From Rubicon: the beginnings of the Republic

the legends

told of the Sibyl were strange and puzzling. On the presumption

that she had foretold the Trojan War, men debated whether she was

a compound of ten prophetesses, or immortal, or destined to live a

thousand years. Some_— the more sophisticated — even wondered

whether she existed at all. In fact, only two things could be asserted

with any real ‘confidence -— that her books, inscribed with spidery

and antique Greek, certainly existed, and that within them could be

read the pattern of events that were to come. The Romans, thanks

to Tarquin’s belated eye for a bargain, found themselves with a

window on to the future of the world. "

Not that this helped Tarquin much. In 509 BC he succumbed to

a palace coup. Kings had been ruling in Rome for more than two

hundred years, ever since the city’s foundation, but Tarquin, the

seventh in line, would also be the last.* With his expulsion, the

monarchy itself was overthrown, and, in its place, a free republic

proclaimed. From then on, the title of ‘king’ would be regarded by

the Roman people with an almost pathological hatred, to be

shrunk from and shuddered at whenever mentioned. Liberty

had been the watchword of the coup against Tarquin, and liberty,

the liberty of a city that had no master, was now consecrated

as the birthright and measure of every citizen. To preserve it

from the ambitions of future would-be tyrants, the founders of the

Republic settled upon a remarkable formula. Carefully, they divided

the powers of the exiled Tarquin between two magistrates, both

elected, neither pennitted to serve for longer than a year. These were

the consuls,‘l' and their presence at the head of their fellow citizens,

* Although, according to Varro, the great polymath of the late Republic, the

Tarquin visited by the Sibyl was Tarquinius Priscus, the king of Rome.

1' Consuls were in fact originally called praetors. The murk of early Roman

history is dense with such confusions.

The Paradoxical Republic 3

the one guarding against the ambitions of the other, was a stirring

expression of the Repub1ic’s guiding principle — that never again

should one man be permitted to rule supreme in Rome. Yet, start»

ling though the innovation of the consulship appeared, it was not

so radical as to separate the Romans entirely from their past. The

monarchy might have been abolished, but very little else. The roots

of the new Republic reached far back in time —.often very far back

indeed. The consuls themselves, as a privilege of their office, bord-

ered their togas with the purple of kings. When they consulted the

auspices they did so according to rites that pre-dated the very foun-

dation of Rome. And then, of course, most fabulous of all, there

were the books left behind by the exiled Tarquin, the three myste-

rious rolls of prophecy, the writings of the ancient and quite

possibly timeless Sibyl.

So sensitive was the information provided by these that access to

them was strictly regulated as a secret of the state. Citizens found

copying them would be sewn into a sack and dropped into the sea.

Only in the most perilous of circumstances, when fearsome prodi-

gies warned the Republic of looming catastrophe, was it permitted

to consult the books at all. Then, once every alternative had been

exhausted, specially appointed magistrates would be mandated to

climb to the temple of Iupiter, where the books were kept in con-

ditions of the tightest security. The scrolls would be spread out.

Fingers would trace the faded lines of Greek. Prophecies would be

deciphered, and advice taken on how best to appease the angered

heavens. ‘-

And advice was always found. The Romans, being a people as

practical as they were devout, had no patience with fatalism. They

were interested in knowing the future only because they believed

that it could then better be kept at bay. Showers of blood, chasms

spitting fire, mice eating gold: terrifying prodigies such as these

were regarded as the equivalent of bailiffs’ duns, warnings to the

Roman people that they stood in arrears with the gods. To get back

in credit might require the introduction of a foreign cult to the

city, the worship of a divinity who had hitherto been unknown.

More typically, it would inspire retrenchment, as the magistrates

desperately sought to identify the traditions that might have been

neglected. Restore the past, the way that things had always been,

and the safety of the Republic would be assured.

This was a presumption buried deep in the soul of every Roman.

In the century that followed its establishment, the Republic was

repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from

the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued

constitutional reforms — and yet throughout this turbulent period

of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern dis-

taste for change. Novelty, to the citizens of the Republic, had

sinister connotations. Pragmatic as they were, they might accept

innovation if it were dressed up as the will of the gods or an ancient

custom, but never for its own sake. Conservative and flexible in

equal measure, the Romans kept what worked, adapted what had

failed, and preserved as sacred lumber what had become redun-

dant. The Republic was both a building site and a junk yard. Rome’s

future was constructed amid the jumble of her past.

The Romans themselves, far from seeing this as a paradox, took

it for granted. How else were they to invest in their city save by

holding true to the customs of their ancestors? Foreign analysts,

who tended to regard the Romans‘ piety as ‘superstition’,1 and

interpreted it as a subterfuge played on the masses by a cynical

ruling class, misread its essence. The Republic was not like other

states. While the cities of the Greeks were regularly shatteredby

civil wars and revolutions, Rome proved herself impervious to such

disasters. Not once, despite all the social upheavals of the Republic’s

first century of existence, had the blood of her own citizens been

spilled on her streets. How typical of the Greeks to reduce the ideal

1

of shared citizenship to sophistry! To a Roman, nothing was more

sacred or cherished. After all, it was what defined him. Public busi-

ness - res publica — was what ‘republic’ meant. Only by seeing himself

reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a Roman truly know him-

self a man.

And by hearing his name on every tongue. The good citizen, in

the Republic, was the citizen acknowledged to be good. The

Romans recognised 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. This was

why, whenever resentful citizens took to the streets, it would be to

demand access to yet more honours and glory. Civil unrest would

invariably inspire the establishment of a new magistracy: the aedile-

ship and tribunate in 494, the quaestorship in 447, the praetorship in

367. The more posts there were, the greater the range of responsi-

bilities; the greater the range of responsibilities, the broader the

opportunities for achievement and approbation. 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-disci-

plined vainglory. To place personal honour above the interests of

the entire community was the behaviour of a barbarian - or worse

yet, a king. A

In their relations with their fellows, then, the citizens of the

Republic were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for

the common good. In their relations with other states, however, no

such inhibitions cramped them. ‘More than any other nation, the

Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.’2 The

consequences for their neighbours of this hunger for honour were

invariably devastating. The legions’ combination of efficiency and

ruthlessness was something for which few opponents found them-

selves prepared. 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. The courage they brought to service in the legions,

steeled by pride in their city and faith in her destiny, was an emo-

tion that every citizen was brought up to share. Something

uniquely lethal — and, to the Romans, glorious - marked their way

of war. -

I Even so, it took time for the other states of Italy to wake up to

the nature of the predator in their midst. For the first century of the

Republic’s existence the Romans found it a struggle to establish

their supremacy over cities barely ten miles from their own gates.

Yet even the deadliest carnivore must have its infancy, and the

Romans, as they raided cattle and skirmished with petty hill tribes,

were developing the instincts required to dominate and kill. By the

360s BC they had established their city as the mistress of central

Italy. In the following decades they marched north and south,

crushing opposition wherever they met it. By the 260s, with start-

ling speed, they had mastered the entire peninsula. Honour, of

course, had demanded nothing less. To states that humbly

acknowledged their superiority, the Romans would grant such

favours as a patron condescends to grant his clients, but to those

who defied them, only ceaseless combat. No Roman could tolerate

the prospect of his city losing face. Rather than endure it, he would

put up with any amount of suffering, go to any lengths.

The time soon came when the Republic had to demonstrate this

in a literal struggle to the death. The wars with Carthage were the

The Paradoxical Republic 7

most terrible it ever fought. A city of Semitic settlers on the North

African coast, dominating the trade routes of the western Medi-

terranean, Carthage possessed resources at least as great as Rome’s.

Although predominantly a maritime power, she had indulged her-

self for centuries with bouts of warfare against the Greek cities of

Sicily. Now, poised beyond the Straits of Messina, the Romans rep-

resented an ominous but intriguing new factor in Sicily’s military

equation. Predictably, the Greeks on the island could not resist

embroiling the Republic in their perennial squabbles with Carthage.

Equally predictably, once invited in, the Republic refused to play by

the rules. In 264 Rome transformed what had been a minor dispute

over treaty rights into a total war. Despite a lack of any naval tradi-

tion, and the loss of fleet after fleet to enemy action or storms, the

Romans endured over two decades of appalling casualties to bring

Carthage, at last, to defeat. By the terms of the peace treaty forced

on them, the Carthaginians undertook a complete withdrawal

from Sicily. Without ever having intended it, Rome found herself

with the nucleus of an overseas empire. In 227 Sicily was constituted

as the first Roman province. .