In a sense, the entire literature of the Augustan period can be seen as a commentary on the fall of the Republic: in profoundly different ways it is a theme that runs throughout the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid; and through Livy’s great history of Rome. Even though the books of that history which covered the late Republic have been lost, an abridgement of Livy’s work by the late-first-century AD poet Florus has survived. Then there is the testimony of Octavian himself, in the form of The Achievements of the Divine Augustus – a lengthy self-justification set up in public places throughout the empire and a superlative exercise in spin.
Even after Augustus’ death, Roman writers kept returning to the heroic years of the Republic’s end. Details from the period filled Valerius Maximus’ compendium of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, and Velleius Paterculus’ Roman Histories, both composed during the reign of Augustus’ successor, Tiberius. The philosopher Seneca, tutor and adviser to Nero, mulled over the lessons of liberty betrayed. So too did his nephew, Lucan, in his epic poem on the civil wars, The Pharsalia, and Petronius, in his considerably less elevated prose work, The Satyricon. All three ultimately committed suicide, the only gesture of republican defiance still permitted Roman noblemen under the rule of the Caesars. ‘A monotonous glut of downfalls’ – so Tacitus, writing at the beginning of the second century AD, described the judicial murders that had blotted the recent history of his country. Rome’s ancient inheritance of freedom seemed to have vanished, drowned in blood. In Tacitus, bleakest of historians, the ghost of the Republic haunts what the city has become.
None of his near contemporaries could rival Tacitus for the clarity and mercilessness of his perspective. Instead, for most, the history of the Republic had become a quarry to be mined for entertainment or elevated anecdotes. The elder Pliny’s Natural History provided character sketches of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero, along with an inexhaustible supply of more eclectic information. Quintilian, in his treatise on rhetoric, The Education of an Orator, often referred back to Cicero and the other orators of the last years of the Republic, and is an invaluable source of quotations for writers who have otherwise been lost. So too is Aulus Gellius, in his chatty collection of essays, The Attic Nights. Suetonius, author of a racy Lives of the Caesars, wrote muck-raking portraits of the two deified warlords, Julius and Augustus. King of the biographers, however, was Plutarch, whose portraits of the great men of the late Republic have been the most influential, because they are the most readable, of any historian’s. Vivid with moralising and gossip, they portray the Republic’s collapse not as a revolution or a social disintegration, but as the ancients tended to see it: a drama of ambitious and exceptional men.
Plutarch, a patriotic Greek, demonstrates the fascination that Roman history continued to exert over the Empire’s subject peoples. Increasingly, from the second century AD onwards, historians who wrote about the Republic’s collapse tended to do so in Greek. The most significant of these was Appian, a lawyer from Alexandria, who wrote a detailed history of Rome and her empire. For the events from the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus to 70 BC, his book, The Civil Wars, is our only surviving narrative source. For events from 69 BC onwards, however, he is supplemented by another historian, Cassius Dio, who wrote at a time when the Roman world, at the beginning of the third century AD, was once again tearing itself to pieces. Even as Rome slipped into terminal decline, citizens of the dying Empire continued to look back at a period that was by now becoming very ancient history indeed. Among the last to do so, around AD 400, was Macrobius, whose Saturnalia is full of anecdotes and jokes lovingly culled from the records of the late Republic. A few years later, a friend of Saint Augustine, Orosius, wrote a history of the world that also covered the period, but by then the Empire – and with it the classical tradition itself – had only a few decades left to live. With the fall of Rome, the history of the city passed into myth.
… and Modern
APA
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The American Philological Association
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Journal of Roman Studies
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