To understand how civic militarism formed the link between Rome’s republican spirit and the Roman citizen-soldier, Brand traces how the “constitutional and cultural evolution of Rome affected the battlefield tactics” in five pivotal battles spanning over 250 years, in similar style to Victor Davis Hanson and John Keegan.[4] But he seems to chooses these battles based on whom Rome was fighting against: from facing the Gauls and Samnites at Sentinum in 295 BC; the proxy of three Carthaginian armies at New Carthage in modern Spain in 209 BC; the Macedonians at Pydna, 168 BC; to eventually fellow Romans at Mutina and Philippi, in 43 and 42 BC, respectively, thereby guaranteeing the collapse of the Republic in the wake of Julius Caesar’s assassination. If Rome built its greatness through its civic militarism and agrarian citizen soldiers, it may very well have excavated its demise through the same. But if the success of the republican citizen soldier led to idolizing the model even while the actual soldiers were becoming professional warriors at odds with civilian political institutions, then that model, still revered in American rhetoric, needs some archeological examination.

What ought America to take from the Roman citizen-soldier model, and what is best left behind? From Homer and Heraclitus stretches the argument that the encounter with war denotes both the root of ethics and the birth of literature, and so defines a nation, not the least through the stories it tells about itself. Himself an increasingly rare example of a historian who has gone to war, in this case Afghanistan in 2012, the better to understand this relationship, Brand echoes the sentiment: “At the center of this life cycle [of governments] are civil-military relations because the soul of any state is most clearly defined when it decides what it is willing to kill and die for.”[5] Somehow, despite the expectation of civic virtue being cemented into every Roman institution, Roman soldiers chose to kill each other at Philippi. And so the Roman Empire, with its Neros, Caligulas, and Diocletians, came.

Was the death of the Roman Republic inevitable, initiating the death of the virtuous farmer citizen soldier? Or did the non-idealized, increasingly professionalized soldiers attached to individual commanders defending the Republic’s expanding periphery accelerate the need for formal imperial governance structures? Was this due to their increasing demands on state resources and partially fueled by the decreasing viability of those vaunted farms? Engaging in one of history’s most contested arguments, Brand insists the Republic could have been salvaged. He buttresses this claim with arguments marshalled from his ancient inspirations Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, and above all, Cicero. It’s a testament to Cicero’s rhetorical prowess that in citing his strategic oratory before and after Caesar’s assassination in March 44 and before Cicero’s own murder in 43 BC, the thoughtful historian Brand seems to ignore the philosophical weak point in Cicero’s argument.