Ancient …
Classical sources are often given the blanket label ‘primary’, when in reality they may be no such thing. Call Plutarch, who was born in the reign of the Emperor Claudius, a primary source for the fall of the Republic and one might as well call Carlyle a primary source for the life of Frederick the Great. Even so, documents from the period covered by this book have been preserved – and, by the standards of ancient history, a voluminous quantity of them. Most were written by Cicero: speeches, philosophical works and letters. A few works by his contemporaries have also survived: most notably the commentaries of Caesar, two monographs by Sallust, fragments of works by the great polymath Terrentius Varro, maxims culled from the dramas of a mime-writer, Publilius Syrus, and the work of two poets, Lucretius and Catullus. Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things provides a fascinating counterpoint to the letters of Cicero: the work of a man who consciously withdrew from the clamour and frenzy of public life. Catullus, who was almost certainly a lover of Clodia Metelli, and a friend of Caelius – though see Wiseman’s Catullus and His World – paints vivid sketches of the capital’s party set, sometimes full of pathos, more often scabrous, witty and abusive.
Greeks also wrote about Roman affairs. One of the first to do so was Polybius, brought to Rome as a hostage in 168 BC, befriended by Scipio Aemilianus, and a witness to the destruction of Carthage. His History provided a penetrating analysis of the Roman constitution and the rise of the Republic to mastery over the entire Mediterranean. Of Posidonius’ writings, little has survived – only a few scraps here and there. Bulkier fragments have been preserved of the Library of History, an immense, forty-volume universal history written by Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian writing even as the Republic collapsed. A generation later, the geographer Strabo, who came from Mithridates’ old kingdom of Pontus, wrote an exhaustive gazetteer of the Roman world – including Italy and Rome herself. This was supplemented by the labours of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose Roman Antiquities was written as an introduction to Polybius, and contains invaluable information derived from the earliest Roman annalists.
In a sense, the entire literature of the Augustan period can be seen as a commentary on the fall of the Republic: in profoundly different ways it is a theme that runs throughout the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid; and through Livy’s great history of Rome. Even though the books of that history which covered the late Republic have been lost, an abridgement of Livy’s work by the late-first-century AD poet Florus has survived. Then there is the testimony of Octavian himself, in the form of The Achievements of the Divine Augustus – a lengthy self-justification set up in public places throughout the empire and a superlative exercise in spin.
Even after Augustus’ death, Roman writers kept returning to the heroic years of the Republic’s end. Details from the period filled Valerius Maximus’ compendium of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, and Velleius Paterculus’ Roman Histories, both composed during the reign of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius. The philosopher Seneca, tutor and adviser to Nero, mulled over the lessons of liberty betrayed. So too did his nephew, Lucan, in his epic poem on the civil wars, The Pharsalia, and Petronius, in his considerably less elevated prose work, The Satyricon. All three ultimately committed suicide, the only gesture of republican defiance still permitted Roman noblemen under the rule of the Caesars. ‘A monotonous glut of downfalls’ – so Tacitus, writing at the beginning of the second century AD, described the judicial murders that had blotted the recent history of his country. Rome’s ancient inheritance of freedom seemed to have vanished, drowned in blood. In Tacitus, bleakest of historians, the ghost of the Republic haunts what the city has become.
None of his near contemporaries could rival Tacitus for the clarity and mercilessness of his perspective. Instead, for most, the history of the Republic had become a quarry to be mined for entertainment or elevated anecdotes. The elder Pliny’s Natural Historyprovided character sketches of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero, along with an inexhaustible supply of more eclectic information. Quintilian, in his treatise on rhetoric, The Education of an Orator, often referred back to Cicero and the other orators of the last years of the Republic, and is an invaluable source of quotations for writers who have otherwise been lost. So too is Aulus Gellius, in his chatty collection of essays, The Attic Nights. Suetonius, author of a racy Lives of the Caesars, wrote muck-raking portraits of the two deified warlords, Julius and Augustus. King of the biographers, however, was Plutarch, whose portraits of the great men of the late Republic have been the most influential, because they are the most readable, of any historian’s. Vivid with moralising and gossip, they portray the Republic’s collapse not as a revolution or a social disintegration, but as the ancients tended to see it: a drama of ambitious and exceptional men.
Plutarch, a patriotic Greek, demonstrates the fascination that Roman history continued to exert over the Empire’s subject peoples. Increasingly, from the second century AD onwards, historians who wrote about the Republic’s collapse tended to do so in Greek. The most significant of these was Appian, a lawyer from Alexandria, who wrote a detailed history of Rome and her empire. For the events from the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus to 70 BC, his book, The Civil Wars, is our only surviving narrative source. For events from 69 BC onwards, however, he is supplemented by another historian, Cassius Dio, who wrote at a time when the Roman world, at the beginning of the third century AD, was once again tearing itself to pieces. Even as Rome slipped into terminal decline, citizens of the dying Empire continued to look back at a period that was by now becoming very ancient history indeed. Among the last to do so, around AD 400, was Macrobius, whose Saturnalia is full of anecdotes and jokes lovingly culled from the records of the late Republic. A few years later, a friend of Saint Augustine, Orosius, wrote a history of the world that also covered the period, but by then the Empire – and with it the classical tradition itself – had only a few decades left to live. With the fall of Rome, the history of the city passed into myth.
… and Modern
* Usually quoted in Latin – ‘alea iacta est’ – but in fact lifted from the Athenian playwright Menander, and spoken by Caesar in Greek. See Plutarch, Pompey, 60 and Caesar, 32.
* Although, according to Varro, the great polymath of the late Republic, the Tarquin visited by the Sibyl was Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome.
† Consuls were in fact originally called praetors. The murk of early Roman history is dense with such confusions.
* Judging from funerary inscriptions — the only written evidence that has survived.
* Piso and Livy disagreed over the destination of the plebeians’ first walk-out, Piso claiming that it had been on the Aventine, Livy at the nearby Sacred Mount.
* Almost certainly – although explicit proof is lacking – there was a property qualification for public office.
* The oft-repeated story that the Romans drove a plough over the foundations of Carthage and sowed them with salt appears to be just that – a story. Certainly, no ancient source refers to it.
* According to the poet Catullus, anyway (37 and 39). It was probably a joke, but one that must have played on Roman prejudices about Spanish standards of personal hygiene.
† The Iberian peninsula was not brought entirely under Roman control until 23 BC.
* The exact nature of Orata’s ‘hanging baths’ has provoked much speculation. Some have argued that they constituted a hot shower, others that Orata had invented the hypocaust, the under-floor central heating system built in to luxury villas. But if a shower, why describe it as a bath? And if a hypocaust, why invent a new phrase? For the best analysis of the various alternatives, see Fagan, ‘Sergius Orata’.
* A claim that could have been made at any point in the Republic’s long history. In fact it was made when the free state had only months to live, by Cicero in the sixth Philippic (19).
* Almost certainly. The evidence is not entirely conclusive.
* To be specific, Cicero, sixteen years later, in the Philippics. Truth was rarely allowed to stand in the way of Cicero’s talent for invective. All the same, it does appear at least possible that Antony’s relationship with Curio had been sufficiently intimate to justify a whiff of scandal.
* Or destroyed it, the evidence is unclear.
* The cephos is generally assumed to have been a species of baboon. Pliny the Elder, 8.28.
* This celebrated phrase is found only in much later sources, but even if it is apocryphal, it is entirely true to the spirit and the values of the Republic.
* At least according to the testimony of Diodorus Siculus (17.52), who had visited both Alexandria and Rome: ‘The population of Alexandria outstrips that of all other cities.’
* Or possibly the entire Library of Alexandria, a disaster for which Christians and Muslims have also been blamed.
* Varro, yet another of Posidonius’ pupils. He was a Pompeian, one of the three generals defeated by Caesar during his first Spanish campaign. He was widely held to be Rome’s greatest polymath. The quotation is from his treatise ‘On Customs’, and is cited by Macrobius, 3.8.9.
* The sources nowhere state it specifically, but the circumstances make it almost certain.
* Sometime between 9 and 15 February 44 BC.
* Since the man born Gaius Octavius changed his name at regular intervals throughout the early years of his career, he is generally called Octavian by historians in order to avoid confusion.
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JRS = Journal of Roman Studies
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