insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar, the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero, it lay in finding better men to run the government—and better laws to keep them in order.”25
Imperialism provoked the crisis that destroyed the Roman Republic. After slowly consolidating its power over all of Italy and conquering the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily, the republic extended its conquests to Carthage in North Africa, to Greece itself, and to what is today southern France, Spain, and Asia Minor. By the first century BC, Rome dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North Africa, Macedonia (including Greece), the Balkans, and large parts of modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. “The republic became enormously rich on the spoils of empire,” Everitt writes, “so much so that from 167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes.”26 The republic also became increasingly self-important and arrogant, believing that its task was to bring civilization to lesser peoples and naming the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (our sea), somewhat the way some Americans in the twentieth century came to refer to the Pacific Ocean as an “American lake.”
The problem was that the Roman constitution made administration of so large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and consensus. Rome was the first case of what today we call imperial overstretch. There were several aspects to this crisis, but the most significant was the transformation of the Roman army into a professional military force and the growth of militarism. Well into the middle years of the republic, the Roman legions were a true citizen army, composed of conscripted small landowners. Unlike in the American republic, male citizens between the ages of seventeen and forty-six, except slaves and freedmen, were liable to be called for military service. One of the more admirable aspects of the Roman system was that only those citizens who possessed a specified amount of property (namely, a horse and some land) could serve, thereby making those who had profited most from the state also responsible for its defense. The Roman plebs, being nonlandowners, did their service as skirmishers for the army, or in the navy, which had far less honor attached to it. At the beginning of each term, the consuls appointed tribunes to raise two legions—a legion never much exceeded six thousand men—from the census roll of eligible citizens.
“Among the Romans,” writes Holland, “it was received wisdom that ‘men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers.’ . . . For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their plows left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years.”27
Traditionally, when a campaign was over, the troops were promptly sent back to their farms, sometimes richer and flushed with military glory. Occasionally, the returning farmers got to march behind their general in a “triumph,” the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar and a victory procession permitted only to the greatest of conquerors. The general himself, who paid for this parade, rode in a chariot, his face covered in red lead to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A boy slave stood behind him holding a laurel wreath above his head while whispering in his ear, “Remember that you are mortal.” In Pompey’s great triumph of 61 BC, after he swept the seas of pirates and conquered Asia Minor, he actually wore a cloak that had belonged to Alexander the Great. Behind the conqueror came his prisoners in chains and finally the legionnaires, who by ancient tradition sang obscene songs satirizing their general.28 Suetonius has recorded for history one of the ribald verses Caesar’s soldiers sang during his Gallic Triumph, which is also evidence of Caesar’s numerous affairs with women:
By the end of the second century BC, in Everitt’s words, “The responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts.”30 The great general Caius Marius (c. 157-86 BC) undertook to reform the armed forces, replacing the old conscript armies with a professional body of career volunteers. Senator Robert Byrd explains: “Whereas the ownership of property had long been a requirement for entry into military service, Marius opened the door of recruitment to all, enrolling men who owned no property and were previously exempt. In accepting such troops, he remedied the long-standing manpower shortage and opened up a career for the employment of thousands of landless and jobless citizens. By this innovation, Marius created a new type of client army, bound to its commander as its patron.... Marius, in creating a professional army, had created a new base of power for ambitious men to exploit and use as an instrument of despotic authority.”31
Members of this large standing army, equipped by the Roman state, signed up for twenty to twenty-five years. Wlien their contracts expired, they expected their commanders, to whom they were personally loyal, to provide them with farms, which Marius had promised them. “From that moment on,” writes Holland, “possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service but the reward.”32 Unfortunately, land in Italy was by then in short supply, much of it tied up in huge sheep and cattle ranches owned by rich, often aristocratic, families and run by slave labor. The landowners were the dominant conservative influence in the Senate, and they resisted all efforts at land reform. Members of the upper classes had become wealthy as a result of Rome’s wars of conquest and bought more land as the only safe investment, driving small holders off their properties. In 133 BC, the gentry arranged for the killing of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (of plebeian origin) for advocating a new land- use law. Rome’s population thus continued to swell with landless veterans. “Where would the land be found,” asks Everitt, “for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war?”33
Although the state owned a large amount of public property that theoretically could have been distributed to veterans, most of it had been illegally expropriated by aristocrats. Marius, who from the beginning allied himself with the populares in the Senate, was willing to seize land for military purposes, but this inevitably meant a direct clash with the established order. “Cicero detested Roman militarism,”and Marius was exactly the kind of leader he believed was leading Rome to ruin.34 Utterly ruthless and caring little for the Roman constitution, Marius served as consul an unprecedented seven times, in clear violation of the requirement that there be an interval of ten years between each re-election. Suzanne Cross, an American scholar of classical antiquity, describes him as harsh and vengeful.35 Marius was the first Roman general to portray himself as “the soldier’s friend.” Marius’s nephew, Julius Caesar, built on this framework, and Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, who became Augustus Caesar, completed the transformation of the republic from a democracy into a military dictatorship.
During the final century before its fall, the republic was assailed by many revolts of generals and their troops, leading to gross violations of constitutional principles and on several occasions civil wars. Julius Caesar, who became consul for the first time in 59 BC, enjoyed great popularity with the ordinary people. After his year in office, he was rewarded by being named governor of Gaul, a post he held between 58 and 49, during which he both earned military glory and became immensely wealthy. In 49 he famously allowed his armies to cross the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy that served as a boundary against armies approaching the capital, and plunged the country into civil war. Taking on his former ally and now rival, Pompey, he won, after which, as Everitt observes, “No one was left in the field for Caesar to fight.... His leading opponents were dead. The republic was dead too: he had become the state.”36 Julius Caesar exercised dictatorship from 48 to 44, and a month before the Ides of March he arranged to have himself named “dictator for life.” Instead, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a conspiracy of eight members, led by Brutus and Cassius, both praetors, known to history as “principled tyrannicides.”
Shakespeare’s re-creation of the scenes that followed, based upon Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of
