Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland Page B

hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it had overwhelmed all who came against it, also bred paralysis. This was the true tragedy of the Gracchi. Yes, they had been concerned with their own glory – they were Roman, after all – but they had also been genuinely passionate in their desire to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. The careers of both brothers had been bold attempts to grapple with Rome’s manifold and glaring problems. To that extent, the Gracchi had died as martyrs to their ideals. Yet there were few of their fellow noblemen who would have found that a reassuring thought. In the Republic there was no distinguishing between political goals and personal ambitions. Influence came through power, power through influence. The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programmes of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. By demonstrating this to the point of destruction, the Gracchi had ultimately stymied the very reforms for which they had died. The tribunes who followed them would be more careful in the causes they adopted. Social revolution would remain on permanent hold.
    Like the city itself, the Republic always appeared on the point of bursting with the fissile tensions contained within it. Yet just as Rome not only endured but continued to swell, so the constitution appeared to emerge stronger from every crisis to which it was subjected. And why, after all, should the Romans not cling to an order that had brought them such success? Frustrating, multi-form and complex it may have been, yet these were precisely the qualities thatenabled it to absorb shocks and digest upheavals, to renew itself after every disaster. The Romans, who had turned the world upside down, could be comforted by knowing that the form of their republic still endured unchanged. The same intimacies of community bonded its citizens, the same cycles of competition gave focus to its years, the same clutter of institutions structured its affairs.
    And even blood spilled in the streets might easily be scrubbed clean.

Sacker of Cities
     
    Long before the murder of the Gracchi and their followers the Sibyl had foreseen it all. Roman would turn against Roman. Nor, according to the Sibyl’s grim prognostications, would the violence be confined to mere scuffles in the capital. Her vision of the future was far bleaker, far more dystopian: ‘Not foreign invaders, Italy, but your own sons will rape you, a brutal, interminable gang-rape, punishing you, famous country, for all your many depravities, leaving you prostrated, stretched out among the burning ashes. Self-slaughterer! No longer the mother of upstanding men, but rather the nurse of savage, ravening beasts!’ 1
    Hardly the kind of forecast to delight the portent-haunted Romans. Fortunately for their peace of mind, however, these particular verses had not been copied from their own prophetic books, which remained locked up where they had always been, secure against any leaks, in the temple of Jupiter. Instead, the bloodcurdling prediction had first begun to circulate far away from Rome, in the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The Romans, it appeared, were not the only people to have been visited by theSibyl. In Rome her prophecies may have been kept a closely guarded secret, but those she had given to the Greeks and Jews were widely broadcast. Many of these clearly referred to the Republic: ‘An empire will rise from beyond the western sea, white and many-headed, and its sway will be measureless, bringing ruin and terror to kings, looting gold and silver from city after city.’ 2 Nervous of prodigies the Romans may have been, but in the eyes of the world they were a prodigy themselves. The deadliest one of all – or