the reviewer's dog-eared copy

The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press, 1939

As impossible as it seems, Ronald Syme’s classic study of ancient Rome, The Roman Revolution, turns 70 in 2009. The difficulty of taking this in stems not from mere temporality (seventy years being, as everyone knows, an unimaginably long time) but from the nature of the work itself: the lively insight and exquisitely controlled anger of The Roman Revolution read as fresh and vital today as they did when the book was first published.

Certainly the experience of reading it is every bit as invigorating as ever. Syme took a particular style of writing history – overlaying a sparse, almost telegraphic voice on a consummate mastery of the whole of the classical canon – and polished it to a level of art unseen in the writing of classical history since Gibbon laid down his pen. It’s a muscular, incredibly assured style, achieved through meticulous self-editing, and it everywhere reveals a keen ear for the perfect little twist of a concluding point, as in describing the Roman world’s last piecemeal surrender to dictatorship:

And now for a moment a delusive ray of hope shone upon the sinking hulk of the Republic. Two veteran legions from Africa arrived at Ostia. Along with a legion of recruits they were stationed on the Janiculum and the city was put in a posture of defence. Whether the Senate now declared Octavianus a public enemy is not recorded: these formalities were coming to matter less and less. Octavianus marched down the Flaminian Way and entered the city unopposed. The legions of the Republic went over without hesitation. A praetor committed suicide. That was the only bloodshed. The senators advanced to make their peace with Octavianus; among them, but not in the forefront, was Cicero. ‘Ah, the last of my friends,’ the young man observed.

Syme attempts to float the same standard dispassionate phraseology that historians of the 20th century typically employ, but he doesn’t try too hard; though The Roman Revolution is in many ways a stunning work of historical detachment, it’s never difficult to tell where Syme’s likes and dislikes fall. He loathes Cleopatra, for instance, and drips a quizzical contempt all over her besotted lover Antony. And his richest ambiguities he saves for the central character of his narrative, the willowy, hypocritical twentysomething Octavian, whose cynical attempts to re-invent himself as the benevolent dictator Augustus draw repeated jabs from our historian, who’s no fan of fascism:

Special commands were no novelty, no scandal. The strictest champion of constitutional propriety might be constrained to concede their necessity. If the grant of extended imperium in the past had threatened the stability of the State, that was due to the ruinous ambition of politicians who sought power illegally and held it for glory and for profit. Rival dynasts rent the Empire apart and destroyed the Free State. Their sole survivor, as warden of the more powerful of the armed provinces, stood as a guarantee against any recurrence of the anarchy out of which his dominion had arisen.

But Augustus was to be consul as well as proconsul, year after year without a break. The supreme magistracy, though purporting no longer to convey enhanced powers, as after the end of the Triumvirate, still gave him the means to initiate and direct public policy at Rome if not to control through consular imperium the proconsuls abroad. For such cumulation of powers a close parallel from the recent past might properly have been invoked: it is pretty clear that it was not.

(The unforgiving starkness of this becomes all the more evident when contrasted with the rhetoric used in standard biographies of Augustus, like this from a work popular when Syme’s book came out: “As he [Augustus] went on there gradually awoke in him a nobler ambition, that of restoring and directing a distracted state. Neither now nor afterward do the more vulgar attributes of supreme power – wealth, luxury, and adulation – seem to have had charms for him.” After Syme, such innocence was no longer critically tenable).

Watching how Syme handles all his sources –watching the intricate, hitherto unseen connections and uprootings that he effects by sifting through everything so carefully (he’ll find a passing comment in an epic poem that sheds light on legionary cooking techniques, or a well-known paragraph from Cicero that can be read in a startling new way) – is at once humbling and exciting, and it’s no wonder The Roman Revolution has cast such a long shadow. The subject matter – the carefully-implemented plan by which Octavian took sole, personal control of the Roman Empire (and the equally careful plan to prevent the Romans from realizing the full import of what he was doing) – has been taken up many times by many historians in the ensuing seventy years. Syme’s masterpiece is in all their bibliographies, and most of those later histories of Augustus or the end of the Roman Republic would have been unthinkable had not Syme so impeccably paved the way.

The sobering fact is how little any of those later books manage to offer even a small amplification of Syme. Even now, The Roman Revolution is the first, best modern history of Rome’s preventable and misunderstood transition from Republic to Empire. Surely a Penguin Classic of it is finally in order?

Steve Donoghue