For many years something about the history of the Roman Republic has seemed strangely unsatisfactory to me.
The problem is not a lack of books. Quite the contrary. Few periods of history have attracted so many historians, biographers, novelists, playwrights, and political commentators. Entire libraries have been devoted to the final century of the Republic. Caesar alone has generated enough literature to occupy a reader for several lifetimes.
Nor is the problem a lack of great historians. Mommsen, Gelzer, Syme, Meier, Gruen and countless others have examined the period from every conceivable angle.
Yet despite all this scholarship, one occasionally encounters the feeling that something essential is missing.
Not long ago I spoke with a gentleman of my own generation who had received the sort of classical education that has become increasingly rare. He had studied Latin at school and university. He could still recite passages from Caesar. He knew Cicero. He knew Cato. He knew the familiar story of the Republic's collapse.
When I asked him about Sulla, however, the conversation faltered.
He knew the name, of course.
But little more.
I was not surprised.
The more one studies the period, the more one notices that Sulla often appears merely as an introduction to other men. He enters the stage briefly, commits a number of unpleasant acts, and then disappears so that the real drama may begin with Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and the Civil War.
Yet this seems odd.
For if one were asked to identify the first Roman who marched an army upon Rome, the answer would not be Caesar.
If one were asked to identify the first Roman who seized the state through military force and reshaped its constitution according to his own design, the answer would again not be Caesar.
If one wished to discover where the old Republic first suffered a truly mortal wound, one would almost certainly find oneself standing in the age of Sulla.
And yet Sulla remains a shadow.
The same cannot be said of Cato.
Few Romans have enjoyed such a remarkable posthumous career.
Generations of readers encountered him as the incorruptible Stoic, the defender of liberty, the conscience of the Republic. Statesmen admired him. Philosophers admired him. Historians admired him. Even those who disagreed with his politics frequently praised his character.
One cannot spend long among the literature without acquiring the impression that Cato entered history already accompanied by a halo.
This too struck me as curious.
Not because Cato lacked courage.
He clearly possessed courage.
Nor because he lacked conviction.
No one who studies his life could reasonably deny the strength of his convictions.
The question that troubled me was rather different.
Why did so few writers seem interested in examining the distance between the image and the man?
The Republic in which Cato lived was not an austere commonwealth of farmers and citizen-soldiers.
It was the wealthiest state in the Mediterranean.
Its aristocracy possessed fortunes of astonishing size. Provincial revenues poured into Italy. Political influence and financial influence were increasingly difficult to separate. Elections consumed enormous sums of money. Public office offered opportunities for enrichment on a scale unknown to earlier generations.
The city itself reflected these transformations.
Ancient writers describe a Rome of crowded tenements, speculative construction, recurring fires, and extraordinary contrasts between wealth and poverty. Entire districts appeared almost improvised, built rapidly and often carelessly to accommodate a growing population. Fires were so common that they became a feature of urban life. Marcus Licinius Crassus, already one of the richest men in Rome, became still richer by purchasing burning properties from desperate owners.
Luxury expanded with prosperity.
The old Roman ideal had praised moderation. Yet by the first century BCE many members of the aristocracy pursued luxury with remarkable enthusiasm. Banquets grew increasingly extravagant. Exotic goods flowed into Italy from every corner of the empire. The simplicity admired by Roman tradition survived more readily in speeches than in practice.
Nor was the political system itself free from suspicion.
When Jugurtha reportedly described Rome as a city for sale if only it could find a buyer, the remark survived because generations considered it believable.
Too many Romans recognised the accusation.
Too many had witnessed the reality behind it.
This was the Republic inherited by Sulla, Cato, and Caesar.
Not a healthy constitution betrayed by a single ambitious man.
Not a golden age awaiting rescue.
But a political order already burdened by wealth, corruption, factionalism, violence, and profound social contradictions.
Into this world stepped Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Posterity remembers him chiefly for bloodshed.
Yet Sulla himself did not regard his actions as destructive. He believed he was restoring the Republic. His reforms sought to strengthen the Senate, restrain disorder, and return stability to a state already suffering from decades of turmoil.
Whether he believed this sincerely is hardly the question.
The more important observation is that in attempting to save the Republic he demonstrated how it could be seized. In attempting to restore constitutional government he permanently altered the constitutional habits upon which that government rested.
The Republic survived Sulla.
The old assumptions did not.
The first great breach had already occurred.
Long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, another Roman general had marched upon Rome.
The same process of examining reputation against reality should apply to Cato.
The reputation of Cato rests upon the assumption that his life embodied the virtues he preached. Yet the historical evidence repeatedly presents a less comfortable picture: a man who condemned the excesses of his age while often participating in them, who denounced ambition while pursuing political influence with relentless determination, and who became a symbol of moral purity largely because later generations preferred the image to the reality.
This statement will strike some readers as unfair.
Yet history has little obligation to protect reputations.
The Cato who survives in popular imagination is often little more than a monument. One sees the woollen toga, the bare feet, the severe expressions, the Stoic aphorisms, the refusal to compromise. One sees the symbol.
The man is harder to find.
Ancient authors themselves preserved episodes that sit uneasily beside the image later generations preferred to admire. They discussed his conduct concerning Marcia. They discussed his habits. They discussed his participation in the political and financial world of the Roman aristocracy. The same man who condemned many of the excesses of his age was not always free of the very faults he identified in others.
None of this proves that Cato was wicked.
It proves something more interesting.
It proves that he was human.
And it raises a question that historians have not always asked with sufficient seriousness.
Why has Caesar's life been subjected to relentless scrutiny while Cato's reputation has so often been accepted on trust?
Caesar's ambitions are examined.
His campaigns are examined.
His motives are examined.
His private life is examined.
His responsibility for the Republic's collapse is examined.
Quite right.
That is precisely what historians should do.
What I never entirely understood was why the same curiosity was not always applied to his opponents.
The young Caesar who refused Sulla's demand that he divorce Cornelia is rarely presented as a moral example. Yet courage is difficult to deny in such a moment. Here was a young man standing before the most powerful individual in Rome and refusing compliance.
Others yielded.
Caesar did not.
The observation is not offered in Caesar's defence. Caesar requires no defence from anyone writing two thousand years after his death.
It merely illustrates a larger point.
The historical figures are often more interesting than the legends.
The same applies to Cato.
The same applies to Sulla.
Indeed, the more closely one examines the late Republic, the less convincing the traditional morality play becomes.
The Republic was not divided between saints and villains.
It was populated by intelligent, capable, ambitious men attempting to navigate a political system increasingly unable to govern the world it had created.
Sulla offered one answer.
Cato offered another.
Caesar offered a third.
Whether any of them were correct remains open to debate.
But one conclusion appears difficult to avoid.
The Republic's crisis did not begin with Caesar.
Nor can it be understood through Caesar alone.
The roots lay deeper.
In the corruption revealed during the Jugurthine War.
In the concentration of wealth.
In the exploitation of provinces.
In the ambitions of generals.
In the failures of institutions.
And perhaps most importantly, in the inability of the governing class to recognise that the world had changed while its political machinery had not.
This is why the story cannot be told through a single life.
Sulla reveals the first great breach.
Cato reveals the ideals—and the contradictions—of the Republican aristocracy.
Caesar reveals the attempt to build something new from a system increasingly unable to govern itself.
The purpose of this trilogy is not to ask the reader to admire one and condemn the others.
It is to ask a more difficult question.
What if the traditional picture is incomplete?
What if Sulla was more than a tyrant?
What if Caesar was more than an ambitious conqueror?
What if Cato was more than a saint?
And what if the fall of the Republic was not the work of a single man, but the consequence of a society whose contradictions had been accumulating for generations?
Those are the questions that follow.
And it is for that reason that the story must be told through three lives rather than one.