the coast from the new colony of Carthage, would be put forever in the shade. The future would be raised on the rubble of the past. For the first time citizens living in Rome would be made to feel that they were parts, as well as the masters, of one world.

If Cleopatra were to be represented in the heart of the Republic as a goddess, then what plans did her lover have for himself?

And there, for anxious Romans, lay the rub. Late in 45 BC the Senate announced that Caesar was henceforward to be honored as divus Iulius: Julius the God. Who now could doubt that he was preparing to break the ultimate taboo and set a crown on his head? There were certainly grounds for such a horrific suspicion. Early in 44 Caesar began appearing in the high red boots once worn by kings in Italy’s legendary past; around the same time he reacted with fury when a diadem that had mysteriously appeared on one of his statues was removed. Public alarm grew. Caesar appears to have realized that he had gone too far. On 15 February, dressed in a purple toga, sporting a golden wreath, he ostentatiously refused Antony’s offer of a crown. The occasion was a festival, and Rome was heaving with holiday crowds. As Antony repeated the offer “a groan echoed all the way round the Forum.”22 Again Caesar refused the crown, this time with a firmness that brooked no future contradiction. Perhaps, had the crowds cheered, he might have accepted Antony’s offer, but it seems unlikely. Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius. Nor, surely, in the final analysis, did he care. The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation. This was the lesson that his stay in Alexandria had taught him. Just as Cleopatra was both a pharaoh to the Egyptians and a Macedonian queen among the Greeks, so Caesar could be at once a living god in Asia and a dictator to the Roma...

their anxieties out of hand. “He would rather die, he said, than be feared.”

As though in derisory answer, from across the Campus came the sound of screams. The spectators at Pompey’s theater were rioting, crushing one another in their panic. Wisps of smoke were already rising into the sky; shops were being smashed as looters set to work. More distantly, the first wails of grief could be heard as Rome’s Jews began the mourning for the man who had always served as their patron. Elsewhere, however, as news of what had happened spread across the city, there was only silence. Far from rushing to the Forum to acclaim the liberators, citizens were rushing to their homes and barring their doors.

Between the rival Caesarian leaders, unchallenged masters now of the entire Western empire, there was to be no war. Instead, on an island in a river near Medina, with their armies lined up on either bank, Antony and Octavian met, embraced, and kissed each other’s cheek. Then, along with Lepidus, they settled down to carve up the world and pronounce the Republic dead.

Naturally, they disguised their purpose with specious and familiar words. They claimed not to be pronouncing the obituary of the Republic but setting it back in order. In truth, they were executing it. As a result of the island conference it was agreed that a triumvirate should be established, but not a loose and shifting alliance as had been established between Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus. This time it would be formally constituted and endowed with ferocious powers. For five years the triumvirs were to exercise proconsular authority over the entire empire. They were to have the right to pass or annul laws as they pleased, without reference to the Senate or the Roman people. Martial law was extended into the sacred space of Rome herself. This, after more than four hundred years of Roman freedom, was effectively the end.

Even so, Cicero could have escaped. News of his proscription reached him well in advance of the bounty hunters. Typically, however, he panicked and vacillated over what to do. Rather than setting sail to join Brutus and Cassius, who were even then recruiting a massive army of liberation in the East, he instead flitted despairingly from villa to villa, haunted, as he had been for so long, by the shadow of exile. After all, as Cato had taught him, there were nightmares worse than death. Trapped by his executioners at last, Cicero leaned out from his litter and bared his throat to the sword. This was the gesture of a gladiator, and one he had always admired. Defeated in the greatest and deadliest of all games, he unflinchingly accepted his fate. He died as he would surely have wished: bravely, a martyr to freedom and to freedom of speech.

But what would that mean in a state no longer free? Not, by definition, the old answer, that it was to value liberty above everything, even life itself. Heroic it may have been, but the grisly example of Porcia was not much emulated. Of those who had lived truest to the ideals of the Republic, most, now that stillness had settled again over Philippi, were dead. The loss of such citizens was impossible to make up, and all the more so because a disproportionate number of the casualties had come from the nobility. The heir to a famous name, in the universal opinion of the Roman people, bore the history of his city in his veins. This was why the extinction of a great house had always been regarded as a matter for public mourning—and why the scything of an entire generation of the nobility, whether at the hands of executioners or amid the dust and flies of Macedon, was a calamity fatal to the Republic. More, much more, than blood had been spilled.