Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

His pleasures, as he progressed through Greece and Asia, were those that had long been traditional among the Republic’s proconsuls: posing as a lover of Greek culture while leeching the Greeks; patronizing local princelings; fighting the Parthians. To diehard republicans, this was all reassuringly familiar, and gradually, in the months and years that followed Philippi, the shattered remnants of Brutus’s armed forces would gravitate, faute de mieux, toward Antony. With him, in the East, the cause of legitimacy licked its wounds as its lifeblood ebbed away.

Yet his—and Antony’s—mastery remained that of a despot. The triumvirate, which had been hurriedly renewed in 37 after its expiry the year before, had no foundations in precedent, only in the exhaustion and misery of the Roman people. The sense of helplessness that the Republic had inspired in other peoples was now its own. As early as 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination, one of his friends had warned that Rome’s problems were intractable—“for if a man of such genius was unable to find a way out, who will find one now?”17 Since then the Roman people had found themselves ever more storm-racked and adrift. The lodestars of custom were gone, and there seemed nothing to take their place.

These lines were written in 40 BC, in the very teeth of Italy’s suffering. Their author, P. Vergilius Maro—Virgil—was from the fertile basin of the River Po, an area where the land commissars had been particularly active. In other poems Virgil had hauntingly depicted the miseries of the dispossessed, and his vision of Utopia was not any the less despairing in its inspiration. Such had been the scale of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Roman people that vague prophetic longings of the kind that Greeks or Jews had long indulged in appeared the only consolations left to them. “The Sibyl’s songs”: these were not the Sibyl’s songs as they appeared in the books on the Capitol. They contained no prescription for appeasing the gods’ anger, no program for restoring peace to the Republic. They were dreams, nothing more.

By 36 BC, when Antony and Octavian faced each other as twin masters of the Roman world, undistracted by rivals, the character of their rule was being influenced ever more by the different traditions of their power bases. For both men the challenge was the same: to secure a legitimacy that was not merely of the sword. Here Octavian, as the ruler of the West, had a crucial advantage. Both he and Antony were Roman, but only he had Rome. When Octavian returned to the capital from the defeat of Sextus he was greeted, for the first time, with genuine enthusiasm. The innate conservatism of his fellow citizens had survived the loss of their freedom, and now, grateful for the peace that Octavian had won them, they paid homage in the language of their ancient rights. They offered the conqueror a sacred privilege: the inviolability of a tribune. Only in a restored Republic would this have any meaning—and Octavian, by accepting it, was signaling his anticipation of just such a prospect. Not that this guaranteed anything, of course, for by now the Romans had learned better than to put their trust in rhetorical flourishes. Even so, with Sextus’s fleet sunk and Lepidus banished in ignominious retirement, Octavian could at last start to flesh out his claims to be laboring in the cause of peace. Taxes were rescinded, grain supplies reestablished, commissioners appointed to bring order

to the countryside. Documents relating to the civil wars were ostentatiously burned. The annual magistrates began to have their responsibilities restored. Back to the future indeed.

Yet if there was much that was factitious about Octavian’s propaganda, it was not all spin. Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalized in 32 when he divorced Octavia, was instinctively recognized by most Romans for what it was—a betrayal of the Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic

itself was dead did not make these any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird themselves for war and imagine that both the Republic and their own virtue were not, after all, entirely dead. Many years later Octavian would boast, “The whole of Italy, unprompted, swore allegiance to me, and demanded that I lead her into war. The provinces of Gaul, Spain, Africa, Sicily and Sardinia also swore the same oath.”21 Here, in the form of a plebiscite spanning half the world, was something utterly without precedent, a display of universalism consciously designed to put that of Antony and Cleopatra in the shadow, drawn from the traditions not of the East but of the Roman Republic itself. Undisputed autocrat and champion of his city’s most ancient ideals, Octavian sailed to war as both. It was a combination that was to prove irresistible.

As he sat down, murmurs of unease, swelling steadily. The leaders of the Senate began to protest. Why, having rescued the Roman people from otherwise certain ruin, was Caesar planning to abandon them now? Yes, he had announced the restoration of constitutional proprieties, and the Senate was duly grateful. But why, just because the traditions of the Republic were set to flourish again, did this mean that Caesar had to resign his guardianship of the state? Did he wish to condemn his people to eternal anarchy and civil war? For this, without him, would surely be their fate! Perhaps, rather than abandon the Republic to disaster, he would therefore listen to a counterproposal? Caesar had declared illegal any of his acts or honors that were contrary to the constitution; very well, then let him, just like any consul, be awarded a province. One that would bring with it twenty-odd legions, true, and include Spain, Gaul, Syria, Cyprus, and Egypt—but a province nonetheless. And let him hold it for ten years, not an unheard of length of time, after all—for had not Caesar’s father, the great Julius, held office for a decade in Gaul? Nothing to offend precedent there. The Republic would flourish and Caesar would fulfill his responsibilities to Rome, and the gods would smile on both. Throughout the Senate there rose a roar of assent.

This, for the man born Gaius Octavius, was the culmination of an entire career spent collecting impressive names. A Caesar at the age of nineteen, he had gone one better two years later when, following his adoptive father’s official deification, he had begun calling himself “Divi Filius”—“Son of a God.” Extraordinary though such a name was, it had evidently met with divine approval, for the career of Caesar Divi Filius had never ceased to be blessed with success. Now, as “Augustus,” he would be distinguished even further from the common run of mortals. The title would veil him like a nimbus in a glow of unearthly power. “For it signified that he was something more than human. All the most sacred and honoured things are described as ‘august.’

And he understood it because he understood the Roman people themselves. Augustus had shared in their deepest dreams and desires. That, after all, was what had won him the world. Last and greatest of the Republic’s strongmen, he had recognized, with the pitiless eye of a pathologist, the malignancy corrupting his city’s noblest ideals—and he had never ceased to exploit it. “Always fight bravely, and be superior to others,” Posidonius had admonished Pompey, citing the impeccable authority of Homer. But the age of heroes was past, and the desire to fight bravely and to be superior to others might now encompass the ruin of Rome. The stakes had grown so high, the resources available to the ambitious so immense, the methods open to them so devastating and lethal, that they had brought the Republic and all its empire to the point of annihilation. No longer a polity of citizens bound by shared assumptions and restraints, Rome had become an anarchy of head-hunters in which only the cruel and fratricidal could hope to advance. This was the hunting ground

into which Octavian, just nineteen, had thrown himself—and there could be no doubt that his aim, from the outset, had been to seize mastery of the state. Having achieved that, however, with his rivals dead or tamed and his people exhausted, he had next faced a momentous decision. Either to continue trampling on the traditions of his city’s past, to wield power nakedly with a sword, as a warlord, perhaps, like his father, like Antony, as a god—or to cast himself as the heir of tradition. By becoming “Augustus” he signaled his choice. He would rule not against the grain of the Republic but with it. He would instruct his countrymen in an ancient lesson: that ambition, if not pursued for the general good, might be a crime. And he himself, the “best guardian of Romulus’ people,”27 would revitalize the ideals of citizenship so that never again would they overreach themselves and degenerate into savagery and civil war.

The old certainties of what it meant to be a Roman had been poisoned, and a confused and frightened people despaired of what had

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.

Now, at enormous expense, Augustus worked to expiate his offense. “The assurance of every citizen’s property rights” was to be an enduring slogan of the new regime, and one that did much to underpin its widespread popularity. To the Romans, security of tenure was a moral as much as a social or economic good. Those who benefited from its return saw it as hailing nothing less than a new golden age: “cultivation restored to the fields, respect to what is sacred, freedom from anxiety to mankind.”

Instead, his fantasy was the old one of all Roman reformers: to renew the rugged virtues of the ancient peasantry, to bring the Republic back to basics. It struck a deep chord, for this was the raw stuff of Roman myth: nostalgia for a venerated past, yes, but simultaneously a spirit harsh and unsentimental, the same that had forged generations of steel-hard citizens and carried the Republic’s standards to the limits of the world.

Honor, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end.

Not to be content with what they had, but always to strive and fight for more, this had been the destiny of the Republic’s citizens—and it gave to Augustus and his mission a time-hallowed glow. In the Romans’ beginning was their end. In 29 BC, the same year that Octavian returned from the East to push forward his program of regeneration, Virgil started a poem on the theme of Aeneas. This was to become the great epic of the Roman people, an exploration both of their primordial roots and of their recent history. Like specters, famous names out of the future haunt the

vision of the Trojan hero: Caesar Augustus, naturally, “son of a god, who brings back the age of gold,”32 but others too—Catiline, “trembling at the faces of the Furies,” and Cato, “giving laws to the just.”33 When Aeneas, shipwrecked off the African coast, neglects his god-given duties to the future of Rome and dallies instead with Dido, the queen of Carthage, the reader is troubled by knowing what will happen to the Trojan’s descendants, Julius Caesar and Antony; Carthage shimmers and elides with Alexandria; Dido with Cleopatra, a second fatal queen. What is gone and what is to come, both cast their shadows, one on the other, meeting, merging, separating again. When Aeneas sails up the Tiber, cattle low in the field that, a thousand years hence, will be the site of the Forum of Augustus’s Rome. To the Romans themselves, who remained a conservative people despite all the upheavals of repeated civil wars, there was nothing startling about the perception that the past might shadow the present. The unique achievement of Augustus, however, was the brilliance with which he colonized both. His claim to be restoring their lost moral greatness to them stirred in the Romans deep sensibilities and imaginings that at their profoundest could inspire a Virgil, and make their landscape once again a sacred and myth-haunted place. But these yearnings also served other, more programmatic purposes. They encouraged veterans, for instance, to remain on their farms and not come endlessly floc...

For generations Rome’s leading citizens had been tortured by the need to choose between self-interest and traditional ideals. Augustus, with his genius for squaring circles, simply made himself the patron of both. And he could do this because, like any star performer, he had the pick of roles he wanted. Only the reality could not be acknowledged: Augustus had no wish to end up murdered on the Senate House floor. Instead, with the willing collaboration of his fellow citizens, who flinched from staring the truth in the face, he veiled himself in robes garnered from the antique lumber box of the Republic, refusing any magistracy not sanctioned by the past, and often not holding any magistracy at all. Authority, not office, was what counted: that mysterious quality that had given to Catulus or to Cato his prestige. “In all the qualities that make up a man,” Cicero had once acknowledged, “M. Cato was first citizen.”35 “First citizen”—“princeps”: Augustus let it be known that he could wish for no prouder title. The son of Julius Caesar was to be regarded as the heir of Cato too. And he pulled it off. No wonder that Augustus boasted of his skills as an actor. Only a man with a supreme talent for dissimulation could have played such various parts so subtly—and with such success. On his signet ring the princeps carried the image of a sphinx—and throughout his career he posed his countrymen a riddle. The Romans were used to citizens who vaunted their power, who exulted in the brilli...

The Republic had long been dead—now it was passing out of fashion too. “Shaggy simplicity is yesterday’s news. Rome’s made of gold,/And coins in all the wealth of the conquered globe.”37 Greatness might have cost the Romans their freedom, but it had given them the world. Under Augustus their legions had continued to display all the martial qualities of old—pushing back the empire’s frontiers, slaughtering barbarians—but to the urbane consumer back on the Campus Martius, it was only distant noise. War no longer disturbed his reckoning. Nor, much, did morality, or duty, or the past. Nor, even, did warnings from the heavens.

All three ultimately committed suicide, the only gesture of republican defiance still permitted Roman noblemen under the rule of the Caesars.

Vivid with moralizing and gossip, they portray the Republic’s collapse not as a revolution or a social disintegration, but as the ancients tended to see it: a drama of ambitious and exceptional men.