Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

By Tom Holland

A vivid historical account of the social world of Julius Caesar’s Rome as it moved from republic to empire, from the acclaimed author of Dynasty and co-host of the hit podcast The Rest Is History

“A fascinating picture of Roman city life . . . In every aspect of this story, Holland expertly makes the Romans, so alien and yet so familiar, relevant to us.”—Los Angeles Times

“Stunning . . . Holland keeps his narrative moving at chariot-race speed.”—Newsday

In 49 B.C., the seven hundred fifth year since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed a small border river called the Rubicon and plunged Rome into cataclysmic civil war. Tom Holland’s enthralling account tells the story of Caesar’s generation, witness to the twilight of the Republic and its bloody transformation into an empire. From Cicero, Spartacus, and Brutus, to Cleopatra, Virgil, and Augustus, here are some of the most legendary figures in history brought thrillingly to life.

Combining verve and freshness with scrupulous scholarship, Rubicon is not only an engrossing history of this pivotal era but a uniquely resonant portrait of a great civilization in all its extremes of self-sacrifice and rivalry, decadence and catastrophe, intrigue, war, and world-shaking ambition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9780307427519

Tom Holland

Tom Holland is the author of a range of books on ancient and early medieval history. He has translated Herodotus and Suetonius, presented TV documentaries on subjects ranging from dinosaurs to the Islamic State, and been described by The Times as 'a leading English cricketer'.

Book preview

1

THE PARADOXICAL REPUBLIC

Ancestral Voices

In the beginning, before the Republic, Rome was ruled by kings. About one of these, a haughty tyrant by the name of Tarquin, an eerie tale was told. Once, in his palace, an old woman came calling on him. In her arms she carried nine books. When she offered these to Tarquin he laughed in her face, so fabulous was the price she was demanding. The old woman, making no attempt to bargain, turned and left without a word. She burned three of the books and then, reappearing before the king, offered him the remaining volumes, still at the same price as before. A second time, although with less self-assurance now, the king refused, and a second time the old woman turned and left. By now Tarquin had grown nervous of what he might be turning down, and so when the mysterious crone reappeared, this time holding only three books, he hurriedly bought them, even though he had to pay the price originally demanded for all nine. Taking her money, the old woman then vanished, never to be seen again.

Who had she been? Her books proved to contain prophecies of such potency that the Romans soon realized that only one woman could possibly have been their author—the Sibyl. Yet this was an identification that only begged further questions, for the legends told of the Sibyl were strange and puzzling. On the presumption that she had foretold the Trojan War, men debated whether she was a compound of ten prophetesses, or immortal, or destined to live a thousand years. Some—the more sophisticated—even wondered whether she existed at all. In fact, only two things could be asserted with any real confidence—that her books, inscribed with spidery and antique Greek, certainly existed, and that within them could be read the pattern of events that were to come. The Romans, thanks to Tarquin’s belated eye for a bargain, found themselves with a window to the future of the world.

Not that this helped Tarquin much. In 509 BC he succumbed to a palace coup. Kings had been ruling in Rome for more than two hundred years, ever since the city’s foundation, but Tarquin, the seventh in line, would also be the last.* With his expulsion, the monarchy itself was overthrown, and, in its place, a free republic proclaimed. From then on, the title of king would be regarded by the Roman people with an almost pathological hatred, to be shrunk from and shuddered at whenever mentioned. Liberty had been the watchword of the coup against Tarquin, and liberty, the liberty of a city that had no master, was now consecrated as the birthright and measure of every citizen. To preserve it from the ambitions of future would-be tyrants, the founders of the Republic settled upon a remarkable formula. Carefully, they divided the powers of the exiled Tarquin between two magistrates, both elected, neither permitted to serve for longer than a year. These were the consuls,† and their presence at the head of their fellow citizens, the one guarding against the ambitions of the other, was a stirring expression of the Republic’s guiding principle—that never again should one man be permitted to rule supreme in Rome. Yet, startling though the innovation of the consulship appeared, it was not so radical as to separate the Romans entirely from their past. The monarchy might have been abolished, but very little else. The roots of the new Republic reached far back in time—often very far back indeed. The consuls themselves, as a privilege of their office, bordered their togas with the purple of kings. When they consulted the auspices they did so according to rites that predated the very foundation of Rome. And then, of course, most fabulous of all, there were the books left behind by the exiled Tarquin, the three mysterious rolls of prophecy, the writings of the ancient and quite possibly timeless Sibyl.

So sensitive was the information provided by these that access to them was strictly regulated as a secret of the state. Citizens found copying them would be sewn into a sack and dropped into the sea. Only in the most perilous of circumstances, when fearsome prodigies warned the Republic of looming catastrophe, was it permitted to consult the books at all. Then, once every alternative had been exhausted, specially appointed magistrates would be mandated to climb to the temple of Jupiter, where the books were kept in conditions of the tightest security. The scrolls would be spread out. Fingers would trace the faded lines of Greek. Prophecies would be deciphered, and advice taken on how best to appease the angered heavens.

And advice was always found. The Romans, being a people as practical as they were devout, had no patience with fatalism. They were interested in knowing the future only because they believed that it could then better be kept at bay. Showers of blood, chasms spitting fire, mice eating gold: terrifying prodigies such as these were regarded as the equivalent of bailiffs’ duns, warnings to the Roman people that they stood in arrears with the gods. To get back in credit might require the introduction of a foreign cult to the city, the worship of a divinity who had hitherto been unknown. More typically, it would inspire retrenchment, as the magistrates desperately sought to identify the traditions that might have been neglected. Restore the past, the way that things had always been, and the safety of the Republic would be assured.

This was a presumption buried deep in the soul of every Roman. In the century that followed its establishment, the Republic was repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued constitutional reforms—and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change. Novelty, to the citizens of the Republic, had sinister connotations. Pragmatic as they were, they might accept innovation if it were dressed up as the will of the gods or an ancient custom, but never for its own sake. Conservative and flexible in equal measure, the Romans kept what worked, adapted what had failed, and preserved as sacred lumber what had become redundant. The Republic was both a building site and a junkyard. Rome’s future was constructed amid the jumble of her past.

The Romans themselves, far from seeing this as a paradox, took it for granted. How else were they to invest in their city save by holding true to the customs of their ancestors? Foreign analysts, who tended to regard the Romans’ piety as superstition,¹ and interpreted it as a subterfuge played on the masses by a cynical ruling class, misread its essence. The Republic was not like other states. While the cities of the Greeks were regularly shattered by civil wars and revolutions, Rome proved herself impervious to such disasters. Not once, despite all the social upheavals of the Republic’s first century of existence, had the blood of her own citizens been spilled on her streets. How typical of the Greeks to reduce the ideal of shared citizenship to sophistry! To a Roman, nothing was more sacred or cherished. After all, it was what defined him. Public business—res publica—was what republic meant. Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a Roman truly know himself a man.

And by hearing his name on every tongue. The good citizen, in the Republic, was the citizen acknowledged to be good. 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. This was why, whenever resentful citizens took to the streets, it would be to demand access to yet more honors and glory. Civil unrest would invariably inspire the establishment of a new magistracy: the aedileship and tribunate in 494, the quaestorship in 447, the praetorship in 367. The more posts there were, the greater the range of responsibilities; the greater the range of responsibilities, the broader the opportunities for achievement and approbation. Praise was what every citizen most desired—just as public shame was his ultimate dread. Not laws but the consciousness of always being watched was what prevented a Roman’s sense of competition from degenerating into selfish ambition. Gruelling and implacable though the contest to excel invariably was, there could be no place in it for ill-disciplined vainglory. To place personal honor above the interests of the entire community was the behavior of a barbarian—or worse yet, a king.

In their relations with their fellows, then, the citizens of the Republic were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. In their relations with other states, however, no such inhibitions cramped them. More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.² The consequences for their neighbors of this hunger for honor were invariably devastating. The legions’ combination of efficiency and ruthlessness was something for which few opponents found themselves prepared. When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found. Rubble left behind by the legionaries could always be distinguished by the way in which severed dogs’ heads or the dismembered limbs of cattle would lie strewn among the human corpses.³ The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine. The courage they brought to service in the legions, steeled by pride in their city and faith in her destiny, was an emotion that every citizen was brought up to share. Something uniquely lethal—and, to the Romans, glorious—marked their way of war.

Even so, it took time for the other states of Italy to wake up to the nature of the predator in their midst. For the first century of the Republic’s existence the Romans found it a struggle to establish their supremacy over cities barely ten miles from their own gates. Yet even the deadliest carnivore must have its infancy, and the Romans, as they raided cattle and skirmished with petty hill tribes, were developing the instincts required to dominate and kill. By the 360s BC they had established their city as the mistress of central Italy. In the following decades they marched north and south, crushing opposition wherever they met it. By the 260s, with startling speed, they had mastered the entire peninsula. Honor, of course, had demanded nothing less. To states that humbly acknowledged their superiority, the Romans would grant such favors as a patron condescends to grant his clients, but to those who defied them, only ceaseless combat. No Roman could tolerate the prospect of his city losing face. Rather than endure it, he would put up with any amount of suffering, go to any lengths.

The time soon came when the Republic had to demonstrate this in a literal struggle to the death. The wars with Carthage were the most terrible it ever fought. A city of Semitic settlers on the North African coast, dominating the trade routes of the western Mediterranean, Carthage possessed resources at least as great as Rome’s. Although predominantly a maritime power, she had indulged herself for centuries with bouts of warfare against the Greek cities of Sicily. Now, poised beyond the Straits of Messina, the Romans represented an ominous but intriguing new factor in Sicily’s military equation. Predictably, the Greeks on the island could not resist embroiling the Republic in their perennial squabbles with Carthage. Equally predictably, once invited in, the Republic refused to play by the rules. In 264 Rome transformed what had been a minor dispute over treaty rights into a total war. Despite a lack of any naval tradition, and the loss of fleet after fleet to enemy action or storms, the Romans endured over two decades of appalling casualties to bring Carthage, at last, to defeat. By the terms of the peace treaty forced on them, the Carthaginians undertook a complete withdrawal from Sicily. Without ever having intended it, Rome found herself with the nucleus of an overseas empire. In 227 Sicily was constituted as the first Roman province.

The theater of the Republic’s campaigning was soon to grow even wider. Carthage had been defeated, but not smashed. With Sicily lost, she next turned her imperial attentions to Spain. Braving the murderous tribes who swarmed everywhere in the mountains, the Carthaginians began to prospect for precious metals. The flood of wealth from their mines soon enabled them to contemplate resuming hostilities. Carthage’s best generals were no longer under any illusions as to the nature of the enemy they faced in the Republic. Total war would have to be met in kind, and victory would be impossible unless Roman power were utterly destroyed.

It was to achieve this that Hannibal, in 218, led a Carthaginian army from Spain, through southern Gaul and over the Alps. Displaying a mastery of strategy and tactics far beyond that of his opponents, he brought three Roman armies to sensational defeat. In the third of his victories, at Cannae, Hannibal wiped out eight legions, the worst military disaster in the Republic’s history. By every convention and expectation of contemporary warfare, Rome should have followed it by acknowledging Hannibal’s triumph, and attempting to sue for peace. But in the face of catastrophe, she showed only continued defiance. Naturally, at such a moment, the Romans turned for guidance to the prophecies of the Sibyl. These prescribed that two Gauls and two Greeks be buried alive in the city’s marketplace. The magistrates duly followed the Sibyl’s advice. With this shocking act of barbarism, the Roman people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not countenance to preserve their city’s freedom. The only alternative to liberty—as it had always been—was death.

And grimly, year by year, the Republic hauled itself back from the brink. More armies were raised; Sicily was held; the legions conquered Carthage’s empire in Spain. A decade and a half after Cannae Hannibal faced another Roman army, but this time on African soil. He was defeated. Carthage no longer had the manpower to continue the struggle, and when her conqueror’s terms were delivered, Hannibal advised his compatriots to accept them. Unlike the Republic after Cannae, he preferred not to risk his city’s obliteration. Despite this, the Romans never forgot that in Hannibal, in the scale of his exertions, in the scope of his ambition, they had met the enemy who was most like themselves. Centuries later statues of him were still to be found standing in Rome. And even after they had reduced Carthage to an impotent rump, confiscating her provinces, her fleet, her celebrated war-elephants, the Romans continued to dread a Carthaginian recovery. Such hatred was the greatest compliment they could pay a foreign state. Carthage could not be trusted in her submission. The Romans looked into their own souls and attributed the implacability they found there to their greatest foe.

Never again would they tolerate the existence of a power capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a preemptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity. Such opponents were easy—all too easy—to find. Already, even before the war with Hannibal, the Republic had fallen into the habit of dispatching the occasional expedition to the Balkans, where its magistrates could indulge themselves by bullying princelings and redrawing boundaries. As the Italians would have confirmed, the Romans had an inveterate fondness for this kind of weight-throwing, reflecting as it did the familiar determination of the Republic never to brook disrespect. For the treacherous and compulsively quarrelsome states of Greece, however, it was a lesson that took some grasping. Their confusion was understandable—in the early years of their encounters with Rome, the Republic did not behave at all in the manner of a conventional imperial power. Like lightning from a clear sky, the legions would strike with devastating impact, and then, just as abruptly, be gone. For all the fury of these irregular interventions, they would be punctuated by lengthy periods when Rome appeared to have lost interest in Greek affairs altogether. Even when she did intervene, her incursions across the Adriatic continued to be represented as peace-keeping ventures. These still had as their object not the annexation of territory but the clear establishment of the Republic’s prestige, and the slapping down of any overweening local power.

In the early years of Roman engagement in the Balkans, this had effectively meant Macedon. A kingdom to the north of Greece, Macedon had dominated the peninsula for two hundred years. As heir to the throne of Alexander the Great, the country’s king had always taken it for granted that he could be quite as overweening as he pleased. Despite repeated punishing encounters with the armies of the Republic, such an assumption never entirely died, and in 168 BC Roman patience finally snapped. Abolishing the monarchy altogether, Rome first of all carved Macedon into four puppet republics, and then in 148, completing the transformation from peace-keeper to occupying power, established direct rule. As in Italy, where roads criss-crossed the landscape like the filaments of a net, engineering prowess set the final seal on what military conquest had begun. The via Egnatia, a mighty gash of stone and gravel, was driven through the wilds of the Balkans. Running from the Adriatic to the Aegean Sea, this highway became the vital link in the coffle joining Greece to Rome. It also provided ready access to horizons even more exotic, those beyond the blue of the Aegean Sea, where cities glittering with gold and marble, rich with works of art and decadent cooking practices, seemed positively to invite the Republic’s stern attentions. Already, in 190, a Roman army had swept into Asia, pulverized the war machine of the local despot, and humiliated him before the gaze of the entire Near East. Both Syria and Egypt, the two local superpowers, hurriedly swallowed their pride, learned to tolerate the meddling of Roman ambassadors, and grovelingly acknowledged the Republic’s hegemony. Rome’s formal empire was still limited, being largely confined to Macedon, Sicily, and parts of Spain, but her reach by the 140s BC extended to strange lands of which few back in Rome had even heard. The scale and speed of her rise to power was something so startling that no one, least of all the Romans themselves, could quite believe that it had happened.

And if they thrilled to their country’s achievements, then so too did many citizens feel unease. Moralists, doing what Roman moralists had always done and comparing the present unfavorably with the past, did not have to look far for evidence of the pernicious effects of empire. Ancient standards appeared corrupted by the influx of gold. With plunder came foreign practices and philosophies. The unloading of Eastern treasures into Rome’s public places or the babbling of strange tongues on her streets provoked alarm as well as pride. Never did the hardy peasant values that had won the Romans their empire seem more admirable than when they were being most flagrantly ignored. The Republic is founded on its ancient customs and its manpower⁴—so it had been triumphantly asserted in the afterglow of the war against Hannibal. But what if these building blocks began to crumble? Surely the Republic would totter and fall? The dizzying transformation of their city, from backwater to superpower, disoriented the Romans and left them nervous of the jealousy of the gods. By an uncomfortable paradox, their engagement with the world came to seem the measure of both their success and their decline.

For great as Rome had become, portents were not lacking of her possible doom. Monstrous abortions, ominous flights of birds: wonders such as these continued to unsettle the Roman people and require, if the prodigies appeared particularly menacing, consultation of the Sibyl’s prophetic books. As ever, prescriptions were duly discovered, remedies applied. The Romans’ time-sanctioned ways, the customs of their ancestors, were resurrected or reaffirmed. Catastrophe was staved off. The Republic was preserved.

But still the world quickened and mutated, and the Republic with it. Some marks of crisis defied all powers of ancient ritual to heal them. Changes such as the Roman people had set in motion were not easily slowed down—not even by the recommendations of the Sibyl.

It required no portents to illustrate this, only a walk through the world’s new capital.

All was not well in the seething streets of Rome.

The Capital of the World

A city—a free city—was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas—citizenship—was to be civilized, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide. A citizen defined himself by the fellowship of others, in shared joys and sorrows, ambitions and fears, festivals, elections, and disciplines of war. Like a shrine alive with the presence of a god, the fabric of a city was rendered sacred by the communal life that it sheltered. A cityscape, to its citizens, was therefore a hallowed thing. It bore witness to the heritage that had made its people what they were. It enabled the spirit of a state to be known.

Foreign powers, when they first came into contact with Rome, would often find themselves reassured by this thought. Compared to the beautiful cities of the Greek world, Rome appeared a backward and ramshackle place. Courtiers in Macedon would snigger in a superior manner every time they heard the city described.⁵ Much good it did them. Yet, even as the world learned to kowtow to the Republic, there remained a whiff of the provincial about Rome. Spasmodic attempts were made to spruce her up, but to little effect. Even some Romans themselves, as they grew familiar with the harmonious, well-planned cities of the Greeks, might occasionally feel a touch of embarrassment. When the Capuans compare Rome, with her hills and deep valleys, her attics teetering over the streets, her hopeless roads, her cramped back-alleys, against their own city of Capua, neatly laid out on a suitable flat site, they will jeer at us and look down their noses,⁶ they worried. Yet still, when all was said and done, Rome was a free city, and Capua was not.

Naturally, no Roman ever really forgot this. He might sometimes moan about his city, but he never ceased to glory in her name. It appeared self-evident to him that Rome, mistress of the world, had been blessed by the gods, and preordained to rule. Scholars learnedly pointed out that the location of the city avoided extremes of heat, which sapped the spirit, and cold, which chilled the brain; it was therefore a simple fact of geography that the best place of all to live, occupying as it does the happy medium, and perfectly placed in the centre of the world, is where the Roman people have their city.⁷ Not that a temperate climate was the only advantage that the gods had thoughtfully provided the Roman people. There were hills that could be easily defended; a river to provide access to the sea; springs and fresh breezes to keep the valleys healthy. Reading Roman authors praise their city,⁸ one would never guess that to have built across seven hills was a contravention of the Romans’ own principles of town-planning, that the Tiber was prone to violent flooding, and that the valleys of Rome were rife with malaria.⁹ The love that Romans felt for their city was of the kind that can see only virtues in a beloved’s glaring faults.

This idealized vision of Rome was the constant shadow of the squalid reality. It helped to generate a baffling compound of paradoxes and magnitudes, in which nothing was ever quite as it seemed. For all the smoke and wealth and din¹⁰ of their city, the Romans never ceased to fantasize about the primitive idyll that they liked to imagine had once existed on the banks of the Tiber. As Rome heaved and buckled with the strains of her expansion, the bare bones of an ancient city state, sometimes blurred, sometimes pronounced, might be glimpsed protruding through the cramped modern metropolis. In Rome memories were guarded closely. The present was engaged in a perpetual compromise with the past, restless motion with a reverence for tradition, hard-headedness with a devotion to myth. The more crowded and corrupted their city grew, the more the Romans longed for reassurance that Rome remained Rome still.

So it was that smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when trees of every kind had completely covered one of the hills, the Aventine.¹¹ Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces, and workshops. Long before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would forewarn the traveler that he was nearing the great city. Nor was smog the only sign. Nearby towns with celebrated names, rivals of the Republic back in the archaic past, now stood deserted, shrunk to a few scattered inns, emptied by Rome’s gravitational pull.

As the traveler continued onward, however, he would find the roadside lined with more recent settlements. Unable to accommodate a burgeoning population, Rome was starting to burst at the seams. Shantytowns stretched along all the great trunk-roads. The dead were sheltered here as well, and the necropolises that stretched toward the coast and the south, along the great Appian Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-rate whores. All the same, not every tomb had been left to crumble. As the traveler approached Rome’s gates he might occasionally find the stench from the city ameliorated by myrrh or cassia, the perfumes of death, borne to him on the breeze from a cypress-shaded tomb. Such a moment, the sense of a communion with the past, was a common one in Rome. Yet just as the stillness of a cemetery sheltered violence and prostitution, so not even the most hallowed and timeless of spots were immune to defacement. Admonitory notices were always being posted on tombs, prohibiting electioneering slogans, but still the graffiti would appear. In Rome, seat of the Republic, politics was a contagion. Only in conquered cities were elections an irrelevance. Rome, having neutered political life in other societies, was now supreme as the world’s theater of ambitions and dreams.

Not even the graffiti-ravaged tombs, however, could prepare a traveler for the bedlam beyond the city gates. The streets of Rome had never had any kind of planning imposed upon them. That would have taken a design-minded despot, and Roman magistrates rarely had more than a single year in office at a time. As a result, the city had grown chaotically, at the whim of unmanageable impulses and needs. Stray off one of Rome’s two grand thoroughfares, the via Sacra and the via Nova, and a visitor would soon be adding to the hopeless congestion. A contractor hurries by, all hot and sweaty, with his mules and porters, stone and timber twists on the rope of a giant crane, funeral mourners compete for space with well-built carts, there scurries a mad dog, here a sow who’s been wallowing in mud.¹² Caught up on this swirl, a traveler was almost bound to end up lost.

Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to negotiate it was to memorize notable landmarks: a fig tree, perhaps, or a market’s colonnade, or, best of all, a temple large enough to loom above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout city, and temples abounded. The Romans’ reverence for the past meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not even when the open spaces in which they might once have stood had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or meat markets, they sheltered veiled statues whose very identities might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demolish them. These fragments of an archaic past preserved in stone, fossils from the earliest days of the city, provided the Romans with a desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm.

Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being rebuilt, torn down, and rebuilt again. Developers were always looking for ways to squeeze in extra space, and squeeze out extra profit. Shanties sprouted like weeds from the rubble left by fires. Despite the best efforts of responsible magistrates to keep streets clear, they were always filling with market stalls or squatters’ shacks. Most profitably of all, in a city long constricted by her ancient walls, developers had begun to aim for the sky. Apartment blocks were springing up everywhere. Throughout the second and first centuries BC landlords would compete with one another to raise them ever higher, a development frowned on by the law, since tenements were notoriously jerry-built and rickety. In general, however, safety regulations were too weakly imposed to inhibit the splendid opportunities for profiteering that a high-rise slum presented. Over six storys or more, tenants could be crammed into tiny, thin-walled rooms, until invariably the building would collapse, only to be flung up again even higher than before.

In Latin these apartment blocks were known as insulae, or islands—a suggestive word, reflecting the way in which they stood apart from the sea of life down on the streets. Here was where alienation bred by the vastness of the city was most distressingly felt. To those dossing in the insulae, rootlessness was more than just a metaphor. Even on the ground floors the insulae usually lacked drains or fresh water. Yet sewers and aqueducts were precisely what the Romans would boast about when they wanted to laud their city, comparing the practical value of their public works with the useless extravagances of the Greeks. The Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s monstrous central drain, had provided the city with its gut since before the foundation of the Republic itself. The aqueducts, built with plunder from the East, were an equally spectacular demonstration of the Romans’ commitment to communal living. Stretching for up to thirty-five miles, they brought cool mountain water into the heart of the city. Even Greeks might on occasion admit to being impressed. The aqueducts convey such volumes that the water flows like rivers, wrote one geographer. There is barely a house in Rome which doesn’t have a cistern, a service-pipe or a gushing fountain.¹³ Evidently, the slums had not been on his tour.

In truth, nothing better illustrated the ambiguities of Rome than the fact that she was at once both the cleanest and the filthiest of cities. Ordure as well as water flowed through her streets. If the noblest and most enduring virtues of the Republic found their expression in the murmuring of a public fountain, then its horrors were exemplified by filth. Citizens who dropped out of the obstacle race that was every Roman’s life risked having shit—literally—dumped on their heads. Plebs sordida, they were called—the great unwashed. Periodically, waste from the insulae would be wheeled out in barrows to fertilize gardens beyond the city walls, but there was always too much of it, urine sloshing over the rims of fullers’ jars, mounds of excrement submerging the streets. In death, the poor themselves would be subsumed into waste. Not for them the dignity of a tomb beside the Appian Way. Instead their carcasses would be tossed with all the other refuse into giant pits beyond the easternmost city gate, the Esquiline. Travelers approaching Rome by this route would see bones littering the sides of the road. It was a cursed and dreadful spot, the haunt of witches, who were said to strip flesh from the corpses and summon the naked specters of the dead from their mass graves. In Rome the indignities of failure could outlive life itself.

Degradation on such a scale was something new in the world. The suffering of the urban poor was all the more terrible because, by depriving them of the solaces of community, it denied them everything that made a Roman what he was. The loneliness of life on the top floor of an apartment block represented the antithesis of all that a citizen most prized. To be cut off from the rituals and rhythms of society was to sink to the level of a barbarian. To its own citizens, as to its enemies, the Republic was unyielding. It gave up on those who gave up on it. And after abandoning them, in the end, it had them swept out with the trash.

It was no wonder that life in Rome should have been a desperate struggle to avoid such a fate. Community was cherished wherever it was found. The potential anonymity of big-city life was not all-conquering. Vast and formless though the metropolis appeared, there were patterns of order defying its chaos. Temples were not the only repositories of the divine. Crossroads, too, were believed to be charged with spiritual energy. Shadowy gods, the Lares, watched over the intersection of all the city’s high streets. These streets, the vici, were so significant as a focus for community life that the Romans used the same word to describe an entire urban quarter. Every January, at the festival of the Compitalia, inhabitants of a vicus would hold a great public feast. Woolen dolls would be hung beside the shrine of the Lares, one for every free man and woman in the quarter, and a ball for every slave. This relative egalitarianism was reflected in the trade associations that were also centred on the vicus, and were open to everyone: citizen, freedman, and slave alike. It was in these associations, the collegia, rather than on the broader stage of the city, that most citizens sought to win that universal goal of a Roman—prestige. In a vicus a citizen could know his fellows, sit down to supper with them, join in festivities throughout the year, and live confident that mourners would attend his funeral. In a patchwork of communities across the metropolis, the intimacies of traditional small-town life still endured.

None of which calmed the suspicions of outsiders. Walk down a main street, and the snarl of narrow back alleys twisting off it might appear dark with menace, the air heavy with the stench of unwashed bodies, and trade. To refined nostrils, both were equally noxious. Fears that the collegia served as covers for organized crime combined readily with the upper classes’ instinctive contempt for anyone obliged to earn his keep. The very idea of paid work inspired paroxysms of snobbery. It affronted all the homespun peasant values in which wealthy moralists, lounging comfortably in their villas, affected to believe. Their scorn for the mob was unvarying. It embraced not only the wretches starving on the streets or crammed into insulae, but also traders, shopkeepers and craftsmen. Necessity, it was assumed, made every poor man dishonest.¹⁴ Such contempt—unsurprisingly—was much resented by those who were its object.* Plebs was a word never spoken by a nobleman without a curling of the lip, but the plebs themselves took a certain pride in it. A description once spat as an insult had become a badge of identity, and in Rome such badges were always highly prized.

Like other fundamentals of Roman life, divisions of class and status were deep rooted in the myths of the city’s very origin. On the far side of Rome’s southernmost valley stretched the Aventine Hill. This was where immigrants would invariably end up, the port of disembarkation possessed by all great cities, an area where new arrivals congregate by instinct, drawn to one another’s company and shared confusion. Facing the Aventine rose a second hill. There were no shantytowns to be found on the Palatine. Hills in Rome tended to be exclusive. Above the valleys the air was fresher, less pestilential—and therefore cost more to breathe. Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far. Here the city’s elite chose to cluster. Only the very, very rich could afford the prices. Yet, incongruously, there on the world’s most expensive real estate stood a shepherd’s hut made of reeds. The reeds might dry and fall away, but they would always be replaced, so that the hut never seemed to alter. It was the ultimate triumph of Roman conservationism—the childhood home of Romulus, Rome’s first king, and Remus, his twin.

According to the legend, both brothers had decided to found a city, but they could not agree where, nor what name it should have. Romulus had stood on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine, both of them waiting for a sign from the gods. Remus had seen six vultures flying overhead, but Romulus had seen twelve. Taking this as incontrovertible proof of divine backing, Romulus had promptly fortified the Palatine and named the new city after himself. Remus, in a fury of jealousy and resentment, had ended up murdered by his brother in a brawl. This had irrevocably fixed the two hills’ destinies. From that moment on, the Palatine would be for winners, the Aventine for losers. Success and failure, prestige and shame—there, expressed in the very geography of the city, were the twin poles around which Roman life revolved.

For just as a valley stretched wide between the hills of Romulus and Remus, so too did the social chasm between the senator in his villa and the cobbler in his shack. There were no subtle gradations of wealth in Rome, nothing that could approximate to a modern middle class. In that sense the Palatine and the Aventine were indeed true insulae, islands apart. Yet the valley that separated the two hills also joined them, by virtue of a symbolism almost as ancient as Romulus himself. Chariots had been racing around the Circus Maximus since the time of the kings. Stretching the entire length of the valley, the Circus was easily Rome’s largest public space. Framed on one side by ragged shacks, on the other by graceful villas, this was where the city came together in festival. Up to two hundred thousand citizens might gather there. It was this capacity, still unrivaled by any other sports arena to this day, which made its gaze both so feared and so desired. There was no truer mirror held up to greatness than that provided by the audience at the Circus. Here was where a citizen could be most publicly defined, whether by cheers of acclamation or by jeering and boos. Every senator who looked down at the Circus from his villa was reminded of this. So too was every cobbler who looked down from his shack. For all the gulf that yawned between them, the ideal of a shared community still held firm for millionaire and pauper alike. Both were citizens of the same republic. Neither Palatine nor Aventine was entirely an island after all.

If you cannot read the map on your e-reading device, click here to download a PDF version: http://rhlink.com/rubi001

Blood in the Labyrinth

The central paradox of Roman society—that savage divisions of class could coexist with an almost religious sense of community—had evolved through the course of its history. A revolution against the exactions of authority had, of course, inspired the Republic’s very foundation. Even so, following the expulsion of Tarquin and the monarchy, the plebeians had found themselves just as tyrannized by the ancient aristocracy of Rome, the patricians, as they had ever been by the kings. There were no snobs like patrician snobs. They had the right to wear fancy shoes. They claimed to hobnob with gods. Some even claimed to be descended from gods. The Julian clan, for instance, traced its lineage all the way back to Aeneas, a prince of the Trojan royal house, who in turn had been the grandson of Venus herself. This was a class of pedigree bound to give one airs.

Indeed, in the early years of the Republic’s history, Roman society had come perilously close to ossifying altogether. The plebeians, however, refusing to accept that they belonged to an inferior caste, had fought back in the only way they could—by going on strike. The site of their protests, inevitably, had been the Aventine.* Here they would periodically threaten to fulfil Remus’s original ambitions by founding an entirely new city. The patricians, left to stew in their own hauteur across the valley, would gracelessly grant a few concessions. Gradually, over the years, the class

Reviews for Rubicon

[blintnatc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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[nigellicus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, not that Rome wasn't already an Empire when the Republic fell. Built on slavery, it celebrated liberty, but how could you appreciate liberty without lots of slaves deprived of their liberty to contrast with your? Such was the mindset of the Romans, according to this immensely readable book, and it is one of a number of paradoxes that fueled the Roman's drive to take over the world, usually with thinly justified pre-emptive strikes against anyone who was even vaguely threatening or disrespectful, then robbing and enslaving and squeezing the survivors unmercifully, creating enormous wealth and opportunities for corruption. Which was, to the Roman mind, as it should be.

I admit my sense of the history of Rome is vague and spotty, filled with cinematic and televisual pageantry rather than a solid conception of its general shape. Still, so much of this is familiar, so many names echoing out of the past, and it's nice to have it brought more sharply into focus. Extraordinary men rise and do extraordinary things to great praise and adulation, then the extraordinary men are brought low, because Rome loves extraordinary men, it just doesn't like them. A swirling vortex of rising and falling leads almost inevitably to chaos and anarchy and a brutal and deadly struggle. The story is often garish and lurid and unimaginably brutal and violent. It's also fascinating and compelling. Holland creates a driving narrative, and while one is automatically suspicious of narratives imposed on history, still it grabs the attention and does not let go.

[jcvogan1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author makes the time of the fall of the Roman Republic feel very contemporary. It was both refreshing, confusing, and off-putting, all at once.

[renzomalo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A well written, informative narrative with more names and characters than you can keep track of, so kudos to Mr. Holland for compiling and detailing this massive history into one volume. It means, of course, that it will likely have to be re-read numerous times to fully grasp the entire scope of the material, which for a dullard like me probably means never. Still, four stars for Mr. Holland and a the longest, historically incestuous soap opera ever written. And kudos to the ancient Romans for having documented the Republic's rise and fall in such intimate detail.

[kukulaj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Delightful straightforward tale, Rome in the first Century B.C., roughly. The Gracchi brothers through Octavian. This is fundamental history for Europe but I sure didn't know any of it beyond the most basic dots, et tu Brute and Cleopatra's snake. Holland tells the tale very well... OK, between Clodius and Cato and Crassus, I get a bit lost. But I can hardly blame the author. Holland gives us a good sense of the values of the Romans and how those drove people's actions.

I can't compare this to other books on this place and period, because I haven't read any others. So, also, I can't offer any opinion on what was left out, etc. But for a first book to get a person a basic foundation & motivated to learn more, this book is great!

[zurilector · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Despite being an essay, it reads like a novel, demonstrating that one can entertain and teach without boring with obscure data and historical dates, highly recommended for fans of Roman history and reading as well. (Translated from Spanish)

[randystafford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are certainly other popular histories on the Roman Republic, but the subject isn’t as popular as the Roman Empire, and I get the sense that most of them start with, understandably, the compelling subject of Julius Caesar, founder of the Imperial Julio-Claudian dynasty.
This is an extremely compelling and readable account of the Roman Republic starting with the usual place its decline is marked from, the murder of the reforming Gracchi Brothers in 133 and 123 BC.

Holland doesn’t follow the usual academic structure of following the chronology and political themes of the Republic’s collapse. He’s interested in capturing the personalities and the spirit of the Romans, the people that gave us so many cultural gifts and, up close, are so alien. The narrative flow wanders back in time on occasion, at just the right moment, to give us the context of the developing disaster. A timeline is helpfully provided to anchor the reader as well as maps and extensive notes, usually form ancient sources.

Of those ancient sources, Holland admits we have only a few of the accounts the Romans wrote of those times to build a story from.
Holland has two great themes, two causes for Republican collapse.

The first echoes the moralists of the time. The simple Roman people had become too rich, particularly after 146 BC when the wealth of the East and Carthaginian silver mines flowed to the capital. The territories, especially became too great of a source of wealth for the Roman elite not to grasp with rapacious publicani, private tax collectors, provincial governorships, and military commands to win even more honor and conquer more rich lands.

The second is the Roman culture, a worldview that emphasized competition, the pursuit of honor and glory but was so distrustful of the brilliant and ambitious that elaborate checks on their power had developed, the strange, cluttered system of Roman government. But, increasingly, the Roman elite were no longer willing to just bask in the limelight of a mere year’s long consulship, the Republic’s most coveted office. They wanted those jobs as governors and commanders and tax farmers.

The Romans, by Holland’s light, were a rapacious lot in terms of glory and money. What, asked the other peoples of the Mediterranean, could you expect from a city whose founders were suckled by wolves?

The wealth – extracted through tribute, taxes, and looting – of the East fueled a wave of villa building among the rich. Pompey built a vast theater. Fish farming became a crazy. Foppish young men, like Caesar in and too loose toga, began to be seen.

The famed Roman courts were one arena of this competition for honor and office. They had the general outlines of ours, but combat was conducted by private parties. Both defense and prosecutor often represented clients or political factions. In following the career of Cicero, we learn how he carefully honed his rhetoric – and his gestures and the stage managing of appropriate histrionics among the witnesses, audience, and accused – to become the most famed attorney in Rome and attain a consulship. Acknowledging the theatrics of the profession, Holland notes that prosecutor and actor derive from the same Latin word.

To show the truth behind some charges, Holland gives us the account of one publican charged with extorting from provincials. On conviction, he happily went into exile – at the site of his supposed crimes where the locals welcomed him back.

But he was not the usual sort of publican. King Mithridates of Pontus invaded Roman Greece. Despite his reputation with the Greeks as a “matricidal barbarian”, they worked with him in a vast conspiracy that, overnight, killed 80,000 Romans and Italians in Greece. But, despite the usual Roman claim that it conquered in self-defense or to preserve its honor, Sulla made a peace treaty with him. There were more important things than avenging dead Romans. He had to get back to Rome to battle with Marius.

And the East had other effects on the Roman patricians, the commanders of legions like Pompey and Caesar. In Egypt, Pompey began to become enamored of the deeds of Alexander the Great and his quest for a world state. In Holland’s view, Caesar, when he took up with Cleopatra, perhaps begin to envision a fusing of Oriental and Roman political ideals, a theocratic monarchy to rule the world. The East, after all, had less of a problem with god-kings than the prickly Romans did.

Even the unbending and austere Cato, after being governor of Cyprus, began to rationalize a Roman Empire as a force for good benefitting its non-Roman subjects.

Freedom was not some universal aspiration or desired state for the Romans. It was a chance to prove you were better than somebody else. Nobody questioned slavery – not even the slaves. Spartacus was unable to convince his followers in Italy to flee. Instead, they wanted to live there like their former masters and paid the price.

Holland’s book is full of incident and detail.

We get the background on Sulla, the first Roman to lead an army on Rome and to be involved in the killing of Roman commanders. A dissolute, poor young man lived with lowlifes – prostitutes, actors, and drag-queens -- until the age of 30 when he cashed in on his good looks and charm. A famous courtesan left him her estate. He would go on to become Rome’s first absolute dictator, a man who nailed names up on the Forum doors, a notice that their lives and fortunes were now forfeit. Yet, he never forgot his lowlife friends in his days of power, even paying the untalented ones to stop embarrassing themselves. And he lived up to his self-given nickname Felix, “Lucky”. He died in bed.

And, ambiguously, he resigned his dictatorship before he died. It was this – and his contempt of the plebians – that endeared him to some Senators and would eventually, in Holland’s eyes, cause them to hatch a plot against Caesar, a man, after achieving absolute power, who showed no signs of giving it up.

As for Pompey, Holland reminds us that he was not just some old guy bested by Caesar but a noted Roman general in his own day. The Roman Senate gave him a three-year remit to take care of piracy in the Mediterranean – the Roman war on terror. He accomplished his mission in three months. But Holland also shows he was a vain man always looking for acclaim and woefully self-deluded when called upon to defend Rome from Caesar. It turns out that he could not, just by stamping his feet, raise enough men to defeat Caesar, his former father-in-law. He was also mocked by his political opponents for being too fond of his wife.

The one Roman people didn’t make fun of was Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and a sinister political operator frequently switching sides. He once remarked that you never had enough money until you could pay for your own private army. Most famously, he made money by showing up at burning buildings and buying them from the owner. But he also made plenty of money by adding names to Sulla’s proscription list. The East held sway over him too. Searching for glory and riches, he led an army to one of Rome’s greatest defeats at Carrhae. His head ended up as a prop in a local performance of Euripedes’ The Bacchae.

And, of course, there is Caesar. Holland concentrates more on his political scheming and vote getting than battlefield exploits, and his portrayal is less sympathetic than that in Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography. There is no doubting that his conquering of Gaul and invasion of Britain was an illegal – Caesar himself had recently introduced laws against such acts by governors –a quest for fame and fortune, but it’s hard not to see him as a good alternative to the chaos of the ostensible Republic. Even Cicero noted, after Caesar’s assassination, that the Romans had their freedom back. But did they have their Republic back? Even Holland admits that Caesar’s famous clemency against his foes was a sign he didn’t intend to be another Sulla. (On the other hand, Caesar, in the cleanup of Roman opponents in Spain, seems to have become increasingly less tolerant and more brutal towards these holdouts.)

Holland also looks at many other things. The increasing resort to armed gangs to murder and intimidate political opponents and their connection to the collegia, the small communities throughout Rome that sometimes combined organized crime and political action with more commercial activities. We hear of the many Roman women, shut out of former political life, who influenced events whether through mothering, whispering secrets with lovers, or being the center of political scandals. Following the austere, childhood of Caesar, we learn it was that it was not atypical. There are surprisingly few toys in Roman archaeological sites. Roman children were started early on their duties as citizens and mothers. We hear of Sibylline prophecies of doom for Rome.

The one thing I would quibble about is that I don’t think the book gives enough coverage to Sulla’s great political opponent, the Roman general Marius. In my reading of Roman history, Marius’ military reforms, while perhaps the only option at the time for solving the problems of levying citizens for Rome’s constant wars not only created the private armies he, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, and Octavian used but also laid the groundwork for the destruction of the Western Empire. As Adrian Goldsworthy argued in How Rome Fell, more Roman soldiers died there at the hands of other Roman soldiers than barbarian.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rubicon is focused on the events leading to the end of the Republic, which in this age of authoritarian ascendancy is worth a second look. The full cast of famous characters and events are here and retold with verve and imagination. There is a lot to cover but Holland manages to find a good balance. Roman culture placed a premium on competition and reputation to such an extent public good was neglected by leaders who spent their times and energies literally back stabbing one another. That's the impression anyway. And so it was civilian rule broke apart replaced by a military dictatorship.

I was happy to see Holland did not shy from the slavery question, how widespread it was and how the civilization could not have existed without this cruel and pitiless institution - something to remember when admiring Roman innovation, like finding pleasure in the beauty of American South work camps (so-called plantations) whose beauty was a mask covering it's ugly purpose, the subjugation of peoples they barely considered human for the purpose of material gain. It was in this environment Christianity took root. But that's for another book.

[citizencane-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having just completed "Why Liberalism Failed " by Patrick Deneen, I thought it might be profitable to recur back to the the ancients for an example of pre-liberal politics as a source of wisdom that might suggest alternative manners and mores that might serve as a guide to a post-liberal politics. So I turned to Tom Holland's "Rubicon - The Last Years of the Roman Republic" and can confidently report that not only is there "no going back", there's no reason to want to.

More than just a history of the last years of the Roman republic, Rubicon is a more extensive narrative that covers the battles with other cities on the Italian peninsula, the Punic wars, the Roman wars in Spain, Gaul, North Africa, Greece, western Asia and its first forays into Britain. The murders of the Gracchi brothers, the dictatorship of Sulla, the rise and fall of Pompey, the slave revolt led by Spartacus, the first triumvirate of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus, Caesar's conquest of Gaul and their leader Vercingetorix, the assassination of Caesar and the the subsequent civil war that saw the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, the emergence of the new triumvirate of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus, Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and the eventual granting of a dictatorship for life to Octavian, henceforth to be known as Caesar Augustus are all chronicled ably and entertainingly by Holland. Holland relies principally on the ancient authors particularly Plutarch, Cicero, who is a major player in the drama, Appian and Valerius Maximus.

It could be said that Rubicon serves as an illustration of the history behind the argument of Federalist 10 concerning the objects of government and the problems posed to civil peace by the activities of factions. The biographies of the best of the Romans concerns their ongoing efforts to climb the greasy pole to the top of the city and the political alliances that are formed around family connections, outright bribery, the use of the courts to proscribe political enemies, switching sides for temporary advantage, marriages and divorces of convenience, the employment of mobs, paying off armies not only with the wealth looted from foreign conquests but land looted from domestic enemies. In all it is not a very edifying spectacle.

There is also abundant evidence that shows that the sins of liberalism described by Deneen in his book are better understood of as endemic to human beings, By way of example, consider this paragraph on Roman mining operations in Spain.

"The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the publicani, who hd proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto, A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles, and might provide more than forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out through the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind."

The above relies on a book published in 1994 by a J. Hughes titled "Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans". No liberal democracy, no capitalism, no Industrial Revolution required.

[la2bkk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As the title indicates, this work covers the monumental events and enormous personalities which comprise the alleged fall of the Roman Republic.

The author has the ability to discern interesting societsl trends throughout the period. Unfortunately, his passive writing style can sometimes be a bit obtuse, which detracts from the overall work. In that regard, he could have learned from Caesar - narrative conveyed in an active and concise fashion is the most compelling.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.

(from July of 2005) I finished the above by Tom Holland today at lunch. A (near)Footean examination of the short-lived Roman Republic -- the text has flourishes of prose but it is the titanic visiage of the people themselves which carry the text.

It also appears that in the aftermath of the Republic it was Augustus who served as the origins of Conservatism, welding self-interest with tradtional ideals onto the unwashed. Sighs float up to the heavens as Order is found and Property is protected.

[breic-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A history of the end of the Roman republic, from Caesar to Octavian/Caesar Augustus. It feels like the author's writing process was to take one sentence from a Wikipedia article, dress it up with a few adverbs, and then add around it three sentences of flowery but unsupported BS. Then repeat. It makes neither for good history, nor for good drama. For both, I'd recommend instead Harris's fictional "Imperium" series, written from Cicero's perspective.

[theidlewoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pacy, confident narrative history focusing on the political struggles within the Roman Republic which ultimately led to the establishment of the Empire. Tom Holland has a very engaging style, which I think has sometimes drawn criticism from reviewers for not being academic enough, but is refreshing for those of us who aren't experts in the period. Combining history reportage on an epic scale, ranging from Transalpine Gaul to Egypt, and speculation on the personalities and vices of the great men who were struggling to secure power, this is enjoyable and clear. Yet, for someone whose crossing of the Rubicon gives the book its title, Caesar in fact comes out of the book looking rather like the last victim of the power struggles, rather than the first of the Emperors - that place is undoubtedly taken by Augustus. A good introduction.

[naggedman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is history at its most readable and informative. Holland succeeds in combining the great sweep of this extraordinary period with detailed insight into characters, events and motivations. One aspect I found uncomfortable is the use of 'BC' in tracking the years and decades; I kept thinking, "the Romans didn't know it was 44 BC, I wonder how they tracked their equivalent - or perhaps didn't". Must look this up some time. Otherwise great stuff.

[mitchell_bergeson_jr · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who says History needs to be boring? Surely not Mr. Holland. His book is a wonderful introduction into the late Roman Republic and it's storied leaders. A great read. Recommended.

[delta351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tom Holland is money. Dan Carlin had talked him up quite a bit on Hardcore History, but it has taken me a while to finally read the book. He has a breezy but fact and information filed style that I find very engaging.

He does an excellent job breaking down the self destruction of the Roman Republic, starting w Marius through the death of Caesar. He speaks to Augustus also. I don't think he is pulling any punches in this book, and does a good job of addressing the personal characteristics of the major players. I also like the contrasts b/t Rome and the eastern empires. Basically he states the Romans were tainted by the human god worship culture of the east.

[br77rino · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tied up for me all the loose hearings of people like Tarquin, Hannibal, Sulla, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey and Octavian. A good story. Of real life. 2500 to 2000 years ago.

[jcbrunner · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In a book titled "Rubicon", I would expect actually more than two chapters about the Roman civil war. While I hugely enjoyed Holland's condense sketch of Greek and Persian history in Persian Fire, I found his attempt in presenting the story of the Roman Republic less stellar. His focus is on Sulla and Cato whom he presents as staunch conservative heroes in contrast to Cicero the weather vane and Pompey the vain. His Caesar is quite dull too.

What I lament most, however, is the absence of the stories of the early heroes of the Roman Republic such as Publius Decius Mus whose crazy willingness to sacrifice himself was part of why the other peoples could not resist the Roman impetus. Like the French levée en masse, the Roman Republic was willing to fling countless bodies at its enemies. The Romans were willing to absorb the casualties their enemies could or would not (see Pyrrhic victory). Endurance and frugality (the Roman soldiers ate mostly vegetarian food) in the name of the Republic made the difference (intrinsic instead of extrinsic motivation). The professionalization by Marius and then Sulla prepared the creation of the Roman empire where a commander and no longer the people decided the issue. Insofar, the Republic was already on life support when Caesar entered the stage.

[gold_gato-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I crossed the Rubicon with this book, hoping it would be a glorious history of Rome and its last days as a Republic, before the Empire began. It is a decent retelling of basic history but really nothing too stalwart. Given the cast of characters and the swirling battles from the days of Tarquin to Caesar, there should be an elevation of prose and heightened enlightenment, but it reads as a thesis from a college student. The book is meant to be popular history for those who don't know Romulus and his tribe, but it just never quite gets there. Short shrift is given to Gaius Marius and even Sulla, who were the two men who dominated Rome before the Empire.

So, not bad, just not great, given the subject matter. But, if you know nothing of Roman history, it will serve a basic purpose.


Book Season = Winter

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After hearing much about this book for several years now and seeing it referenced in essays about the current state of our nation, I found the most striking thing about it was not the parallels to the USA's current situation vis-a-vis the world and the Patriot Act. Rather, what impressed me most were the differences between the world of the Roman 2000 years ago and our contemporary one. The main such difference being Roman fatalism, the sense that one must make the most of what is, after all, a bad deal. For us, this seems to mean surrounding ourselves with luxuries and comfort, for the Romans it meant becoming famous through wealth, public service or military victories. Hmmmm.

[alcracka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some people call Tom Holland a crappy pop historian. The issue here is that for many historical events, there are questions about veracity or motive or what really went down. Guys like Holland will take the most exciting of the possible truths and go with that; thus, Nero put Christians in cages and set them on fire to use as streetlights. That's probably not true, but it makes a fun story. Keep that in mind if you read Holland; but he's basically got his shit together. It's not that big a deal.

[wildbill_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed reading this book very much. I read Persian Fire and enjoyed it which gave me a big reason to read this book. I stay with authors I like.
I don't read a lot of Roman history, particularly this era. I had a lot to learn and I had a good time doing it. The end of the Republic as Rome grows into an empire is a fascinating story. It is full of larger than life personalities of the generals who conquered the empire.
This author adds vivid descriptions of the underside of the Republic where all the powerful positions are obtained by votes. The men who control the votes and how they wheel and deal the elections for consul and tribune add to the gritty reality of the author's style.
The author tells the down and dirty on everybody such as Caesar's homosexual sex life. The story of Cicero is that of a great man stripped of his power and dignity whose last gesture is to hold out is neck for his executioner.
Caesar is the man who stays ahead of the crowd. A great soldier loved by his men. He crosses the Rubicon and goes on to greater glory until the Ides of March 44 b. c. when he pulls his toga over his face to hide his defeat.
The end of the story is wonderfully ironic. 18 year old Octavian comes from out of nowhere and Antony adds to the legend of Cleopatra by destroying himself for love of her.
Good story. Well written, informative and entertaining history. That is what I like. I think it is good enough as a book to recommend to those who are not usually readers of history.

[vguy_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent. Main interest her is my own reading experience. Reading the book for a 2nd time; something I v rarely do. First read it 3-4 years ago as a kick off to broad study of classical history ( supporting my daughter's Classics exam). My knowledge of the period then was pretty much what I picked up from shakespeare (JC & Ant & Cleo). Then spent a couple of years in which Graeco-Roman History was the core of my reading. Now re-reading "Rubicon", I find I literally don't remember a word of it, though much is colourfully expressed and dramatically related. But I am familiar with the characters and can follow the "plot", am at home with the whole sequence of events , which on first reading left me a trifle overwhelmed (I remember that feeling), but the words on the page are as if read for the first time.

[starkravingmad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Outstanding narrative of the Roman Republic leading to the emergence and rise of Ceaser

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve read dozens of history books and novels pertaining to the Roman Republic and succeeding Roman Empire. As a result, I feel like I’ve been exposed to virtually every nuance and every character of the period. Nevertheless, I can’t say that I felt like I was wasting my time in reading this treatment of the era.

Sure, I was familiar with the players and the events, however the author was successful in presenting the history in such a way as to make it entertaining and even enlightening. While certainly the rise and fall of Julius Caesar was necessarily covered, much of the background focused on both his predecessors (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus) and his contemporaries (Cicero, Cato) to a degree not found in other works of the period. Also, the style in which the book is written (narrative) makes the history more readable and enjoyable.

The primary focus of the book is the fall of the Roman Republic. Beginning with the primacy of Marius, the role of the “first man” took on added importance as each succeeding holder of the title assumed greater responsibility and power. By the time Augustus achieved prominence, the road had been well mapped by Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Whereas Sulla could have likely eliminated the Republic by force of arms (instead retiring after a reign of terror), Augustus was virtually elevated to the status of an Emperor by acclimation of a people weary of civil war and strife.

All in all, a worthwhile refresher on the final years of the Republic and the actors therein, from a somewhat novel viewpoint.

[cgodsil_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Describes how the Roman republic became a dictatorship as a result of acquiring an empire.

[ehines_20 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very readable and informative, but the persistent and strong anti-plebian bias wears thin. Particularly in the breezy self-contradictions of the Gracchi chapter.

[cynara_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Holland's pacing in Rubicon is better than most of the novels I've read lately. I never felt like he was wandering off into guesswork, but it's an extraordinarily vivid historical account. He avoids both academic dryness and semi-fictionalised "Caesar flushed pale" prose.

[nakmeister · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent popular history read. This is the first book I'd read by Tom Holland, and I also knew very little about Ancient Rome. The book is about the Roman Republic, mostly the last 50 years of the Roman Republic, 100BC to 50BC (roughly). It reads somewhat like a novel - it's certainly a page turner. The author, as he indicates at the beginning, makes hardly any mention of sources etc in the main text - these are mainly endnotes and the occasional footnotes - which aids the narrative flow. It can be quite difficult keeping track of all the different characters populating the book - but it's hardly the fault of the author that that period of history has so many interesting characters.

Overall a great, enjoyable, informative read.

[nielsengw_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Holland’s work covers the history of the Roman Empire from 509 BC to 14 AD and single-handedly makes one want to read much more about the Republic. His characters appear as archetypes for historians—Cicero battling Hortensius, Pompey railing (and failing) against Julius Caesar, each new personage inspiring the next. This history is thoroughly researched and enhanced by contemporary writing. Holland is even gracious enough to declare the shortcomings of some of the texts. A good start to 2009.