A Short Step to Dictatorship Ronald Syme’s ‘The Roman Revolution,’ written under the cloud of fascism, is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate By Joseph Epstein

Posted By on April 16th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-short-step-to-dictatorship-1460736966

In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86-35 B.C.), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on “The Roman Revolution.” Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

SYME THE ROMAN REVOLUTION:

Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for “The Roman Revolution,” which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life; consider alone Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. CONTINUE AT SITE

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