Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Flower has a really original and striking interpretation of Roman history, and she explains it very clearly in this short book. The thesis is that the Roman Republic is not a single, monolithic power from the very beginning, and then 450 years later it suddenly crumbles and falls to pieces in the first century BC. She says there were multiple republics.
On to Harriet Flower’s Roman Republics.
This book shows how Rome itself could be its own worst enemy. Flower has a really original and striking interpretation of Roman history, and she explains it very clearly in this short book. Her thesis is that the Roman Republic is not a single, monolithic power from the very beginning, and then 450 years later it suddenly crumbles and falls to pieces in the first century BC. She says there were multiple republics.
So we’re talking about the period before Rome becomes an empire?
We’re talking about the Roman republican period, the 450 years before the empire began, in the first century BC, with Augustus as the first emperor. In 509 BC, after the overthrow of the monarchy, that’s when the republic began. And it’s a complex system of separation of powers, checks and balances, with a constitution, and a legislative body called the senate. It thrived for 450 years, but it wasn’t just one system. Flower argues that there were a series of republics, each form responding to the social and political needs of the time and then flourishing. And then cracks develop, or there are external threats, and then, it morphs, it changes as a result of those pressures, and a new republic rises like a phoenix from the previous one. She reveals the strength and the fault-lines of each reincarnation of the Roman Republic.
Why is that an enemy from within, then, when it’s really a strength, this flexibility and resilience?
It has to change over and over again because of the fault-lines that develop, that come from society itself, from the system itself. So frictions and weaknesses are inherent, there’s this constant tension throughout 450 years – overreaching expansion, expensive wars, they’ve got very serious social and class issues between the aristocrats and the plebeians, they have slave revolts, which were of their own making because they had such an insatiable and massive demand for slaves. Their occupied lands in Italy and Spain rise up and threaten them. All these tensions arise from within the Roman system and there’s constant pressure building from inside, all the political feuds that last for generations, for centuries, the ideological factions, the ultimate polarisation that finally, at the end of the first century BC, degenerates into horrifying gang violence and devastating civil war that ultimately tore the last republic apart. Flower describes the rise of the warlords of Rome in the first century BC and says that symbolises the end of the republic and the beginning of an age of personal power, which then leads to the destruction of the late republic. One of the warlords takes over – Augustus – and as we know, Rome doesn’t die. Instead this results in a radical new imperial government ruled by an emperor and Rome flourishes for another 400 years. So the strength and flexibility is important – but it’s interesting to realise that it’s not all strength, it wasn’t an invincible monolith – it was subject to fault-lines and cracks.
When I read it, I’d just written my own book on Mithradates [The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy]. Mithradates actually predicted this outcome, he liked to turn Rome’s famous foundation legend against it in his speeches. He often said that Rome was a vicious predator, just like a wolf, preying on weaker nations. He asked, ‘What can you expect from a nation whose founders were raised by a she-wolf? Sooner or later those sons of a wolf are going to turn on their own mother.’ And that’s what happened.
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Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in classics and history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Her most recent book, Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates the Great, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. The comparison between Mithradates and Osama bin Laden is, she says, a tempting one – Mithradates began with a really terrifying act of genocide, which lured the Romans into a costly, long and unwinnable war in the Near East. ‘It was quite a wild goose chase he led them on. And they lost track of him at the end of the Third Mithradatic War. In 63BC he died, old and free.’
