Reflections From Two Tom Holland (Not Spider-Man) Books on Rome
Books on long dead people that still feel alive...
I just read two Tom Holland (not Spiderman) books on Rome and thought it would be good to share a few relevant themes. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Cesar cover the two centuries or so between political upheaval and ultimate fall of the Republic through the last living direct heir of Augustus, the first ruling emperor of Rome.
As a historian, reading about ancient Rome comes with a well worn disclaimer. We have a remarkably complete historical record of the elites, generals and politicians. Some primary source but others that are chronicled but also serve as a second sort of primary source because they themselves are thousands of years old. Mostly absent are the diaries of the soldiers or the love letters or the newspaper articles that tell us what day to day life was like in Rome; a city of about a million people at the center of an empire that ruled over 4 million ancients. Nearly all of their unique voices are lost to history. We see Rome through the direct words of its towering personalities and chroniclers.
What I have enjoyed most about reading Tom Holland is how he tells the narrative through the characters. Rome is long gone. But people, especially politicians and generals have not so much changed. Some themes travel across the millennia quite well.
On Liberty…
Much like the colonial America revolutionaries who studied classical Roman history and politics, the rallying cry for the Roman Republic was liberty. Not for everyone of course. But for the Roman citizens to which it pertained, a moral imperative of personal liberty sustained Rome’s political norms for centuries. Liberty has many meanings though. And what Romans meant by it is in its own right an important insight that matters to our contemporary politics.
The true engine behind the elites that were willing to fight to maintain the virtue of Roman liberty was less about the equality of citizens and dignity of all Romans than it was about a right to glory and status. No man can rule over another man without consent. But not to avoid tyranny for the voiceless. But so that every Roman citizen is free to pursue the highest office and/or raise an army to seek glory for himself, his house and Rome by conquering exotic kingdoms and building temples to the gods. Not always in any particular order. Competition, not equality, was at the heart of Roman liberty. The tension between Life, Liberty and/or the Pursuit of Happiness/property/glory that has been the American intractable problem for two centuries wasn’t really in dispute. One can imagine a Roman Senator warming to contemporary Conservative American politics quite easily. The liberal humanist innovations of government were 1700 years away. And life in its absence was tremendously uneasy for the overwhelming majority of Romans relative to the sophisticated equilibrium of the elites.
On revolution…
Societal equilibrium is an underrated universal goal. And while unrest in the name of progress or tyranny tends to crease the fabric of history, what’s happening more times than not is some calculated reasoning of elites on whether or not a new equilibrium is worth risking the old one. The story of the fall of the Roman Republic told from a distance focuses on Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC as the watershed event that has ever since symbolized a metaphoric point of no return. What’s lost in that narrative is the decades of civil war that had been raging in Rome before. Lucius Cornelius Sulla named himself dictator twice between 90 and 80 BC. Prior to that the Italian allies of the peninsula fought (a war) for and won the rights of citizenship. By the time Julius Caesar’s civil war came about it was the fourth one in as many decades. The two that followed found an exhausted governing class searching for an equilibrium they could live with. And when Octavian allowed them to at least pretend he was just the first among many Roman citizens, the Princeps Senatus, instead of “dictator for life” they took the deal.
In reading about that period, I’m reminded of something a judge in Iraq told me. It was about the equilibrium of Saddam. “People just got tired.” Sassan stole the old equilibrium for her decades before I was there and offered a new one in return. The U.S. invasion had stolen that equilibrium and couldn’t provide a new one. Political exhaustion is a thing. The major and problematic shifts away from liberal principles often seem like they come overnight, but it’s a long game that does it more times than not. And so it is when politics slides away from it too.
On Populism…
One could walk over to the Forum to stir up the energy of the masses if things got too crowded or precarious in the Senate. Throughout the history of the Republic, recruiting mobs and gangs to shout down political adversaries wasn’t exactly uncommon. But the increased polarization and the seemingly legitimate claims that the fait of the Republic were at stake that was common in the decades before Caesar’s assassination led to a peak. Violence and assassinations ramped up. Caesar’s assassination was the most famous but there was Claudius before him and the burning of the Senate that came during the ensuing trial…and others. The pattern was pretty clear. As the political strife ramped up, the ability to summon “the people” to fight a corrupt elite became more enticing. Democratic institutions weakened and became challenged and then weakened more in a spiral to the bottom.
“Strong Men” don’t subjugate the people. They use them to subjugate the elites. That pattern appears to have been well intact 2000 years ago.
On War…
We fight them over there so we don’t fight them here. That was the core tenant of America’s 21st century wars on Terrorism. It was also Rome’s rallying cry to conquer barbarians not so close to the gates. It was easy to sell wars in far off lands to Romans. It brought glory on Rome and riches and plunder to the generals and soldiers that fought them. But the main motivation was to ensure Roman domestic safety. Whether or not anyone truly believed it is less material than the reality that they said it for centuries. And the result was a constant stream of bloodshed and plundering that was mostly invisible to everyday Romans. Except of course when the returning veterans needed to be granted their plots of land to keep them from turning their short swords on the homeland. The 1st Century BC GI Bill was a farm, most likely confiscated from a non citizen somewhere on the peninsula. And the Roman War on Terror was alive and well for centuries, before and after the fall of the Republic.
On America…
At some point, reading about the fall of the Republic urges you to project the similarities forward into the world we live in today to try to make a case that we’re on some predestined path towards collapse or autocracy. It’s something that politicians and historians alike have been doing for centuries. But I think about it differently. What Holland’s accounts of Rome show us, in great detail, is that patterns of politics and social institutions are deeply consistent across time, technology levels and cultures. At certain levels of sophistication we get predictable in what we care about and how we approach our needs and desires as a polis. We can see ourselves in the ebbs and flows of history.
But that’s something distinctly short of believing in some deterministic linear path into the future that maps along the same lines as our past. We may know the rules and tendencies of baseball, but we don’t know who is going to win tomorrow’s game or how. Or who the players that matter will be 50 years from now. The Hitlers and Napoleons and terrorist attacks and plagues, and randomness of war outcomes all matter. The black swans of the future will have as much or more impact than the human tendencies of the past.
As for America, I find some comfort in the well worn paths. We are not so much on uncharted ground as we might think. We’re quite well charted actually.