# Rubicon  ## Metadata - Author: [[Tom Holland]] - Full Title: Rubicon - Category: #books ## Highlights - The Romans had a word for such a moment. “Discrimen,” they called it—an instant of perilous and excruciating tension, when the achievements of an entire lifetime might hang in the balance. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=110)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=298)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=306)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Privileges of birth, then, guaranteed nothing in Rome. The fact that the descendants of a goddess might find themselves living in a red-light district ensured that it was not only the very poor who dreaded the consequences of failure. At every social level the life of a citizen was a grueling struggle to emulate—and, if possible, surpass—the achievements of his ancestors. In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. Indeed, this, to the Romans, was what liberty meant. It appeared self-evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, toward a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition. The proof of the superiority of this model of society lay in its trouncing of every conceivable alternative. The Romans knew that had they remained the slaves of a monarch, or of a self-perpetuating clique of aristocrats, they would never have succeeded in conquering the world. ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=551)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked. Only if an aspect of their government had proven to be inefficient, or unjust, would they abolish it. Otherwise, they would no more have contemplated streamlining their constitution than they would have been prepared to flatten Rome and build her again from scratch. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=562)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=624)) - Tags: [[blue]] - These eruptions of civil violence were the first to spill blood in the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Their grotesque quality vividly reflected the scale of aristocratic paranoia. Tyranny was not the only specter that the Gracchi had raised from Rome’s ancient past. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Gaius died on the spot most sacred to the plebeian cause, the Aventine. By taking refuge there, he and his supporters had deliberately sought to identify their cause with that of the ancient strikers. Despite the fact that the poor failed to rise in his support, Gaius’s attempt to stir long-dormant class struggles struck most members of the nobility as a terrifying act of irresponsibility. Yet the reprisals too filled them with unease. Headhunting was hardly the practice of a civilized people. In the lead-weighted skull of Gaius Gracchus an ominous glimpse could be caught of what might happen were the conventions of the Republic to be breached and its foundations swept away. It was a warning that temperament more than fitted the Romans to heed. What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents, and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny or barbarism—these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=632)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programs of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. ([Location 647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=647)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Many argued that the Republic needed a rival who was worthy of the name. Without rivalry, they demanded, how would Rome’s greatness ever be maintained? Such a question, of course, could have been asked only in a state where ruthless competition was regarded as the basis of all civic virtue. ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=697)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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 fulfil its aims. If anything, by prescribing how governor and entrepreneur could best collaborate, it only served to bring them closer together: the one needed the other if they were both to end up rich. The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex. ([Location 830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=830)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honors had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, and its presence there, a lurking toxin, could not easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate—these had previously been the worst that a citizen might have had to dread. But Sulla, in his pursuit of Marius, was pushing rivalry and personal hatred to new extremes. From that moment on, the memory of it would haunt every ambitious citizen—both as a temptation and as a fear. ([Location 1228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1228)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Crassus would inherit from his father the recognition that wealth was the surest foundation of power. Later, he was to be notorious for claiming that until a man could afford to maintain his own army it was impossible for him to have too much money. ([Location 1451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1451)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This streak of cruelty would never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: “Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?”16 ([Location 1735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1735)) - Tags: [[blue]] - child-rearing, like virtually every other aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of competition. To raise heirs successfully, to instill in them due pride in their bloodline and a hankering after glory, these were achievements worthy of a man. ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1823)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Only in 78, once Sulla was safely dead, did he finally return to Rome. In a city still terrified of the dead dictator’s shadow, Caesar was like a splash of color. “He had a talent for being liked in a way remarkable in one of his youth, and since he had an easy, man-of-the-people manner, he made himself hugely popular with the average citizen.”10 Effortlessly charming though Caesar was, this was still a statement of political intent. Crowd pleasers marked themselves out as populares. Marius had been one, Sulpicius too. Sulla’s entire political program had been an attempt to scotch the popularis tradition—the tradition to which Caesar regarded himself as heir. ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1909)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The sheer range of Caesar’s abilities, and the energy with which he developed them, marked him out as a man with a brilliant future. ([Location 1919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1919)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only “those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law.”17 Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.18 Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning clothes and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed. ([Location 1988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=1988)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For those on the Cursus, exposure was all. A new man had to hype himself or else he was nothing. This was a lesson that Cicero would never forget. ([Location 2076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2076)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Reflect on what city this is, on the nature of your goal, and on who you are,” his brother advised him. “Every day, as you are walking down to the Forum, turn these thoughts over and over in your mind: ‘I am a new man! I want the consulship! This is Rome!’ ”29 ([Location 2129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2129)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Crassus, faced with a threat like Pompey, appears to have reevaluated his strategy. Immense though his own prestige was, it remained half in the shadows. Now was the time to move into the full glare of public approbation. Crassus was no Cethegus. He knew perfectly well that power without glory would always be limited, especially in competition with a rival such as Pompey. He needed a smashing victory of his own, and fast. ([Location 2230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2230)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme, and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting for his life was only one of degree. A Roman was brought up to thrill to the spectacle of both. ([Location 2250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2250)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was why they fought: not merely to test themselves, in the approved Roman manner, against the savagery of the enemy and the fear of a violent death, but to reclaim a status that poverty had caused them to lose. The regard of his fellow citizens was as much of an obsession for the outcast as it was for the rich. Only war enabled him to demonstrate what even the most snobbish acknowledged, that “there is no condition so base that it cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory.” ([Location 2520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2520)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Pompey’s genius for posing had found its perfect stage in the east. Acutely conscious that the eye of history was upon him, the great man rarely did anything without angling his profile toward it. As Alexander had done, he had even brought a tame historian with him to chronicle every act of heroism, every magnanimous deed. He fought campaigns as he handled kings, with half an eye to providing sensational copy. It was not enough to thrash recalcitrant Orientals. He had to tangle with poisonous snakes, hunt after Amazons, push eastward toward the great ocean that encircled the world. And all the while, uninhibited by finicky cavils from the Senate, he could fuss with territories as though they were counters on a gaming board, rearranging them as he pleased, handing out crowns, abolishing thrones, the still-boyish master of the fate of millions. ([Location 2713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2713)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the new Alexander, he was appropriating a dream shared by potentate and slave alike. If any Roman was qualified to appreciate this, it was Pompey himself. The conqueror of the pirates and the patron of Posidonius, he would have been perfectly aware of the menacing links between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed. ([Location 2740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2740)) - Tags: [[blue]] - So it was that the ancient Roman yearning for glory turned pathological. Lucullus, splitting mountains for the benefit of his fish, and Hortensius, serving peacocks for the first time at a banquet, were both still engaged in the old, familiar competition to be the best. But it was no longer the desire for honor that possessed them. Instead it was something very like self-disgust. ([Location 2868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2868)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. “They began to seek dishes,” he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, “not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.” ([Location 2873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=2873)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Caesar’s strategy of conspicuous extravagance was perilous. The promise of future greatness was staked against ruin. Money might be squandered, but never potential. Lose an election, fail to gain a lucrative posting, and a whole career might come crashing down. ([Location 3022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=3022)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Only with a career of short cuts behind him could a Roman have suffered a midlife crisis of this nature. Most of Pompey’s countrymen yearned for their forties. Middle age was the prime of a citizen’s life, and for the upper classes a time when they could at last run for the consulship. To the Romans, the cult of youth appeared unsettling and foreign, a delusion to which kings in particular were prone. ([Location 3294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=3294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Even so, he was proud of what he had achieved in Cyprus—not only for the Republic, but for the provincials themselves. It appeared to him self-evident that the rule of an upstanding Roman administrator was vastly preferable to the squalid anarchy that had prevailed in Cyprus before his arrival. Here was a portentous development: the Senate’s most unbending traditionalist squaring Rome’s ancient virtues with her new world role. Greek intellectuals, of course, had long been pushing for this—as Cato would well have known, for he was a keen scholar of philosophy, which he studied with the seriousness he brought to all he did. It was Posidonius, every Roman’s favorite guru, who had argued that subject peoples should welcome their conquest by the Republic, since it would contribute toward the building of a commonwealth of man. Now the Romans themselves were latching on to the same argument. ([Location 4014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4014)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Whatever his own doubt and weariness, his outward show of confidence remained as sovereign as ever. In Caesar’s energy there was something demonic and sublime. Touched by boldness, perseverance, and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal. No wonder that his men worshiped him, for they too were Roman, and felt privileged to be sharing in their general’s great adventure. ([Location 4129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4129)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was important to Pompey’s purpose that the savagery of his imports serve to edify as well as entertain. This was why animals were rarely kept in zoos. Only by displaying them in combat, the monstrous matched with the human, could Pompey instruct his fellow citizens in what it took to be the rulers of the world. ([Location 4214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4214)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Having at last won for himself the undisputed preeminence he had always craved, Pompey had no wish to see it threatened by having to choose between rival blocs of his supporters. Yet no matter how determinedly he closed his eyes to it, the dilemma refused go away. In the debate on Caesar’s future neither side would accept any hint of a compromise. Both believed themselves utterly, implacably in the right. ([Location 4405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4405)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Once he had been found guilty in a court of law, Caesar’s great achievements would help him not a whit. To the cheering of pygmies who had never in their lives rallied an ambushed legion, or planted an eagle beyond the icy northern seas, or defeated in one battle two colossal hordes of barbarians, he would be forced into exile, to spend the rest of his life in the company of men such as Verres, his expectations withering to nothing in the sunshine of Marseille. ([Location 4412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4412)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since Caesar’s ultimate sanction was his army, this could not help but strike Pompey as a challenge to himself. Honor and vanity alike obliged him to dig in his heels. Rome’s greatest general could not appear to be nervous of the legions of Gaul. At the end of September he finally delivered an unambiguous verdict: Caesar should give up his command the following spring. This would be months before the consular elections, and provide Cato, or anyone else, with plenty of time to bring a prosecution. And what if Caesar put up a tribune to veto such a proposal and still sought to win the consulship while keeping hold of his army? Pompey was asked. The answer was softly spoken, but delivered with unmistakable menace: “You might as well ask, What if my son chooses to raise a stick against me?”32 ([Location 4436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4436)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “By now,” wrote Petronius of the Republic’s last generation, “the conquering Roman had the whole world in his hand, the sea, the land, the course of the stars. But still he wanted more.”34 And because he wanted more, he took more; and because he took more, he wanted more. It was almost impossible for appetites so monstrous to be sated within the ancient limits of custom or morality. Pompey and Caesar, Rome’s greatest conquerors, had won resources for themselves beyond all the imaginings of previous generations. Now the consequences of such obscene power were becoming grimly apparent. Either man had the capability to destroy the Republic. Neither wished to do so, but deterrence, if it were to have any value, obliged both to prepare for the worst. ([Location 4466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4466)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To Caelius, it appeared self-evident that Caesar’s army was incomparably superior to anything that Pompey could muster. “In peacetime,” he wrote to Cicero, “while taking part in domestic politics, it is most important to back the side that is in the right—but in times of war, the strongest.” ([Location 4481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4481)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Pompey, of course, could argue that there were sound military reasons for the surrender of the capital—and so there were. Nevertheless, it was a tragic and fatal mistake. The Republic could not endure as an abstraction. Its vitality was nourished by the streets and public places of Rome, by the smoke rising from age-blackened temples, by the rhythms of elections, year after year after year. Uprooted, how could the Republic remain true to the will of the gods, and how were the wishes of the Roman people to be known? By fleeing the city the Senate had cut itself off from all those—the vast majority—who could not afford to pack up and leave their homes. As a result, the shared sense of community that had bound even the poorest citizen to the ideals of the state was betrayed. No wonder that the great nobles, abandoning their ancestral homes, dreaded looters and the fury of the slums. ([Location 4564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4564)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Cicero already knew what his fellow senators were soon to learn: that a citizen in exile was barely a citizen at all. ([Location 4588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4588)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Naturally, there was outrage. Caesar ignored it. The appearance of legality mattered to him, but not so much as the reality of power. ([Location 4668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4668)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For those who were not Caesar, however, for those who relied on the law as the bulwark of their liberty and the guarantor of their traditions, all was now confusion. What was an honorable citizen to do? No one could be sure. Old route maps were proving to be treacherous guides. Civil war made of the Republic a disorienting labyrinth, one in which familiar highways might turn suddenly into culs-de-sac, and cherished landmarks into piles of rubble. Cicero, for instance, having finally screwed up the courage to scuttle for Pompey’s camp, still found himself lost. Cato, taking him to one side, told him that his coming had been a terrible mistake and that he would have been “more useful to his country and friends staying at home, and remaining neutral.”5 Even Pompey, when he found out that Cicero’s only contributions to the war effort were defeatist witticisms, publicly wished that he would go over to the enemy. Instead, Cicero sat in lugubrious impotence and moped. ([Location 4669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4669)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But in a civil war to what could a citizen pledge his loyalty? Not his city, nor the altars of his ancestors, nor the Republic itself, for these were claimed as the inheritance of both sides. But he could attach himself to the fortunes of a general, and be certain of finding comradeship in the ranks of that general’s army, and identity in the reflected glory of the general’s name. This was why the legions of Gaul had been willing to cross the Rubicon. What, after nine years of campaigning, were the traditions of the distant Forum to them, compared to the camaraderie of the army camp? And what was the Republic, compared to their general? ([Location 4678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4678)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But in his council of war tempers were fraying. The senators in Pompey’s train, impatient for action, wanted Caesar and his army wiped out. What was wrong with their generalissimo? Why would he not fight? The answer was all too readily at hand, bred of decades of suspicion and resentment: “They complained that Pompey was addicted to command, and took pleasure in treating former consuls and praetors as though they were slaves.”10 So wrote his not unsympathetic adversary, who could give orders to his subordinates as he pleased and not be jeered at for it. But this was because Caesar, whatever he pretended otherwise, was not fighting as the champion of the Republic. Pompey was. To him, it was a title that meant everything. Now his colleagues, as jealous of overweening greatness as they had always been, demanded that he demonstrate his fitness to lead them by bowing to the wishes of the majority—let him crush Caesar once and for all! Pompey, reluctantly, gave way. The orders went out. Battle was to be joined the following day. Pompey the Great, by staking his own and the Republic’s future on a single throw, had finally proved himself a good citizen. ([Location 4730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4730)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was the threat of such ridicule, of course, that helped to keep a Roman a man. Custom, wrote the greatest scholar of Caesar’s day, was “a pattern of thought which has evolved to become a regular practice”:* shared and accepted by all the citizens of the Republic, it had provided Rome with the surest foundation of her greatness. How different things were in Alexandria! Raised from scratch on sandbanks, the city lacked deep roots. No wonder, to Roman eyes, that it had such a harlot character. Without custom there could be no shame, and without shame anything became possible. A people whose traditions had withered would become prey to the most repellent and degrading habits. ([Location 4877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4877)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Better to die than live a slave: this was the lesson that a Roman drew in with his breath. One could submit to the dictator, and be grateful to him, even admire him—but one could never repress the resulting sense of shame. “To the free men who accepted Caesar’s perks, his very power to dole them out was an affront.”21 ([Location 4989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=4989)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions. In the East they would appreciate this. In the East they already worshiped Caesar as a god. In the East there were traditions older by far than the Republic, of the flesh becoming divine and of the rule of a king of kings. ([Location 5062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5062)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation. This was the lesson that his stay in Alexandria had taught him. Just as Cleopatra was both a pharaoh to the Egyptians and a Macedonian queen among the Greeks, so Caesar could be at once a living god in Asia and a dictator to the Romans. Why offend the sensibilities of his fellow citizens by abolishing the Republic when—as Caesar himself was said to have pointed out—the Republic had been reduced to “nothingness, a name only, without body or substance”?23 What mattered was not the form but the reality of power. And Caesar, unlike Sulla, had no intention of relinquishing it. ([Location 5074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5074)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. “Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude—but our city is not.” Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. “So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die than shrink from regaining it.”9 ([Location 5231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5231)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Having achieved that, however, with his rivals dead or tamed and his people exhausted, he had next faced a momentous decision. Either to continue trampling on the traditions of his city’s past, to wield power nakedly with a sword, as a warlord, perhaps, like his father, like Antony, as a god—or to cast himself as the heir of tradition. By becoming “Augustus” he signaled his choice. He would rule not against the grain of the Republic but with it. He would instruct his countrymen in an ancient lesson: that ambition, if not pursued for the general good, might be a crime. And he himself, the “best guardian of Romulus’ people,”27 would revitalize the ideals of citizenship so that never again would they overreach themselves and degenerate into savagery and civil war. ([Location 5595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5595)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The challenge—and the great opportunity—for Augustus was to persuade them of the opposite. Do that and the foundations of his regime would be secure. A citizen who could restore to his fellows not only peace but also their customs, their past, and their pride would rank as august indeed. ([Location 5608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5608)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To the Romans themselves, who remained a conservative people despite all the upheavals of repeated civil wars, there was nothing startling about the perception that the past might shadow the present. The unique achievement of Augustus, however, was the brilliance with which he colonized both. His claim to be restoring their lost moral greatness to them stirred in the Romans deep sensibilities and imaginings that at their profoundest could inspire a Virgil, and make their landscape once again a sacred and myth-haunted place. But these yearnings also served other, more programmatic purposes. They encouraged veterans, for instance, to remain on their farms and not come endlessly flocking to Rome; to be content with their lot, leaving their swords to rust in the lofts of their barns. And over the vast tracts of the countryside that remained the property of agribusiness, worked by chain gangs of slaves, they cast a veil woven of fantasy. ([Location 5650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5650)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Romans were used to citizens who vaunted their power, who exulted in the brilliance and glamour of their greatness—but Augustus was different. The more his grip tightened on the state, the less he flaunted it. Paradox, of course, had always suffused the Republic, and Augustus, insinuating himself into its heart, took on, chameleonlike, the same characteristic. The ambiguities and subtleties of civic life, its ambivalences and tensions, all were absorbed into the enigma of his own character and role. It was as though, in a crowning paradox, he had ended up as the Republic itself. ([Location 5678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5678)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “The fruit of too much liberty is slavery”39 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 a new age, to prove. ([Location 5716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0012RMVEI&location=5716)) - Tags: [[blue]]