The End of the Republic—Then and Now

Gunther Heilbrunn

Politics, Europe

Cato's role in republican politics both ancient and modern should not be minimized.

Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York, Liveright, 2015), 512 pp., $35.00.

THE INITIALS SPQR, the title of Mary Beard’s lively, engrossing and chatty new history of Rome, were part of the everyday language of our republican forebears, at least those engaged in the pamphlet wars around the new federal constitution. Senatus Populusque Romanus, “Senate and People of Rome,” suggested a balance between the wisdom of elders (the root sense of “senate”) and the rights of the people. The pamphleteers signed with Roman names, such as Cato and Caesar, the great opponents in Rome’s Civil War. That war spawned the dictatorship of Caesar which, after his assassination, made way for the principate of Augustus, who sought to restore the forms of the republic while retaining real power for himself and his heirs. For fledgling Americans, this was not antiquarian history. The failure of the Roman republic, as senators prostrated themselves before contemptuous emperors, and elections, hotly contested a few generations earlier, faded into insignificance, fed into cautionary lessons for Federalists and anti-Federalists alike. The Latin motto on the dollar bill, Novus ordo saeclorum, harked back to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, in which the poet, turning his back on the naysayers who saw decline everywhere, predicted arrival of a new era of peace and plenty. The devastation and bloodletting of civil war had given rise to millenarian expectations that found at least a rhetorical home in the new “empire of liberty.”