Rome's Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire

409 Pages·2015·9.5 MB·English

by  Richard Alston

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ROME’S REVOLUTION
Ancient Warfare and Civilization
series editors:
Richard Alston Robin Waterfield
In this series, leading historians offer compelling new narratives of the
armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world, from the
wars of Archaic Greece to the fall of the Roman Empire and the Arab
conquests.
Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire
Robin Waterfield
By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise
and Fall of the Macedonian Empire
Ian Worthington
Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece
Robin Waterfield
In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation
of an Islamic Empire
Robert G. Hoyland
Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War
Dexter Hoyos
Rome’s Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire
Richard Alston
ROME’S REVOLUTION
Death of the Republic and
Birth of the Empire
S
Richard Alston
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alston, Richard, 1965–
Rome’s revolution: death of the republic and birth of the empire / Richard Alston.
pages cm.—(Ancient warfare and civilization)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–973976–9 (hardback)—ISBN 978–0–19–023160–6 (electronic text)—
ISBN 978–0–19–023161–3 (electronic text) 1. Rome—History—Republic, 265–30 b.c.
2. Rome—History—Augustus, 30 b.c.–14 a.d. I. Title.
DG254.A47 2015
937′.05—dc23
2014049749
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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CONTENTS
Preface  vii
List of Illustrations  xiii
List of Maps  xv
1. The Historian’s Problem: The Augustan Paradox  1
2. Death of a Dictator  15
3. The Crisis of the Republic  31
4. Caesar and Pompey  53
5. Mutina: The Last Battle of the Republic  73
6. A Victory Lost: The Defeat of the Senate  99
7. The Revolution Begins  119
8. Death in Rome  135
9. The Triumvirs’ Victory  149
10. The Soldiers’ Peace  161
11. The Triumviral Wars  175
12. Antony and Cleopatra: Love and its Enemies  189
13. The Invention of Augustus  213
14. The Augustan Republic  237
15. Anarchy and Power  257
16. The Augustan Order  275
17. The Imperial Monarchy  299
18. Death of an Emperor  321
v
Contents
Timeline  339
Cast of Characters 347
Notes  353
Bibliography  373
Index  379
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PREFACE
On March 15th, 44 B.C., a group of senators stabbed to death Julius
Caesar. By this act, they hoped and believed, they had restored the
Republic and freed Rome from the tyranny of a dictator. In fact, their
actions brought an end to the Republic and ushered in a new political
system, which we know as the Roman Empire. These were foundational
events in Roman history. It is a matter of taste whether one emphasizes
ends or beginnings, but in both ending and beginning, the events which
are recounted in this book were violent, epochal, and revolutionary.
The violence of the revolution was intimate. Roman killed Roman.
Family members turned against each other. The heads of enemies were
displayed in the center of Rome. The dark heart of political power was
there for all to see. It is this cataclysmic violence that has given historians
and political thinkers pause over the centuries.
Rome was not just any state. It was a state that came to be associated
with civilization, with grandeur, and with greatness. Rome has been a
paradigmatic source of Western civilization. In politics, the republican-
ism of Rome has been long admired. At least until its last generation,
Rome appeared to avoid the demagoguery and internal conflicts of clas-
sical Athens, and in so doing achieved a political stability that lasted at
least four centuries and a community of purpose that brought a vast
empire to this small Italian city-state. Great orators and political think-
ers, such as Cicero and Cato, gave of their views as they stood before the
people in the assemblies of state. This was the land of liberty and citizen-
ship, those core values of Western political life. The historical imaginings
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Preface
of Rome’s Republic fired the English civil war against their king and
French revolutionary ardor throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and inspired America to seize freedom from the remote,
archaic, but powerful English monarchy.
But behind Rome’s idealized Republic lurks the unpleasant fact of
Rome’s revolution, a revolution that suggested that corruption was latent
in even the best of republics and moral and political decline went hand
in hand with political and military success. Rome suggests that all the
privileges of freedom, security, and wealth that were so hard-won over
centuries of struggle could be dissipated in the blood of civil war.
This book looks once more at the trauma of the Roman revolution and
attempts to understand that violent end. The problem is worth tackling
not just because it was such a pivotal moment in world history, nor even
because so much of our political thought since the sixteenth century has
grappled with the problem of the failure of the Republic, but because, it
seems to me, we have lost sight of the violence of the revolution.
In conventional historical narratives, the fall of the Republic and the
birth of the empire have become bloodless, a constitutional adjustment
or a worrying but brief exception in an extended golden age of rational-
ist, aristocratic rule. Not only does this distort events, but it civilizes
them. The story I will tell here is of the fundamentals of politics: power,
money, and violence.
In Western societies, we are fixated on political styles and the minor
differences between our leaders. We have lost sight of the ability of power
to destroy and, indeed, our reliance on political power to provide the
basic necessities that get us from day to day and from generation to
generation. Contemporary politics in the West is often described as dull
and tedious, but if the state should fail, politics would suddenly become
very interesting indeed.
The problem is one of perspective. If you are reading about the vicious
violence that marks the Roman revolution in a comfortable seat in a
library or lounge in Paris or Washington, London or New York, if you are
warm and well fed and have no prospect of hunger or cold, then you can
shudder with incomprehension and wonder at the darkness of the human
soul that could tear such a system apart and bring forth anarchy onto the
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Preface
streets. You might shake your head at the dissipation of the freedoms of
the Republic and the gradual and inexorable accumulation of power by
the new imperial regime. You might thank your luck to be born in the
current age, when such stories are things of the past. Or you might
confine the story to the shelf of history books, remote from the realities
of the modern world and with no meaning. But in many other parts of
the world, if you are sitting reading this book, you may wonder what
exactly the problem is: people, perfectly normal, rational people, can,
under certain circumstances, take up arms and kill their neighbors.
Governments, almost as a matter of course, use their resources corruptly
to buy support and secure their political continuity.
In 44 B.C., the comfortable of the Roman world—the senators, the men
who made the great decisions of state, led the armies, presided over the
courts, and sacrificed to the gods—had no idea that their world was
about to fall apart and a new regime would come to power. If any pessi-
mists envisaged an end to the Republic, few, it seems, ever conceived of a
new world order. But that new order emerged, and the old system was
torn down. The senators did not understand the perilous and fragile
nature of their position until a Roman legionary stood before them,
armed and very dangerous.
The story that I tell is of a violent society. Rome was not a place of easy
consensus and of shared values. In Rome, social order was maintained
through the use of violent repression. Rome was, after all, a slave society,
and the Romans were a people who had conquered Italy and large parts
of the Mediterranean basin by the time this story begins. Violence is not,
it seems to me, the normal way in which human relations are negotiated.
I do not believe that left to our own devices, we will all start killing each
other; the human heart is not the heart of darkness. But many societies
are violent, and the potential for violence lies close to the surface. In
many places, the political order is predatory, ensuring the acquiescence
and service of its population through exploitation of their dependence
and threats of violence.
This project started from a radical thought. I had been teaching the
Roman revolution for years, but I did not like the books I got my
students to read and I worried about the essays they wrote. Somehow,
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