War is remembered throughout history by the most defining moments, the ones that make permanent memories and lasting world-wide changes: We remember the lucky shot at Sarajevo made by Gavrilo Princeps; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; when Lancaster and York plucked the red and white roses; listening to Winston Churchill declare “We shall not flag or fail…”. These are the moments that shape our memory and understanding of war. These moments, unfortunately, are nothing more than mythology.
For a true act of exemplary decision, consider the crossing of the Rubicon. The Roman word for a choice for which either catastrophe or triumph hung in the balance, Tom Holland tells us, was discrimen. The fall of men who claimed to be dedicated to an uplifting ideal and the rise of men who were self-interested; in other words, Rubicon, is a great example of discrimen. Holland would explain that Rubicon is a study of how personal ambition rose as civic honour degenerated, of greed, feuds, risk, and folly rising to power. Long after the Republic fell and the Principate took over, the glory days were remembered by the nostalgic and the idealists.
Their passion and their cause resides within Holland. These days it seems that the only access we have to history is either romanticized cinema or works of academia that are difficult to slog through.
Holland, however, manages to both educate and entertain with his well-paced and well-written historical observations by drawing on the best of cinema and academia.
The myths behind the ancient Roman regime changeover are taken by Rubicon, examined, and transformed into the harsh, compelling reality. Once the various, unconnected explanations have been dismissed, the circle of cause and effect spirals, as always, outward. The encompassed chronology nearly overwhelms the actual narrative due to the sheervolume of information that Holland must necessarily cover. His skills as a novelist come into play as he manages to pull of this literary feat. He manages to make comprehensible, though his research, a period of history that is complicated. Through wit and probably reluctant affection, the repellent men that constitute this large cast become individuals and are brought vibrantly to life.
Cicero, who up until the very end was loyal to the values of and the Republic itself, who waited too long to leave Rome and had to succumb to the assassin’s blade and die like a brave gladiator, would appear to be Holland’s hero. At the other end of the spectrum, the reader feels cheated when Sulla, one of the cruelest of Roman dictators, not only retires but manages to expire peacefully at home in his bed.
When writing a history for general readership about ancient Rome, the author faces two challenges. First of all, one must be able to pass along the great amounts of necessary information in such a manner that the reader gains understanding of the Roman Republic without being driven away through boredom or incomprehension. You must also manage to convey how this alien civilization manages to, through it’s military virtues, legislature, literature, hygiene, and paganism, deceive us into believing that it was similar to ours; a truly fascinating fact. The paradoxes of Roman society are conveyed by Holland in illustrious style.
Holland succeeds in this in part by utilizing the same devices that Roman writers used; changing the style from poetic to rhetorical to using modern vernacular. One can hear the poet Propertius when one reads; ‘As the traveller approached Rome’s gates he might occasionally find the stench from the city ameliorated by myrrh or cassia, the perfumes of death, borne to him on the breeze from a cypress-shaded tomb’. You also get a sense through the impact of the words of the multitude of changes which shocked conservative first century BC Rome — the new men and the new ways; the hacks, drag-queens, sleaze, pornographers, the new vulgarity.
The Republic had an important and arduous history. Western culture would have been entirely different had Caesar made a different choice. The ‘democratical gentlemen’ of the seventeenth century, who succeeded in overturning a monarchy, employed the same arguments and motives that were used centuries earlier by the advocates for Roman republicanism. When we start looking through the modern cases of discrimen; the arguments for all the latest alliances and conflicts, we find ourselves unerringly drawn back to the ancient civil wars. We see and hear the tantalizingly familiar justifications, spins, and patterns.
Julius Caesar provides the beginning, but it is Octavian, who reinvented himself as Augustus, the Pax Romana instigator, founder of a nation, and teenaged inciter of brutal, widespread proscriptions, who provides the ending of Holland’s tale. The stream that is the Rubicon was crossed by Julius Caesar, but it took an Augustus to make the changes needed to make an essentially absolute monarchy out of a republic. This was managed, not with armies, but with words. After all, as he assured the idealists, he was only primus inter pares, or ‘first among equals’.
Julius Caesar authored a third person account of his nine years spent in war with Gaul, which is entitled Commentarii de Bello Gallico, or Commentaries on the Gallic War in Latin. Various translations of the book’s title such as: On the Gallic War, The Gallic War, About the Gallic War, and the Conquest of Gaul have been used for English translations of the work, though the latin name is most commonly retained. Caesar spent nine years fighting native armies of Gaul to ensure Roman domination of that land. He describes his military experience there with the Commentarii de Bello Gallico. “Gaul,” as defined in Ceasar’s book, usually means the whole of Gaul, which included modern Switzerland, Belgium, and France, but excluded the Provincia Narbonensis, or what is now know as Provence. At times, however, he only mentions the lands of the Celts, or Gauls to the Romans, from the Channel to Lyon (Lugdunum).