Read Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic for Free Online

chilled the brain; it was therefore a simple fact of geography that ‘the best place of all to live, occupying as it does the happy medium, and perfectly placed in the centre of the world, is where the Roman people have their city’. 7 Not that a temperate climate was the only advantage that the gods had thoughtfully provided the Roman people. There were hills that could be easily defended; a river to provide access to the sea; springs and fresh breezes to keep the valleys healthy. Reading Roman authors praise their city, 8 one would never guess that to have built across seven hills was a contravention of the Romans’ own principles of town-planning, that the Tiber was prone to violent flooding, and that the valleys of Rome were rife with malaria. 9 The love which Romans felt for their city was of the kind that can see only virtues in a beloved’s glaring faults.
    This idealised vision of Rome was the constant shadow of the squalid reality. It helped to generate a baffling compound of paradoxes and magnitudes, in which nothing was ever quite as it seemed. For all the ‘smoke and wealth and din’ 10 of their city, the Romans never ceased to fantasise about the primitive idyll that they liked to imagine had once existed on the banks of the Tiber. As Rome heaved and buckled with the strains of her expansion, the bare bones of an ancient city state, sometimes blurred, sometimes pronounced, might be glimpsed protruding through the cramped modern metropolis. In Rome memories were guarded closely. The present was engaged in a perpetual compromise with the past, restless motion with a reverence for tradition, hard-headedness with a devotion to myth. The more crowded and corrupted their city grew, the more the Romans longed for reassurance that Rome remained Rome still.

    So it was that smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when trees ‘of every kind’ had completely covered one of the hills, the Aventine. 11 Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces and workshops. Long before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would forewarn the traveller that he was nearing the great city. Nor was smog the only sign. Nearby towns with celebrated names, rivals of the Republic back in the archaic past, now stood deserted, shrunk to a few scattered inns, emptied by Rome’s gravitational pull.
    As the traveller continued onwards, however, he would find the roadside lined with more recent settlements. Unable to accommodate a burgeoning population, Rome was starting to burst at the seams. Shanty-towns stretched along all the great trunk-roads. The dead were sheltered here as well, and the necropolises that stretched towards the coast and the south, along the great Appian Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-rate whores. All the same, not every tomb had been left to crumble. 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. Such a moment, the sense of a communion with the past, was a common one in Rome. Yet just as the stillness of a cemetery sheltered violence and prostitution, so not even the most hallowed and timeless of spots were immune to defacement. Admonitory notices were always being posted on tombs, prohibiting electioneering slogans, but still the graffiti would appear. In Rome, seat of the Republic, politics was a contagion. Only in conquered cities were elections an irrelevance. Rome, having neutered political life in other societies, was now supreme as the world’s theatre of ambitions and dreams.

    Not even the graffiti-ravaged tombs, however, could prepare a traveller for the bedlam beyond the city gates. The streets of Rome had never had any kind