- Holland, Tom.
Rubicon.
London: Abacus, 2003.
ISBN 0-349-11563-X.
-
Such is historical focus on the final years of the Roman Republic and
the emergence of the Empire that it's easy to forget that the Republic
survived for more than four and a half centuries prior to the
chaotic events beginning with Caesar's crossing the Rubicon which
precipitated its transformation into a despotism, preserving the form
but not the substance of the republican institutions. When pondering
analogies between Rome and present-day events, it's worth keeping in
mind that representative self-government in Rome endured about twice
as long as the history of the United States to date. This superb
history recounts the story of the end of the Republic, placing the
events in historical context and, to an extent I have never
encountered in any other work, allowing the reader to perceive the
personalities involved and their actions through the eyes and
cultural assumptions of contemporary Romans, which were often very
different from those of people today.
The author demonstrates how far-flung territorial conquests and the
obligations they imposed, along with the corrupting influence of
looted wealth flowing into the capital, undermined the institutions of
the Republic which had, after all, evolved to govern just a city-state
and limited surrounding territory. Whether a republican form of
government could work on a large scale was a central concern of the
framers of the U.S. Constitution, and this narrative graphically
illustrates why their worries were well-justified and raises the
question of whether a modern-day superpower can resist the same drift
toward authoritarian centralism which doomed consensual government in
Rome.
The author leaves such inference and speculation to the reader. Apart
from a few comments in the preface, he simply recounts the story of
Rome as it happened and doesn't draw lessons from it for the present.
And the story he tells is gripping; it may be difficult to imagine,
but this work of popular history reads like a thriller (I mean
that entirely as a compliment—historical integrity is never
sacrificed in the interest of storytelling), and he
makes the complex and often contradictory characters of figures such as
Sulla, Cato, Cicero, Mark Antony, Pompey, and Marcus Brutus come alive
and the shifting alliances among them comprehensible. Source citations
are almost entirely to classical sources although, as the author
observes, ancient sources, though often referred to as primary,
are not necessarily so: for example, Plutarch was born 90 years after
the assassination of Caesar. A detailed timeline lists events from
the foundation of Rome in 753
B.C.
through the death of Augustus in
A.D. 14.
A U.S. edition is now available.
October 2007 