Augustus

II

THE GREAT-UNCLE

48–47 B.C.

What were the causes of the crisis? It was partly the product of stubborn political, military, and economic facts, and partly of colorful but obstinate personalities.

It was also the inadvertent outcome of astonishing success. As the patricians and the plebs fought for constitutional mastery, Rome’s legions slowly fought their way through Italy in war after war until they controlled the peninsula. After a titanic struggle with Carthage in northern Africa, the Republic emerged as a Mediterranean power by the beginning of the second century B.C.

From then on, Rome increasingly acted as an international “policeman,” sending its legions to right wrongs in foreign countries—especially the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Middle East. Invited to intervene by some Greek cities, it vanquished Macedonia and eventually annexed it as a Roman province. It went on to defeat Antiochus, king of Syria, who unwisely challenged Rome to a fight. In 133 B.C., the king of Pergamum (in today’s western Turkey) died, leaving his kingdom to Rome, which renamed it the province of Asia.

The Republic was now the leading power not only in the western Mediterranean but also in the Middle East. It commanded an empire stretching from Spain (which it had inherited from the Carthaginians nearly a century before) to western Turkey. A band of client kingdoms marked the boundary with the Parthian empire (today’s Iraq and Iran).

The triumph of Rome has puzzled historians down the centuries. Of the many factors that accounted for the city’s emergence on the world stage, the most important was that from their earliest beginnings Romans lived in a permanent state of struggle—with their enemies abroad and with one another at home. Tempered in that fire, they became formidable soldiers as well as learning the political arts of negotiation, compromise, and anger resolution. Flexible and skilled at improvisation, they developed a practical imagination. They usually tried to settle a dispute, if they could, without violence, but when military force became necessary they applied it with a ruthless vigor.

Three important consequences followed Rome’s emergence as a superpower. The first was a huge influx of wealth and slaves. Direct taxation for Roman citizens living in Italy was abolished. The lives of the ruling class became more and more opulent, the frequent festivals and gladiatorial games increasingly elaborate. With the opening up of foreign markets, cheap grain flooded into Italy, driving the native smallholder out of business and replacing him with large livestock ranches often run with slave labor.

The rural unemployed fled to the big city, which became yet bigger. Unfortunately, the job market could not expand to soak up the refugees from the countryside. The authorities began to provide free grain to quiet a febrile and uncontrollable urban population.

Second, to manage such extensive dominions demanded substantial military forces. In the old days, country smallholders were called up to fight short campaigns as and when necessary. Now standing armies were required, with soldiers serving for long periods. These soldiers depended on their generals to persuade the Senate to allocate farms to them when they retired, either in Italy or further afield. These farms would be their “pensions.”

Largely as a result of conquest, the state owned a good deal of land. However, rich landowners, among whom were many senators, had quietly appropriated much of it without payment. These noble squatters were, to put it mildly, disinclined to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. So the legionaries depended on their generals to bully, finesse, or persuade the Senate to free up land for their retirement farms. They developed a loyalty to their generals rather than to Rome.

The third consequence of empire was the strain that its administration placed on the ruling class, and indeed on the Republic’s constitution. So large was the throughput of elected officials that it is hardly surprising that their caliber was variable. A good number were corrupt and incompetent.

Many Romans believed that their traditional virtues of austere duty and healthy poverty were being eroded, and that this decadence explained the growing violence and selfishness of political life. The picture was not quite so bleak as it was depicted, for some nobiles worked hard to maintain standards. However, others did live in extravagant, irresponsible, and self-indulgent ways, and it was they who set the tone.

A tribune of the people, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (from one of Rome’s oldest families), wanted to reform Italian agriculture by providing small plots of land for would-be peasant farmers. The Senate turned down the idea, but it was approved by the people and became law. In 133 B.C., Gracchus was murdered in the street by a group of angry senators, who claimed that he wanted to set up a tyranny. Ten years later, Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, was elected tribune and proposed further reforms. He was either killed or took his life after being cornered in a street riot.

These acts of violence were a turning point in the fortunes of the Republic. A historian writing in the following century said: “From now onward, political disputes that had been resolved by agreement were decided by the sword.”

The ruling class’s long habit of cooperation was breaking down. Many leading Romans forgot that public office was meant to be held for the public good. Also, and more seriously, everyone could see that the Roman system of government was too unwieldy to manage an empire and needed drastic streamlining.

Crises came crashing in one after another, like waves against a storm-battered ship. For the first time in three centuries, hordes of invading Celts poured into Italy; they were destroyed only with great difficulty.

Italy was governed through a network of alliances, but its communities and tribes did not have full civic rights and had long pressed for Roman citizenship. In 91 B.C. they lost patience and revolted in what became known as the War of the Allies. Rome wisely gave them what they wanted, but too late to avoid much bitterness and bloodshed.

The eastern provinces, led by the wily Mithridates, king of Pontus, twice rebelled, and it was many years before Rome regained full control.

However, the real threat to the Republic lay in domestic dissension at home. While Rome had no political parties in the modern sense and, apart from the occasional new man like Octavius, almost all elected officials were drawn from a small number of noble families, two distinct trends of opinion marked the political scene.

The optimates, the “best people,” represented conservative opinion, traditional values, and a collegiate approach to politics. They resented any challenge to the ruling oligarchy and, because they controlled the Senate, were able to block reform. The optimates’ opponents, the populares, claimed to stand, as their nickname suggests, for the interests of the Roman people, of the citizenry at large. Although some of the populares were genuine reformers, others were simply ambitious individualists.

In the eighties B.C., two outsize political personalities collided. One was a respected popularis, Gaius Marius, victor over the Celts. The second was an optimate, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In 88 B.C., despite the fact that it was illegal for armed soldiers to enter Rome, Sulla marched his army, loyal to him personally and to no one else, into the city to fight against Marius and his friends. Such an attack had never happened before in the history of the Republic. Sulla’s action set a black precedent for ambitious Romans to follow in later years, as violence among politicians became more common.

One after another, Marius and Sulla staged massacres of their political opponents. In Sulla’s case, the bloodletting was legalized. He was elected dictator and, using the supreme emergency powers this gave him, he posted in the Forum a list of his political enemies who were to be killed without trial. Sulla even offered rewards for their execution. Modern scholars estimate that about five hundred died, senators and a larger number of equites. This summary procedure was called a proscription.

Sulla introduced measures to strengthen the power of the Senate and weaken that of the people, and then retired into private life. When he died in 78 B.C., most of his reforms were quickly overturned.

Both of these bitter rivals won power but failed to make good use of it, and to its ruin, Rome grew ever more accustomed to the use of force to settle political disputes.

Julius Caesar never troubled to conceal the fact that he was a popularis both by conviction and by family tradition. As quaestor, aedile, and praetor, he had gone out of his way to infuriate respectable opinion. In 60 B.C., when Gaius was three years old, Caesar was in his fortieth year and planning his campaign to win the consulship for 59. He knew that his opponents in the Senate would do everything they could to stop him.

Caesar combined charm and determination in equal quantities. According to Suetonius, he was tall, fair, and well-built, with a rather broad face, keen, dark-brown eyes, and soft, white skin. He wore fashionable clothes. “His dress was, it seems, unusual: he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened.” He was very attentive to his appearance, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved (his growing baldness upset and irritated him), and depilating his body.

He was prone to headaches and suffered from epileptic seizures (which grew in frequency as he became older). Despite his luxurious tastes, he cultivated a healthy and energetic life. He kept to a simple diet and was an expert horseman from boyhood. He had trained himself to put his hands behind his back and then, keeping them tightly clasped, to put his horse to a full gallop; as the stirrup had not yet been invented, this was no mean feat. When on military campaigns he inured himself to long, hard journeys, sleeping night after night in the open.

Caesar spent much of his leisure time chasing after the wives of his political colleagues; it was widely rumored that he slept with men as well. He had extravagant tastes and once gave the favorite of his numerous mistresses—Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus—a pearl worth an astonishing 240,000 sesterces. He was a keen collector of gems, carvings, statues, and “old masters” (sculptures and paintings of the Greek artistic heyday in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.). He liked to have clever and attractive people around him, and paid such high prices for good-looking and talented slaves that he was too ashamed to have them recorded in his account books.

A politician still on the way up, Caesar knew he would not win the consulship without help. He took the momentous decision to form an alliance with two leading populares. One was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (in English, Pompey the Great), who was, by common consent, the greatest man of his age. As a young man he had raised a private army to support Sulla, and behaved cruelly enough to win the nickname adulescens carnifex, the “butcher boy.” He was a competent general but a manager of genius, who accomplished a series of special commissions with speed and efficiency—in particular, clearing the Mediterranean of pirates and finally putting paid to Mithridates. The second leading Roman in Caesar’s sights was Marcus Licinius Crassus; he had defeated Spartacus and was a multimillionaire property developer who once quipped that a man could only count himself rich if he could afford to pay an army. In 60 B.C., they joined forces with Caesar, who sealed the deal by marrying Julia, his daughter and only legitimate child, to Pompey.

Modern historians call the pact the First Triumvirate; at the time it was nicknamed “the three-headed monster,” because the three men made themselves the unofficial rulers of Rome. They pooled their financial resources and supporters to control the voting at assemblies. In this way they won consulships for one another and for their friends, and passed whatever laws they wished (including allocations of land for demobilized veterans) over the head of the Senate. They also gave themselves unusually long five-year governorships in the provinces (proconsuls traditionally served for only one to three years).

When Caesar was consul in 59 B.C., he ignored the vetoes of his optimate colleagues and pushed controversial legislation through the assembly. This was a breach of the constitution, and his enemies neither forgot nor forgave the high-handedness. However, officeholders were immune from prosecution and for the time being he could not be taken to court.

The Senate was furious but powerless. Sooner or later, it hoped, the trio would quarrel. Then the time would come when the optimates could take their revenge. The Senate’s leading personality at this time was Marcus Porcius Cato—a dour man. Plutarch reports: “It was really very difficult to make him laugh, although once in a while, he allowed himself to relax his features into a smile.” He refused to use perfume and his personal habits were severe. He always walked, and trained himself to endure extremes of heat and cold. He was a hard worker and prided himself on never telling a lie; his reputation inspired a proverb—“That cannot be true, even if Cato says it is.” His way of life was a reproach to the decadence of the times, so much so that he could infuriate his friends as well as his enemies.

Whereas Caesar appears to have been an abstemious drinker, Cato was puritanical in everything except for an enormous capacity for alcohol and a surprising weakness for gambling. He remarked that “Caesar was the only sober man who tried to wreck the constitution.”

After his consulship, Caesar went to rule Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul (northern Italy and southern France). Wanting to prove himself as a general, he invaded the rest of Gaul (central and northern France and Belgium). When he needed more time to complete the conquest, he arranged a second five-year term as governor. By 49 B.C., he had added a huge new province to the empire—and in so doing created an experienced army that would follow wherever he led.

In 53 B.C., Crassus commanded an expedition against the Parthian empire. The Parthians were fierce former nomads who became the dominating force on the Iranian plateau during the third century B.C. From about 190 B.C., they intermittently governed Mesopotamia, the heartland of the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires. They were highly skilled horsemen, famous for the “Parthian shot”: they rode up to the enemy, then suddenly galloped away, turning round in their seat to loose an arrow. The Romans, who depended on infantry, found these highly mobile fighters hard to defeat.

This was problematic, for the Parthian monarchs were aggressive, with a tendency to meddle in Rome’s eastern provinces and in the client kingdoms that acted as a buffer between the two empires and that Rome saw as within its sphere of influence. Both sides aimed to control the strategically important, semi-independent kingdom of Armenia (it looked both eastward and westward, being attached to the plateau of Asia Minor and the Iranian plateau, and it had long been a bone of contention). Luckily, murderous dynastic disputes often distracted the Parthians from foreign adventures.

Rome was itself frequently guilty of interference. A few years previously, the proconsul of Syria had supported a claimant to the Parthian crown, a move which, although unsuccessful, naturally infuriated the sitting monarch.

As a result, relations between the two powers were icy, and each side felt it had good reason to launch a preventive war against the other. Hostilities were hastened by Crassus’ personal ambitions, for he was intent on winning military glory that would rival the achievements of Pompey and Caesar.

Crassus marched an army of about thirty-five thousand men into Mesopotamia. Near a place called Carrhae he came up against a force of about ten thousand mounted archers. The terrain was open downland, ideal for cavalry maneuvers, and the Parthians steadily shot down the helpless legionaries. The Romans sought terms and Crassus was killed during the negotiations. Only ten thousand of his men survived the debacle. Humiliatingly, many legionary standards were captured.

This was a massive blow to Rome’s pride that would demand revenge as soon as the political situation at home permitted it.

Gaius was too young to understand these events when they took place. But he lived in a family that had been engaged in high politics for at least two generations, and the issues of the day must have been regularly discussed at home. Close relatives found themselves on different sides of the fence, and at least one of them, Gaius’ stepfather, Philippus, preferred to sit on it. His full sister Octavia, not his half sister of the same name by their father’s first marriage, was wedded at the age of fifteen or sixteen to Gaius Claudius Marcellus, a middle-aged optimate twenty years or so her senior, who strongly disapproved of Caesar’s constitutional recklessness.

In 56 B.C., when the boy was seven, Philippus became consul. Gaius did not need to master the complexities of his great-uncle’s alliance with Pompey and Crassus to enjoy the glamour and excitement of the consulship. It was the peak of achievement for a Roman and, although the boy mostly lived in the country, we may imagine that he was brought to Rome to witness Philippus in all the splendor of his office.

Roman consuls inherited the ceremonial grandeur of the Etruscan kings whom they replaced when the Republic was founded in 509 B.C. A consul wore a distinctive toga with a broad purple hem, and the high scarlet shoes of royalty. He sat on a special chair of state, the sella curulis, inlaid with ivory, and was always accompanied by an official bodyguard of twelve lictors. Each member of this escort carried the emblem of state authority, an ax bound with rods; this was the fasces, which symbolized the consul’s absolute power, or imperium. When a consul visited a house, the lictors stood guard at the front door and would instantly arrest anyone whom he pointed out.

As Gaius approached his teens, the political situation in Rome deteriorated. Caesar and the Senate hired gangs that fought pitched battles in the Forum. Public life was badly disrupted; elections were postponed and officeholders attacked in the street. No doubt the careful Atia insisted that Gaius stay safely in the country. As an emergency measure, the Senate arranged for Pompey to be appointed sole consul in 52 B.C. and entrusted him with the task of restoring order, which he did with his customary efficiency.

The First Triumvirate proved that men with the support of the people and soldiers of Rome, lots of money, and a fair amount of nerve could disregard the ruling class and, in effect, hijack the Republic.

However, as expected and despite Caesar’s best efforts, the alliance at last broke up. Crassus was gone and, as the fifties drew to a close, Pompey, jealous of Caesar’s military achievements in Gaul, became increasingly friendly with the optimates.

Once his governorship was over, Caesar intended to return to Rome, a conquering hero, and stand for consul for 48 B.C. His term in Gaul was due to end in late 50 or early 49 B.C.; he arranged for an extension, so that there would be no interval before the beginning of his second consulship, and permission to stand in absentia. This was important because, as a private citizen, he would be liable for prosecution for his illegal acts when consul ten years before. Cato and his friends in the Senate wanted a showdown with Caesar: they were set on having their day in court and pressed for Caesar’s early recall.

Naturally, Caesar tried to prevent this from happening, for he would certainly be found guilty of constitutional crimes and his political career would be prematurely aborted. Fruitless maneuvers and debates took place as people began to realize that Caesar would never hand himself over to his enemies. However, the senatorial extremists, increasingly sure of Pompey’s support, refused to compromise. Civil war seemed inevitable.

Gaius was now thirteen years old and well able to understand the seriousness of the situation. He will have been aware that opinion in his family, as in many others, was sharply divided. His brother-in-law, Gaius Claudius Marcellus, was consul for 50 B.C. and, despite his family connection with Caesar, was anxious to bring him to justice. Closer to home, Philippus, never known for strength of conviction, had astutely married his daughter Marcia to his uncle-in-law’s sworn enemy Cato, thus keeping a careful foot in both camps. Philippus was not the only noble Roman to hedge his bets by ensuring that relatives could be found on each side. After all, it was not clear who would emerge the victor.

Caesar bought the services of indigent young tribunes of the people, who vetoed any hostile senatorial decrees on his behalf. One of these was Philippus’ son (yet another insurance policy), but the most important was the thirty-three-year-old Marcus Antonius, or Mark Antony as he is known to us, a distant relative of Caesar through Antony’s mother, a member of the Julian clan.

Mark Antony came from a good but impecunious family. He showed little interest in politics in his youth, sowing wild oats in spectacular manner and running up large debts. At one stage, he was rumored to have become the kept boy of a wealthy young aristocrat.

Sometime in his early twenties, Mark Antony realized that it was time to settle down. Following in the footsteps of many ambitious young Romans, he went on a “grand tour” to finish his education by studying public speaking in Athens or one of the great cities of Asia Minor. He took to what was called the Asiatic style of oratory, florid and boastful and swashbuckling—“in common with Antony’s own mode of life,” as Plutarch sharply remarked.

He also underwent military training and quickly showed his aptitude for soldiering, being tough and brave and possessing a gift for leadership. In 55 B.C., when he was twenty-five or twenty-six, he played a junior role in a Roman invasion of Egypt to restore an unpopular monarch, Ptolemy XII Auletes, to his throne. While in Alexandria he met for the first time one of the Auletes’ daughters, a fourteen-year-old princess called Cleopatra. According to Appian, he was “provoked by the sight of her.”

Antony then caught Caesar’s eye and fought bravely with him in Gaul, becoming one of the victorious general’s most trusted followers. His features were bold and masculine. He had a broad forehead and an aquiline nose, and wore a well-grown beard. He reminded people of traditional sculptures of Hercules, an association he cultivated in his choice of dress: at public events, he would wear his tunic low over his hips, with a large sword by his side and a heavy cloak. It was observed that his behavior was as Herculean as his appearance; he liked talking dirty and getting drunk in public. He used to sit down beside his soldiers as they ate, or he took his food standing up at the common mess table; they loved him for it.

He much enjoyed having sex with women, a weakness that won him considerable sympathy, writes Plutarch, “for he often helped others in their love affairs and always accepted with good humour the jokes they made about his own.” When he was in funds, he showered money on his friends and was usually generous to soldiers under his command.

Few senators had any appetite for civil war; in December 50 B.C. the Senate voted by a huge majority that Pompey and Caesar, both of whom had armies, should demobilize. It looked as if peace would break out, a prospect that the die-hard consul Marcellus, Octavia’s husband, was determined to avoid. He believed that Caesar would be easily defeated on the battlefield, and wanted to see him eliminated. He decided to act decisively. Without senatorial approval or the other consul’s consent, he put a sword in Pompey’s hand and gave him authority to defend the state.

On January 7, the Senate acknowledged that matters were now past recall and declared a state of emergency. Fearing for their lives, Antony and other supporters of Caesar fled to their commander, who was waiting at the little river Rubicon in northern Italy, which separated his province of Cisalpine Gaul from Roman territory proper.

While these high events unfolded, Philippus will have felt obliged to be at the heart of affairs in Rome, as would Atia as a close relative of Caesar’s. There was much at stake, and a threat to Caesar could be equally a threat to them. However, they quietly sent Gaius to one of his father’s country places, near Velitrae, where he would be out of harm’s way.

During the night of January 10, in the full knowledge that he was launching a civil war, Caesar ordered his soldiers, all passionately loyal to him, to invade Italy.

“Let the dice fly high!” he said, as if he were playing a game of chance.

There was panic in Rome. The consuls fled southward. Pompey, whom the Senate appointed commander in chief, gave up Italy as a lost cause and sailed to Greece. His idea was to recruit a large army from the eastern provinces. He would invade Italy when he was ready and, with the help of some legions in Spain, crush Caesar as if in a pincer.

Caesar had hoped to catch Pompey, but just missed him. So, after a whirlwind stay at Rome, he rushed off to Spain. A praetor, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, was instructed to look after his interests in the city, and Mark Antony was put in command of the troops remaining in Italy and given the responsibility for its administration.

Caesar was a master of the art of persuasion. When senior opponents fell into his hands, he did not take revenge, as expected, and execute them. Instead, he freed them all. Clemency was to be “the new style of conquest.” Some middle-of-the-road senators gratefully took the hint and returned without fanfare to the capital.

Philippus was on tenterhooks, knowing that he would soon have to choose sides. He had left Rome with everyone else, but not for Pompey’s camp. We hear of him a few weeks later in Naples, then a charming city founded by Greek colonists and called variously Parthenope or Neapolis. But, uncommitted as ever, he did not cross over to join Pompey, and eventually Caesar gave him leave to travel abroad if he wished (there is no evidence that, in the event, he took up this permission). Interestingly, the bellicose Marcellus, who as consul had precipitated the fighting, belatedly remembered into which family he had married, began to regret his bold stand, and unobtrusively slid into neutrality.

What Gaius made of these fine judgments and cautious calculations is unknown. His health was delicate and he did not have the full-blooded Roman delight in soldiering. So it may be that he was less impressed than others by Caesar’s extraordinary military adventures in Gaul. It should be borne in mind that, unless in infancy, he had never met his great-uncle, who had left Rome for his governorship when Gaius was only four years old. If their paths did cross in his earliest years, Gaius would have had at most a dim memory of his celebrated relative.

At the very least, though, the boy would have known all about the sensational doings of the head of the Julian clan: they must have been a frequent, sometimes anxious topic of conversation among his relatives.

Letters arrived in Rome from Spain. After some early setbacks when he had been cornered by flash floods, Caesar had won a brilliant campaign of maneuver with minimum bloodshed. With the western arm of Pompey’s pincers put out of action, he returned to Rome, where he was voted dictator. He made sure that at last he won the much-disputed consulship of 48 B.C., the prize for which he had set off the conflagration.

We may guess that Philippus visited Rome with Atia and Gaius and was present at Senate meetings as one of the few ex-consuls in Italy. So at some time during these eleven action-crammed days during the late autumn of 49 B.C., a momentous but inevitably brief encounter may have taken place between a busy fifty-one-year-old man at the height of his fame and his powers and an unknown teenager in his fifteenth year. Caesar would have had no time to make a considered judgment of Gaius, except perhaps for noting that he seemed a bright boy who had promise.

Then Caesar was off again—down to Brundisium and overseas to seek out his great rival Pompey.

Rome reverted to its default setting of worried waiting. Once again, the news seesawed. Letters traveled unpredictably back to Italy through messengers dispatched by participants, whether by the northern land route or, once spring had set in, over the dangerous seas.

In mid-August of 48 B.C., astonishing reports reached the city. Pompey’s army had been utterly defeated in a great battle near the town of Pharsalus in central Greece. Fifteen thousand of his legionaries were dead, against only two hundred of Caesar’s. The Republic’s commander in chief had survived, but promptly disappeared, presumably making his way eastward. Caesar followed. For the moment, no one knew where either man was.

In Rome, the immediate reaction was to accept that Caesar had become the first man in the state. He was awarded unprecedented honors and powers. In the middle of September, within a few weeks of the battle, Caesar was nominated dictator for a year (the usual limit was six months), and Mark Antony was proclaimed his deputy as magister equitum, master of the horse.

It emerged that Pompey had fled to Egypt, where he hoped that the boy pharaoh, Ptolemy XIII, would give him refuge and a base from which he might be able to recruit a new army in Asia Minor and raise the resources to pay for it. The king’s advisers, feeling that it was far too dangerous to become implicated in someone else’s civil war on what looked like the losing side, and wishing to ingratiate themselves with the winner, had the defeated general killed even before he landed on Egyptian soil.

Caesar arrived in Alexandria on October 2 in hot pursuit. To his public disgust, but also his private relief, he was presented with Pompey’s head. He refused to look at it and shed a well-judged tear; but he accepted the dead man’s signet ring as evidence to send to Italy. Roman public opinion was saddened, but not surprised, when it learned a month later of the death. As Caesar remarked of Pompey during the campaign in Greece, “He does not know how to win wars.”

It was at this high point of his great-uncle’s career that Gaius stepped out from the shadows of childhood and joined the adult community.