The Roman Revolution is a profund and unconventional treatment of a great theme. the fall of the republic and the decline of freedom in Rome.

This original master work by a craftsman of Roman history is superb. The primary lesson of the Roman Revolution for us is the classic warning of a powerful leader who came to power in the midst during a time of chaos or disruption. Syme relates the final years of the ancient Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire by Caesar Augustus. A momentous warning, in 1939, it was immediately controversial although timely in light of World War II. Its thesis is that the structure of the Republic and its Senate were inadequate to the needs of Roman rule, and that Augustus was merely doing what was necessary to restore order in public life. This was a situation not unlike the contemporary events in Nazi Germany and the other fascist regimes.

Syme relies on prosopography, as described by Friedrich Münzer, to demonstrate Augustus' covert but undisputed power. His manipulation of the Roman client system and the development of personal relationships into a "Caesarian" faction then eliminated the competition. The inexorable process culminated in the exploitation of his relationship as a relative of Julius Caesar to pursue Caesar's assassins, then over a period of years to gradually incorporate his personal power and prestige while all the while nominally restoring the Republic in name only. Augustus then appears as a crafty politician in Rome's constitutional crisis.

His conclusion of inevitability is less strongly supported than his elucidation of the usurpation process and the major challenge to his view appears in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, where Erich Gruen argued that the traditional view of the Republic's decay is not actually supported by the objective evidence.

Dense, but unbelievably well informed. ( )

4138 The Roman Revolution, by Ronald Syme (read 7 Mar 2006) This book, published in 1939, is a classic account of Rome from about 60 B.C. to 14 A.D. The book has many footnotes, but they are mostly in Latin, and some of the book is of limited interest and I found I was happy to get to the last page. The author disagrees with the claim, made in William Haynes Lytle's famed poem beginning "I am dying, Egypt, dying" that Mark Antony, drunk with Cleopatra's caresses, "madly threw the world away." Most of the book deals with events after Ceasar's death, and the book spends many chapters on Augustus and how he gradually killed off the Roman Republic, so that when he died in 14 A.D. the Empire had replaced the Republic. ( )

Sir Ronald Syme's analysis of the rise of Octavian/Augustus is comprehensive and breathtaking (though, I've since discovered, lacking in certain small ways: for instance, Syme never names the Arval Brotherhood as one of the priesthoods that Augustus revived as part of his efforts to "purify" the Roman people); Syme examines the Augustan Revolution through the lens of contemporary events in Europe (remember, the original date of publication was 1939), and it is this vantage point, left largely unremarked but lurking always in the background, that gives the book its urgency and, I suspect, its controversy. Syme relies almost exclusively on ancient sources; his statement of purpose in his introductory chapter ("The present inquiry will attempt to discover the resources and devices by which a revolutionary leader arose in civil strife, usurped power for himself and his faction, transformed a faction into a national party, and a torn and distracted land into a nation, with a stable and enduring government" [p. 4]) doubtless caused many of Roman Revolution's original readers many a disquieting moment: could Germany's self-proclaimed "Thousand Year Reich" really be a'borning? And what about the Soviet Union..? If I had to sum up this book in 15 words or less, I'd say "Faction is everything:" while Syme doesn't promote the fuzzy and paranoid thinking that goes by the label of "conspiracy theory," conspiracies were rife in those days, and what you did often counted for far less than who you knew. Rom. Rev. has changed the way that I look at politics in general; for that alone, it is well worth the time and effort I spent reading it. ( )