Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic Read Free Page A

saw in the rise to power of the Caesars a ‘Roman revolution’, a prefiguring of the age of the fascist and communist dictators. So Rome has always been interpreted, and reinterpreted, in the light of the world’s convulsions. Syme was heir to a long and honourable tradition, one stretching all the way back to Machiavelli, who drew from the history of the Republic lessons both for his own native city of Florence, and for that namesake of the Republic’s destroyer, Cesare Borgia. ‘Prudent men are wont to say – and this not rashly or without good ground – that 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.’ 4 If there are periods when this claim can seem outlandish, then there are periods when it does not – and the present, surely, is one of them. Rome was the first and – until recently – the only republic ever to rise to a position of world power, and it is indeed hard to think of an episode of history that holds up a more intriguing mirror to our own. Nor is it only the broad contours of geopolitics, of globalisation and the
pax Americana
, that can be glimpsed, albeit faint and distorted, in the glass. Our fads and obsessions too, from koi carp to Mockney to celebrity chefs, cannot help but inspire, in the historian of the Roman Republic, a certain sense of
déjà vu
.
    Yet parallels can be deceptive. The Romans, it goes without saying, existed under circumstances – physical, emotional, intellectual – profoundly different from our own. What strikes us as recognisable about aspects of their civilisation may be so – but not always. Often, in fact, the Romans can be strangest when theyappear most familiar. A poet mourning the cruelty of his mistress, or a father his dead daughter, these may seem to speak to us directly of something permanent in human nature, and yet how alien, how utterly alien a Roman’s assumptions about sexual relations, or family life, would appear to us. So too the values that gave breath to the Republic itself, the desires of its citizens, the rituals and codes of their behaviour. Understand these and much that strikes us as abhorrent about the Romans, actions which to our way of thinking are self-evidently crimes, can be, if not forgiven, then at least better understood. The spilling of blood in an arena, the obliteration of a great city, the conquest of the world – these, to the Roman way of thinking, might be regarded as glorious accomplishments. Only by seeing why can we hope to fathom the Republic itself.
    Naturally, it is a hazardous and quixotic enterprise to attempt to enter the mindset of a long-vanished age. As it happens, the last twenty years of the Republic are the best documented in Roman history, with what is, for the classicist, a wealth of evidence – speeches, memoirs, even private correspondence. Yet even these only gleam as riches for being set against such darkness. 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 which 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. The silence will be one with which the ancient historian is all too familiar, for, to twist the words of Shakespeare’s Fluellen, ‘there is no tiddle taddle nor pibble pabble in Pompey’s camp’. Nor in the peasant’s hut, nor in the slum dweller’s shanty, nor in the field slave’s barrack. Women, it is true, can sometimes be overheard, but only the very noblest, and even those invariably when quoted – or misquoted – by men. In Roman history to search for details of anyone outside the ruling class is to pan for gold.

    Even the narrative of great events and exceptional men, however magnificent it may