Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

And yet—we flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are also, for good as well as ill, the heirs of the Roman Republic.

Flattery

the comparison of Rome to the modern-day United States has become something of a cliché.

he who would foresee what has to be should reflect on what has been, for everything that happens in the world at any time has a genuine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.”

everything that happens in the world at any time has a genuine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.”

Yet parallels can be deceptive. The Romans, it goes without saying, existed under circumstances—physical, emotional, intellectual—profoundly different from our own.

One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries.

Great to think of when studying ancient histories. Wonder if it will be different now

The Romans themselves had always dreaded that this might be their destiny. As Sallust, their first great historian, put it, “There can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved.”

Maybe i need to ignore trump and focus more on the good people

“It seems an almost superfluous task, to draw attention to an age when men of such extraordinary character lived”6—and then promptly write it up. He knew, as all

Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude. Caesar, Gallic Wars Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories

Tom Holland rules. Great comparisons.

Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a Roman truly know himself a man.

The Romans recognized no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both.

The approval of the entire city was the ultimate, the only, test of worth.

The via Egnatia, a mighty gash

The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked.

after Sulla’s coup “there was nothing left which could shame warlords into holding back on military violence—not the law, not the institutions of the Republic, nor even the love of Rome.”5 In fact, it illustrated the opposite.

Crassus would inherit from his father the recognition that wealth was the surest foundation of power. Later, he was to be notorious for claiming that until a man could afford to maintain his own army it was impossible for him to have too much money.

Every member of every tribe was entitled to his vote, but since this had to be delivered in person at the Ovile the practical effect was to ensure that only the wealthiest out-of-towner could afford to travel to Rome to exercise his right. Inevitably, this served to skew the voting in favor of the rich.

wow, same playbook

The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even “personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review.”4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.

interesting

People who mattered were waking up to the fact that Cicero’s estimation of his own talents was not merely insufferable egotism, and that his genius as an advocate was indeed something exceptional.

All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave.

Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

the traditions of Roman discipline always played well with the voters.

“In the dining room a cock-teaser, in the bedroom an iceblock”:

Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. “Back in the old days,” he thundered, “the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognized the potential deadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.”

“He addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus.”

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.

After all, with a conventional political career closed off to him, he had nothing to lose. Clodius was not interested in the bleating praise of men like Cicero. What he wanted, like any member of his arrogant, high-reaching family, was power. Win that and the marks of honor would surely follow soon enough. His plan was simple: seduce the mob and seize control of the streets. So criminal, so outrageous was this policy that in more settled times surely not even Clodius would have dared conceive it.

“It is disturbing,” Cicero reflected, “that it tends to be men of genius and brilliance who are consumed by the desire for endless magistracies and military commands, and by the lust for power and glory.”5 An ancient insight.

At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable—for only a private citizen could be brought to trial.

oh, history

What had begun as a feud of the kind that had always existed in the Republic—indeed, had formed the essence of its politics—was now spreading a contagion of bitterness and antagonism far beyond the ranks of the two rival factions.

It seemed by now that every skirmish thrown up in political life was having a similar effect. The vast majority of citizens who cared for neither side, or for both, were in despair. “I’m fond of Curio,” wailed Cicero. “I wish to see Caesar honoured in the manner which is his due, and as for Pompey, I would lay down my life for him—all the same, what really counts with me is the Republic itself.”37 But there was nothing that he or anyone who thought like him could do. Spokesmen for peace were increasingly dismissed as appeasers. The rival factions were embracing their doom. It was as though, peering over the edge, vertigo was tempting them to jump. The thrill of a bloodlust was ripe in the winter air, and the talk was all of war. In

maybe the best summary of civil war paralysis ive seen

It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions.

The dictators curse

Malicious, rancorous, unfair—but it was the mark of a free Republic that its citizens’ speech be free too.