How the republic falls

The headlines over the past month or so feel like a throwback to the distant past. An elected populist refuses to leave office. He fears, perhaps, prosecution once out of office for crimes he committed during his tenure — but he and his followers blame that eventuality on a vendetta by his political opponents. He blames traditional elites for his own failures in office. As time runs out, he gives an inflammatory speech. A mob, roused by his speech, attacks the power centre of the republic, called the Capitol. People die, and the republic is weakened.

Anyone who has immersed themselves in books about the dying decades of the Roman Republic will find all this very familiar. We all know, yes, about how Julius Caesar, at the pinnacle of his power, was violently struck down. The most memorable dramatisation of the fall of the Republic is, after all, Shakespeare’s. But Caesar —whose populist ambitions gave rise to a term that has sadly fallen out of fashion, Caesarism — was only the last of a series of such leaders who delivered successive death-blows to a system of oligarchic, republican government that had lasted for centuries.

The Roman Empire has been a magnet for authors of various sorts even in recent decades, long after classical civilisations and their literature ceased to be a core subject of study in school. In particular, those last decades of the Republic, resonated down the ages, and continue to do so today. The Senate was divided then between “populares”, who claimed to represent “the people” but were often demagogic aristocrats, and “optimates”, oligarchs who thought that they were the best people to rule. Neither side was particularly appealing; in the early modern era, the oligarchs got the best stories — partly because they lost, and that is romantic, partly because 18th and 19th-century Western aristocrats liked to think of themselves as being the modern-day counterparts of the optimates, and partly because they included a bunch of interesting characters whose own words survived the fall of the empire. Marcus Tullius Cicero, for example, who was killed by Julius Caesar’s heirs, although he was not part of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, became the symbol of stoicism and heroism because his letters can still be read.

The best takes on these characters are those that embed themselves in the real issues and concerns of that time, but break out of the straitjacket imposed by preconceived notions about the actors’ personalities — which we, after all, can never really know. The British bestseller writer Robert Harris — who wrote the best take I can think of about what the world would have looked like if the Nazis had won the Second World War, Fatherland — turned Cicero’s life into a trilogy that portrays the orator relatively sympathetically, but doesn’t shy away from his many flaws. Allan Massie’s Augustus and its companion volumes perform this task even better. But I have a particular weakness for the Roma sub Rosa mystery series by Steven Saylor — “sub rosa”, or “underneath the rose”, was a Latin phrase for “secret”, and the books are about murders that also happen to occur at pivotal moments in the fall of the Republic. His Cicero — a fussy, vengeful lawyer — has stuck with me.

The most disappointing historical fiction is that in which the writer manages to get too attached to specific historical figures, either making them anachronistically modern, or paragons of virtue. Colleen McCullough, the Australian writer probably best known for The Thorn Birds, was obsessed with ancient Rome and claimed to have “the [world’s] best private library on Republican Rome” at home. Her six-book series on the dying decades of the Republic is, on one level, superb: It clearly spells out, especially in the initial volumes, the tensions between a system of government centuries old and designed for a very different nation, and the requirements being put on it by becoming the most powerful nation in the world. (Again, that sounds familiar.) The various populists, many of whom used mobs to attack the Roman capitol and Senate, are convincingly drawn — till Julius Caesar enters the scene, and the narrative sadly collapses. McCullough simply can’t conceal her affection for the man and he takes over the narrative.

Caesar was both charismatic and a monster — someone who enslaved an entire nationality, the Gauls, simply to ease his way to the top of the Roman hierarchy. Amusingly, he was mocked at the time for a hairstyle that was really quite inappropriate for a man his age, and had a somewhat dubious reputation with women. (I shouldn’t even need a parenthesis to point out the modern-day connection here.) His name lived on after Rome fell, becoming the title of Kaisers and Tsars. And that’s why I would say that, if you want to understand today’s politics, read novels about the fall of Rome. Populism is democracy’s oldest and most enduring disease.