Rubicon: The Triumph And Tragedy Of The Roman Republic - Plot & Excerpts
How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic’s greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Romans’ concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist that they had won their empire purely in self-defence. To people who had been flattened by the legions, this argument may have appeared laughable, but the Romans believed it all the same, and often with a deadly seriousness. Opposition to Crassus’ war against Parthia, for instance, had been bitter. Everyone knew that there had been no excuse for it save greed. The blood-soaked sands of Carrhae showed that the gods had known this too. All the same, Crassus was not the only man to have dreamed of pushing Rome’s supremacy to the limits of the world. Something was changing in the mood of the Republic. Globalising fantasies were much in the air. The globe itself could be found on coins as well as triumphal floats. The old suspicion of empire was fading fast.
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