Joseph’s Reviews > Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic > Status Update

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 freedom of speech.

So it was that Caesar, arriving in the middle of a dynastic death struggle with barely four thousand men, more than made up in prejudices what he lacked in troops. The contemptibility of the Ptolemies was confirmed for him from the moment he stepped ashore. There, a welcoming gift on the harbor quay, was Pompey's pickled head. Caesar wept...

As the Republic tottered, so the tremors could be felt throughout the world.

No one could know it at the time, but 460 years of the free Republic were being brought to an end.

[Crassus' troops] left behind twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost [to the Parthians]. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.

After a bitter exile of eighteen months Cicero had returned to Rome.

The Catiline Conspiracy

For Cicero...could penetrate to the heart of the mania for fishponds. It spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome's public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one's ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man's flight threatened the entire line of battle.

What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the "Cursus." This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves...In the Republic sports were political and politics was a sport.

It was an irony that shadowed the entire program of his reforms. Sulla's task as dictator was to ensure that in the future no one would ever again do as he had done and lead an army on Rome. Yet it is doubtful whether Sulla himself would have regarded this as a paradox.