THE ROMAN WORLD WAR

Innovative reading of the last years of the Roman Republic.

Traina, an emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, allows that the term “world war” may seem anachronistic, given its 20th-century context. But, he adds, the struggles that marked that last half century of republican rule in Rome were more than “a concatenation of civil wars”: The conflicts between Marc Antony, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and lesser-known antagonists had reverberations across the vast, far-flung territories that would, in time, become part of the new Roman Empire, from Parthia in what is now Iran to Mauritania, Spain, and Britain. Traina’s world war was not fought with arms alone; as he notes, whereas Pompey was fond of building monuments to himself, his rival Caesar spent his time draining malarial swamps and planting colonies of military veterans across the map while crushing enemies from North Africa to Gaul. In Traina’s telling, one reason for Caesar’s demise was not only that he assumed the mantle of dictatura perpetua, or dictator in perpetuity, but also that “he envisaged an empire whose center would no longer be the city of Rome.” That vision entailed the conquest of the East, with rival generals bent on subjugating what would become the “eastern provinces”—Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia—and even going so far as to ally with the hated Persians to make it happen. On that note, Traina does a quick reckoning of the rival forces: Cassius’ army included thousands of Persians, Medians, and Arabs, while Brutus’ cavalry was made up of “Gauls, Lusitanians, Thracians, Illyrians, and Thessalians,” and Octavian’s army included a Spartan contingent, “two thousand soldiers who subsequently died in combat.” Rome got its empire, with Octavian becoming Augustus Caesar, and the Mediterranean becoming a “Roman lake,” launching power struggles and local wars across the known world that would flare for centuries.

A novel interpretation of the wars that made Rome a world power.