Even as the streets ran red with the blood of its proscribed upper class, Sulla promised to restore the republic. Sulla's campaigns in the East against Mithridates of Pontus (a hard man to kill) and the savage triumphs of Pompey the Great were straws in the wind they caused Romans to wonder about the wisdom of rewarding military heroes with a dictatorship. The integrity of the republic was continually threatened by the centrifugal forces of ambition. We see an organism that responds to the chaotic century with growth, resilience, shock and, ultimately, its death throes. after the expulsion of King Tarquin, it became the world's greatest power, the capital of the world. Politicians and pirates, generals and slaves and gigolos: the extraordinary characters of this alien yet familiar world still astonish the modern reader. The names dazzle the memory: Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Sulla, Pompey, Cato, Spartacus, Cleopatra, Brutus, Antony. He trains a pathologist's eye on the Roman generation born around 100 B.C. His absorbing, witty narrative captures the scope and drama of the republic and shapes its labyrinthine elements into a single continuum.Ĭharacter is Holland's principal focus. Holland's rich analysis begins at this point. Rome was the first republic to become an empire the second, of course, is the United States.Īncient historians Sallust and Livy believed that the moral decline of Rome began in the second century B.C. In Rome citizens had free speech, private property and rights before the law. Rome was the last free city left in the ancient world.

Rome is the mother lode of Western societal and political attributes: stern, persevering, patrician, moralistic, materialistic, hypocritical, with reverence for the past and deep-rooted divisions of class and status. Why read about Rome? Rome intrigues us because it mirrors our own society.

With this cinematic opening, British historian and novelist Tom Holland begins his splendid history of roughly the last century of the Roman Republic, leading to its end at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. 'So fateful was Caesar's crossing that the Rubicon stands for every fateful step taken since.'

Rubicon by Tom Holland