The bitter rivalry that destroyed the Roman Republic

UNCOMMON WRATH by Josiah Osgood 352pp, OUP, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £20.83 ★★★★★

Caius Julius Caesar and Marcus Porcius Cato, although both Roman senators, could hardly have been more different. Caesar was urbane and charming, fashionably dressed, with a liking for pearls. Cato, abrupt and intransigent, disdaining a tunic and clad in just a cloak, stomped the Forum barefoot. Caesar, although he made himself a dictator for life after the Civil War of 49–45BC, was a brilliant general, politician and intellectual, and generally fares well in modern memory, both popular and academic. Even after Caesar had effectively ended the free Republic, the dedicated republican Cicero could still find him congenial company at dinner.

The contemporary image of Cato is encapsulated by his portrayal in the HBO/BBC TV drama Rome as a boorish and obstructionist prig; a position not unrepresented in scholarship. Josiah Osgood, an eminent American ancient historian, in his wonderful dual biography Uncommon Wrath, seeks to rehabilitate him. Osgood places Cato’s feud with Caesar – which put them on opposing sides of the Civil War, and ultimately led Cato to commit suicide rather than accept a pardon from his rival – at the heart of the fall of the Republic.

The book opens in December 63 BC with the first clash between the protagonists, as recorded by Sallust, in the debate on the punishment of the men implicated in the conspiracy of Catiline. Caesar proposed life imprisonment; Cato won the day with the death penalty. Osgood notes that Sallust’s account of their two speeches forms the climax of the Latin historian’s monograph on the conspiracy. For

HBO’s ‘Rome’ painted Cato as a boorish prig, but Sallust wrote of his ‘extraordinary’ gifts

Sallust, the excellence of a few citizens had made Rome great, but success, wealth and luxury had then inhibited the appearance of similar men – until Caesar and Cato.

Osgood goes somewhat further, suggesting that the competing “extraordinary excellence” of the two, as Sallust puts it, went on to destroy the Republic. This is an unusual idea in two ways. First, as Osgood acknowledges, the ancients put Caesar’s falling-out with Pompey, not Cato, as the immediate cause. Second, as few scholars now would ascribe the success of the early and middle Republic to Sallust’s moral “Great Men” view of history, it seems a stretch to implicitly invoke it for the collapse of the late Republic.

The Republic can be thought to have contained the seeds of its own demise from the start. Its expansionism was fuelled by the competitive nature of its senatorial elite. Senators had a vested interest in aggressive war-making to acquire the military glory and plunder necessary to advance their careers. But Rome’s political structures had been created to run a small city state. Traditional military commands of limited geographic span, held for just one campaigning season, were not adequate to fight the wars of a Mediterranean-wide empire. Once special commands, covering vast territories and held for several years, were introduced, the gap between the winners and losers in the senatorial competition became too great to maintain any pretence of equality within a group of aristocrats. The senatorial game was one that someone had to win.

The acquisition of an empire, with its massive influx of wealth into Rome, not only created divisions within the elite, but between the rich and poor, which in turn summoned up further splits within the senate. The city of Rome swelled to perhaps a million inhabitants. The majority of the plebs urbana lived in appalling conditions. In the final century and a half BC, some politicians espoused their cause. These

became known as populares, and their opponents optimates

– roughly “those acting for the people” and “the best men”. Both terms were contentious then, and remain so in modern scholarship. Both types of politician, who were almost without exception from higher echelons of the elite, could agree that the Roman people were sovereign, and should receive benefits from the possession of the empire. A popularis, such as Caesar, however, held that the people could be active in their sovereignty, ignoring the senate and voting any benefits directly to themselves. An optimate, such as Cato, might compromise on the benefits side, but not on the sidelining of the senate.

Osgood is well aware of such arguments, and gives an elegant overview of optimates and populares, but when we expect him to turn to structures we frequently get something else. “It would, of course, be an oversimplification to explain the terrible civil war that broke out in 49[BC] purely as the result of the political and personal feud between Cato and Caesar. Other individuals played their part.” This foregrounding of the personal reveals Uncommon Wrath not just as a work of history, but as an eloquent and impassioned attack on factionalism in contemporary political life.

“Out of the fear of some perceived threat or a desire to overcome opposition at a particular moment, politicians on both sides broke the usual rules of politics, resulting in louder denunciations, more feverish worries, and even nastier partisanship.” This well-written book, underpinned by profound erudition, deserves the widest readership, but it might have deeper resonances in America than in the UK. Storming the Capitol in Washington, DC is of a different magnitude to lockdown drinks in 10 Downing Street.