The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire Read Free

happy chance, a few of Cicero’s letters to Varro have survived the bonfire of time. In one note, Cicero urged Varro to hurry up: “I am coming to hope that your arrival is not far away. I wish I may find some comfort in it though our afflictions are so many and so grievous that nobody but an arrant fool ought to hope for any relief.”
    The “afflictions” Cicero had in mind stemmed from a civil war among Rome’s governing élite. Leading personalities were at risk of losing life and limb. What were they to do, they asked themselves anxiously, in an age when the Roman Republic, the ancientworld’s lone superpower, omnipotent abroad, seemed bent on destroying itself at home?
    MOST OBSERVERS OF the day thought that the rot had set in a century or so previously. Rome’s conquest of Greece and much of the Near East released unimaginable quantities of gold, not to mention that human gold, uncounted numbers of slaves. Wealth flooded into Rome, which became, in effect, the capital of the known world and grew into a multicultural melting pot and megalopolis of up to one million souls.
    This was the unintended consequence of winning an empire, and it is perhaps no accident that the serious study of Rome’s past began at about this time. To men like Varro and Cicero, the once tough, socially responsible, resourceful, and plain-living Roman was being softened and subverted by the Oriental vices of greed, luxury, and sexual license. The city’s constitution had served it well for centuries. A lawmaking citizens’ assembly balanced a small ruling class of nobles. But for this system to work effectively a capacity for compromise and reasonableness was essential—and now this capacity had been lost.
    The crisis came when Cicero was a young man. In 82, the Republic’s bloodbath of a civil war, which was waged on and off for fifty years, reached its first horrific climax. Soldiers were forbidden to enter Rome, but a vengeful and ambitious general, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, led an army of Roman citizens into the city and conducted a massacre of his opponents.
    The uncertainty about who was to be a victim paralyzed high society.Eventually, a young man plucked up his courage and approached Sulla.
    “We don’t ask you to exempt from punishment those you have decided to kill, but at least free from suspense those you have decided to spare,” the young man said.
    “I don’t yet know whom I’m going to spare.”
    “Well, then, at least make clear whom you’re going to kill.”
    Sulla took the point, and saw to it that from time to time whitewashed notice boards were put up in the Forum, Rome’s central square, on which were written the names of those who were to die. There were no formal executions, and anyone who chose to was permitted to carry out killings, and qualified for a handsome reward upon the production of a severed head. A victim’s estate was forfeit. The process was called a proscription (the Latin for “notice board” is proscriptio ).
    SULLA’S OBJECT WAS to eliminate his opponents, but his supporters often took the opportunity to settle private scores or to enrich themselves. One hapless property owner complained, “What a disaster! I’m being hunted down by my Alban estate.”
    Cicero, an ambitious lawyer in his twenties, had direct experience of this cruel and fraudulent behavior. In his first criminal case, he courageously exposed the activities of a member of Sulla’s circle, a Greek former slave named Chrysogonus. He revealed a plot to pretend that a dead landowner had been proscribed; this allowed his estate to be confiscated and sold at a knock-down price to Chrysogonus.
    At some risk to his personal safety, Cicero drew an unforgettable portrait of a ruthless fixer on the make:
And look at the man himself, gentlemen of the jury. You see how, with hair carefully arranged and smeared with oil, he roams around the Forum, accompanied by a crowd of hangers-on who (humiliatingly, he implied) are all Roman