A TikTok trend started circulating in September 2023 encouraging women to ask the men in their lives just how often they think about the Roman Empire. My partner did not even bother asking me, she saved some time and jumped straight to laughter. As the person who knows me best, she already knew that the answer was a lot. All I could say in my own defense was that I actually spend almost zero time thinking about the Roman Empire, because I’m far too busy thinking about the Roman Republic – the 400-year experiment in flawed quasi-democracy which collapsed into the Roman Empire. She did not consider this exculpatory. But, as a citizen of a 249-year experiment in flawed quasi-democracy which appears on the verge of collapse, I’m not sure how I could avoid thinking about it.
Several weeks ago, an old college friend shared a video essay with me which seamlessly blended two topics I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about: the collapse of the Roman Republic, and the ailing state of the American republic. Written and produced by Ian Danskin, the essay has been ricocheting around inside my skull ever since.
Titled “The South Bank of the Rubicon,” Danskin’s piece ruminates on the famous moment from the slow fall of the Roman Republic when Julius Caesar, bringing his troops from the provinces into Roman home territory and starting a civil war which would result in him becoming dictator for life, crossed the Rubicon.
The term “crossing the Rubicon” entered the lexicon at some point in the 2,074 years since that event as meaning a point of no return. At the time that Caesar crossed the actual Rubicon, though, it did not seem that way to many. Sure, Caesar actively chose to start a civil war in the process, but it was the sixth civil war the Republic had seen in the last fifty years. And yes, it resulted in Caesar supplanting the authority of the Senate and Consuls by becoming dictator for life, but Lucius Cornelius Sulla had marched on Rome and become dictator thirty-some years before, and life had gone on.
Some saw what was happening; Cato and Cicero and others raised their voices in opposition to the slow-rolling collapse of the Republican system, but they had arrived at the correct answer before it was in fashion, and their warnings were not heeded. The Republic was in the process of ending for about 80 years, and no single event was too much for everyone to bear.
In his new essay, Danksin, who first appeared on my radar in 2017 with his “Alt-Right Playbook” series of videos – a great resource for navigating and countering that era’s rapidly shifting right-wing organizing and activism – takes the eerie reality of the Roman Republic’s slow-moving collapse and transposes it onto our time, asking a contemporary American audience to imagine itself in the long process of crossing its own Rubicon, when no single event has been too much for everyone to bear.
“Say for the sake of argument that you are, at this moment, standing ankle-deep in the water, desperately wondering how many paces you are from the south bank of the Rubicon,” Danskin says. “It seems we are always approaching the other side of the Rubicon, never arriving. ‘We can still turn back. The north is still the nearer bank.’”
When I first heard the piece, this point struck me cold. Because, looking around, looking at the news for even a moment, it’s clear that the act of crossing the American Rubicon has already started. And, more chillingly, it’s clear that it started several years ago; that it had already started when, as Danskin references, protesters were black-bagged by government forces during the 2020 protests; that it had already started when a crowd of a defeated leader’s supporters violently attacked the seat of American democracy on January 6, 2021.
Today, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE is a sort of shorthand for the end of the Republic, but historians generally don’t date the end of the Republic until 22 years and two more civil wars later, in 27 BCE. And for several centuries afterwards, much of the Roman Empire-era occurred under the increasingly thin pretense that the Empire was still the Republic. There never came a time when everyone agreed that the Republic was gone. It happened slowly, but inexorably. One step at a time.
The chilling lesson about the end of the Roman Republic, and the reason I spend so much time thinking and reading about it, is that the popular notion of Gaius Julius Caesar bringing it to an end is wrong. Caesar was just one of the last in a long line to give it a shove towards the end. The Republic was not ended by One Evil Man, as comforting as that may be to believe. In reality, the Republic was ended – like Caesar himself – by a thousand cuts. It was killed by decades of drift, abetted by hundreds of self-interested career politicians who saw personal advantage in each new dysfunction. The system went into terminal spin, capable of creating powers which it no longer had the power to restrain.
“You don’t have to cross the river quickly, just steadily,” as Danskin puts it, “so that every step makes the last one seem inevitable and the next one obvious.”
It is this process of slow, grinding inevitability, captured so well by Danskin, which rendered much of the Roman political elite useless during the long end. And it is the same process causing political paralysis in the contemporary American context. No single moment, no single occurrence, has been too much for everyone to bear. So we trudge on, towards the south bank of the Rubicon, never sure if we’re there yet.
What has really hung with me from Danskin’s essay is not the poignant historical transposition, though; it’s what Danskin asks of his audience near the end.
“I want you to decide, at this moment, what the Rubicon is for you. What is that undeniable instant where, if something drastic does not happen immediately, your rights and freedoms are forfeit?”
I have been asking myself that question for weeks now, and my entire aim in writing this column is to encourage some of you to ask yourself the same. Where is my Rubicon? What event will cause me to consider taking actions which I would rather consider extreme than necessary? And what are those actions? In a more innocent time, I might have listed some of the things which have already happened: the violent refusal to accept election results, Nazi salutes at a Presidential inauguration. A few years ago, these things were unthinkable, now they’re simply things which happened before we all moved on.
I do not have an answer yet, but the question is frequently on my mind as the current administration openly defies judicial orders, attempts to disenfranchise millions of voters, and seizes unprecedented control over independent agencies. With unthinkable things happening every day, it’s important to find that line, and to hold it.
Will it be if federal forces use live ammunition on protesting crowds? Or if the Republican Congress passes legislation granting Trump extraordinary powers? Or if he actually invades Canada or Mexico? Or if they start rounding up LGBTQ+ people? I can’t answer for you, but I’m working on answering for myself.
“I’m asking when would be the time to act?” Danskin prompts. “Write it down. Put it on your phone, or a dry erase board, or a Post-It on your bathroom mirror, so that when that moment comes, you will remember that this was your Rubicon.”
“Because it won’t feel like it anymore,” he said. “It will feel like the next logical step.”
