Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Rubicon by Tom Holland


British Subtitle: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
American Subtitle: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

Why I Read This Book
          When I first saw this book in the bookstores, I turned my nose up at it.  I had spent my teenage years being obsessed with Roman history, and had already read much on the subject.  I knew all this stuff already.  Or at least, even if I didn’t know all the intricate details, I knew all the stuff that was likely to be contained in a brief survey history like this one.  (If the book had been an in-depth examination of one particular figure or event, that would have been different, but this was a lightening quick survey of the last 100 years of the Roman Republic.  There was unlikely to be much in this book that I didn’t know.)

            But then, I was talking to a friend and fellow history buff over dinner one night, and he said this was his favorite history book.  “It’s a great narrative history,” my friend says.  “Tom Holland writes in such an engaging way that I just got caught up in the book.  I finished the whole thing off in just two days.”

            I also share a passion for well-written narrative history.  And despite the fact that I’ve already read much on the end of the Roman Republic, I decided that if the book was as well-written as my friend claimed, then I would give it a try.  Sometimes it can be fun to hear a story you already know told by a different story-teller, who might come at it from a slightly different angle or emphasize slightly different things.

The Review
          This book was recommended to me as a well-written narrative history which would be a pleasure to read.  And it did not disappoint.
            My friend told me he got so absorbed in the book he finished it off in only two days.  I took 4 days myself, but I had a similar experience.  The book pulled me in, and I had a hard time putting it down.
            And yes, as I suspected, I pretty much did know most of the stuff in here.  But it was still fun to read it again from a slightly different angle, told by a skilled story-teller.  (And actually, it would be an exaggeration to say I already knew everything in this book.  While perhaps 70% of the book was review for me, on just about every page there was usually some piece of information that was either new to me, or that I had once known and then forgotten.)

            That such an engaging history of the fall of the Roman Republic can be written is partly due to Tom Holland’s excellent storytelling, but it is also partly due to the richness of the source material itself.

            For those of us interested in ancient history, the last years of the Roman Republic are especially interesting because of all the information that has survived.  Somewhat paradoxically, we know more about the history, politics and gossip of the last 100 years of Republican Rome than we do about many other more recent historical periods.  (It’s counter-intuitive, but it is not always the case that the older a historical period is, the less it is known.)  As Tom Holland writes: “As it happens, the last twenty years of the Republic are the best documented in Roman history, with what is, for the classicist, a wealth of evidence—speeches, memoirs, even private correspondence” (Author’s preface, xxvii).  Although Tom Holland quickly goes on to qualify this remark (it’s only a lot when you compare it to how sparse our sources are for most of the rest of ancient history), there still exists more than enough information to tell a good story about the different personalities, factions, rivalries, and political maneuverings of ancient Rome. 
            Much of Cicero’s personal correspondence has also survived the centuries, and as he was a frequent commentator on political events, we often get his opinions on all the political events of the day, like a running commentary on history from beyond the grave. 

            Indeed the information is rich enough that Tom Holland could have made a book 20 times the size if he wanted to.  (His slim volume clocks in at only 389 pages).  And in his rush to cram everything in, there are invariably some characters or events that get short changed.  (One example out of many: the entire career of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (W) is summed up in two sentences—“No sooner had Sulla’s ashes been scattered in the wind than one of the consuls had launched an uprising against the entire Sullan regime.  The revolt had been speedily and brutally put down.” (p. 122).)

            At other points, one sometimes gets the sense that Tom Holland is teasing the reader by only alluding to a larger richer story.  For example, when writing about Mark Antony and Clodius, Tom Holland says, “Mark Antony, moving on from his affair with Curio, had begun sniffing around Clodius’ much-loved wife, Fulvia, a breach of the codes of friendship that would soon see the two men threatening to kill each other.” (p. 251).  But why not give the whole story?  Or why not relate the tale about how Mark Antony attacked Clodius in the forum, and Clodius only escaped by barricading himself in the stairs of a nearby bookstore?
            The brief quotations from Cicero’s letters enliven the narrative with a first person eye-witness account of the history, but here again the quotations are too brief.  The one sentence excerpts from Cicero’s letters just made me want to hear more than Tom Holland was giving me.

            And in the course of the rushed narrative, other balls get dropped here and there.  Tom Holland recounts (briefly) the career of Clodius’s antagonist Milo, and he also recounts the failed debt relief rebellion of Marcus Caleius Rufus, but fails to mention that Milo was also part of that rebellion, and was also killed in it.  (I know this is just a survey history, and you can’t include everything, but since Milo had already been one of the characters in the narrative, it would have been fitting to include this detail, and it would only have cost one extra sentence.)

            And yet, for all the details I wish had been included, I have to admit the author does do a very good job of writing a summary history.  Tom Holland manages to put enough personal details and intrigue in to keep the narrative interesting, while still moving it along at a very fast clip.  I’ll quote a couple paragraphs to illustrate this.  (This isn’t going to fully make sense taken out of context, but hopefully it will give an idea of how the book reads nonetheless.)

            In his desperation to find a forceful counterweight to Pompey, Cato had settled upon an extraordinary choice.  His favoured candidate for the consulship of 52 was none other than Clodius’ old sparring-partner, the turbulent street-brawler Milo.  Once a ferocious partisan of Pompey, Milo had been unceremoniously dumped by the great man, and was therefore happy to throw his lot in with Cato and his plans.  Pompey warned his former protégé to stand down, and when Milo refused threw his weight behind rival candidates.  But his fury was, of course, nothing compared to that of Milo’s deadliest enemy.  For three years, Clodius had been on his best behaviour, attempting to rebrand himself as a sound and sober statesman, but the prospect of having Milo as consul was too much.  Like a reformed alcoholic reaching for a bottle, Clodius returned to the streets.  His old gangs were resurrected.  In reply, Milo bought up the gladiator schools.  As 53 BC drew to a close, Rome descended into anarchy.  So too did the Republic.  For the third time in four years elections were postponed, this time because the presiding official had been knocked out by a brick.  With all public business in abeyance, club-wielding mobsters roamed the streets, while law-abiding citizens cowered where they could.
            It seemed that things could hardly become any worse.  Then, on 18 January 52 BC, they did.  Clodius and Milo met fact to face on the Appian Way.  Taunts flew; one of Milo’s gladiators flung a javelin; Clodius was struck in the shoulder.  His bodyguards hauled their wounded leader to a nearby tavern, but Milo’s heavies, following in pursuit, overpowered them.  Clodius himself was slung out of the tavern on to the road, where he was speedily finished off.  There, by the side of a shrine to the Good Goddess, his corpse was left mangled and naked in the dust.  It appeared that the goddess had at last had her revenge.  (p. 289-290).

            If you’re a history geek like me, you might lament that this narrative is not as detailed as it could have been, but you have to admit that kind of writing is more than enough to keep you turning the pages!  I fully recommend this book to anyone interested in history.

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            Having lamented that this book is too brief, I suppose I should ask the question: Is there a better, more detailed narrative history book on the Roman Republic?  Tom Holland himself seems to imply that the selection is limited.  …back in the late nineties, when I first began to contemplate writing about the downfall of the Republic, there were almost no narrative accounts of Roman history.”  (p. xv-xvi)  Tom Holland goes on to say that this has changed for the better, so that nowadays, “books and films on the Romans are legion” (p.xv).  But has anyone else stepped in to fill the gap of a well-written narrative history of the end of the Republic? 
            If anyone knows of a book recommendation for me, let me know in the comments section.

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            I debated whether or not to add this book to my list of favorite narrative history books.  I tend to define good narrative history as not only using a narrative style, but also focusing in on only one main story or figure.  A book like this, which covers about a 100 year time span, I’d be more inclined to put in the category of “survey history”.  (Granted these distinctions exist only in my own mind, and no one else is obliged to follow them.)
            However, since I included David Starkey’s Monarchy as an addendum to my list—a survey history, but a survey history that was done in a narrative style—I’ll put this book in the same category.  It doesn’t quite qualify for my definition as a great narrative history, but it can certainly get an honorable mention.

Connections to Modern Day Events
          Some of the connections from ancient Rome to modern day events are drawn explicitly by the author in his introductions*.  In particular, the author sees the wars between Republican Rome and the Near Eastern monarchies as parallel to America’s current wars in the Middle East. 
            To quote from part of that introduction: “…on the 11 of September, 2001, for instance, I was writing about the Asiatic Vespers, the co-ordinated massacre on a single night of 80,000 Roman and Italian businessmen.  The man responsible for this atrocity was a power-hungry Near Eastern despot called Mithridates; and the Romans, after giving his armies a punitive thrashing, had been content to impose a swingeing peace treaty, but otherwise leave him be.  For the next fifteen years, they were itching to make good this mistake.  Numerous casus belli were adduced: among them that Mithridates had broken the weapons sanctions imposed upon him, and that he had been actively supporting terrorists.  In the end, the hawks had their way.  War was declared in 74 BC, and, after initial set-backs, Mithridates’ regime was overthrown.  And all this I was writing about in the spring of 2002, as the first storm-clouds of the Iraq crisis were starting to loom.
            As I pressed on with my narrative, over and over again, a day’s writing would be given an eerie coda by what I heard on the evening news: as the Romans hunted Mithridates on a wild goose-chase through the wilds of Armenia, so American special forces were combing Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden; as the Roman people suspended many of their traditional freedoms in order to give increased powers to the war against cells of shadowy ‘pirates’, so sweeping new anti-terrorism laws were being introduced; as evidence was fabricated against Antony and Cleopatra by the future emperor Augustus, in an attempt to urge a nervous Senate to go to war, so the British government was releasing its dossier of evidence against Saddam Hussein. (p. xvii)

            I’ve got to confess, when I initially read that section, I rolled my eyes.  If you read a lot of modern history books, you may be finding these constant attempts to draw parallels to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars a bit cliché by now.  (For example, in The Great Upheaval,  Jay Winik draws a modern day parallel with Russia’s War against Turkey.  In Three Empires on the Nile,  the British fight against Muslim fanatics in the Sudan is also explicitly compared to modern day US foreign policy.  Basically any history book published these days that contains any type of East-West conflict is going to be explicitly compared to Iraq and Afghanistan.)
            And yet, I suppose just because it’s becoming cliché doesn’t mean it’s not valid.  Every era of history if you look at it carefully can offer up some sort of parallel to the problems of every other era.  And while this is certainly not unique to the study of ancient Roman history, it doesn’t mean the parallels that Tom Holland has found are not real enough.

            Anyway, continuing on in the next couple of paragraphs in the same introduction, Tom Holland draws tentative parallels between the contradiction of Republican Rome’s imperialistic policy, and republican America’s imperialistic policy.
            Tendentious parallels, perhaps thrown up by circumstance—and yet suggestive all the same.  Rome was the first and—until recently—the only republic ever to behave towards its neighbors as an undisputed superpower, patronising strongmen here, overthrowing them there, throwing its weight around as and when it pleased.  The end result, of course, was to be empire, and the rule of an emperor: an imperium which in the early years of the twenty-first century it became something of a newspaper cliché to see as prefiguring the pax Americana.  Yet while the comparison of George W. Bush’s  Washington with the Rome of the emperors was clearly wide of the mark, the mingled arrogance and anxiety which characterized the Republic’s attitude towards its own greatness, the temptations of overweening power and the dread of offending the gods, did indeed, I think, as I was writing Rubicon, have a certain haunting contemporary resonance.
            In 2003, just before the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a British newspaper polled numerous historians across the world, asking them to nominate the event which they felt most interestingly paralleled the crisis over Iraq.  Some mentioned Suez; others Munich; a few even the build up to the First World War.  None, however, ventured back beyond the twentieth century; certainly none thought to peer into the gloaming of the classical past.  A distant, far-away period, of which we know nothing?  Maybe.  Even so, I remain convinced that for those who wished to use history as a guide to understanding why America was bound to go to war in the Middle East, to fathoming the temptations offered her by her power, and the imperatives of her hunger for revenge, the obscure date of 74 BC offered far more food for thought than either 1939 or 1956. 
            Even now, with American hegemony looking infinitely more frayed than it did in the first years of the twenty-first century, the drama of the Republic’s greatness and collapse continues to cast an eerie shadow.  Yes, the Romans who conquered the world, and lost their liberty in doing so, are a people alien and strange; but perhaps that is precisely why we find it so hard to look at them, and not identify in their ambitions and agonies certain glimmerings of ourselves. (p. xviii-xix).

            And here we come to the end of the Republic.  “…the Romans who conquered the world, and lost their liberty in doing so.”  Is he implying that this is the course America is on?  Well….maybe.
            This is perhaps where things get a little bit murky.  Undoubtedly Tom Holland seems to believe that there are some sort of parallels between ancient Republican Rome and modern day republican America.  Undoubtedly he believes there are some lessons to be learned here.  But exactly what those lessons are is spelled out neither in his introduction nor in his narrative.  Many themes are hinted at (the contradiction between republic and empire, for example) but no definitive case is made.
            This is mostly due to the nature of the book.  Tom Holland’s book is, unapologetically, a narrative history.  It is concerned with telling the story of the major figures and is not an analytical examination of why the Roman Republic eventually ended in dictatorship.  (No doubt that analytical book is out there somewhere.)  Although Tom Holland draws the reader’s attention to some themes, most of the causes of the end of Republican Rome must be inferred by the reader.

So, What Caused the End of the Roman Republic?
            Among the various themes that get hinted at in Tom Holland’s book are:
* The political culture of Republican Rome, which encouraged such a vicious atmosphere of competition among its citizens.  This intense competition lead on more than one occasion to bloodshed rather than compromise.
* The rapid expansion of Rome’s territory during the 1st century BC, which the republican system of government may not have been equipped to deal with
* The influx of wealth into Rome from her newly acquired Eastern provinces, which in turn caused many citizens to become more concerned about money than about civic duty
* The increasing gang violence in the city of Rome, which the republic (without an official police force) was ill-equipped to deal with
* Related to the above point: the disenfranchisement of the lower-class citizens, which gave them less of an investment in preserving the institutions of the Republic.  (Tom Holland also theorizes that this is why Sulla’s and Caesar’s troops followed their generals into illegality.  For the lowly soldier, denied an opportunity to participate in the Republic’s civil institutions, the army was their sole source of community and their only real loyalty.)
* After about 40 years of civil war, the weariness of the citizens with the different fighting factions, and the desire to have a stable government, even if it meant the end of the Republic.

          To me though, what stands out most strongly is that the ancient Romans put such great faith in their republican traditions, institutions and laws that many of them never seemed to realize that laws and constitutions do not enforce themselves.  The Roman Senate never realized that whoever controls the largest army ultimately gets to decide the law.
            As long as the army’s leaders agreed to play by the republic’s rules, the republic could exist.  But as soon as someone at the head of a powerful army decided they didn’t want to play by the rules anymore, then there was little the Senate could do about it.
            Julius Caesar is most famous for crossing the Rubicon with his armies in defiance of the Senate’s order, but Tom Holland points out that the system was broken long before Caesar.  There had been a period of about 40 years of violence and illegality in Republican Rome that Tom Holland traces all the way back to Sulla, as the first Roman general to defy the Senate and impose his own will by force.
            Sulla had been ordered by the Roman law to hand over command to his rival Marius.  Instead, Sulla chose to ignore the law, and march his legions on Rome.  As Tom Holland relates the event:
            Sulla, first in consternation and then in mounting fury, retired to his tent.  There he did some quick calculations.  With him at Nola he had six legions…Marius, back in Rome, had no legions whatsoever.
            The maths was simple.  Why, then, had Marius failed to work it out, and how could so hardened an operator have chosen to drive his great rival into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready to hand?  Clearly, the prospect that Sulla might come out of it fighting had never even crossed Marius’ mind.  It was impossible, unthinkable.  After all, a Roman army was not the private militia of the general who commanded it, but the embodiment of the Republic at war.  Its loyalty was owed to whomever was appointed to its command by the due processes of the constitution.  This was how it had always been, for as long as the Republic’s citizens had been going to war—and Marius had no reason to imagine that things might possibly have changed. (p. 69)

            Yes, the Romans laws said that a commander could never disobey the Senate, or march his legions on Rome.  But what did the laws matter the minute Sulla had six legions behind him, and decided he was going to do what he liked?
            The lesson here seems to be that anytime enough military power is centralized in one place, the republican laws and the constitution become as worthless as the paper they are printed on.  (This, by the way, has since been repeated many times—see: every example in history of a coup d’état against a democratic government.)

            From the floodgates opened by Sulla’s example, Tom Holland traces a whole series of other republican strongmen who blatantly disregarded the Republican constitution: Marius himself, Cinna, Sulla again, Pompey, Crassus, and finally Julius Caesar.  And then after Caesar, his lieutenants Lepidus and Mark Anthony, and then finally Octavian.
            Ironically, the same blind faith in republican laws exhibited by Marius against Sulla was later repeated by Cato against Julius Caesar.  Just as Marius had backed Sulla into a corner, and expected Sulla to meekly hand over his legions rather than disobey Roman law, so Cato seems to have had the same blind faith in the force of Roman law when he attempted to back Caesar and his legions into a corner 40 years later. 

            This point also ties in with the expansion of the Roman Empire.  The more foreign wars Rome fought, the more legions it needed to create.  The more legions it created, the more powerful the leaders of those legions then became.

Connections With Other Books I’ve Read
          Although I call myself a history nerd, I do have to confess that I’m a person of limited intelligence, and almost all of my historical knowledge comes from either narrative histories, or historical fiction rather than real hard hitting academic history books.

            And although I’m sometimes embarrassed to admit how much of my historical knowledge comes from historical fiction, it definitely has its benefits for a certain type of person.  Some of us have a certain type of mind which is very likely to forget dry facts, but can latch onto and remember a story almost perfectly.

            It’s been over 20 years since I first read the historical fiction novels The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough (I read these books when I was 14), but I can still remember them.  Not every word, of course, but certain scenes still stick out vividly in my mind.  (Which is impressive considering how much else I’ve managed to forget over the years).  So when I read Tom Holland’s account of the rivalry between Gaius Marius and Sulla, and the Italian War, and Mithridates, I could still remember all of these events from Colleen McCullough’s fiction.  (For example, Tom Holland tells the story of how Mithridates pours molten liquid gold down Manius Aquillius’s throat, which is a scene I still vividly remember from reading The Grass Crown 22 years ago.)
          Regular readers of this blog are probably sick of - hearing - me - praise Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series.  But if you’re interested in this time period, and you like historical fiction, I can’t recommend these books highly enough.
            The books cover exactly the same time period that Rubicon covers—tracing the last years of the Roman Republic, starting all the way back with the rivalry of Gaius Marius and Sulla and continuing until the deaths of Anthony and Cleopatra.  Compared to the scant 390 pages of Rubicon, Master of Rome is epic in length—7 books in total, each one of them running close to 1,000 pages.  But while it may not be a quick read, if you’re a history nut then you’ll find the rich details of these books incredibly rewarding in a the way that the all-too-quick summary in Rubicon is not.  (And don’t just take my word for it.  Fellow bibliophile and history nut Peter Bratt also strongly recommends these books: The bulk of my fiction reading involved Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, which consisted of seven different books that amounted to over 6,500 pages of enjoyable historical fiction. This series certainly deserves the title of my favorite work of fiction in 2011).

            Granted Colleen McCullough’s books are not perfect—they have a heavy pro populares (W) bias, which means it’s always good to read them next to a more neutral historian like Tom Holland to keep perspective. 
            [In McCullough’s somewhat biased version of history, it is the Senate’s conservatives who deserve most of the blame for the fall of the Roman Republic.  It is implied that if the conservatives had not been so pig-headed and obstructionist on problems such as land reform or increasing the citizenship franchise, then the populares would not have had to resort to extra constitutional measures to get their much needed reforms through.  This theme isn’t quite as prevalent in Tom Holland’s book, but he does mention a couple times the problem of the Senate’s xenophobia and conservatism.]

            Also for more historical fiction on the same period, see the first two books of Robert Harris’s Cicero - trilogy.  (The third book is still being written at the moment.)

            (If someone knows of other good historical fiction covering this period, please let me know in the comments section.)

            As for my old school papers, two of them relate directly to events covered in Rubicon: my high school paper on the Catiline Conspiracy, and a college paper on organized gang warfare in the Roman Republic.

Footnotes:
*The edition of this book I have contains two author’s introductions—one written on initial publication in 2003 (p. xxi-xxx), and another updated introduction written in 2013 (p. xv-xix).  

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