empowered the thinking of generations of European readers.
Cicero regarded Julius Caesar as a second Hannibal, but though the dictator manipulated and bullied him as a politician, he held Cicero in the highest esteem as an author. He once wrote of him that he was “winner of a greater laurel wreath than any gained by a triumph, insomuch as it is greater to have advanced the frontiers of Roman genius than those of the Roman empire.”
Praise from one’s worst enemy is the most annoying, but also the most credible, of compliments.
SO THE LONG, slow collapse of the Roman Republic had one positive consequence. The uncertainties of the age impelled men like Cicero and Varro to inquire into their collective past—to find an explanation for the crisis and, as a kind of antidote, to reveal the basis of their country’s vanishing greatness. They evoked an idea of Rome that still lives and breathes two thousand years later.
But what was gone was gone, and they knew that. Cicero wrote the epitaph:
The Republic, when it was handed down to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colors were already fading with age. Our own time has not only neglected to freshen it by renewing its original colors, but has not even gone to the trouble of preserving its design and portrayal of figures.
Photo Insert
If ancient Rome were to have a logo, it would be this bronze wolf, ferocious and tender, that suckled the babies Romulus and Remus, who as young men went on to found the city of Rome. The wolf is traditionally believed to be of Etruscan make, dating from the fifth century (although some scholars argue that it is medieval). The infants were added by the Renaissance artist Antonio Pollaiuolo.
There are no original images of Rome’s early history. The French revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David admired the legendary stories of austere patriotism and created his own versions, which are close in spirit to a Republican Roman’s worldview.
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Hannibal was Rome’s greatest enemy and for a time brought it to its knees. This marble bust is reputed to be of the Carthaginian general and was found at the ancient city of Capua. If genuinely classical, it must surely have been carved after the defeat of his cause at the battle of Zama, for fierceness and focus are softened by melancholy and resignation.
It took Rome more than a generation to produce a commander capable of beating Hannibal. The young Scipio Africanus learned from his opponent, and outdid him. This bust of the mature Scipio was discovered in the Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum.
Hannibal’s greatest victory was at Cannae, a town near the river Aufidus in Apulia. Eighty thousand Roman soldiers lost their lives. A solitary, commemorative column stands above the flat, dusty plain where the battle was fought.
Everywhere they went, Romans built roads. These linked distant settlements to the capital, enabled the legions to march swiftly to trouble spots, and asserted power over the mountainous Italian landscape. In 312 Appius Claudius Caecus built the opening stretch of the Republic’s first major highway, the Via Appia, and parts of it can still be seen to this day.
As the first century got under way, Marius spoke for the People and Sulla for the aristocracy. One after the other, each man hijacked the state and massacred his opponents. During their time, the ruling class lost its tolerance of opposition, without which the finely balanced Roman constitution could not function.
In 196 Titus Quinctius Flamininus proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks, a gesture that won him immense popularity. He was the first Roman whose portrait head appeared on a Greek or Macedonian coin, in this case a gold stater in the style of Alexander the Great’s money.
In 63 Pompey the Great defeated Mithridates, king of Pontus. With his long-lasting settlement of the provinces and kingdoms of the Middle East, Rome became the unchallenged superpower of the classical world, and remained so for centuries.
The great orator Cicero believed that the Roman constitution was nearly perfect, despite all the evidence that it was in a state of terminal decay. He looked back with pride to a glorious past. He was put to death for defending the Republic he loved by those who worked to destroy it and replace it with an autocracy.
The Forum Romanum was the public square in the heart of ancient Rome. Here were the Senate House, the Comitium, or place of public assembly, the law courts (held in the open air), shops, and temples. As this panoramic view shows, all that remains are pillaged ruins. In the center stands the columned frontage of the temple of Saturn behind which can be seen the arch of the emperor Septimius Severus and, beyond, the plain brick wall and pediment of the Curia Julia, the Senate House. On the right are the foundations of a shopping mall and business center, the Basilica Julia, in the distance three tall columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux and on their left the white fragment of the circular temple of Vesta, where the city’s sacred flame was kept.
