Tom Holland

Hello and welcome to Book Club. in classical mood this time, tracing the fall of the all-powerful Roman Republic that had been the guardian of liberties for at least some of its citizens, and the transition to empire and to emperors. Rubicon is one of the celebrated histories by Tom Holland, whose books have taken us to ancient Mesopotamia, medieval England, and into the whole shaping of the Western world by Christianity in his best-selling Dominion.

But now, with this story of triumph and tragedy, as he puts it, we're back in a pre-Christian era. starting with a convulsion that began in January of 49 BC when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in northern Italy en route to Rome and civil war, all in search of power. There would be no going back. He'd been a Roman governor but was on the way to dictatorship after victory over his old ally-turned-rival Pompey. The eventual fall of the Republic and the birth of imperial Rome

It wasn't simply a matter of battle, though that was Caesar's strength, but a victory of ambition, a good deal of jealousy, and certainly that lust for power. These warriors didn't only struggle with the enemies of Rome, but with themselves. Tom Holland's writing is never dry. The figures who embodied Roman authority are painted in vivid hues in this book, and the politics of more than 2,000 years ago springs freshly.

to life, perhaps because so many of the ploys and jealousies that racked Rome and pulled the Republic apart are not unknown to us in the world today. Battles between democracy and authoritarianism are hardly new. This is history for our time, which is perhaps why this is one of Tom's books that has captivated so many readers, a few of whom are gathered here in Topping's bookshop in Edinburgh. To enjoy...

the sheer skullduggery and drama of ancient Rome laid bare. Tom Holland, welcome to Book Club. Thank you. My question to you is a rather obvious one, but I think it's the one that will occur to many listeners. Anyone reading the story that turns on Caesar's civil war... must surely be reminded that there's nothing new under the sun. Well, I think that the story of the Roman Republic and how it becomes...

an empire has an incredibly primal role for everyone in the West. It's the ancestral story of how a republican system of government can become an autocracy. And in that sense, it can seem quite a familiar story. But I think also a huge part of the fascination of the Romans. is actually that they are in so many ways incredibly different. So when you read about ancient Rome, you are seeing things that are familiar.

But you are also discovering that there are many strange and novel ways to be human. And that, for me, I think, is the great fascination of ancient history. How would you sum up the ideals of the Republic? The ideals of the Republic, they were founded on the expulsion of a monarchy. And with the expulsion of the monarchy, the Romans committed themselves to the ideal that never again would they be subject to a single man, that the ideals of citizenship.

were what underpinned both the politics and the society of that state and that the essence of the republic was always to be free. That was what it was to be a citizen. It was to be free. Some were more free than others, of course. Well...

There are vast discrepancies in wealth and status and rank, and the Romans thought this was as it should be, that elites were natural. It was the way of things. It absolutely was. And also, of course, Rome was... slave-owning society and again I think that one of the functions that slaves served for Romans it wasn't just that they were there to do the dirty work although certainly they were

slaves also existed to reassure Roman citizens that they were free men. They couldn't truly know themselves to be free without having the spectacle of people who were slaves. Well, let's go to...

readers here in Edinburgh and get the first question. I'm interested to know why the Roman Republic placed so much significance on the Rubicon River. The Rubicon in the first century BC constituted the frontier between Italy, where everyone by this point who was free was a Roman citizen, and where Gaul begins.

So we might be tempted today by equating Gaul with contemporary France to assume that Italy ends at the Alps for the Romans. It doesn't. It ends with the Rubicon. And the implication in turn of that is that... This stretch of Gaul between the Rubicon and the Alps needs a governor. And a governor needs legions. And that is a certain menace if you don't trust the guy who is the governor. And when...

In January of that year, Caesar decided to take the step, so to speak, and you describe it at the very beginning of the book. What did he have in mind? Caesar has been backed by his enemies into a corner. He is hated by large sections of the traditional Roman elite and they have been trying to strip him of his command. Caesar is confronted by their political maneuverings with a completely invidious choice. He can either...

give up his command, remain a constitutional figure within the bounds of legality, but risk the prospect of a prosecution that would effectively destroy his political career. Or he can uphold his... dignitas as he saw it his his sense of value and self-worth but to do that requires him to break the laws of the roman people by crossing the rubicon and effectively

invading Italy and declaring himself an outlaw and so he famously stands on the banks of the Rubicon wondering whether to cross it and then he crosses it. And you might say the rest is history which...

is the title of a certain podcast which you grace night by night. Right, let's have another question. Out of all your characters or individuals over the several hundred years, Was there any, are there any for whom you felt warmth? I feel admiration for these terrifying creatures in the way that I kind of might admire. I suppose, a great white shark or a tyrannosaur. But that's obviously not quite the same as affection. So I feel a measure of affection for the great chronicler.

of this convulsive period who is Cicero. A man who was much admired through the Renaissance and into the modern period as a kind of exemplar for politicians to follow. I think his reputation now is slightly less elevated than that. But as a recorder of what he is seeing, he is... And what you get with Cicero, not just through his speeches, he was a great advocate, but also through his letters, is what you so rarely get in ancient history. It's a sense of what...

It is to be alive when these great events are happening. So from Cicero, you have detailed, he knows Caesar well, he knows Pompey, he knows Crassus, he knows all these great figures. He is often a player in... the great events of the republic in its final decades but you also get incredible details of a kind that

I can't really think of anything comparable in Roman history. So the one I always remember is he describes going to see one of his many villas and he observes that there is a crack in the plaster. a first world problem or whatever you the roman equivalent would be you know dear one of my many houses has got a crack

But it is a kind of detail that shrinks the millennia that separates us from him. And I think the measure of how much I personally, as someone writing about this period owed to Cicero, is that when, spoiler alert, Cicero ends... up being murdered and his his he is silent quite nastily

Well, very nastily because his severed head is delivered to the wife of an enemy. Indeed. And she takes out her hairpins and stabs the tongue with the pins. So he is very much being silenced. But it meant that for me, trying to write the story... suddenly Cicero is silenced and it's like when you have an old-fashioned car radio and you're listening to a news program or something or music and then you go into a tunnel and it cuts out that was the effect for me of losing Cicero and I mourned him

Let's think about the sweep of the story, because at the end, the future Emperor Augustus thought or claimed to believe that he was saving the Republic. In fact, the Republic was over. Well, I... It's a very sort of general question, but I wanted to ask, if Sulla and Caesar had not been the kind of people they were,

Was it inevitable that the Republic would come to an end? Do you think other people would have cropped up? Or was there some inherent weaknesses that meant it was going to die? Yeah, I mean, that is... I suppose the hundred Sesterci question. So Sulla is a precursor of Caesar. He's a great general who establishes a dictatorship. And of course, the dictatorship was an official Roman position. And Caesar then follows him. The ambitions of both these men result in civil wars.

And the civil war that follows the murder of Caesar results in such a process of chaos and convulsion that Caesar's adoptive son, his great nephew, the man who comes to be called Augustus, is able to establish... an autocracy on the rubble of the republic essentially because the romans who had believed themselves so committed to the ideal of liberty are prefer to have peace than

the anarchy that they have come to see as being the consequence of liberty. Was it inevitable? I think it probably was. And the reason for that is that the more Rome expands... the less its hinterland is confined to Italy, the more that distant lands, rich in treasure, rich in men. enable individual Roman magistrates to take on power and wealth beyond the dreams of earlier generations. So these titans...

in the Republic, are able to put the whole Republic in their shadow. And Sulla, who you mentioned, is one example of this. Another is Pompey the Great. Julius Caesar is of course the paradigm of this process and I think that In a way, it was inevitable. It was the fruit of Rome's own greatness. And this is why I subtitled the book The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic. The Romans...

saw empire as evidence that they were the most moral of people. The gods obviously favoured them and had given them the rule of the world. But at the same time there was a nervousness about it, a feeling that... The conquest of foreign wealthy lands had softened and degraded.

the ancestral virtues of the Roman people and that in that sense the slavery that was the ultimate fate of the Romans under the Caesars was something that they had brought on themselves and that Perhaps if the Republic had not expanded and become great in the way that it did, then Rome might have continued free.

During the introduction, then we heard that Rubicon's been such a popular book because many people in modern times can see parallels with... today and in that vein are there any protagonists that if you could go in a time machine and pluck them back and take them into modern day to help resolve some of our problems you would and the converse is Is there anyone that you would slam the door shut to?

Do you know, I would not let any of them loose in the contemporary world. I mean, it seems as bad an idea as setting up Jurassic Park. The Romans of that last generation of the Republic are the kind of... tyrannosaurs of history they are thrilling they are They are compelling. They are terrifying. You can't take your eyes off them, but you wouldn't want them, I think, in your own world. And the thought of Julius Caesar being...

elected president of the United States or Pompey the Great having control of Putin's nuclear arsenal is a terrifying one. Leave them where they are. You're listening to Book Club on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Science. We're with the award-winning writer and historian Tom Holland discussing his book Rubicon, The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. Give us a little reading to give us the flavour, Tom.

OK, so this is from the introduction, and it's about, it has Caesar standing on the banks of the Rubicon, wondering whether to cross it, and then he does. Sweeping into Italy, Caesar knew that he was risking world war. for he had confessed as much to his companions and shuddered at the prospect. Clear-sighted as he was, however, not even Caesar could anticipate the full consequences of his decision.

In addition to crisis point, the Latin word discremen had a further meaning, dividing line. This was, in every sense, what the Rubicon would prove to be. By crossing it... Caesar did indeed engulf the world in war, but he also helped to bring about the ruin of Rome's ancient freedoms and the establishment upon their wreckage of a monarchy, events of primal significance.

for the history of the West. Long after the Roman Empire itself had collapsed, the opposites delineated by the Rubicon, liberty and despotism, anarchy and order. republic and autocracy, would continue to haunt the imaginings of Rome's successors. Narrow and obscure the stream may have been, so insignificant that its very location was ultimately forgotten.

yet its name is remembered still. No wonder. So fateful was Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon that it has come to stand for every fateful step taken since.

Hi. Given that the whole economy was based on slavery, was there any chance that Spartacus' rebellion could have totally destroyed Rome if more people had risen, if it had spread more? the rebellion of the slaves. Yeah, I think it's interesting that... I think, I mean, it's hugely contested. I don't think that the Roman economy was as dependent on slavery as perhaps is conventionally thought. There were lots of people who were paid to do jobs that slaves would all...

So as I said, I think that the role of slaves is not merely utilitarian. They exist to reassure Romans of their own liberty. And gladiators... of which Spartacus of course is the most famous example. in a way, are the exemplars of this. Because by the time that Spartacus is alive in the first century BC, Rome is vast. There are lots of citizens in Rome who will never see.

a foreign war they will have no comprehension of what it is to fight and there is a sense in which the spectacle of gladiators in an amphitheater is a reminder to Romans of the martial qualities that are required for Rome and her empire to be sustained. But it is also... giving to the common citizen of Rome a kind of God's eye perspective on the world. So it's as though the citizen watching gladiators fight, these slaves who have no choice but to obey.

the promptings of their owners and to provide entertainment to the masses who are watching them. The Roman who is watching that can have a sense of pride. that he, even though he may never have served within the legions, is part of the... part of the city, part of the citizen body that can bring people like Spartacus and warriors like that into the heart of Rome or into...

Capua or Naples or anywhere else where these entertainments are held and in that sense it is simultaneously educational, a reminder of what it takes to be ruler of the world. and a demonstration of the benefits of ruling the world. And we have a question here. One of the things I found really fascinating was the Roman attitudes towards children and childhood. And there was a...

The moment that you talked about how the younger the child died, the less the family were expected to grieve for them. I just found that really alien to our society. I just wondered what you found Roman society was most... like us and in what ways they were most different? I think Romans did grieve their children but they had so many children and mortality was so high that a certain flintiness.

was expected but we know that romans were capable of experiencing immense grief for their children cicero is an example he loses a daughter caesar his daughter julia has married Pompey. And so it's fundamental to his political strategy that she lives. But I think there's a real sense that is commented on by biographers of Caesar, Roman biographers. That when Julia dies, Caesar's grief is not just for his lost alliance with Pompey, but for...

his daughter. So I think the Romans do feel very deeply, but there is a, I guess, I mean, often it is literally stoic. You know, these are kind of philosophical maxims that... certainly leading romans live by so i think in that sense the the grief that a parent might feel for a dead child i think that is something that joins us across the millennia

But as you say, there are so many aspects of Roman life that are profoundly alien to us. And that I think, certainly for me, unsettles... notions that there are absolute cultural values and I'm aware that we're on Radio 4 going out in the middle of the day so I don't want to go too deeply into this but I think that Roman attitudes to sex and to gender

are deeply unsettling and there's a kind of an element of violence built into it and again and again when writing about Roman attitudes to sexuality and the way that it would have an interface with Roman ideas on mastery, on what it is to be free, on the sense in which liberty In the Roman, mind is predicated on the dominance of those who are not free and the way that that bleeds into attitudes about sexual relations. It's often quite shocking.

Hi there, you mentioned that you wrote this in the backdrop of 9-11. Would you write it differently today and do you see the story differently today? I think I probably would. I mean, I was really quite surprised that when I read, reread the book. It was like a photograph album, kind of reminding me of what was in the news as I was writing it. So there's an episode where a Roman businessman...

they've moved into Asia, as they called it, what we would now call the kind of the western seaboard of Turkey, full of wealthy cities, glamorous architecture, celebrity chefs. Romans are obsessed with the celebrity chefs of Asia. And they're all piling in, making lots of money, and they have the muscle of Roman might, Roman military might, behind them. And the local king is very cross about this.

and wants to throw the Romans out. And so he launches a coordinated massacre of Roman and Italian merchants on a single day. And I wrote this, and as I was doing it... my wife rang and said have you seen what's on the news and i went and switched on the tv and the twin towers were in the process of being hit and the sense of

past and present coming into a strange communion was something that then shaped my attitude to writing the book because to be honest one of the things that worried me about writing about this period was whether I knew that people would probably be interested in Rome's engagement with the western half of the empire because people read Asterix the Gaul. Julius Caesar crosses the channel to Britain.

kind of may be familiar with that. But the real kind of the motor of the action really lies in the East, a great imperial republic engaging in lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. And part of the problem is that for long stretches of time, the Romans don't want to rule it directly. Essentially, they just want to mosey in, beat everybody up and then withdraw. And the sense that Rome is simultaneously...

the mistress, but doesn't really want to be a part of it. The fact that suddenly after 9-11 you had... Another imperial republic engaged in precisely that part of the world where the rulers couldn't make their mind up whether they wanted... a kind of direct rule or did they want a kind of loose hegemony or did they want to just go in and topple a local tyrant and then withdraw? The parallels did seem to me quite eerie and I think perhaps they influenced...

the writing of the book more perhaps than they should have done if I was writing a, you know, a very scholarly work of history. I might have tried to sort of guard against that. But I feel... Kind of justified in having done that, because as I say, I think that Rome has been so influential on... the would-be great powers of the West, obviously including and perhaps especially and pre-eminently the United States, that I think it's not wrong to find at least rhymes.

within contemporary history, things that rhyme with the patterns and the rhythms of ancient Roman history. I just wondered what you said when the Roman Empire collapsed, several people tried to...

recreate rome at one point or another with an image of it but never succeeded whereas if you compare that to china the warring states merged into one empire around the same time And although they collapsed, the Chinese empires collapsed, they always reformed again. If you have any observations on that, is it just geography or is there more to it than that?

I think it is geography. So this is the great question, because even as the Romans are building their empire on the western edge of Eurasia, the Chinese are constructing their empire on the eastern edge of it. And the salient thing about the Roman Empire is that it collapses. And there is no longer any Roman territory left. The question of why is hugely, hugely debated.

But I think the geography does play a key part because I think the moment that the Romans lose their monopoly over the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean once again starts dividing. And if you think about the landscape of certainly Europe, you have the Alps. you have the Pyrenees, you have the Channel. These are like sinews that can be very easily cut. And I think China has, you know, it's a kind of geographically perhaps more coherent unitary power.

But I think there is also a further corollary in the fact that China does not fall whereas the Roman Empire does, which is that in the West, I think we have the notion that... empires and great states and great powers will rise but they will also decline. The idea that the Roman Empire declined and fell means that it's almost like a law of physics. Every great empire must decline and fall. And that's why the theme of America, declining and fall, is such a topic of obsessive interest.

But in China, it's different. China has, like the Romans were, you know, has suffered conquest by barbarians, has suffered division, separation, fragmentation. But it has always come back together again. And China always absorbed its foreign... and conquerors and even the period of eclipse that it went to in the 19th century when economically and

militarily it fell far behind the western powers now that it is returning to its ancient primacy its ancient centrality i would say that the lessons of history for the chinese would be that once you're great you will always stay great which is almost the opposite to the lesson that we in the West, influenced by the shadow of Rome, have tended to draw from history.

Thank you very much indeed, Tom Holland, for being our guest on Book Club this month and talking to us about Rubicon, a fascinating and, of course, bloody adventure in history. This time next week here, you can hear, of course... Take Four Books, where the writer Comte Aubin will be talking about his new novel, Long Island, and the three other literary works that helped to shape it. Our next recording of Book Club will...

be with the novelist Kit Duval, discussing her book My Name is Leon. If you'd like to come along to that event, all the details, as ever, are on the website. So do keep reading along with us until next month. and the next book. And I'm here to tell you about how to be in love from BBC Sounds. Now, as a single divorcee, I feel ready to find love again. But I want to see if there's a better way of going about it.

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