Proem

The volume now in the reader's hand treats the century across which the Roman Republic, having completed the construction of Mediterranean hegemony described in the previous volume, turned the military instrument of that construction against itself. The terminus a quo is the tribunate of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 BC, the year in which political violence returned to the Roman civic order after more than three centuries of constitutional restraint; the terminus ad quem is the naval engagement at Actium in September of 31 BC, the last battle of the last civil war of the Republican period, after which the surviving dynast would reorganize the Roman state into the constitutional form that the subsequent half-millennium would know as the Principate. The century between these termini contains the most consequential sequence of internal political-military convulsions in the history of any ancient state: two generations of escalating civic violence, five distinct civil wars, three institutionalized campaigns of political murder conducted under color of law, the extinction of the senatorial Republic as a governing system, and — running through and beneath the political catastrophe — some of the most operationally brilliant military campaigning of the entire ancient world, conducted in Numidia and the Alpine passes, in Pontus and Armenia, in Gaul and Britain and Spain, and finally on the fields of Pharsalus and Philippi where Roman legions destroyed Roman legions in engagements larger than any the Republic had ever fought against a foreign enemy.

The analytical thesis of the volume can be stated at the outset, because it is the thread on which every chapter is strung. The wars of the previous volumes were won by an institutional system — the annually rotating magistracies, the senatorial direction of strategy, the citizen-militia legion recruited from the propertied classes and disbanded at the campaign's end — that bound military power to the civic order by making the army a temporary emanation of the citizen body rather than a permanent institution with interests of its own. The wars of Mediterranean hegemony described in Book IV progressively broke that binding. The extended overseas commands broke the annual rotation; the professional demands of provincial garrison warfare broke the militia pattern; and the reform associated with Gaius Marius in 107 BC — the enrollment of the capite censi, the propertyless citizens who had no farm to return to and whose economic future therefore depended entirely on their commander's ability to extract land and donatives from the political system on their behalf — completed the transformation of the legion from an emanation of the citizen body into a client army bound to its general. Every subsequent convulsion of the century follows from this transformation. Sulla could march on Rome in 88 BC because his soldiers' loyalty ran to Sulla and not to the abstraction of the Republic; Caesar could cross the Rubicon in 49 BC for the same reason; the triumviral armies that fought at Philippi were, in institutional terms, the private instruments of the dynasts who paid them. The constitutional history of the late Republic is military history, and the military history is constitutional; the volume treats them as the single braided subject they were.

The reader should be warned that the emotional register of the volume differs from its predecessors. The earlier volumes could narrate Roman victory and Roman catastrophe alike within a frame of institutional admiration — the story of Cannae is terrible, but it is the story of a political community absorbing a wound that should have been mortal and refusing to die. The present volume offers no such consolation. Its subject is the self-destruction of the institutional order whose resilience the earlier volumes celebrated, and the moral texture of the material is correspondingly darker: proscription lists posted in the Forum with prices on senatorial heads; the Tiber choked with the bodies of political losers; six thousand crucified slaves lining the Appian Way from Capua to Rome; the severed head and hands of Rome's greatest orator nailed to the speaker's platform from which he had dominated Roman public life for four decades. The Codex Kythagoras editorial method does not soften such material, and does not moralize it beyond what the ancient sources themselves supply; but the reader should know what country he is entering.

The compensating gift of the period is its sources, and here the volume must pause, because the evidentiary situation transforms in the middle of the century in a way that changes the character of the attestation apparatus itself. For the Gracchan crisis and the wars of Marius and Sulla, the source state is comparable to the later chapters of Book IV: the full Livian narrative is lost (Books 58 through 90 survive only in the Periochae), and we depend on Appian's Civil Wars Book 1 — the only continuous surviving narrative of the period 133 to 70 BC — supplemented by Plutarch's biographies, Sallust's monographs, and the fragments. But from approximately the sixties BC onward, the compendium enters for the first time the sunlight of genuinely contemporary documentation. The letters of Cicero — more than nine hundred of them, spanning 68 to 43 BC, many written with no expectation of publication — constitute the most intimate continuous documentary record of any period of ancient history; they are AGrade A evidence in the fullest sense, the unguarded correspondence of a principal participant. The war commentaries of Caesar — seven books on Gaul and three on the civil war, composed by the commanding general himself — present the attestation methodology with its most interesting single problem: they are AGrade A in the strict sense that the author is the subject and the eyewitness, and they are simultaneously the most systematically self-interested major source in the entire compendium, a sustained exercise in political self-presentation whose factual reliability must be calibrated claim by claim against the author's evident purposes. The monographs of Sallust, written in the forties and thirties by a senatorial participant in the Caesarian wars, supply contemporary analysis wrapped in moralizing archaism. And at the century's end stand the Res Gestae of Augustus himself — the victor's own marmoreal summary of the period, AGrade A as documentary text and DGrade D as interpretation, the most instructive single demonstration in ancient literature of the difference between those two things. The Editor's Notes throughout the volume will therefore carry a double burden: grading the evidence, as before, and repeatedly reminding the reader that in this period the best-attested version of events is frequently the version composed by the man who had the most to gain from its acceptance.

The principal figures of the volume require no introduction of the kind the earlier proems supplied, because they are the most famous names of Roman history: the brothers Gracchus; Marius, seven times consul, the savior of Italy and the butcher of his political enemies; Sulla, the first Roman to march his legions on Rome and the author of the first proscription; Sertorius, the one-eyed Roman who built a counter-Rome in Spain; Spartacus the Thracian, whose two years of servile war frightened Italy as nothing had since Hannibal; Lucullus and Pompey, the conquerors of the East; Crassus, richest of the Romans, dead in the Parthian sand at Carrhae; Cato, the Stoic conscience of a Republic that no longer deserved one; Cicero, who talked and wrote as though words could still govern events after the legions had learned otherwise; Caesar, the most complete man of action the ancient world produced; Brutus and Cassius, the last men to kill for the Republic; Antony; Cleopatra; and the cold young heir who outlasted them all and whom the volume will leave, at its close, standing alone above the corpse of the Republic with the name Augustus not yet upon him. It is the most crowded portrait gallery in ancient history, and the volume's discipline will be to treat these figures as the sources permit them to be seen — which is to say, more strangely and less cinematically than twenty centuries of retelling have rendered them.

A final word on geography. The strategic theater of the volume is everything the previous volumes conquered, plus the two great annexations of the period itself: Gaul, brought into the empire by eight years of Caesarian campaigning that killed or enslaved — if the ancient figures are even approximately credible — a substantial fraction of its population; and the East beyond the Aegean, where the Mithridatic wars and Pompey's settlement carried Roman administration to the Euphrates and the Caucasus. The volume's maps must accordingly range from the Atlantic to Armenia, from the Rhine crossings and the Kentish coast to the Nile; the civil wars themselves were fought at Mediterranean scale, with the decisive engagements at Pharsalus in Thessaly, Thapsus in Africa, Munda in Spain, Philippi in Macedonia, and Actium at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf — a geographic distribution that is itself the strategic signature of the period, for the civil wars were fought across the whole of the Mediterranean world precisely because the whole of the Mediterranean world was now the prize.

Let us begin in the summer of 133 BC, in the Forum Romanum, where a tribune of the plebs is standing for re-election, and where the men who intend to prevent it are breaking up the benches of the assembly to arm themselves with the fragments.