Rubicon: the Last Years of the Roman Republic Book

On a dark January morning, Julius Caesar, the governor of Gaul, rode with his closest aides towards a river named the Rubicon, which marked the line of the frontier with Ancient Italy. A governor was forbidden to lead troops out of his allotted provinceâ??to break this severest of laws was tantamount to a declaration of civil war. Caesar was a gambler, however. Like the consummate actor on the public stage he had always been, he quoted a line from one of Menander's plays: "The die is cast." Then he ordered the legion behind him to advance, over the river and on toward Rome. Crossing the Rubicon was a step so consequential that it has come to stand for every fateful step in history since. When Caesar cast his die, the result was indeed a civil war, one that would end up destroying Rome's traditional freedoms and establishing a permanent dictatorship on the wreckage of its constitution.In RUBICON, Cambridge- and Oxford-educated historian and novelist Tom Holland gives readers a harrowing and exciting account of the fall of the Republic, one that begins in 100 B.C., the approximate birth date of the generation that was to bring about the Republic's ruin. He then traces the development of these men into the ruling minds of the Republic, to the rise of Alexandria as a thriving metropolis and East-to-West port, the rule of Augustus, and the occurrence at the Rubicon that marked Rome's end of expansionism. Capturing the suspense and drama of Rome's most famous political rivalries, its vibrant and charged atmosphere, all the while featuring some of the most celebrated personalities in historyâ??Caesar, Cicero, Spartacus, Cleopatra, Brutus, Pompey, Virgil. As the United States embarks on its own imperial adventures, RUBICON is the chronicle of Rome for which readers have been waitingâ??carefully researched and wildly compelling.Read More