II. Read and translate the text

History remembers wars in terms of the tipping point, the moment when the world changes forever. The decisive moment is a staple of our understanding. It is also, of course, a myth.

The crossing of the Rubicon was the exemplary act of decision. The Romans had a word, discrimen, for a choice hanging in the balance that might bring either triumph or catastrophe. Rubicon is a study of discrimen, of the fall of great men ostensibly dedicated to an uplifting ideal, and the rise of other, more floridly self-interested great men — the Roman emperors. Of risk and greed, feuds and folly; of the degeneration of civic honour to the hegemony of personal ambition. Long into the Principate that replaced the Republic, political idealists and the historically nostalgic recalled the glory days.

Rubicon unravels the myths and exposes the compelling reality behind what we might now call regime change in ancient Rome. Like all studies of cause and effect, the circle tends to move outwards once discrete explanations are dismissed.

The hero is Cicero, whose loyalty to the Republic and its values endured to the end; he hesitated too long in leaving Rome and died like the bravest of gladiators, stretching out his neck for the assassin's blade. By contrast when the dictator Sulla, one of the cruelest of Romans, goes into retirement he expires at home in bed.

Two challenges face a historian writing about ancient Rome. The first is transmitting hefty information of a dullness that has driven generations away from classics, yet without which the dynamics of the Roman Republic cannot be understood. The second is to reflect the true fascination of ancient Rome, a civilisation deceptively like our own — with paganism, hygiene, a legislature, literature and military virtues — but that was in fact utterly alien.

Part of this success is created in changes of register, from the rhetorical to the poetic to modern vernacular — stylistic devices loved by-Roman writers. "As the traveller approached Rome's gates he might occasionally find the stench from the city ameliorated by myrrh or cassia, the perfumes of death, borne to him on the breeze from, a cypress-shaded tomb" has echoes of the poet Propertius. Yet there, are, also pornographers, hacks, drag-queens and sleaze here; and words whose impact echo the shock of the vulgar, of the new men and their new ways that appalled conservative Rome in the first century BC.

The history of the Republic is difficult and important. Caesar's decision changed the course of Western culture. In the 17th century the arguments employed by the distant advocates of Roman republicanism re-emerged in the mouths and motives of the "democratical gentlemen" who found themselves overturning a monarchy. And now, as we sift through the arguments for recent conflicts and alliances and the modern workings of discrimen, the civil wars of antiquity demand attention yet again. The patterns, the justifications and the spin are compellingly familiar.

Speaking about Julius Caesar and Octavian, Octavian was the teenage instigator of widespread and brutal proscriptions who reinvented himself as Augustus, father of a nation, instigator of the Pax Romana. It was Julius Caesar who crossed the narrow stream of the Rubicon, but it took Augustus to lubricate the transition from a republic to what was, in effect, an absolute monarchy. And he did it with words, not armies. He was, he reassured the old idealists, simply primus inter pares — first among equals.

* Сultural comment

Drag – the clothing of one sex worn by the other