Words&Dirt

Tom Holland’s Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic makes it easy to understand why the fall of Rome still animates the imaginations of contemporary scholars and history enthusiasts. Striking a deft balance between erudition and accessibility, Holland’s narrative is replete with lush sensory details that bring the Roman Republic’s last century to life. While we are treated to the familiar exploits of Rome’s most (in)famous leaders, Rubicon also makes an effective effort to capture the general ethos of Rome as common citizens might have experienced it.  Through a close examination of the cultural traditions, political organizations, and economic systems that kept the Republic alive and led to its eventual downfall, this informative book exposes the intricate and fragile nature not just of the Roman way of life, but of all self-governing communities.

The fall of Rome is often held up as a cautionary tale about the excesses of empire, one that I find particularly germane when comparing Rome with the modern United States. Admittedly, Holland makes no effort to avoid identifying potential similitudes between ancient Rome and many of today’s most powerful nation-states. I’m sure a more thorough historical investigation would expose the inconsistencies and inadequacies of this method, but there’s no denying that it imbues the Roman story with fresh relevance, especially for casual readers.

One of the most striking parallels between declining Rome and the modern United States is that the integrity of Rome’s government officials became compromised by over-dependence on lucrative relationships between the private and public sectors. As Roman influence began to sprawl, the centralized government increasingly looked to private contractors (ironically called publicanis) to manage distant economies and populations:

In return for providing investors back in Rome with docile natives, decent harbors, and good roads, the Roman authorities in the provinces began to look for backhanders. The corruption that resulted from this was all the more insidious because it could never be acknowledged. Even as they raked in the cash, senators still affected a snooty disdain toward finance. The contempt for profit was even enshrined in law: no publicanus was allowed to join the Senate, just as no senator was permitted to engage in anything so vulgar as overseas trade. Behind the scenes, however, such legislation did little to fulfill its aims. If anything, by prescribing how governor and entrepreneur could best collaborate, it only served to bring them closer together…The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex. (loc. 838-44)

We need look no further to understand this system as a precursor to the US military-industrial complex, especially when prompted by Holland’s provocative (but not inaccurate) language. In fact, a good argument can be made that the contemporary US system is far more brazen than its Roman predecessor, given that many of our pretensions toward separation of private and public interests have been scoured away in recent years. Hopes that such developments will prove less damaging to our civilization than they were to Rome’s are vainly cultivated.

Another key link to the contemporary United States can be found in Holland’s characterization of Roman attitudes toward slavery:

What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

It was a logic slaves accepted too. No one ever objected to the hierarchy of free and un-free, merely his own position in it. (loc. 2326)

Though the US no longer practices institutional slavery, this passage echoes with chilling accuracy the attitude of many wealthy and middle-class citizens toward the nation’s poor. Holland is particularly adroit in pointing out how institutionalized inequality not only blinds those in power to the presence of injustice, but also shackles disenfranchised populations with the insidious notion that emancipation can only be sought through individual betterment at the expense of others rather than through collective movements that spur societal change.

Other salient similarities to modernity include Rome’s unquenchable thirst for empirical expansion (now accomplished by way of economic imperialism rather than open warfare), its hardy cultivation of a wealthy elite (the Roman 1%), conflicts with pirates that bear uncanny resemblance to the War on Terror, and a bloodthirsty obsession with violent entertainment (at least Hollywood blood is fake!).

Despite its considerable strengths, Rubicon also has some undeniable flaws. The most significant of these is Holland’s tendency to make generalized statements about how “the Romans” would think about a subject or respond to a problem. These statements actually comprise most of my favorite passages, but any careful reader knows that such proclamations, which aim to synthesize the dispositions of countless individuals lost to history, must be taken with a grain of salt. This is a perennial problem of historical writing that is certainly not limited to Holland’s text, and probably results from an understandable lack of quotidian details about the lives of normal people living in Rome and its territories.

While striving admirably to give voice to “the Romans,” Holland must ultimately fall back on the well-recorded squabblings of “great” men (and the occasional woman): Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, Cicero, Cato, Octavion, Cleopatra, and all the rest. Readers fascinated by charismatic and ambitious personalities will find much gratification exploring the plots, betrayals, and truces that bound these figures together and tore them apart. Personally, I found it easy to get lost in all the proper nouns, and was left with the same sense of disenchantment I usually get when learning about powerful politicians: if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Julius Caesar and his ilk are perhaps the most wooden and predictable players in Holland’s grand narrative, but their tales benefit from being situated in interesting and turbulent times. Despite the ease with which our social imaginations glom onto imposing individuals who seem to move the world with a sigh, such periods are, in the final analysis, far less determined by big personalities than by much grander social, economic, and political trends.

Rubicon’s ending also leaves much to be desired. After bemoaning the fall of the Republic for several hundred pages, Holland provides hardly any information about exactly why its demise was so tragic:

The gods, surveying the scene of leisure and peace that Rome had become, had clearly decided that there was nothing left for them to say.

“The fruit of too much liberty is slavery” had been the mournful judgment of Cicero––and who was to say that his own generation, the last of a free Republic, had not proved it true? But the fruit of slavery? That was for a new generation, and new age, to prove. (loc. 5795-808)

Holland needed to end somewhere, but I wish he’d included a short section explaining how the loss of a free Republic made life better or worse for Romans and the rest of the world over the next few decades and/or centuries. This would have provided a better sense of how this particular moment fit into the greater tapestry of world history. Strangely, the best expression of this notion comes in the book’s preface: “Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded…As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again” (loc. 130-6). Rubicon could have been greatly improved had Holland returned to this devastating idea long enough to communicate the far-reaching consequences of the Republic’s fall. As it is, I was left feeling like nothing much changed after Caesar crossed the Rubicon. And if that was in fact the message Holland meant to communicate, he should have done so more emphatically.

Overall, this is an engaging and edifying book that helped me think about the ways in which we’ve made real progress over the last two millennia, and how we are still mired in many of the same problems that brought Rome to its knees. Rubicon throws the precariousness of self-governance into sharp relief and serves as a stern reminder that such periods are few and far between in human history, and should never be taken for granted.

Rating: 8/10