Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

“What sort of justice is it to preclude a native-born Roman from all hope of the consulship simply because he is of humble birth?”15 the plebeians had demanded.

In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. Indeed, this, to the Romans, was what liberty meant. It appeared self-evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, toward a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition.

Initially, large areas of Spain had been regarded as too remote and dangerous to exploit, the haunt of tribesmen so irredeemably savage that they believed banditry to be an honorable profession and used urine to brush their teeth.* By the last years of the second century BC, however, all except the north of the peninsula had been opened up for business.† Huge new mines were sunk across central and southwestern Spain. Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers, which show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bear witness to the volumes of poisonous smoke the mines belched out.

The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex.

When an Athenian peace delegation did what Athenian peace delegations had always done and began to discourse windily on the glories of its city’s past, Sulla silenced the talk with a gesture of his hand. “Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.”9 With this dismissal, he sent the delegates back to their city to eat boiled shoe leather and starve.

To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, “and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate”13—but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. If he failed to gain a senior magistracy or—worse—lost membership of the Senate altogether, a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only “to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all.”