Words&Dirt

“‘The only thing that doesn’t change the world is a corpse.’”

––Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future, “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” by Cory Doctorow, pg. 138

“There was nothing more upsetting to a Roman than to feel deprived of fellowship, of a sense of community, and rather than endure it he would go to any extreme. But in a civil war to what could a citizen pledge his loyalty? Not his city, nor the altars of his ancestors, nor the Republic itself, for these were claimed as the inheritance of both sides. But he could attach himself to a fortunes of a general, and be certain of finding comradeship in the ranks of that general’s army, and identity in the reflected glory of the general’s name. This was why the legions of Gaul had been willing to cross the Rubicon. What, after nine years of campaigning, were the traditions of the distant Forum to them, compared to the camaraderie of the army camp? And what was the Republic, compared to their general? There was no one capable of inspiring a more passionate devotion in his troops than Caesar. Amid all the confusion of war it had become perhaps the surest measure of his greatness. Arriving in Spain to take on three veteran Pompeian armies in the summer of 49 B.C., he was able to push his soldiers to the extremes of exhaustion and suffering, so that, within months, the enemy had been utterly vanquished. No wonder, when backed by such steel, that Caesar dared to scorn the limits placed on other citizens, and even sometimes those on flesh and blood. ‘Your spirit,’ Cicero would later tell him, ‘has never been content within the narrow confines which nature has imposed upon us.’ But nor were the spirits of the men who followed his star: his legions, he boasted, ‘could tear down the heavens themselves.’

Here, in the mingling of the souls of Caesar and his army, was the glimpse of a new order. Ties of mutual loyalty had always provided Roman society with its fabric. So they continued to do in time of civil war, but increasingly purged of old complexities and subtleties. Simpler to follow the blast of a trumpet than the swirl of contradictory obligations that had always characterized civilian life. Yet these same obligations, comprised as they were of centuries of taboos and traditions, were not lightly to be set aside. Without them the Republic, at least as it had been constituted for centuries, would die. The checks and balances that had always served to temper the Romans’ native love of glory, and divert it into courses beneficial to their city, might soon fall away. An ancient inheritance of customs and laws might be forever lost. Already, in the first months of the civil war, the ruinous consequences of such a catastrophe could be glimpsed. Political life still subsisted, but as a grisly parody of itself. The arts of persuasion were increasingly being abandoned as resorts to violence and intimidation took their place. The ambitions of magistrates, no longer dependent on votes, could now be paid for with their fellow citizens’ blood.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 4745-65