The rise and fall of the Roman Republic

Contemporary Review, June, 2004 by George Wedd

Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic. Tom Holland. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. 405 pages. ISBN 0-316-86130-8.

Why Rome, anyway? In the eighth century BC there must have been lots of large villages in the Central Mediterranean populated by refugees and runaways. Rome's position was useful, at a river crossing ringed by defensible hills, near the coast but far enough way to be safe from pirates, but not outstandingly so. Why did this one place rise so far above all competitors? The main dates are well known: 753BC is a credible date for the foundation, and 590 BC for the expulsion of the king. Later, we have the 'secession of the plebs' to the Aventine and their admission to a large share in the 'public business' (res publica). Incidentally, the plebeians were far from the bottom of the heap in Roman society; the secession was more like a strike by the middle classes against the patricians, and their admission to the government must have brought in a great deal of new talent and property. But simply to tell the tale does not fully explain why Rome was the major power in the world (China always excluded, with apologies) when Caesar overthrew the Republic, and well on her way to the splendid period when, under Trajan, her soldiers looked simultaneously on the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, the Carpathians, the Atlantic and the North Sea.

The book effectively starts with Rome's elimination of her principal rival, Carthage, in 146 BC, and tells the complex and gripping story with quite sufficient--sometimes more than sufficient--detail down to the death of Augustus in AD 14. If not a grindingly deep scholar, Mr Holland has read widely and absorbed the literature intelligently. When he translates, he does so in a free and racy style which at first surprises and then pleases. He brings out well the contradictions that lay at the heart of the Republic. Essentially, they boiled down to this: every able Roman sought personal advancement, fame and wealth, and the Republic was generous with all three. But the able Roman must not go too far. He collected clients and friends on the way up as well as enemies. The top of society was numerically small, lived close to each other and was very conscious that there was no-one outside or above them. The Romans were a litigious lot and created a vast structure of law which saved the Republic by canalising disputes into the courts. The Republic's constitution was ramshackle, with bits added as need arose and the author might have spent more time on the 'tribes' and complex electoral laws.

The author is good--very good--on the quality of life in late-Republican Rome. He also brings out the fact that the governmental structures were all new, and the Romans were inventing it all as they went along. Politics turned mainly on personalities. There were only two major attempts to challenge the value-systems: the first by the Gracchi and the second, by Catiline. The author's weakness is in his thin treatment of that other great Roman institution, the army. Its slow change from a gathering of citizen-soldiers to a professional body of long-serving men needs to be tracked. The key change came when the small cash allowance soldiers were given to buy salt (salarium = salt-money = salary) was enlarged, probably by Marius, as the only legal way of giving the soldiers a living wage. The Republic fell when these two great institutions, the law and the army, came into conflict and the law was used to challenge a too successful general, Caesar, who had the nerve to scrap Republican substance and the judgement to retain Republican forms.