Tom Holland has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio. He lives in London with his wife and two children.
Praise for Tom Holland’s
Rubicon
Winner of the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2004
‘This is narrative history at its best … It really held me, in fact, obsessed me … Bloody and labyrinthine political intrigue and struggle, brilliant oratory, amazing feats of conquest and cruelty. Holland’s lucid account of this alien civilisation moves at a fine pace. He makes no facile comparisons with our times, but you sense you are witnessing through him the enduring difficulty of reconciling power and peace’
Ian McEwan, Books of the Year
‘It’s terrific and I’m so grateful to [Tom Holland] for reminding me, so vividly, of not just the Roman Empire but of the people it produced and influenced’
Joanna Trollope, Observer Books of the Year 2005
‘I am afraid I have read nothing but books about the Roman Empire, the most gripping of which was Tom Holland’s Rubicon’
Boris Johnson, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 2005
‘Holland writes throughout with wonderful zest … this is a terrific read and a remarkable piece of scholarship. As an introduction to Roman history, it is unlikely to be bettered’
Christopher Matthews, Daily Mail
‘A fine achievement, a book which will still deserve to be read when the political fashion has moved on … For any newcomer who wants the story of the Republic [and] who is tired of hearing people bang on about what the Romans did for us and wants to know what (and how) the Romans did for themselves, this is probably as good as it gets’
Peter Stothard, Times Literary Supplement
‘A model of exactly how a popular history of the classical world should be written … a riveting study of the period … the most readable book on the later Roman republic since Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution … Next time someone asks me why they should study Roman history, Rubicon will be one of the first books that I shall direct them to’
Richard Miles, Guardian
‘The blood-stained drama of the last decades of the Roman Republic … is told afresh with tremendous wit, narrative verve and insight … What characters there were in this drama! He resurrects them with a novelistic luminosity which illuminates not only that lost world, but our own as well’
Christopher Hart, Independent on Sunday
‘The story of Rome’s experiment with republicanism – peopled by such giants as Caesar, Pompey, Cato and Cicero – is told with perfect freshness, fine wit and true scholarship’
Andrew Roberts
‘Holland has the rare gift of making deep scholarship accessible and exciting. A brilliant and completely absorbing study’
A. N. Wilson
‘Tom Holland’s Rubicon makes history read like a thrilling mafia epic. Classical celebrities who flit across the subconscious of half-educated people like me keep walking in and swaggering about, all alive’
Griff Rhys Jones, Books of the Year
‘A history of the Roman Republic at the height of its fame … The excitement of this book lies in the knowledge that once the summit is reached, either of a mountain or a civilisation, the trail leads downwards’
Beryl Bainbridge, Books of the Year
‘An excellent and extremely readable study of the last days of the Roman republics’
John Bayley, Books of the Year
‘Ancient history often descends to us either through impregnable academic works or the sword-and-sandal epics of the cinema. What Holland achieves is to draw from both genres to write a modern, well-paced and finely observed history which entertains as it informs’
Elizabeth Speller, Observer
‘The Republic won an empire, and destroyed itself in doing so. Tom Holland tells the story of how this came about, and does so with splendid verve … His writing is as pellucid as Macauley’s’
Allan Massie, Spectator
‘Engrossing … a lively narrative style … A thoroughly worthwhile and timely project – an account of a formative period of Western history that manages to be accessible and not over-simplified’
Harry Eyres, Daily Telegraph
‘A master of the telling detail … Rubicon is unrivalled in revealing the humbug behind the cant and stripping Julius Caesar and company of their moral finery’
Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times
‘Tom Holland’s excellent new study of the fall of the Republic … reevaluating Rome for a new generation’
Robert Harris, Sunday Times
‘For the student of contemporary politics as well as the classicist, Tom Holland’s account of the last century or so of the Roman Republic is timely. It enables the reader to re-live the slow, bloodstained collapse of a system, not only as a fascinating drama in its own right, but as a morality tale … This gripping narrative resurrects some of the half-forgotten personalities and events that shaped who we are. In the light of the parallels between the two great imperial republics, it can be recommended as an instructive beach-read for senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic’
Anthony Everitt, Independent
‘Fresh and vivid … Holland’s strength is as a narrative historian and there is no better and clearer guide to the tangled political events of 100–44 BC … if a new readership is to be won for ancient history, it is books like this that will pave the way’
Frank McLynn, New Statesman
‘Rubicon … is no dry history: it is immensely readable, a perfect combination of authoritative scholarship and racy narrative … all Holland’s people are real and alive. Sometimes they even talk’
David Wishart, The Scotsman
‘Holland paints a vivid social portrait of the Roman world … Ideal bedside reading for George W. Bush’
Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph
‘Explosive stuff … a seriously intelligent history of the late republic that approximates as closely to the condition of the novel as should be allowed. Concentrating on the characters, plotting their interactions, rise and fall with considerable narrative skill, writing with élan and gusto … It is a history for our times … One can see classicists like Paul Wolfowitz in the White House eagerly seizing this book to find out how to deal with those tricky middle-easterners … a wickedly enjoyable book and a very sharp “reading” of the late Roman republic’
Peter Jones, BBC History Magazine
‘Holland brings to vivid life the names found in thousands of schoolbooks … and gives them both personality and relevance…. With authoritative prose, this comes as recommended reading for those interested in the ancient world’
Good Book Guide
‘Always readable and often beautiful … essential reading for anyone interested in ancient history. However, it also says more about our modern civilisation than many books that more overtly address the contemporary political and social issues … [Holland] blows the dust off an ancient civilisation, and shows that we still have plenty to learn from the past’
Sunday Business Post
‘Holland brings a diverse cast of characters to life and in his descriptions of the skullduggery, luxury and squalor of ancient Rome he’s marvellously entertaining’
Evening Herald
‘Stunning … Rubicon is unusually well informed by any standard and impressive for its large but not overwhelming cast of characters. The roster goes well beyond the expected Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Crassus, Caesar and Cicero. Look out for prototypical metrosexuals, high-class oyster purveyors, overprivileged aristo table-dancers, back-alley prostitutes and a small army of political bit players – mercifully, not all identified by name. Holland keeps his narrative moving at chariot-race speed’
Corey Brennan, Newsday
COPYRIGHT
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-13105-1
Copyright © 2003 Tom Holland
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
For Eliza.
Welcome to the world.
Contents
Praise
Copyright
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Note on Proper Names
Preface
1 THE PARADOXICAL REPUBLIC
2 THE SIBYL’S CURSE
3 LUCK BE A LADY
4 RETURN OF THE NATIVE
5 FAME IS THE SPUR
6 A BANQUET OF CARRION
7 THE DEBT TO PLEASURE
8 TRIUMVIRATE
9 THE WINGS OF ICARUS
10 WORLD WAR
11 THE DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC
Timeline
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their help with the writing of this book. To my editors, Richard Beswick and Stephen Guise in London, and Bill Thomas and Gerry Howard in New York. To that best of agents and dearest of friends, Patrick Walsh. To Jamie Muir, for being the first to read the manuscript, and for all his unstinting friendship, encouragement and advice. To Caroline Muir, for being such a help whenever my failure to be a stern pater familias threatened to overwhelm me. To Mary Beard, for saving me from more errors than I can bear to count. To Catharine Edwards, for doing the same. To Lizzie Speller, for being as obsessed by Pompey’s quiff as I was, and for all her conversation and support. To everyone at the British School in Rome, and to Hilary Bell, for not complaining (too much) as I dragged her round yet another coin collection. To the staff of the London Library, and the library of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. To Arthur Jarvis and Michael Symonds, for first introducing me to the late Republic. And above all, of course, to my beloved wife and daughter, Sadie and Katy, for keeping me sane when it seemed that I would never have time for anything except for the Romans: ‘ita sum ab omnibus destitutus ut tantum requietis habeam quantum cum uxore et filiola consumitur.’
List of Maps
1 The Roman World in 140 BC
2 Rome in 140 BC
3 Italy in the First Century BC
4 Campania in the First Century BC
5 The Forum and Environs
6 The Eastern Mediterranean in 50 BC
7 Gaul in 60 BC
8 Rome in AD 14
9 The Roman World in AD 14
Note on Proper Names
Where familiar use has served to anglicise proper names, I have chosen to employ the modern rather than the classical usage: Pompey rather than Pompeius, for instance; Naples rather than Neapolis.
Preface
January 10th, the seven-hundred-and-fifth year since the foundation of Rome, the forty-ninth before the birth of Christ. The sun had long set behind the Apennine mountains. Lined up in full marching order, soldiers from the 13th Legion stood massed in the dark. Bitter the night may have been, but they were well used to extremes. For eight years they had been following the governor of Gaul on campaign after bloody campaign, through snow, through summer heat, to the margins of the world. Now, returned from the barbarous wilds of the north, they found themselves poised on a very different frontier. Ahead of them flowed a narrow stream. On the legionaries’ side was the province of Gaul; on the far side Italy, and the road that led to Rome. Take that road, however, and the soldiers of the 13th Legion would be committing a deadly offence, breaking not only the limits of their province, but also the sternest laws of the Roman people. They would, in effect, be declaring civil war. Yet this was a catastrophe for which the legionaries, by marching to the border, had shown themselves fully steeled. As they stamped their feet against the cold, they waited for the trumpeters to summon them to action. To shoulder arms, to advance – to cross the Rubicon.
But when would the summons come? Faint in the night, its waters swollen by mountain snows, the stream could be heard, but still no blast of trumpets. The soldiers of the 13th strained their ears. They were not used to being kept waiting. Normally, when battle threatened, they would move and strike like lightning. Their general, the governor of Gaul, was a man celebrated for his qualities of dash, surprise and speed. Not only that, but he had issued them with the order to cross the Rubicon that very afternoon. So why, now they had finally arrived at the border, had they been brought to a sudden halt? Few could see their general in the darkness, but to his staff officers, gathered around him, he appeared in a torment of irresolution. Rather than gesture his men onwards, Gaius Julius Caesar instead gazed into the turbid waters of the Rubicon, and said nothing. And his mind moved upon silence.
The Romans had a word for such a moment. ‘Discrimen’, they called it – an instant of perilous and excruciating tension, when the achievements of an entire lifetime might hang in the balance. The career of Caesar, like that of any Roman who aspired to greatness, had been a succession of such crisis points. Time and again he had hazarded his future – and time and again he had emerged triumphant. This, to the Romans, was the very mark of a man. Yet the dilemma which confronted Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon was uniquely agonising – and all the more so for being the consequence of his previous successes. In less than a decade he had forced the surrender of 800 cities, 300 tribes and the whole of Gaul – and yet excessive achievement, to the Romans, might be a cause for alarm as well as celebration. They were the citizens of a republic, after all, and no one man could be permitted to put his fellows forever in the shade. Caesar’s enemies, envious and fearful, had long been manoeuvring to deprive him of his command. Now, at last, in the winter of 49, they had succeeded in backing him into a corner. For Caesar, the moment of truth had finally arrived. Either he could submit to the law, surrender his command, and face the ruin of his career – or he could cross the Rubicon.
‘The die is cast.’* Only as a gambler, in a gambler’s fit of passion, was Caesar finally able to bring himself to order his legionaries to advance. The stakes had proved too high for rational calculation. Too imponderable as well. Sweeping into Italy, Caesar knew that he was risking world war, for he had confessed as much to his companions, and shuddered at the prospect. Clear-sighted as he was, however, not even Caesar could anticipate the full consequences of his decision. In addition to ‘crisis point’, ‘discrimen’ had a further meaning: ‘dividing line’. This was, in every sense, what the Rubicon would prove to be. By crossing it, Caesar did indeed engulf the world in war, but he also helped to bring about the ruin of Rome’s ancient freedoms, and the establishment, upon their wreckage, of a monarchy – events of primal significance for the history of the West. Long after the Roman Empire itself had collapsed, the opposites delineated by the Rubicon – liberty and despotism, anarchy and order, republic and autocracy – would continue to haunt the imaginings of Rome’s successors. Narrow and obscure the stream may have been, so insignificant that its very location was ultimately forgotten, yet its name is remembered still. No wonder. So fateful was Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon that it has come to stand for every fateful step taken since.
With it, an era of history passed away. Once, there had been free cities dotted throughout the Mediterranean. In the Greek world, and in Italy too, these cities had been inhabited by men who identified themselves not as the subjects of a pharaoh or a king of kings, but as citizens, and who proudly boasted of the values that distinguished them from slaves – free speech, private property, rights before the law. Gradually, however, with the rise of new empires, first those of Alexander the Great and his successors, and then of Rome, the independence of such citizens everywhere had been stifled. By the first century BC, there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself. And then Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded, and none was left at all.
As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again. Since the Renaissance there have been many attempts to ford back across the Rubicon, to return to its far bank, to leave autocracy behind. The English, American and French revolutions were all consciously inspired by the example of the Roman Republic. ‘As to rebellion in particular against monarchy,’ Thomas Hobbes complained, ‘one of the most frequent causes of it is the reading of the books of policy, and histories of the ancient Greeks, and Romans.’1 Not, of course, that the desirability of a free republic was the only lesson to be drawn from the dramas of Roman history. It was no less a figure than Napoleon, after all, who went from consul to emperor, and throughout the nineteenth century the word most commonly applied to Bonapartist regimes was ‘Caesarist’. By the 1920s and 1930s, when republics everywhere appeared to be collapsing, those crowing over their ruin were quick to point out the parallels with the death-throes of their ancient predecessor. In 1922 Mussolini deliberately propagated the myth of a heroic, Caesar-like march on Rome. Nor was he the only man to believe that a new Rubicon had been crossed. ‘The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt,’ Hitler later acknowledged. ‘The march on Rome was one of the turning points of history.’2
With fascism, a long tradition in Western politics reached a hideous climax, and then expired. Mussolini was the last world leader to be inspired by the example of ancient Rome. The fascists, of course, had thrilled to its cruelty, its swagger, its steel, but nowadays even its noblest ideals, the ideals of active citizenship that once so moved Thomas Jefferson, have passed out of fashion. Too stern, too humourless, too redolent of cold showers. Nothing, in our aggressively postmodern age, could be more of a turn-off than the classical. Hero-worshipping the Romans is just so nineteenth century. We have been liberated, as John Updike once put it, ‘from all those oppressive old Roman values’.3 No longer, as they were for centuries, are they regarded as a mainspring of our modern civic rights. Few pause to wonder why, in a continent unimagined by the ancients, a second Senate should sit upon a second Capitol Hill. The Parthenon may still gleam effulgent in our imaginings, but the Forum glimmers barely at all.
And yet – we flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are also, for good as well as ill, the heirs of the Roman Republic. Had the title not already been taken, I would have called this book Citizens – for they are its protagonists, and the tragedy of the Republic’s collapse is theirs. The Roman people too, in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace. Rather bread and circuses than endless internecine wars. As the Romans themselves recognised, their freedom had contained the seeds of its own ruin, a reflection sufficient to inspire much gloomy moralising under the rule of a Nero or a Domitian. Nor, in the centuries since, has it ever lost its power to unsettle.
Of course, to insist that Roman liberty had once been something more than a high-sounding sham is not to claim that the Republic was ever a paradise of social democracy. It was not. Freedom and egalitarianism, to the Romans, were very different things. Only slaves on the chain gang were truly equal. For a citizen, the essence of life was competition; wealth and votes the accepted measures of success. On top of that, of course, the Republic was a superpower, with a reach and preponderance quite new in Western history. Yet none of this – even once it has been admitted – necessarily diminishes the relevance of the Republic to our own times. Just the opposite, it might be thought.
Indeed, since I started writing this book, the comparison of Rome to the modern-day United States has become something of a cliché. For the historian, the experience of being overtaken by current affairs is more common than might be thought. It is often the case that periods which have appeared foreign and remote can come suddenly, disconcertingly, into focus. The classical world in particular, so similar to ours, so utterly strange, has always had this kaleidoscopic quality. A few decades ago, in the late 1930s, the great Oxford classicist Ronald Syme saw in the rise to power of the Caesars a ‘Roman revolution’, a prefiguring of the age of the fascist and communist dictators. So Rome has always been interpreted, and reinterpreted, in the light of the world’s convulsions. Syme was heir to a long and honourable tradition, one stretching all the way back to Machiavelli, who drew from the history of the Republic lessons both for his own native city of Florence, and for that namesake of the Republic’s destroyer, Cesare Borgia. ‘Prudent men are wont to say – and this not rashly or without good ground – that he who would foresee what has to be should reflect on what has been, for everything that happens in the world at any time has a genuine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.’4 If there are periods when this claim can seem outlandish, then there are periods when it does not – and the present, surely, is one of them. Rome was the first and – until recently – the only republic ever to rise to a position of world power, and it is indeed hard to think of an episode of history that holds up a more intriguing mirror to our own. Nor is it only the broad contours of geopolitics, of globalisation and the pax Americana, that can be glimpsed, albeit faint and distorted, in the glass. Our fads and obsessions too, from koi carp to Mockney to celebrity chefs, cannot help but inspire, in the historian of the Roman Republic, a certain sense of déjà vu.
Yet parallels can be deceptive. The Romans, it goes without saying, existed under circumstances – physical, emotional, intellectual – profoundly different from our own. What strikes us as recognisable about aspects of their civilisation may be so – but not always. Often, in fact, the Romans can be strangest when they appear most familiar. A poet mourning the cruelty of his mistress, or a father his dead daughter, these may seem to speak to us directly of something permanent in human nature, and yet how alien, how utterly alien a Roman’s assumptions about sexual relations, or family life, would appear to us. So too the values that gave breath to the Republic itself, the desires of its citizens, the rituals and codes of their behaviour. Understand these and much that strikes us as abhorrent about the Romans, actions which to our way of thinking are self-evidently crimes, can be, if not forgiven, then at least better understood. The spilling of blood in an arena, the obliteration of a great city, the conquest of the world – these, to the Roman way of thinking, might be regarded as glorious accomplishments. Only by seeing why can we hope to fathom the Republic itself.
Naturally, it is a hazardous and quixotic enterprise to attempt to enter the mindset of a long-vanished age. As it happens, the last twenty years of the Republic are the best documented in Roman history, with what is, for the classicist, a wealth of evidence – speeches, memoirs, even private correspondence. Yet even these only gleam as riches for being set against such darkness. One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written which relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants’ diaries. The silence will be one with which the ancient historian is all too familiar, for, to twist the words of Shakespeare’s Fluellen, ‘there is no tiddle taddle nor pibble pabble in Pompey’s camp’. Nor in the peasant’s hut, nor in the slum dweller’s shanty, nor in the field slave’s barrack. Women, it is true, can sometimes be overheard, but only the very noblest, and even those invariably when quoted – or misquoted – by men. In Roman history to search for details of anyone outside the ruling class is to pan for gold.
Even the narrative of great events and exceptional men, however magnificent it may appear, is in truth a mutilated ruin, like an aqueduct on the Campagna, arches striding, and then, abruptly, fields. The Romans themselves had always dreaded that this might be their destiny. As Sallust, their first great historian, put it, ‘there can be no doubting that Fortune is the mistress of all she surveys, the creature of her own caprices, choosing to broadcast the fame of one man while leaving that of another in darkness, without any regard for the scale of what they might both have achieved’.5 Ironically, the fate of his own writings was to illustrate this bitter reflection. A follower of Caesar, Sallust composed a history of the years immediately preceding his patron’s rise to power, a work unanimously praised by its readers as definitive. Had it only survived, then we would have had a contemporary’s account of a decade, from 78 to 67 BC, rich in decisive and dramatic events. As it is, of Sallust’s masterwork, only scattered fragments remain. From these, and from other scraps of information, a narrative may still be reconstructed – but what is gone can never be repaired.
No wonder that classicists tend to be nervous of sounding overly dogmatic. Write so much as a sentence about the ancient world and the temptation is immediately to qualify it. Even when the sources are at their most plentiful, uncertainties and discrepancies crop up everywhere. Take, for example, the celebrated event after which this book is titled. That the crossing happened as I described it is probable but by no means certain. One source tells us that the Rubicon was forded after sunrise. Others imply that the advance guard had already passed into Italy by the time that Caesar himself arrived on the river’s bank. Even the date can only be deduced from extraneous events. A scholarly consensus has formed around 10 January, but any date between then and the 14th has been argued for – and besides, thanks to the vagaries of the pre-Julian calendar, what the Romans called January was in fact our November.
In short, the reader should take it as a rule of thumb that many statements of fact in this book could plausibly be contradicted by an opposite interpretation. This is not, I hasten to add, a counsel of despair. Rather, it is a necessary preface to a narrative that has been pieced together from broken shards, but in such a way as to conceal some of the more obvious joins and gaps. That it is possible to do this, that a coherent story may indeed be made out of the events of the Republic’s fall, has always been, to the ancient historian, one of the great appeals of the period. I certainly see no reason to apologise for it. Following a lengthy spell in the dog-house, narrative history is now squarely back in fashion – and even if, as many have argued, it can only function by imposing upon the random events of the past an artificial pattern, then that in itself need be no drawback. Indeed, it may help to bring us closer to the mindset of the Romans themselves. Rare, after all, was the citizen who did not fancy himself the hero of his own history. This was an attitude that did much to bring Rome to disaster, but it also gave to the epic of the Republic’s fall its peculiarly lurid and heroic hue. Barely a generation after it had occurred, men were already shaking their heads in wonderment, astonished that such a time, and such giants, could have been. A half-century later and the panegyrist of the Emperor Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, could exclaim that ‘It seems an almost superfluous task, to draw attention to an age when men of such extraordinary character lived’6 – and then promptly write it up. He knew, as all Romans knew, that it was in action, in great deeds and remarkable accomplishments, that the genius of his people had been most gloriously displayed. Accordingly, it was through narrative that this genius could best be understood.
More than two millennia after the Republic’s collapse, the ‘extraordinary character’ of the men – and women – who starred in its drama still astonishes. But so too – less well known perhaps than a Caesar, or a Cicero, or a Cleopatra, but more remarkable than any of them – does the Roman Republic itself. If there is much about it we can never know, then still there is much that can be brought back to life, its citizens half emerging from antique marble, their faces illumined by a background of gold and fire, the glare of an alien yet sometimes eerily familiar world.
Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude.
Caesar, Gallic Wars
Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
Sallust, Histories
THE PARADOXICAL REPUBLIC
Ancestral Voices
In the beginning, before the Republic, Rome was ruled by kings. About one of these, a haughty tyrant by the name of Tarquin, an eerie tale was told. Once, in his palace, an old woman came calling on him. In her arms she carried nine books. When she offered these to Tarquin he laughed in her face, so fabulous was the price she was demanding. The old woman, making no attempt to bargain, turned and left without a word. She burned three of the books and then, reappearing before the King, offered him the remaining volumes, still at the same price as before. A second time, although with less self-assurance now, the King refused, and a second time the old woman left. By now Tarquin had grown nervous of what he might be turning down, and so when the mysterious crone reappeared, this time holding only three books, he hurriedly bought them, even though he had to pay the price originally demanded for all nine. Taking her money, the old woman then vanished, never to be seen again.
Who had she been? Her books proved to contain prophecies of such potency that the Romans soon realised that only one woman could possibly have been their author – the Sibyl. Yet this was an identification that only begged further questions, for the legends told of the Sibyl were strange and puzzling. On the presumption that she had foretold the Trojan War, men debated whether she was a compound of ten prophetesses, or immortal, or destined to live a thousand years. Some – the more sophisticated – even wondered whether she existed at all. In fact, only two things could be asserted with any real confidence – that her books, inscribed with spidery and antique Greek, certainly existed, and that within them could be read the pattern of events that were to come. The Romans, thanks to Tarquin’s belated eye for a bargain, found themselves with a window on to the future of the world.
Not that this helped Tarquin much. In 509 BC he succumbed to a palace coup. Kings had been ruling in Rome for more than two hundred years, ever since the city’s foundation, but Tarquin, the seventh in line, would also be the last.* With his expulsion, the monarchy itself was overthrown, and, in its place, a free republic proclaimed. From then on, the title of ‘king’ would be regarded by the Roman people with an almost pathological hatred, to be shrunk from and shuddered at whenever mentioned. Liberty had been the watchword of the coup against Tarquin, and liberty, the liberty of a city that had no master, was now consecrated as the birthright and measure of every citizen. To preserve it from the ambitions of future would-be tyrants, the founders of the Republic settled upon a remarkable formula. Carefully, they divided the powers of the exiled Tarquin between two magistrates, both elected, neither permitted to serve for longer than a year. These were the consuls,† and their presence at the head of their fellow citizens, the one guarding against the ambitions of the other, was a stirring expression of the Republic’s guiding principle – that never again should one man be permitted to rule supreme in Rome. Yet, startling though the innovation of the consulship appeared, it was not so radical as to separate the Romans entirely from their past. The monarchy might have been abolished, but very little else. The roots of the new Republic reached far back in time – often very far back indeed. The consuls themselves, as a privilege of their office, bordered their togas with the purple of kings. When they consulted the auspices they did so according to rites that pre-dated the very foundation of Rome. And then, of course, most fabulous of all, there were the books left behind by the exiled Tarquin, the three mysterious rolls of prophecy, the writings of the ancient and quite possibly timeless Sibyl.
So sensitive was the information provided by these that access to them was strictly regulated as a secret of the state. Citizens found copying them would be sewn into a sack and dropped into the sea. Only in the most perilous of circumstances, when fearsome prodigies warned the Republic of looming catastrophe, was it permitted to consult the books at all. Then, once every alternative had been exhausted, specially appointed magistrates would be mandated to climb to the temple of Jupiter, where the books were kept in conditions of the tightest security. The scrolls would be spread out. Fingers would trace the faded lines of Greek. Prophecies would be deciphered, and advice taken on how best to appease the angered heavens.
And advice was always found. The Romans, being a people as practical as they were devout, had no patience with fatalism. They were interested in knowing the future only because they believed that it could then better be kept at bay. Showers of blood, chasms spitting fire, mice eating gold: terrifying prodigies such as these were regarded as the equivalent of bailiffs’ duns, warnings to the Roman people that they stood in arrears with the gods. To get back in credit might require the introduction of a foreign cult to the city, the worship of a divinity who had hitherto been unknown. More typically, it would inspire retrenchment, as the magistrates desperately sought to identify the traditions that might have been neglected. Restore the past, the way that things had always been, and the safety of the Republic would be assured.
This was a presumption buried deep in the soul of every Roman. In the century that followed its establishment, the Republic was repeatedly racked by further social convulsions, by demands from the mass of citizens for expanded civic rights, and by continued constitutional reforms – and yet throughout this turbulent period of upheaval, the Roman people never ceased to affect a stern distaste for change. Novelty, to the citizens of the Republic, had sinister connotations. Pragmatic as they were, they might accept innovation if it were dressed up as the will of the gods or an ancient custom, but never for its own sake. Conservative and flexible in equal measure, the Romans kept what worked, adapted what had failed, and preserved as sacred lumber what had become redundant. The Republic was both a building site and a junk yard. Rome’s future was constructed amid the jumble of her past.
The Romans themselves, far from seeing this as a paradox, took it for granted. How else were they to invest in their city save by holding true to the customs of their ancestors? Foreign analysts, who tended to regard the Romans’ piety as ‘superstition’,1 and interpreted it as a subterfuge played on the masses by a cynical ruling class, misread its essence. The Republic was not like other states. While the cities of the Greeks were regularly shattered by civil wars and revolutions, Rome proved herself impervious to such disasters. Not once, despite all the social upheavals of the Republic’s first century of existence, had the blood of her own citizens been spilled on her streets. How typical of the Greeks to reduce the ideal of shared citizenship to sophistry! To a Roman, nothing was more sacred or cherished. After all, it was what defined him. Public business – res publica – was what ‘republic’ meant. Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a Roman truly know himself a man.
And by hearing his name on every tongue. The good citizen, in the Republic, was the citizen acknowledged to be good. The Romans recognised no difference between moral excellence and reputation, having the same word, honestas, for both. The approval of the entire city was the ultimate, the only, test of worth. This was why, whenever resentful citizens took to the streets, it would be to demand access to yet more honours and glory. Civil unrest would invariably inspire the establishment of a new magistracy: the aedileship and tribunate in 494, the quaestorship in 447, the praetorship in 367. The more posts there were, the greater the range of responsibilities; the greater the range of responsibilities, the broader the opportunities for achievement and approbation. Praise was what every citizen most desired – just as public shame was his ultimate dread. Not laws but the consciousness of always being watched was what prevented a Roman’s sense of competition from degenerating into selfish ambition. Gruelling and implacable though the contest to excel invariably was, there could be no place in it for ill-disciplined vainglory. To place personal honour above the interests of the entire community was the behaviour of a barbarian – or worse yet, a king.
In their relations with their fellows, then, the citizens of the Republic were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. In their relations with other states, however, no such inhibitions cramped them. ‘More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.’2 The consequences for their neighbours of this hunger for honour were invariably devastating. The legions’ combination of efficiency and ruthlessness was something for which few opponents found themselves prepared. When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found. Rubble left behind by the legionaries could always be distinguished by the way in which severed dogs’ heads or the dismembered limbs of cattle would lie strewn among the human corpses.3 The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine. The courage they brought to service in the legions, steeled by pride in their city and faith in her destiny, was an emotion that every citizen was brought up to share. Something uniquely lethal – and, to the Romans, glorious – marked their way of war.
Even so, it took time for the other states of Italy to wake up to the nature of the predator in their midst. For the first century of the Republic’s existence the Romans found it a struggle to establish their supremacy over cities barely ten miles from their own gates. Yet even the deadliest carnivore must have its infancy, and the Romans, as they raided cattle and skirmished with petty hill tribes, were developing the instincts required to dominate and kill. By the 360s BC they had established their city as the mistress of central Italy. In the following decades they marched north and south, crushing opposition wherever they met it. By the 260s, with startling speed, they had mastered the entire peninsula. Honour, of course, had demanded nothing less. To states that humbly acknowledged their superiority, the Romans would grant such favours as a patron condescends to grant his clients, but to those who defied them, only ceaseless combat. No Roman could tolerate the prospect of his city losing face. Rather than endure it, he would put up with any amount of suffering, go to any lengths.
The time soon came when the Republic had to demonstrate this in a literal struggle to the death. The wars with Carthage were the most terrible it ever fought. A city of Semitic settlers on the North African coast, dominating the trade routes of the western Mediterranean, Carthage possessed resources at least as great as Rome’s. Although predominantly a maritime power, she had indulged herself for centuries with bouts of warfare against the Greek cities of Sicily. Now, poised beyond the Straits of Messina, the Romans represented an ominous but intriguing new factor in Sicily’s military equation. Predictably, the Greeks on the island could not resist embroiling the Republic in their perennial squabbles with Carthage. Equally predictably, once invited in, the Republic refused to play by the rules. In 264 Rome transformed what had been a minor dispute over treaty rights into a total war. Despite a lack of any naval tradition, and the loss of fleet after fleet to enemy action or storms, the Romans endured over two decades of appalling casualties to bring Carthage, at last, to defeat. By the terms of the peace treaty forced on them, the Carthaginians undertook a complete withdrawal from Sicily. Without ever having intended it, Rome found herself with the nucleus of an overseas empire. In 227 Sicily was constituted as the first Roman province.
The theatre of the Republic’s campaigning was soon to grow even wider. Carthage had been defeated, but not smashed. With Sicily lost, she next turned her imperial attentions to Spain. Braving the murderous tribes who swarmed everywhere in the mountains, the Carthaginians began to prospect for precious metals. The flood of wealth from their mines soon enabled them to contemplate resuming hostilities. Carthage’s best generals were no longer under any illusions as to the nature of the enemy they faced in the Republic. Total war would have to be met in kind, and victory would be impossible unless Roman power were utterly destroyed.
It was to achieve this that Hannibal, in 218, led a Carthaginian army from Spain, through southern Gaul and over the Alps. Displaying a mastery of strategy and tactics far beyond that of his opponents, he brought three Roman armies to sensational defeat. In the third of his victories, at Cannae, Hannibal wiped out eight legions, the worst military disaster in the Republic’s history. By every convention and expectation of contemporary warfare, Rome should have followed it by acknowledging Hannibal’s triumph, and attempting to sue for peace. But in the face of catastrophe, she showed only continued defiance. Naturally, at such a moment, the Romans turned for guidance to the prophecies of the Sibyl. These prescribed that two Gauls and two Greeks be buried alive in the city’s marketplace. The magistrates duly followed the Sibyl’s advice. With this shocking act of barbarism, the Roman people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not countenance to preserve their city’s freedom. The only alternative to liberty – as it had always been – was death.
And grimly, year by year, the Republic hauled itself back from the brink. More armies were raised; Sicily was held; the legions conquered Carthage’s empire in Spain. A decade and a half after Cannae Hannibal faced another Roman army, but this time on African soil. He was defeated. Carthage no longer had the manpower to continue the struggle, and when her conqueror’s terms were delivered, Hannibal advised his compatriots to accept them. Unlike the Republic after Cannae, he preferred not to risk his city’s obliteration. Despite this, the Romans never forgot that in Hannibal, in the scale of his exertions, in the scope of his ambition, they had met the enemy who was most like themselves. Centuries later statues of him were still to be found standing in Rome. And even after they had reduced Carthage to an impotent rump, confiscating her provinces, her fleet, her celebrated war-elephants, the Romans continued to dread a Carthaginian recovery. Such hatred was the greatest compliment they could pay a foreign state. Carthage could not be trusted in her submission. The Romans looked into their own souls and attributed the implacability they found there to their greatest foe.
Never again would they tolerate the existence of a power capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a pre-emptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity. Such opponents were easy – all too easy – to find. Already, even before the war with Hannibal, the Republic had fallen into the habit of dispatching the occasional expedition to the Balkans, where its magistrates could indulge themselves by bullying princelings and redrawing boundaries. As the Italians would have confirmed, the Romans had an inveterate fondness for this kind of weight-throwing, reflecting as it did the familiar determination of the Republic never to brook disrespect. For the treacherous and compulsively quarrelsome states of Greece, however, it was a lesson which took some grasping. Their confusion was understandable – in the early years of their encounters with Rome, the Republic did not behave at all in the manner of a conventional imperial power. Like lightning from a clear sky, the legions would strike with devastating impact, and then, just as abruptly, be gone. For all the fury of these irregular interventions, they would be punctuated by lengthy periods when Rome appeared to have lost interest in Greek affairs altogether. Even when she did intervene, her incursions across the Adriatic continued to be represented as peace-keeping ventures. These still had as their object not the annexation of territory but the clear establishment of the Republic’s prestige, and the slapping down of any overweening local power.
In the early years of Roman engagement in the Balkans, this had effectively meant Macedon. A kingdom to the north of Greece, Macedon had dominated the peninsula for two hundred years. As heir to the throne of Alexander the Great, the country’s king had always taken it for granted that he could be quite as overweening as he pleased. Despite repeated punishing encounters with the armies of the Republic, such an assumption never entirely died, and in 168 BC Roman patience finally snapped. Abolishing the monarchy altogether, Rome first of all carved Macedon into four puppet republics, and then in 148, completing the transformation from peace-keeper to occupying power, established direct rule. As in Italy, where roads criss-crossed the landscape like the filaments of a net, engineering prowess set the final seal on what military conquest had begun. The via Egnatia, a mighty gash of stone and gravel, was driven through the wilds of the Balkans. Running from the Adriatic to the Aegean Sea, this highway became the vital link in the coffle joining Greece to Rome. It also provided ready access to horizons even more exotic, those beyond the blue of the Aegean Sea, where cities glittering with gold and marble, rich with works of art and decadent cooking practices, seemed positively to invite the Republic’s stern attentions. Already, in 190, a Roman army had swept into Asia, pulverised the war-machine of the local despot and humiliated him before the gaze of the entire Near East. Both Syria and Egypt, the two local superpowers, hurriedly swallowed their pride, learned to tolerate the meddling of Roman ambassadors, and grovellingly acknowledged the Republic’s hegemony. Rome’s formal empire was still limited, being largely confined to Macedon, Sicily and parts of Spain, but her reach by the 140s BC extended to strange lands of which few back in Rome had even heard. The scale and speed of her rise to power was something so startling that no one, least of all the Romans themselves, could quite believe that it had happened.
And if they thrilled to their country’s achievements, then so too did many citizens feel unease. Moralists, doing what Roman moralists had always done, and comparing the present unfavourably with the past, did not have to look far for evidence of the pernicious effects of empire. Ancient standards appeared corrupted by the influx of gold. With plunder came foreign practices and philosophies. The unloading of Eastern treasures into Rome’s public places or the babbling of strange tongues on her streets provoked alarm as well as pride. Never did the hardy peasant values that had won the Romans their empire seem more admirable than when they were being most flagrantly ignored. ‘The Republic is founded on its ancient customs and its manpower’4 – so it had been triumphantly asserted in the afterglow of the war against Hannibal. But what if these building blocks began to crumble? Surely the Republic would totter and fall? The dizzying transformation of their city, from backwater to superpower, disoriented the Romans and left them nervous of the jealousy of the gods. By an uncomfortable paradox, their engagement with the world came to seem the measure of both their success and their decline.
For great as Rome had become, portents were not lacking of her possible doom. Monstrous abortions, ominous flights of birds: wonders such as these continued to unsettle the Roman people and require, if the prodigies appeared particularly menacing, consultation of the Sibyl’s prophetic books. As ever, prescriptions were duly discovered, remedies applied. The Romans’ time-sanctioned ways, the customs of their ancestors, were resurrected or reaffirmed. Catastrophe was staved off. The Republic was preserved.
But still the world quickened and mutated, and the Republic with it. Some marks of crisis defied all powers of ancient ritual to heal them. Changes such as the Roman people had set in motion were not easily slowed down – not even by the recommendations of the Sibyl.
It required no portents to illustrate this, only a walk through the world’s new capital.
All was not well in the seething streets of Rome.
The Capital of the World
A city – a free city – was where a man could be most fully a man. The Romans took this for granted. To have civitas – citizenship – was to be civilised, an assumption still embedded in English to this day. Life was worthless without those frameworks that only an independent city could provide. A citizen defined himself by the fellowship of others, in shared joys and sorrows, ambitions and fears, festivals, elections, and disciplines of war. Like a shrine alive with the presence of a god, the fabric of a city was rendered sacred by the communal life that it sheltered. A cityscape, to its citizens, was therefore a hallowed thing. It bore witness to the heritage that had made its people what they were. It enabled the spirit of a state to be known.
Foreign powers, when they first came into contact with Rome, would often find themselves reassured by this thought. Compared to the beautiful cities of the Greek world, Rome appeared a backward and ramshackle place. Courtiers in Macedon would snigger in a superior manner every time they heard the city described.5 Much good it did them. Yet, even as the world learned to kowtow to the Republic, there remained a whiff of the provincial about Rome. Spasmodic attempts were made to spruce her up, but to little effect. Even some Romans themselves, as they grew familiar with the harmonious, well-planned cities of the Greeks, might occasionally feel a touch of embarrassment. ‘When the Capuans compare Rome, with her hills and deep valleys, her attics teetering over the streets, her hopeless roads, her cramped back-alleys, against their own city of Capua, neatly laid out on a suitable flat site, they will jeer at us and look down their noses,’6 they worried. Yet still, when all was said and done, Rome was a free city, and Capua was not.
Naturally, no Roman ever really forgot this. He might sometimes moan about his city, but he never ceased to glory in her name. It appeared self-evident to him that Rome, mistress of the world, had been blessed by the gods, and preordained to rule. Scholars learnedly pointed out that the location of the city avoided extremes of heat, which sapped the spirit, and cold, which chilled the brain; it was therefore a simple fact of geography that ‘the best place of all to live, occupying as it does the happy medium, and perfectly placed in the centre of the world, is where the Roman people have their city’.7 Not that a temperate climate was the only advantage that the gods had thoughtfully provided the Roman people. There were hills that could be easily defended; a river to provide access to the sea; springs and fresh breezes to keep the valleys healthy. Reading Roman authors praise their city,8 one would never guess that to have built across seven hills was a contravention of the Romans’ own principles of town-planning, that the Tiber was prone to violent flooding, and that the valleys of Rome were rife with malaria.9 The love which Romans felt for their city was of the kind that can see only virtues in a beloved’s glaring faults.
This idealised vision of Rome was the constant shadow of the squalid reality. It helped to generate a baffling compound of paradoxes and magnitudes, in which nothing was ever quite as it seemed. For all the ‘smoke and wealth and din’10 of their city, the Romans never ceased to fantasise about the primitive idyll that they liked to imagine had once existed on the banks of the Tiber. As Rome heaved and buckled with the strains of her expansion, the bare bones of an ancient city state, sometimes blurred, sometimes pronounced, might be glimpsed protruding through the cramped modern metropolis. In Rome memories were guarded closely. The present was engaged in a perpetual compromise with the past, restless motion with a reverence for tradition, hard-headedness with a devotion to myth. The more crowded and corrupted their city grew, the more the Romans longed for reassurance that Rome remained Rome still.
So it was that smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when trees ‘of every kind’ had completely covered one of the hills, the Aventine.11 Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces and workshops. Long before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would forewarn the traveller that he was nearing the great city. Nor was smog the only sign. Nearby towns with celebrated names, rivals of the Republic back in the archaic past, now stood deserted, shrunk to a few scattered inns, emptied by Rome’s gravitational pull.
As the traveller continued onwards, however, he would find the roadside lined with more recent settlements. Unable to accommodate a burgeoning population, Rome was starting to burst at the seams. Shanty-towns stretched along all the great trunk-roads. The dead were sheltered here as well, and the necropolises that stretched towards the coast and the south, along the great Appian Way, were notorious for muggers and cut-rate whores. All the same, not every tomb had been left to crumble. 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. Such a moment, the sense of a communion with the past, was a common one in Rome. Yet just as the stillness of a cemetery sheltered violence and prostitution, so not even the most hallowed and timeless of spots were immune to defacement. Admonitory notices were always being posted on tombs, prohibiting electioneering slogans, but still the graffiti would appear. In Rome, seat of the Republic, politics was a contagion. Only in conquered cities were elections an irrelevance. Rome, having neutered political life in other societies, was now supreme as the world’s theatre of ambitions and dreams.
Not even the graffiti-ravaged tombs, however, could prepare a traveller for the bedlam beyond the city gates. The streets of Rome had never had any kind of planning imposed upon them. That would have taken a design-minded despot, and Roman magistrates rarely had more than a single year in office at a time. As a result, the city had grown chaotically, at the whim of unmanageable impulses and needs. Stray off one of Rome’s two grand thoroughfares, the via Sacra and the via Nova, and a visitor would soon be adding to the hopeless congestion. ‘A contractor hurries by, all hot and sweaty, with his mules and porters, stone and timber twists on the rope of a giant crane, funeral mourners compete for space with well-built carts, there scurries a mad dog, here a sow who’s been wallowing in mud.’12 Caught up on this swirl, a traveller was almost bound to end up lost.
Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to negotiate it was to memorise notable landmarks: a fig-tree, perhaps, or a market’s colonnade, or, best of all, a temple large enough to loom above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout city, and temples abounded. The Romans’ reverence for the past meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not even when the open spaces in which they might once have stood had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or meat markets, they sheltered veiled statues whose very identities might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demolish them. These fragments of an archaic past preserved in stone, fossils from the earliest days of the city, provided the Romans with a desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm.
Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt again. Developers were always looking for ways to squeeze in extra space, and squeeze out extra profit. Shanties sprouted like weeds from the rubble left by fires. Despite the best efforts of responsible magistrates to keep streets clear, they were always filling with market stalls or squatters’ shacks. Most profitably of all, in a city long constricted by her ancient walls, developers had begun to aim for the sky. Apartment blocks were springing up everywhere. Throughout the second and first centuries BC landlords would compete with one another to raise them ever higher, a development frowned on by the law, since tenements were notoriously jerry-built and rickety. In general, however, safety regulations were too weakly imposed to inhibit the splendid opportunities for profiteering that a high-rise slum presented. Over six storeys or more, tenants could be crammed into tiny, thin-walled rooms, until invariably the building would collapse, only to be flung up again even higher than before.
In Latin these apartment blocks were known as insulae, or ‘islands’ – a suggestive word, reflecting the way in which they stood apart from the sea of life down on the streets. Here was where alienation bred by the vastness of the city was most distressingly felt. To those dossing in the insulae, rootlessness was more than just a metaphor. Even on the ground floors the insulae usually lacked drains or fresh water. Yet sewers and aqueducts were precisely what the Romans would boast about when they wanted to laud their city, comparing the practical value of their public works with the useless extravagances of the Greeks. The Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s monstrous central drain, had provided the city with its gut since before the foundation of the Republic itself. The aqueducts, built with plunder from the East, were an equally spectacular demonstration of the Romans’ commitment to communal living. Stretching for up to thirty-five miles, they brought cool mountain water into the heart of the city. Even Greeks might on occasion admit to being impressed. ‘The aqueducts convey such volumes that the water flows like rivers,’ wrote one geographer. ‘There is barely a house in Rome which doesn’t have a cistern, a service-pipe or a gushing fountain.’13 Evidently, the slums had not been on his tour.
In truth, nothing better illustrated the ambiguities of Rome than the fact that she was at once both the cleanest and the filthiest of cities. Ordure as well as water flowed through her streets. If the noblest and most enduring virtues of the Republic found their expression in the murmuring of a public fountain, then its horrors were exemplified by filth. Citizens who dropped out of the obstacle race that was every Roman’s life risked having shit – literally – dumped on their heads. Plebs sordida, they were called – ‘the great unwashed’. Periodically, waste from the insulae would be wheeled out in barrows to fertilise gardens beyond the city walls, but there was always too much of it, urine sloshing over the rims of fullers’ jars, mounds of excrement submerging the streets. In death, the poor themselves would be subsumed into waste. Not for them the dignity of a tomb beside the Appian Way. Instead their carcasses would be tossed with all the other refuse into giant pits beyond the easternmost city gate, the Esquiline. Travellers approaching Rome by this route would see bones littering the sides of the road. It was a cursed and dreadful spot, the haunt of witches, who were said to strip flesh from the corpses and summon the naked spectres of the dead from their mass graves. In Rome the indignities of failure could outlive life itself.
Degradation on such a scale was something new in the world. The suffering of the urban poor was all the more terrible because, by depriving them of the solaces of community, it denied them everything that made a Roman what he was. The loneliness of life on the top floor of an apartment block represented the antithesis of all that a citizen most prized. To be cut off from the rituals and rhythms of society was to sink to the level of a barbarian. To its own citizens, as to its enemies, the Republic was unyielding. It gave up on those who gave up on it. And after abandoning them, in the end, it had them swept out with the trash.
It was no wonder that life in Rome should have been a desperate struggle to avoid such a fate. Community was cherished wherever it was found. The potential anonymity of big-city life was not all-conquering. Vast and formless though the metropolis appeared, there were patterns of order defying its chaos. Temples were not the only repositories of the divine. Crossroads, too, were believed to be charged with spiritual energy. Shadowy gods, the Lares, watched over the intersection of all the city’s high streets. These streets, the vici, were so significant as a focus for community life that the Romans used the same word to describe an entire urban quarter. Every January, at the festival of the Compitalia, inhabitants of a vicus would hold a great public feast. Woollen dolls would be hung beside the shrine of the Lares, one for every free man and woman in the quarter, and a ball for every slave. This relative egalitarianism was reflected in the trade associations that were also centred on the vicus, and were open to everyone: citizen, freedman and slave alike. It was in these associations, the collegia, rather than on the broader stage of the city, that most citizens sought to win that universal goal of a Roman – prestige. In a vicus a citizen could know his fellows, sit down to supper with them, join in festivities throughout the year, and live confident that mourners would attend his funeral. In a patchwork of communities across the metropolis, the intimacies of traditional small-town life still endured.
None of which calmed the suspicions of outsiders. Walk down a main street, and the snarl of narrow back alleys twisting off it might appear dark with menace, the air heavy with the stench of unwashed bodies, and trade. To refined nostrils, both were equally noxious. Fears that the collegia served as covers for organised crime combined readily with the upper classes’ instinctive contempt for anyone obliged to earn his keep. The very idea of paid work inspired paroxysms of snobbery. It affronted all the homespun peasant values in which wealthy moralists, lounging comfortably in their villas, affected to believe. Their scorn for ‘the mob’ was unvarying. It embraced not only the wretches starving on the streets or crammed into insulae, but also traders, shopkeepers and craftsmen. ‘Necessity’, it was assumed, ‘made every poor man dishonest.’14 Such contempt – unsurprisingly – was much resented by those who were its object.* Plebs was a word never spoken by a nobleman without a curling of the lip, but the plebs themselves took a certain pride in it. A description once spat as an insult had become a badge of identity, and in Rome such badges were always highly prized.
Like other fundamentals of Roman life, divisions of class and status were deep rooted in the myths of the city’s very origin. On the far side of Rome’s southernmost valley stretched the Aventine Hill. This was where immigrants would invariably end up, the port of disembarkation possessed by all great cities, an area where new arrivals congregate by instinct, drawn to one another’s company and shared confusion. Facing the Aventine rose a second hill. There were no shanty-towns to be found on the Palatine. Hills in Rome tended to be exclusive. Above the valleys the air was fresher, less pestilential – and therefore cost more to breathe. Of all Rome’s seven hills, however, the Palatine was the most exclusive by far. Here the city’s elite chose to cluster. Only the very, very rich could afford the prices. Yet, incongruously, there on the world’s most expensive real estate stood a shepherd’s hut made of reeds. The reeds might dry and fall away, but they would always be replaced, so that the hut never seemed to alter. It was the ultimate triumph of Roman conservationism – the childhood home of Romulus, Rome’s first king, and Remus, his twin.
According to the legend, both brothers had decided to found a city, but they could not agree where, nor what name it should have. Romulus had stood on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine, both of them waiting for a sign from the gods. Remus had seen six vultures flying overhead, but Romulus had seen twelve. Taking this as incontrovertible proof of divine backing, Romulus had promptly fortified the Palatine and named the new city after himself. Remus, in a fury of jealousy and resentment, had ended up murdered by his brother in a brawl. This had irrevocably fixed the two hills’ destinies. From that moment on, the Palatine would be for winners, the Aventine for losers. Success and failure, prestige and shame – there, expressed in the very geography of the city, were the twin poles around which Roman life revolved.
For just as a valley stretched wide between the hills of Romulus and Remus, so too did the social chasm between the senator in his villa and the cobbler in his shack. There were no subtle gradations of wealth in Rome, nothing that could approximate to a modern middle class. In that sense the Palatine and the Aventine were indeed true insulae, islands apart. Yet the valley that separated the two hills also joined them, by virtue of a symbolism almost as ancient as Romulus himself. Chariots had been racing round the Circus Maximus since the time of the kings. Stretching the entire length of the valley, the Circus was easily Rome’s largest public space. Framed on one side by ragged shacks, on the other by graceful villas, this was where the city came together in festival. Up to two hundred thousand citizens might gather there. It was this capacity, still unrivalled by any other sports arena to this day, which made its gaze both so feared and so desired. There was no truer mirror held up to greatness than that provided by the audience at the Circus. Here was where a citizen could be most publicly defined, whether by cheers of acclamation or by jeering and boos. Every senator who looked down at the Circus from his villa was reminded of this. So too was every cobbler who looked down from his shack. For all the gulf that yawned between them, the ideal of a shared community still held firm for millionaire and pauper alike. Both were citizens of the same republic. Neither Palatine nor Aventine was entirely an island after all.
Blood in the Labyrinth
The central paradox of Roman society – that savage divisions of class could coexist with an almost religious sense of community – had evolved through the course of its history. A revolution against the exactions of authority had, of course, inspired the Republic’s very foundation. Even so, following the expulsion of Tarquin and the monarchy, the plebeians had found themselves quite as tyrannised by the ancient aristocracy of Rome, the patricians, as they had ever been by the kings. There were no snobs like patrician snobs. They had the right to wear fancy shoes. They claimed to hobnob with gods. Some even claimed to be descended from gods. The Julian clan, for instance, traced its lineage all the way back to Aeneas, a prince of the Trojan royal house, who in turn had been the son of Venus herself. This was a class of pedigree bound to give one airs.
Indeed, in the early years of the Republic’s history, Roman society had come perilously close to ossifying altogether. The plebeians, however, refusing to accept they belonged to an inferior caste, had fought back in the only way they could – by going on strike. The site of their protests, inevitably, had been the Aventine.* Here they would periodically threaten to fulfil Remus’ original ambitions by founding an entirely new city. The patricians, left to stew in their own hauteur across the valley, would gracelessly grant a few concessions. Gradually, over the years, the class system had become ever more permeable. The old rigid polarisation between patrician and plebeian had begun to crack. ‘What sort of justice is it to preclude a native-born Roman from all hope of the consulship simply because he is of humble birth?’15 the plebeians had demanded. No justice at all, it had finally been agreed. In 367 BC a law had been passed that permitted any citizen to stand for election to the great offices of the state – previously a prerogative of the patricians alone. In acknowledgement of their traditional intimacy with the gods a few minor priesthoods had remained the patricians’ exclusive preserve. To the pure-bred families who had found themselves swamped by plebeian competition, this must have seemed small consolation indeed.
Over the centuries, many clans had faded away almost completely. The Julians, for instance, had found that descent from Venus did little to help them in reaching the consulship: only twice in two hundred years did they win the ultimate prize. Nor was it only their political stock that had gone down in the world. Far from the rarefied heights of the Palatine, stuck in one of the valleys where the poor seethed and stank, they had seen their neighbourhood gradually decline into a slum. What was once the small village of Subura had become the most notorious district in Rome. Like a stately ship taking in water, the lineaments of the Julian mansion had been submerged behind brothels, taverns and even – most shocking of all – a synagogue.
Privileges of birth, then, guaranteed nothing in Rome. The fact that the descendants of a goddess might find themselves living in a red-light district ensured that it was not only the very poor who dreaded the consequences of failure. At every social level the life of a citizen was a gruelling struggle to emulate – and, if possible, surpass – the achievements of his ancestors. In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. Indeed, this, to the Romans, was what liberty meant. It appeared self-evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, towards a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition. The proof of the superiority of this model of society lay in its trouncing of every conceivable alternative. The Romans knew that had they remained the slaves of a monarch, or of a self-perpetuating clique of aristocrats, they would never have succeeded in conquering the world. ‘It is almost beyond belief how great the Republic’s achievements were once the people had gained their liberty, such was the longing for glory which it lit in every man’s heart.’16 Even the crustiest patrician had to acknowledge this. The upper classes may have sniffed at the plebs as an unwashed rabble, but it was still possible for them to idealise an abstract – and therefore safely odourless – Roman people.
Hypocrisy of this kind virtually defined the Republic – not a byproduct of the constitution but its very essence. The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked. Only if an aspect of their government had proven to be inefficient, or unjust, would they abolish it. Otherwise, they would no more have contemplated streamlining their constitution than they would have been prepared to flatten Rome and build her again from scratch. As a result, the Republic was as full of discrepancies and contradictions as the fabric of the city, a muddle of accretions patched together over many centuries. Just as the Roman streets formed a labyrinth, so the byways that a citizen had to negotiate throughout his public life were confusing, occluded and full of dead ends. Yet they had to be followed. For all the ruthlessness of competition in the Republic, it was structured by rules as complex and fluid as they were inviolable. To master them was a lifetime’s work. As well as talent and application, this required contacts, money and free time. The consequence was yet further paradox: meritocracy, real and relentless as it was, nevertheless served to perpetuate a society in which only the rich could afford to devote themselves to a political career. Individuals might rise to greatness, ancient families might decline, yet through it all the faith in hierarchy endured unchanging.
For those at the bottom of the heap, this resulted in painful ambivalences. Legally, the powers of the Roman people were almost limitless: through a variety of institutions they could vote for magistrates, promulgate laws, and commit Rome to war. Yet the constitution was a hall of mirrors. Alter the angle of inspection, and popular sovereignty might easily take on the appearance of something very different. Foreigners were not alone in being puzzled by this shape-shifting quality of the Republic: ‘the Romans themselves’, a Greek analyst observed, ‘find it impossible to state for sure whether the system is an aristocracy, a democracy, or a monarchy’.17
It was not that the people’s powers were illusory: even the grandest candidates for magistracies made efforts to court the voters and felt not the slightest embarrassment in doing so. Competitive elections were crucial to the self-image as well as the functioning of the Republic.
It is the privilege of a free people, and particularly of this great free people of Rome, whose conquests have established a world-wide empire, that it can give or withhold its vote for anyone, standing for any office. Those of us who are storm-tossed on the waves of popular opinion must devote ourselves to the will of the people, massage it, nurture it, try to keep it happy when it seems to turn against us. If we don’t care for the honours which the people have at their disposal, then obviously there is no need to put ourselves at the service of their interests – but if political rewards are indeed our goal, then we should never tire of courting the voters.
18
The people mattered – and, what is more, they knew that they mattered. Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favours sweat. In the Republic ‘there was nothing more fickle than the masses, nothing more impenetrable than the people’s wishes, nothing more likely to baffle expectation than the entire system of voting’.19 Yet if there was much that was unpredictable about Roman politics, there was more about it that was eminently predictable. Yes, the people had their votes, but only the rich had any hope of winning office,* and not even wealth on its own was necessarily sufficient to obtain success for a candidate. The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity. Certainly, a Roman did not have to be a member of the ruling classes to share their prejudices. The aim of even the most poverty-stricken citizens was not to change society, but to do better out of it. Inequality was the price that citizens of the Republic willingly paid for their sense of community. The class-based agitation that had brought the plebeians their equality with the patricians was a thing of the long-vanished past – not merely impossible, but almost impossible to conceive.
That this was the case reflected an irony typical of the Republic. In the very hour of their triumph the plebeians had destroyed themselves as a revolutionary movement. In 367 BC, with the abolition of legal restrictions on their advancement, wealthy plebeians had lost all incentive to side with the poor. High-achieving plebeian families had instead devoted themselves to more profitable activities, such as monopolising the consulship and buying up the Palatine. After two and a half centuries of power they had ended up like the pigs in Animal Farm, indistinguishable from their former oppressors. Indeed, in certain respects, they had come to hold the whiphand. Magistracies originally wrung from the patricians as fruits of the class war now served to boost the careers of ambitious plebeian noblemen. One office in particular, that of the tribunate, presented immense opportunities for grandstanding. Not only did tribunes have the celebrated ‘veto’ over bills they disliked, but they could convene public assemblies to pass bills of their own. Patricians, forbidden from running for plebeian offices, could only watch on in mingled resentment and distaste.
It could, of course, be dangerous for a tribune to overplay his hand. Like most magistracies in the Republic, his office presented him with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Even by the standards of Roman political life, however, the unwritten rules that helped to determine a tribune’s behaviour were strikingly paradoxical. An office that provided almost limitless opportunities for playing dirty was also hedged about by the sacred. As it had been since ancient times, the person of a tribune was inviolable, and anyone who ignored that sanction was considered to have laid his hands upon the gods themselves. In return for his sacrosanct status a tribune was obliged during his year of office never to leave Rome, and always to keep an open house. He had to pay close attention to the people’s hardships and complaints, to listen to them whenever they stopped him in the street, and to read the graffiti which they might scrawl on public monuments, encouraging him to pass or obstruct new measures. No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as to affect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. ‘Populares’, the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.
Yet at the same time as he upheld the interests of the people, a popularis also had to respect the sensibilities of his own class. It was a balancing act that required enormous skill. If the tribunate was always regarded with suspicion by the more conservative elements in the nobility, then that was in large part because of the unique temptations that it offered to its holders. There was always a risk that a tribune might end up going too far, succumbing to the lure of easy popularity with the mob, bribing them with radical, un-Roman reforms. And, of course, the more that the slums swelled to bursting point, and the more wretched the living conditions for the poor became, the greater that risk grew.
It was two brothers of impeccable breeding, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who finally made the fateful attempt. First Tiberius, in 133 BC, and then Gaius, ten years later, used their tribunates to push for reforms in favour of the poor. They proposed that publicly held land be divided into allotments and handed out to the masses; that corn be sold to them below the market rate; even, shockingly, that the Republic should provide its poorest soldiers with clothes. Radical measures indeed, and the aristocracy, unsurprisingly, was appalled. To most noblemen, there appeared something implacable and sinister about the devotion of the Gracchi to the people. True, Tiberius was not the first of his class to have concerned himself with land reform, but his paternalism, so far as his peers were concerned, went altogether too far and too fast. Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? What struck them as particularly ominous was the fact that Tiberius, having finished his year of office, had immediately sought re-election, and that Gaius, in 122 BC, had actually succeeded in obtaining a second successive tribunate. Where might illegalities such as these not end? Sacred as the person of a tribune might be, it was not so sacred as the preservation of the Republic itself. Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.
These eruptions of civil violence were the first to spill blood in the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Their grotesque quality vividly reflected the scale of aristocratic paranoia. Tyranny was not the only spectre that the Gracchi had raised from Rome’s ancient past. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Gaius died on the spot most sacred to the plebeian cause, the Aventine. By taking refuge there, he and his supporters had deliberately sought to identify their cause with that of the ancient strikers. Despite the fact that the poor failed to rise in his support, Gaius’ attempt to stir long-dormant class struggles struck most members of the nobility as a terrifying act of irresponsibility. Yet the reprisals too filled them with unease. Head-hunting was hardly the practice of a civilised people. In the lead-weighted skull of Gaius Gracchus an ominous glimpse could be caught of what might happen were the conventions of the Republic to be breached, and its foundations swept away. It was a warning that temperament more than fitted the Romans to heed. What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny or barbarism – these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall.
Here, then, was one final paradox. A system that encouraged a gnawing hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it had overwhelmed all who came against it, also bred paralysis. This was the true tragedy of the Gracchi. Yes, they had been concerned with their own glory – they were Roman, after all – but they had also been genuinely passionate in their desire to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. The careers of both brothers had been bold attempts to grapple with Rome’s manifold and glaring problems. To that extent, the Gracchi had died as martyrs to their ideals. Yet there were few of their fellow noblemen who would have found that a reassuring thought. In the Republic there was no distinguishing between political goals and personal ambitions. Influence came through power, power through influence. The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programmes of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. By demonstrating this to the point of destruction, the Gracchi had ultimately stymied the very reforms for which they had died. The tribunes who followed them would be more careful in the causes they adopted. Social revolution would remain on permanent hold.
Like the city itself, the Republic always appeared on the point of bursting with the fissile tensions contained within it. Yet just as Rome not only endured but continued to swell, so the constitution appeared to emerge stronger from every crisis to which it was subjected. And why, after all, should the Romans not cling to an order that had brought them such success? Frustrating, multi-form and complex it may have been, yet these were precisely the qualities that enabled it to absorb shocks and digest upheavals, to renew itself after every disaster. The Romans, who had turned the world upside down, could be comforted by knowing that the form of their republic still endured unchanged. The same intimacies of community bonded its citizens, the same cycles of competition gave focus to its years, the same clutter of institutions structured its affairs.
And even blood spilled in the streets might easily be scrubbed clean.
THE SIBYL’S CURSE
Sacker of Cities
Long before the murder of the Gracchi and their followers the Sibyl had foreseen it all. Roman would turn against Roman. Nor, according to the Sibyl’s grim prognostications, would the violence be confined to mere scuffles in the capital. Her vision of the future was far bleaker, far more dystopian: ‘Not foreign invaders, Italy, but your own sons will rape you, a brutal, interminable gang-rape, punishing you, famous country, for all your many depravities, leaving you prostrated, stretched out among the burning ashes. Self-slaughterer! No longer the mother of upstanding men, but rather the nurse of savage, ravening beasts!’1
Hardly the kind of forecast to delight the portent-haunted Romans. Fortunately for their peace of mind, however, these particular verses had not been copied from their own prophetic books, which remained locked up where they had always been, secure against any leaks, in the temple of Jupiter. Instead, the bloodcurdling prediction had first begun to circulate far away from Rome, in the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The Romans, it appeared, were not the only people to have been visited by the Sibyl. In Rome her prophecies may have been kept a closely guarded secret, but those she had given to the Greeks and Jews were widely broadcast. Many of these clearly referred to the Republic: ‘An empire will rise from beyond the western sea, white and many-headed, and its sway will be measureless, bringing ruin and terror to kings, looting gold and silver from city after city.’2 Nervous of prodigies the Romans may have been, but in the eyes of the world they were a prodigy themselves. The deadliest one of all – or so the Sibyl warned.
For her vision of the Republic’s rise to greatness was dark indeed. Ancient cities, great monarchies, famous empires, all would be swept away. Mankind would acknowledge a single order. One superpower would rule supreme. But this would bring no dawning of a universal peace. Far from it. Instead, it would be the Romans’ fate to surfeit on their own greatness. ‘They will sink into a swamp of decadence: men will sleep with men, and boys will be pimped in brothels; civil tumults will engulf them, and everything will fall into confusion and disorder. The world will be filled with evils.’3
Scholars have dated these verses to around 140 BC. Rome’s supremacy was so well established by then that its description would hardly have required the powers of an authentic Sibyl. Unlike their counterparts held by the Republic, the prophetic books circulating in the Greek East never suggested that the future could be altered. Before their vision of a series of great empires succeeding each other throughout history, with Rome’s the greatest and most baneful of all, mere mortals were represented as impotent. No wonder that the poets hiding behind the pseudonym of the Sibyl, when they claimed to peer into the future, should have offered a vision of the Republic as a mother of ‘ravening beasts’, torn to shreds by her own children. It was a prophecy bred equally of wishful thinking and desperation, of an inability to imagine how else the Roman juggernaut might ever be stopped. ‘They will bring despair to humanity – and then, once they have succumbed to their savagery and pride, the fall of these men will be terrible indeed.’4
There could have been no doubt, in the 140s, as to what the Sibyl was referring when she spoke of the Romans’ savagery and pride. This was the decade when the brute fact of their power was demonstrated to the world beyond all possible doubt. Devastation shadowed the Mediterranean. First, the Republic decided to conclude unfinished business and bring the ghostly half-life of Carthage to an end. Even in Rome herself there were those who disapproved. Many argued that the Republic needed a rival who was worthy of the name. Without rivalry, they demanded, how would Rome’s greatness ever be maintained? Such a question, of course, could have been asked only in a state where ruthless competition was regarded as the basis of all civic virtue. Unsurprisingly, however, a majority of citizens refused to stomach its implications. For more than a century they had been demonising the Carthaginians’ cruelty and faithlessness. Why, most citizens wondered, should the standards of Roman life be applied to the protection of such a foe? This question was duly answered by a vote to push Carthage into war. By aiming at her complete annihilation, the Republic revealed what the logical consequence of its ideals of success might be. In such brutality, unmediated by any nexus of fellowship or duty, lay the extremes of the Roman desire to be the best.
In 149 the hapless Carthaginians were given the vindictive order to abandon their city. Rather than surrender to such a demand, they prepared to defend their homes and sacred places to the death. This, of course, was precisely what the hawks back in Rome had been hoping they would do. The legions moved in for the kill. For three years the Carthaginians held out against overwhelming odds and in the final stages of the siege the generalship of Rome’s best soldier, Scipio Aemilianus. At last, in 146, the city was stormed, gutted of its treasures and set ablaze. The inferno raged for seventeen days. On the cleared and smoking ruin, the Romans then placed a deadly interdiction, forbidding anyone ever to build upon its site again. Seven hundred years of history were wiped clean.*
Meanwhile, just in case anyone was missing the lesson, a Roman army spent the same spring of 146 rubbing it into the noses of the Greeks. That winter a ragbag of cities in southern Greece had presumed to disturb the balance of power that Rome had established in the area. Such lese-majesty could not be allowed to pass unpunished. In a war that was over almost before it had begun, a Greek army was swatted like a bothersome wasp, and the ancient city of Corinth reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. Since Corinth had long been celebrated for two things in particular – the quality of her prostitutes and the splendour of her art – the opportunities for plunder were enthusiastically embraced. The women of the slaughtered citizens were enslaved, while on the harbour quays soldiers rolled dice on priceless paintings. Jumbles of statuary stood piled all around them, ready to be auctioned off in job lots or crated back to Rome.
The obliteration of not one but two of the greatest cities of the Mediterranean was a stunning outrage. No wonder, in the face of it, that the Sibyl imagined a curse laid against Rome, one borne upon the smoke from the twin scenes of annihilation. Even the Romans themselves felt a little queasy. No longer could it be pretended that they were conquering the world in self-defence. Memories of the looting of Corinth would always be recalled by the Romans with embarrassment. Guilt over Carthage, however, provoked in them something far more. It was said that even as Scipio watched the flames lap at the crumbling walls of the great city, he had wept. In the destruction of Rome’s deadliest enemy he could see, like the Sibyl, the baneful power of the workings of Fate. At the moment when the Republic’s supremacy had been so overwhelmingly affirmed, when there was not an enemy who could hope to stand against it, when the plunder of the whole world seemed its for the taking, Scipio imagined its doom. Lines from Homer came to him.
‘
The day of the destruction of sacred Troy will arrive
,
And the slaughter of Priam and his people.
’
5
But what he imagined might bring slaughter and destruction to the Republic, Scipio, unlike the Sibyl, did not say.
Choking on Gold
Prior to the cataclysms of 146 there had been some confusion among the Greeks as to the precise definition of ‘freedom’. When the Romans claimed to be guaranteeing it, what did this mean? One could never be sure with barbarians, of course: their grasp of semantics was so woefully inadequate. All the same, it did not require a philosopher to point out that words might be slippery and dangerously dependent on perspective. And so it had proved. Roman and Greek interpretations of the word had indeed diverged. To the Romans, who tended to regard the Greeks as fractious children in need of the firm hand of a pater familias, ‘freedom’ had meant an opportunity for the city states to follow rules laid down by Roman commissioners. To the Greeks, it had meant the chance to fight each other. It was this incompatibility of viewpoints that had led directly to the tragedy of Corinth’s destruction.
After 146 there could be no more quibbling over diplomatic language. The treaties of friendship that governed relations between the Republic and her allies now stood brutally defined. They granted the Republic freedom of action, and her allies none at all. If the Greek cities were still permitted a nominal autonomy, then this was only because Rome wanted the benefits of empire without the bother of administering it. Cowed and obsequious, states far beyond the shores of Greece also redoubled their efforts to second-guess the Republic’s will. Throughout the monarchies of the East, assorted royal poodles would jump whenever the Romans snapped their fingers, perfectly aware that even a hint of independence might result in the hamstringing of their war elephants, or the sudden promotion of rivals to their thrones. It was the last monarch of Pergamum, a Greek city controlling most of what is now western Turkey, who took the resulting spirit of collaboration to its logical extreme. In 133 he left his entire kingdom to the Republic in his will.
This was the most spectacular bequest in history. Fabled for the gargantuan splendour of her monuments and the wealth of her subject cities, Pergamum offered the prospect of riches beyond even the Romans’ plunder-sated dreams. But what was to be done with the legacy? Responsibility for that decision lay with the Senate, an assembly of some three hundred of Rome’s great and good, generally acknowledged – even by those not in it – to be both the conscience and the guiding intelligence of the Republic. Membership of this elite was determined not automatically by birth but by achievement and reputation – as long as he had not blotted his copy-book too outrageously, any citizen who had held high office could expect to be enrolled in it as a matter of course. This gave to the Senate’s deliberations immense moral weight, and even though its decrees never had the technical force of law, it was a brave – or foolhardy – magistrate who chose to ignore them. What was the Republic, after all, if not a partnership between Senate and people – ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’, as the formula put it? Stamped on the smallest coins, inscribed on the pediments of the vastest temples, the abbreviation of this phrase could be seen everywhere, splendid shorthand for the majesty of the Roman constitution – ‘SPQR’.
Even so, as in any partnership, there was nothing like a dispute over money to breed tension. News of the windfall from Pergamum arrived just in time for that doughty champion of the people, Tiberius Gracchus, to propose that it be spent on funding his ambitious reforms. The people themselves, naturally enough, agreed. Most of Tiberius’ fellow senators, however, did not, and dug in their heels. In part, of course, this reflected distaste for Tiberius’ demagoguery, and indignation that he should dare to trample on the Senate’s august toes. But there was more to the opposition than a simple fit of pique. The prospect of inheriting an entire kingdom did indeed affront long-held Roman principles. Pre-eminent among these were an identification of gold with moral corruption and a hearty suspicion of Asiatics. Senators, of course, could afford to stand up for such traditional values, but there was also a more practical reason why they should have regarded the bequest of Pergamum as an embarrassment. Provinces, it was assumed, were burdensome to run. There were subtler ways of fleecing foreigners than by imposing direct rule on them. The Senate’s preferred policy, practised throughout the East, had always been to maintain a delicate balance between exploitation and disengagement. Now, it seemed, that balance was in danger of being upset.
So, initially, the Senate – aside from colluding in Tiberius’ murder – did nothing. Only when the kingdom’s collapse into anarchy threatened the stability of the entire region was an army finally dispatched to Pergamum, and even then it took several years of desultory campaigning before the Republic’s new subjects were brought to heel. Still the Senate refrained from establishing Rome’s first province in Asia. Instead, the commissioners sent to regulate the kingdom were carefully instructed to uphold the regulations of the kings they were replacing. As was invariably the Roman way, the emphasis lay on pretending that nothing much had changed.
So it was that a governing class that had been responsible for guiding its city to a position of unparalleled world power, bringing the entire Mediterranean under its effective control, and annihilating anyone who dared to oppose it, still clung to its instinctive isolationism. As far as Roman magistrates were concerned, abroad remained what it had always been: a field for the winning of glory. While plunder was never to be sniffed at, honour remained the truest measure of both a city and a man. By holding to this ideal, the members of the Roman aristocracy could reassure themselves that they remained true to the traditions of their rugged forefathers, even as they revelled in the sway of their command. As long as the effete monarchs of Asia sent their embassies crawling to learn the every whim of the Senate, as long as the desert nomads of Africa reined in their savagery at the merest frown of a legionary commander, as long as the wild barbarians of Gaul dreaded to challenge the unconquerable might of the Republic, then Rome was content. Respect was all the tribute she demanded and required.
But if the senatorial elite, confident already in their own wealth and status, could afford to believe this, then businessmen and financiers, to say nothing of the vast mass of the poor, had very different ideas. The Romans had always associated the East with gold. Now, with the settlement of Pergamum, came the opportunity to start looting it systematically. Ironically, it was the Senate’s insistence that the traditional governance of Pergamum be respected that pointed the way. Governance, to the Pergamene kings, had meant taxing their subjects for all they could get. It was an example from which the Romans had much to learn. While it had been a constant principle of the Republic that war should turn a profit, profit, to the Romans, had tended to mean plunder. In the barbarian West, it was true, conquest had generally been followed by taxation, but only because otherwise there would have been no administration at all. In the East administration had existed long before Rome. For this reason it had always seemed cheaper, and far less bother, to pillage with abandon, and then to top up funds with an indemnity or two.
Pergamum, however, illustrated that taxation could indeed be made to pay – that it was a glittering opportunity, in fact, and not at all a chore. Soon enough the officials who had been sent to administer the kingdom were wallowing in peculation. Extravagant rumours of their activities began to filter back to Rome. There was outrage: Pergamum was the property of the Roman people, and if there were pickings to be had, then the Roman people wanted their proper share. Mouthpiece for this resentment was none other than Gaius Gracchus, tribune in succession to his murdered brother, and just as keen to lay his hands on the Pergamene bonanza as Tiberius had been. He, too, was proposing ambitious social reforms; he, too, needed quick funds. So it was that in 123, after a decade of agitation, Gaius Gracchus finally succeeded in pushing through a fateful law. By its terms, Pergamum was at last subjected to organised taxation. The lid of the honeypot was now well and truly off.6
Pragmatic and cynical in equal measure, the new tax regime worked by actively fostering greed. Lacking the huge bureaucracies that the monarchs of the East relied upon to squeeze their subjects, the Republic turned instead to the private sector to provide the necessary expertise. Tax-farming contracts were publicly auctioned, with those who bought them advancing in full the tribute owed to the state. Since the sums demanded were astronomical, only the very wealthiest could afford to pay them, and even then not as individual contractors. Instead, resources would be pooled, and the resulting companies administered, as befitted huge financial concerns, with elaborate care. Shares might be offered, general meetings held, directors elected to the service of the board. In the province itself a consortium’s employees would include soldiers, sailors and postmen, quite apart from the tax-collecting staff. The name given to the businessmen who ran these cartels, publicani, harked back to their function as agents of the state, but there was nothing public spirited about the services they provided. Profit was all, and the more obscene the better. The aim was not only to collect the official tribute owed to the state, but also to strongarm the provincials into paying extra for the privilege of being fleeced. If necessary, commercial know-how would complement the thuggery. A debtor might be offered loans at ruinous rates and then, once he had been leeched of everything he owned, enslaved. Far distant in Rome, what did the shareholders of the great corporations care for the suffering they imposed? Cities were no longer sacked, they were bled to death instead.
Ostensibly, Rome’s subjects did have some recourse against the depredations of their tormentors. The taxation system may have been privatised, but the province’s administration remained in the hands of the senatorial elite – the class still most imbued with the ideals of the Republic. These ideals obliged governors to provide their subjects with the benefits of peace and justice. In reality, so lucrative were the bribes on offer that even the sternest principles had the habit of eroding into dust. Roman probity fast became a sick joke. To the wretched provincials, there appeared little difference between publicani and the senators sent to govern them. Both had their snouts in the same loot-filled trough.
As a spectacle of greed, the rape of Pergamum was certainly blatant. The vast sway of the Republic’s power, won in the cause of the honour of Rome, stood nakedly revealed as a licence to make money. The resulting goldrush was soon a stampede. Highways originally built as instruments of war now served to bring the taxman faster to his victim; pack-animals straining beneath the weight of tribute clopped along the roads behind the legionaries. Across the Mediterranean, increasingly a Roman lake, shipping sailed for Italy, crammed with the fruits of colonial extortion. The arteries of empire were hardening with gold, and the more they hardened, so the more gold Rome squeezed out.
As her grip tightened, so the very appearance of her provinces began to alter, as though giant fingers were gouging deep into the landscape. In the East great cities were ransacked for treasure – but in the West it was the earth. The result was mining on a scale not to be witnessed again until the Industrial Revolution. Nowhere was the devastation more spectacular than in Spain. Observer after observer bore stunned witness to what they saw. Even in far off Judaea, people ‘had heard what the Romans had done in the country of Spain, for the winning of the silver and the gold which is there’.7
The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the publicani, who had proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto. A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles, and provide upwards of forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas-clouds were never far behind.
Initially, large areas of Spain had been regarded as too remote and dangerous to exploit, the haunt of tribesmen so irredeemably savage that they believed banditry to be an honourable profession, and used urine to brush their teeth.* By the last years of the second century BC, however, all except the north of the peninsula had been opened up for business.† Huge new mines were sunk across central and south-western Spain. Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers, which show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bear witness to the volumes of poisonous smoke they belched out.8 The ore being smelted was silver: it has been estimated that for every ton of silver extracted over ten thousand tons of rock had to be quarried. It has also been estimated that by the early first century BC, the Roman mint was using fifty tons of silver each year.9
As in Asia, so in Spain, the huge scale of such operations could not have been achieved without collusion between the public and private sectors. Increasingly, in return for providing investors back in Rome with docile natives, decent harbours and good roads, the Roman authorities in the provinces began to look for backhanders. The corruption that resulted from this was all the more insidious because it could never be acknowledged. Even as they raked in the cash, senators still affected a snooty disdain towards finance. The contempt for profit was even enshrined in law: no publicanus was allowed to join the Senate, just as no senator was permitted to engage in anything so vulgar as overseas trade. Behind the scenes, however, such legislation did little to fulfil its aims. If anything, by prescribing how governor and entrepreneur could best collaborate, it only served to bring them closer together: the one needed the other if they were both to end up rich. The result was that Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex. In the years following the Pergamene bequest motives of profit and prestige grew ever more confused. The traditional policy of isolationism came increasingly under threat. And all the while the provincials were exploited ever more.
Not that every ideal of the Republic was dead. There were some administrators so appalled by what was happening that they attempted to take a stand against it. This was a dangerous policy – for if the business cartels ever found their interests seriously threatened, they were quick to muscle in. Their most notorious victim was Rutilius Rufus, a provincial administrator celebrated for his rectitude who had sought to defend his subjects against the tax-collectors, and who in 92 BC was brought to trial before a jury stuffed with supporters of the publicani. Big business had successfully oiled the workings of the court: the charge – selected with deliberate effrontery – was extortion. After he had been convicted Rufus, with matching effrontery, chose as the place of his exile the very province he was supposed to have looted. There he was loudly welcomed with honours and scattered flowers.
The province was Asia: formerly the kingdom of Pergamum and still, forty years after it had been given to them, the Romans’ favourite milch-cow. To the provincials, the conviction of Rufus must have seemed the final straw: proof, if proof were still needed, that Roman greed would never restrain itself. Yet what could be done? No one dared fight back. The charred rubble of Corinth testified eloquently to the perils of doing that. Despair as well as taxes crushed the Greeks of Asia. How could they ever hope to throw the Republic, its rapacious financiers and invincible legions off their backs?
Then, at last, three years after the conviction of Rufus, the provincial authorities pushed their money-grubbing too far. Looking to widen their activities, Roman business interests began casting greedy eyes on Pontus, a kingdom on the Black Sea coast in the north of what is now Turkey. In the summer of 89 the Roman commissioner in Asia, Manius Aquillius, trumped up an excuse for an invasion. Rather than risk his own troops’ lives, he preferred to order a client-king to do the fighting for him – having assumed, with fatal complacency, that any fallout from such a provocation would be easily containable. But the King of Pontus, Mithridates, was no ordinary opponent. His biography, carefully honed by a genius for florid propaganda, read like a fairy tale. Persecuted by his wicked mother as a child, the young prince had been forced to take refuge in a forest. Here he had lived for seven years, outrunning deer and outfighting lions. Nervous that his mother might still try to have him murdered, Mithridates had also developed an obsessive interest in toxicology, taking repeated antidotes until he was immune to poison. Not the kind of boy, in short, to let family stand in the way of a throne. Duly returning to his capital at the head of a conquering army, Mithridates had ordered his mother killed, and then, just for good measure, his brother and sister too. More than twenty years later he remained as power hungry and ruthless as ever – far too much so, certainly, for a reluctant Roman poodle. The invasion was contemptuously repelled.
Next, however, came a more fateful step. Mithridates had to decide whether to take the attack to Rome herself. Superpowers were not taken on lightly, but war with the Republic was a challenge for which Mithridates had been preparing all his reign. Like any ambitious despot, he had worked hard to beef up his offensive capabilities, and his army was shiny new – literally so, since its weapons were embossed with gold and its armour with bright jewels. But if Mithridates liked to make a splash, he also enjoyed playing at cloak and dagger: travelling undercover through Asia, he had seen enough to convince him of the provincials’ hatred of Rome. This, more than anything, was what persuaded him to take the plunge. Crossing into the province of Asia, he found the garrisons protecting it scanty and ill-prepared, and the Greek cities eager to hail him as a saviour. In a matter of weeks Roman power in the province had totally collapsed, and Mithridates found himself standing on the shore of the Aegean Sea.
As a matricidal barbarian he was hardly the kind of champion the Greeks would normally have taken to their hearts. But better a matricidal barbarian than the publicani – the longing for freedom was so desperate, and the loathing of Rome so visceral, that the provincials were willing to go to any lengths to dispose of their oppressors. In the summer of 88, when Rome’s chains had already been thrown off, they were to demonstrate this in a horrific explosion of violence. Aiming to bind the Greek cities to him irrevocably, Mithridates wrote to them, ordering the massacre of every Roman and Italian left in Asia. The Greeks followed his instructions with savage relish. The atrocity was all the more terrible for the secrecy with which it had been prepared and the perfect co-ordination of the attacks. Victims were rounded up and slaughtered by hired assassins, hacked to pieces as they clung to sacred statues, or shot as they attempted to escape into the sea. Their bodies were left to rot unburied outside city walls. Eighty thousand men, women and children were said to have been killed on that single, deadly night.10
As a blow to the Roman economy, this was calculated and devastating; but as a blow to Roman prestige it was far worse. Mithridates had already shown himself a master of propaganda, resurrecting the Sibyl’s prophecies and throwing in some new ones of his own in order to make them appear more relevant to himself. The common theme was the appearance of a great king from the East, an instrument of divine retribution sent to humble the arrogant and grasping superpower. The mass slaughter of businessmen was only one way in which Mithridates chose to dramatise this. Even more calculated for effect was the execution of Manius Aquillius, the Roman commissioner who had provoked Mithridates into war in the first place. Falling ill at just the wrong moment, the unfortunate Aquillius was captured and dragged back to Pergamum, shackled all the way to a seven-foot barbarian. After tying him to an ass and parading him through jeering crowds, Mithridates next ordered some treasure melted down. When all had been prepared, Aquillius’ head was jerked back, his mouth forced open, and the molten metal poured down his throat. ‘War-mongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive – greed, deep-seated, for empire and riches.’11 This had been the verdict of Mithridates on the Republic and now, in the person of her legate in Asia, he exacted symbolic justice. Manius Aquillius choked to death on gold.
A Trumpet in the Sky
When a ship loaded with the pickings of empire sailed for Italy, it would most likely aim for the bare cone of Vesuvius. Sailors would scan the horizon, searching for the familiar, flat-topped silhouette of the volcano, and when they made it out raise a prayer of thanks to the gods for having brought them safely through the perils of their voyage. Ahead of them was journey’s end. Across the glittering azure of the bay the sailors would see towns dotted along the coastline, picturesque touches of Greece on the Italian shore, planted there by colonists centuries earlier – for business, in the Bay of Naples, had always been international. Not that these old ports received much shipping now. Naples herself, for instance, basking in the sun, made a living from a very different trade. Only two days’ ride from Rome, her ancient streets had recently begun to fill with tourists, all of them keen to taste the Greek lifestyle – whether by debating philosophy, complaining to doctors, or falling in love with a witty, well-read whore. Meanwhile, out to sea, the giant freight ships loomed and passed on by.
Nowadays, their port of call was a few miles up the coast. At Puteoli, Roman businessmen had long since flattened all traces of Greek heritage. Huge, concrete moles harboured shipping from all over the Mediterranean, loaded with grain to feed Rome’s monstrous appetite and slaves to fuel her enterprises, but also rarities garnered from her far-off domains: sculptures and spices, paintings and strange plants. Only the wealthiest could afford such luxuries, of course, but there was a growing market for them in the villas that now dotted the coastline either side of Puteoli, and were themselves the ultimate in consumer trophies. Like the super-rich anywhere, the Roman aristocracy wanted to keep their favourite holiday destination exclusive, and to this end had begun to buy it up.
The property boom in the region had been fuelled throughout the nineties by resourceful entrepreneurs – and in particular by an oyster-breeder named Sergius Orata. Looking to capitalise on the insatiable Roman appetite for shellfish, Orata had developed the local oyster beds on a hitherto undreamed-of scale. He had built channels and dams to regulate the flow of the sea, and lofty canopies over the mouth of the neighbouring Lucrine Lake, which he then promoted as home to the tastiest oysters in the world. Contemporaries were so impressed by Orata’s wizardry that they claimed he could have bred shellfish on his roof had he tried. But it was a further piece of technical innovation that really made Orata’s name: having cornered the market in oysters, he then invented the heated swimming pool.
Such at least seems the likeliest meaning of a cryptic Latin phrase, balneae pensiles – literally, hanging baths.* We are told that this invention required the suspension of seas of warm water and was marvellously relaxing, properties which helped Orata to market it as successfully as oysters. Soon enough, no property could be called complete unless it had first had a ‘hanging bath’ installed. Of course, it was Orata himself who did the installing – buying up villas, building the swimming pools, then selling the properties on.
It did not take long for his speculations to make the Bay of Naples synonymous with wealth and chic. Nor was the boom confined solely to the coast. Inland too, in ancient cities such as Capua, where the scent of perfume hung thick in the streets, or Nola, a favoured ally of Rome for more than two centuries, marks of peace and softness were all around. Beyond their walls, fields of apple-trees and vines, olive groves and wild flowers stretched away, back towards Vesuvius and the sea. This was Campania, the jewel of Italy, playground of the rich, fertile, prosperous and luxuriant.
But not everywhere was booming. Beyond Nola, valleys wound from the lowlands into a very different world. In Samnium all was mountainous and austere. Just as the jagged contours of the landscape provided a brutal contrast with the plain below, so too did the character of the people who had to scratch a living from the stony, scrub-clad soil. There were no oysters in Samnium, no heated swimming pools, only lumbering peasants with comical, rustic accents. They practised witchcraft, wore ugly rings of iron round their necks, and – scandalously – permitted barbers to shave their pubic hair in public. The Romans, needless to say, regarded them with scorn.
All the same, they could never quite forget that these savages had been the last Italian people to contest the mastery of the peninsula with them. Barely ten miles from Nola, at a mountain pass known as the Caudine Forks, the Samnites had inflicted one of the most humiliating defeats in Roman history. In 321 BC an entire army had been trapped in the defile and forced to surrender. Rather than slaughter their captives, the Samnites had elected to strip them to their tunics and drive them beneath a yoke formed of spears, while the victors, in their splendid armour, had stood and watched in triumph. By humiliating them in this manner, however, the Samnites had betrayed a fatal misunderstanding of their enemies. Peace was intolerable to the Romans unless they dictated it themselves. Despite the terms agreed and sworn to, they had soon found a way of breaking the treaty, and returned to the attack. Samnium had been duly conquered. Colonies were built on remote hilltops, roads driven over the valleys, the very ruggedness of the landscape tamed. To anyone lolling beside one of Orata’s swimming pools, the age when the Samnites would sally forth from the mountains to devastate Campania must have seemed very ancient history indeed.
But then suddenly, late in 91 BC, the unbelievable happened. Long-held grudges, never entirely extinguished, flared back into flames. Warfare returned to the Samnite hills. The mountain-men armed themselves as though the long years of occupation had melted away. Pouring from their fastnesses, they did as their ancestors had always done, and swept into the plains. The Romans, unmindful of the storm about to break, had stationed only the barest military presence in Campania and were caught perilously short. All along the Bay of Naples, lately the scene of such indolence and peace, cities fell to the rebels like ripe fruit from a tree: Surrentum, Stabiae and Herculaneum. But the biggest prize of all – by virtue of its strategic situation – lay further inland: Nola. After only the briefest of sieges the city was betrayed to the Samnites. The garrison was invited to join the rebel forces, but when its commander and the senior officers contemptuously refused, they were starved to death. The city itself was strengthened and provisioned. Soon enough Nola had become a mighty stronghold of the rebels’ cause.
That cause was not confined to the Samnites alone. The treachery that had delivered Nola into the hands of the rebels was far from an isolated incident: the town of Pompeii, for instance, only a few miles from Naples along the slope of Vesuvius, had been party to the rebellion from the very start. Elsewhere in Italy, tribes and cities whose previous campaigns against Rome belonged to an age of barely remembered legend had also taken up arms. The particular focus of the rebellion, however, lay along the line of the Apennines, in territory mountainous and backward like Samnium, where the peasants had long been brutalised by poverty. It was this which gave their eruption into the urbanised lowlands such a savage quality. When the rebels captured Asculum, the first city to fall to them, they slaughtered every Roman they could find. The wives of those who refused to join them had then been tortured and scalped.
The record of such atrocities might suggest nothing more than a vengeful and primitive barbarism. Yet the hatreds of the peasantry would have counted for nothing without the oligarchies who ruled the various Italian states having their own reasons for unleashing them. It had always been Roman practice to flatter and bribe the ruling classes of their allies – indeed, it was the success of this policy that had done more than anything else to ensure the Italians’ loyalty in the past. Increasingly, however, those with the crucial power to influence their communities – the wealthy, the landed, the literate – had begun to find themselves alienated from Rome. Their resentments were many. The burden of military service in Rome’s wars fell disproportionately on their shoulders. They held an inferior status in Roman law. Perhaps most unsettlingly of all, however, their eyes had been opened to a world of opportunity and power undreamed of by their ancestors. The Italians had not only helped Rome to conquer her empire, but had contributed enthusiastically to exploiting it. Wherever Roman arms had led, there Italian businessmen had been sure to follow. In the provinces the Italian allies were guaranteed privileges virtually indistinguishable from those of full Roman citizens, and the wretched provincials certainly found it hard to tell the two classes apart, loathing them equally as ‘Romaioi’. Far from mollifying the Italians, however, the experience of living abroad as a master race seems only to have encouraged them in their determination to share in a similar status back in their native land. In an era when Roman power had grown so universal, it is hardly surprising that the limited privileges of self-determination that Rome had always granted Italian politicians should have come to seem very small beer. What was the right to determine a local boundary dispute or two compared to the mastery of the world?
Just as the teeming wharves of Puteoli or the sophistication of the nearby pleasure-villas spoke of a shrinking world, then so too, in its own way, did the Italians’ revolt. The mass of their armies may have been fighting in defence of vaguely felt local loyalties, but their leaders certainly had no wish to return to the parochialisms of life before Rome. Far from trying to free their communities from the grip of a centralising super-state, they could think of no recourse other than to invent a new one of their own. At the start of the war, the rebel leaders had chosen Corfinium, in the heart of Italy, to be their new capital, ‘a city which all the Italians could share in as a replacement for Rome’.12 Just so that no one would miss the symbolism of this measure, both Corfinium and the new state itself had then been given the name of ‘Italia’. Coins had been duly issued and an embryonic government set up. Not until the nineteenth century, and Garibaldi, would there be another such attempt to form an independent Italian state.
But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the establishment of Italia suggests that for the vast majority of the Italian leaders, at least, rebellion against Rome had been a gesture less of defiance than of frustrated admiration. From the constitution to the coinage, everything was copied from the Romans. All along, the rickety new state had never been anything more than second best to the Italians’ real ambition – enrolment as citizens of Rome. Even among the common soldiers, to whom Roman citizenship would have brought few benefits, there are signs that resentment of the Republic was sometimes balanced by a mood of fellow feeling. Early in the war, following the defeat of Rome’s main army in central Italy, the survivors found themselves engaged in a desperate holding action, against men at least as well trained and armed as themselves. All through the summer of 90 BC they fought a painstaking trench warfare, gradually rolling back the rebels’ front until, as harvest-time drew near, and with it the end of the campaigning season, they prepared to engage the enemy one final time. But as the two armies lined up opposite each other soldiers on both sides began to recognise friends, calling out to one another, and then laying down their arms. ‘The threatening atmosphere was dissolved and instead became like that of a festival.’ As their troops fraternised the Roman commander and his opposite number also met, to discuss ‘peace and the Italian longing for citizenship’.13
The talks failed – naturally. How could a Roman ever grant concessions to an enemy in the field? All the same, the very fact that a parley had been possible suggested that there were regrets on both sides. Of particular significance was the identity of the Roman general. Gaius Marius was the Republic’s most celebrated soldier. Even though by now he was in his sixties, and not as light in the saddle as he had once been, he still had star quality. The rebels knew and admired him, many having been commanded by him in battle. Marius’ imperious habit of awarding citizenship to entire cohorts of Italian allies as a reward for exceptional valour was gratefully remembered. So too was the fact that Marius was not even a native of the city of Rome: he had grown up in Arpinum, a small hill town a three-day journey from the capital, famous for its poverty and remoteness, and not much else. In primordial times it had been the stronghold of tribesmen who had themselves fought against the Romans, but defeat had been followed by assimilation, and – ultimately – by enfranchisement. This last step, however, had occurred less than a century before the other Italian allies had launched their own desperate bid for the citizenship, so that the career of a man such as Marius, who had risen from such unpromising beginnings to such extraordinary heights, could not help but serve the rebels as an inspiration.
And not only the rebels. There were plenty of Romans who sympathised with the Italians’ demands. After all, what had Rome been founded as if not a city of immigrants? The first Roman women had been the abducted Sabines, back in the time of Romulus, who had flung themselves between their fathers and their new husbands, begging them not to fight but to live in peace as the citizens of a single state. The appeal had succeeded, and Romans and Sabines had settled down together on the seven hills. The legend reflected the reality that there had never been a city so generous with her citizenship as Rome. Men of diverse backgrounds and origins had always been permitted to become Roman, and to share in Roman values and beliefs. In turn, of course, it was an irony, if not quite a paradox, that chief among these was an attitude towards non-Romans of invincible contempt.
Tragically, however, in the years leading up to the Italian revolt, the arguments for openness and exclusivism had begun to grow dangerously polarised. To many, there had seemed a world of difference between granting citizenship to the occasional individual or community and enfranchising the whole of Italy. Roman politicians had not needed to be motivated entirely by chauvinism or arrogance – although plenty were, to be sure – to fear that their city was in danger of being swamped. How were Rome’s ancient institutions to cope with the sudden enrolment of millions of new citizens, dotted throughout the length and breadth of Italy? To conservatives, the threat appeared so desperate that their efforts to combat it had grown desperate in turn. Bills had been passed expelling all non-citizens from Rome. More ominously, there had been increasing resort to violence against opponents bringing forward bills of their own. In 91 BC a proposal to enfranchise the Italians had been abandoned amid rioting and violent demonstrations, and its proposer, retiring in dudgeon to his home, had been stabbed to death in the twilight gloom of his portico. The murderer was never found, but the Italian leaders had certainly known who to blame. Within days of the assassination they had begun massing their hillsmen for war.
As news had reached Rome of the massacres and scalpings at Asculum the rival factions whose squabblings had precipitated the crisis were shocked into a dazed unity. Even those most identified with the Italians’ cause had girded themselves for the fight. The grim doggedness of Marius’ campaigning had been matched wherever the legions met their erstwhile allies, in a long, bloody slog to reverse the disastrous series of defeats that had marked the start of Rome’s war. By the time Marius sat down to negotiate terms with his Italian adversary, the Roman cause had been stabilised throughout northern Italy; a few weeks later and the rebel cause began to crumble. The massacre at Asculum had heralded the revolt, and it was news from Asculum again that enabled the Romans to celebrate their first decisive victory of the war. The triumphant general had been Gnaeus Pompeius ‘Strabo’, possibly the most loathed man in Rome, as notorious for the shadiness of his character as for the squint that had given him his nickname. Strabo owned vast swaths of territory in Picenum, on the eastern seaboard of Italy, and had been blockaded there since the start of the war. With the onset of autumn, however, and clearly unwilling to go hungry through the winter, Strabo had launched two sorties that successfully caught the enemy in a pincer attack. The remnants of the rebel army had fled to Asculum, which Strabo, completing the reversal of fortune, had settled down to starve into submission.
With victory now looking increasingly assured, the Senate launched a pincer movement of its own. One wing of the attack was continued military action beyond the campaigning season, harrying the insurgents throughout central Italy, forcing their increasingly bedraggled armies to retreat into the mountains where the winter snows lay thickest. The second wing of the pincer was led by those politicians who had always favoured granting citizenship to the Italians. Confident that military success now enabled Rome to be generous, they succeeded in persuading even the most die-hard conservatives that there was no alternative, in the long term, to enfranchising the allies. Accordingly, in October 90 BC a bill was proposed and passed. By its provisions all the Italian communities that had stayed loyal were granted Roman citizenship immediately, and the rebels were promised it in due course if they would only lay down their arms. To many, the offer proved irresistible. By the summer of 89 most of northern and central Italy was back at peace.
In Samnium, however, where the struggle was rooted in ancient loathing, a resolution was not so easily obtained. And it was at this very moment, with the Republic exhausted and still preoccupied with war in its back yard, that alarming news began to filter through from Asia. A chasm of difference might have seemed to separate the peak-hugging hamlets of the Samnites and the great cities of the Greek East, cosmopolitan as they were, adorned with monuments of marble and gold, but Roman rule had bridged it. There had certainly been no lack of Samnites among the hordes of Italian businessmen and tax-farmers who had battened on to Asia. There they had merrily contributed to the very resentment of Rome that back in Samnium had pushed their compatriots into revolt. Despite the war raging in Italy, the Romans and Italians of Asia had been far too busy screwing money out of the provincials to worry about fighting each other – or, indeed, anyone else.
Then came Mithridates. When, in 89, Roman rule in Asia collapsed, the shockwaves spread fast throughout the Mediterranean economy. Italy was plunged into a disastrous slump. Ironically, the rebel leaders had exploited their compatriots’ business ties in the East to beg Mithridates to join them in their revolt, but now that Mithridates had finally taken up their invitation they found that it was Italian businessmen who were the hardest hit. In Rome, by contrast, in senatorial circles the prospect of a war with Mithridates was greeted with open relish. Everyone knew that Orientals were soft and fought like women. Even more invitingly, everyone knew that the reason for this was because Orientals were obscenely rich. No wonder that there was an almost audible sound of aristocratic lips being smacked.
One man in particular regarded the command as his by right. Marius had long had his eye on a war with Mithridates. Ten years previously he had travelled to Asia and confronted the King face to face, telling him with the bluntness of a man spoiling for a fight either to be stronger than Rome or to obey her commands. On that occasion Mithridates had managed to swallow his pride and back down from war. All the same, it may have been no coincidence that when at last he did rise to the bait the man who provoked him into doing so was a close ally of Marius. Manius Aquillius, the commissioner who incited Rome’s puppet king to invade Pontus, had previously served as Marius’ military deputy and consular colleague, and Marius in turn had helped secure Aquillius’ acquittal on a charge of extortion. The events and sources are murky, but it is possible that there is an explanation here for Aquillius’ otherwise seemingly cavalier attitude towards Rome’s security in the East, at a time when, back in Italy, she was fighting for her life. He had been aiming to provide his patron with a glorious Asian war.14
But the plot – if such indeed it were – was to have fatal consequences: for Aquillius himself, for Marius, and for the Republic as a whole. To the contagion of faction-fighting that had infected Rome for decades, racking first her own streets and then the whole of Italy, a new and deadly strain was about to be added. An Eastern command was a prize so rich that no one, not even Marius, could take it for granted. There were others, hungry and ambitious, who wanted it too. Just how badly would soon become clear.
That autumn of 89 BC, looking to the future, the Roman people found themselves in the grip of a collective paranoia. A terrible war was drawing to a close, but despite the victory there was only a sense of foreboding. Once again, it seemed, the gods were speaking through strange signs of the Republic’s doom. Most ominous of all was a trumpet, heard ringing out from a clear, cloudless sky. So dismal was its note that all those who heard it were driven half mad with fear. The augurs nervously consulted their books. When they did so they found, to their horror, that the meaning of such a wonder left little room for doubt: a great convulsion in the order of things was approaching. One age would pass away, another would dawn, in a revolution fated to consume the world.
LUCK BE A LADY
The Rivals
During the nineties Marius had gone shopping for real estate on the coast along from Naples. So had most of Rome’s super-rich, of course, but Marius’ investment in an area notorious for its indolence and effeminacy had raised particular eyebrows. Location, location, location: the great general had chosen a spot just south of the Lucrine Lake, where his villa would be conveniently situated not only for Orata’s oyster-beds, but also for the sulphur baths of the nearby spa town of Baiae. The perfect retirement home, in other words – and, as such, a public-relations disaster. Shellfish and health resorts were not what the Romans cared to associate with their war heroes. The satirists had a field day. The man of steel, they jeered, had grown soft and obese.
But this mockery was misdirected. Marius’ weight problems were only common gossip in the first place because, far from lounging by the side of his pool, the old general had chosen to remain in the public eye. Rome was the only conceivable theatre for a man of his fame, and Marius had never had the slightest intention of retiring. Ironically, this could be read in the architecture of the notorious villa itself. Built on a natural promontory, it mimicked the layout as well as the situation of a legionary camp, and displayed an enthusiasm for entrenchment that had always been the hallmark of Marius’ generalship. In its blending of the military virtues with imposing splendour, it was in fact the perfect expression of how the great general liked to see himself.
One of his former officers, inspecting the villa, could only exclaim in rueful approbation that, compared to his old commander, everyone else was blind. In the summer of 89 BC that officer had good reason to appreciate the qualities that made for an exemplary encampment. Down the coast from Marius’ villa, smoke billowed out over the orchards and vineyards of Campania as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in command of a vast army of thirteen legions, blockaded the rebel-held cities of the plain, forcing their surrender one by one. No more apprenticeships for Sulla. Instead, a career marked by the struggle to emerge from Marius’ shadow had finally brought him a reputation as perhaps the ablest officer in the war. Yet even though the rivalry between the two men, veteran general and ambitious protégé, had long since grown poisonous, Sulla never made the mistake of underestimating his old commander. Where others saw marks of flabby degeneracy in Marius’ villa, Sulla found inspiration.
It was not only that its siting served as an object lesson in the science of entrenchment. On a coastline thronged with the resorts of the ruling classes the magnificence of Marius’ estate stood out. Traditional Roman morality may have frowned upon conspicuous consumption, but it also fostered competition as the essence of life. It was his clients’ scrabbling after status symbols that had enabled Orata to make such a killing. No Roman could afford to lose face, not even when it came to having a swimming pool installed. To the nobility, a villa was less important as a holiday home than as a public display of its owner’s splendour and high birth.
And yet Marius was a provincial. His breeding lacked pedigree, his manners polish. He had won his prestige on raw ability alone. If his villa loomed above those of the aristocracy, then it served as all the more vivid a symbol of the status that an outsider could hope to win in the Roman Republic. And Marius’ status was indisputable. Not only had he won election to just about every magistracy going – often several times over – but he had even married a bona fide Julian, patrician and still proud of it, despite her family’s decline. So it was that a nobody from Arpinum could claim that he slept with a descendant of the goddess of love. Naturally, none of this did anything to boost the great man’s popularity with the establishment. Even so, Marius’ example was one that Sulla, though himself a patrician, would have been eager – and indeed anxious – to absorb.
For the younger man’s career too had been a struggle against the circumstances of his upbringing. Despite his noble birth, his father had died leaving him virtually penniless, and throughout his youth Sulla’s means had been humiliatingly disproportionate to his pretensions. He had gradually sunk into a world of seedy lodgings and even seedier companions – comics, prostitutes and drag-queens – to whom, however, he would display a touching loyalty all his life, to the immense scandal of his peers. Sulla had relished the demi-monde even as he struggled to escape from it; nor was he ever to lose his taste for slumming. Hard drinking and wisecracking, he combined the aptitudes of a bar-fly with the natural talents of a gigolo, being as physically striking as he was charming, with piercing blue eyes and hair so golden that it was almost red. Ultimately, indeed, it had been sex appeal that had redeemed him from the ranks of the déclassé, for one of Rome’s best-paid courtesans had grown so obsessed with him that in her will she had left him everything she owned. At around the same time Sulla’s stepmother had also died, having similarly appointed him her sole heir. Only at thirty, an age when most nobles had already spent years climbing the slippery pole of advancement, had Sulla at last found himself with the funds to launch his political career.
From that point on he had sought and gained prestige with a rare brilliance. His talents may have been exceptional, but not his ambition, for in Rome a man was reckoned to be nothing without the fame that accrued from glorious deeds. Whether won in warfare or political office, the reward such fame brought was the opportunity to try for ever greater achievements and ever greater renown. And at the summit of this relentless uphill race, a summit to which Sulla was now drawing close, the supreme prize beckoned. This, of course, was the consulship – still, more than four centuries after its inauguration, a magistracy of literally regal scope. If Sulla could only win election to this office, then his authority would be sanctioned by the trappings, as well as the powers, of the ancient kings. Not only would he inherit the toga bordered with royal purple and a special chair of state; he would also be accompanied by lictors, a bodyguard of twelve men, each bearing on his shoulder the fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, most dreaded of all the attributes of monarchy. An escort, in short, sufficient to reassure anyone that he had indeed reached the very top.
Not that he would ever stay there for long. A consul was no tyrant. His fasces served as symbols not of oppression but of an authority freely bestowed by the people. Subject to the whims of the voters, limited to a single year in power, and accompanied in office by colleagues their precise equal, magistrates of the Republic had little choice but to behave in office with scrupulous propriety. No matter how tempestuous a citizen’s ambitions, they rarely broke the bounds of the Romans’ respect for tradition. What the Republic fostered it also served to trammel.
And so it had always been. Rare was a high achiever who had not been oppressed by the resulting sense of tension. The ideals of the Republic served to deny the very hunger they provoked. As a result, the fate of a Roman who had tasted the sweetness of glory might often be a consuming restlessness, the gnawing, unappeasable agony of an addict. So it was that Marius, even in his sixties, and with countless honours to his name, still dreamed of beating his rivals to the command of the war against Mithridates. And so it was that Sulla, even were he to win the consulship, would continue to be taunted by the example of his old commander. Just as Marius’ villa outshone all others on the Campanian coast, so too did his prestige outrank that of any other former consul. Most men were confined by precedent and opportunity to holding the consulship once in their lives. Marius had held the office an unprecedented six times. He liked to claim that a fortuneteller had promised him a seventh.
No wonder that Sulla loathed him. Loathed him, and dreamed of winning the same greatness that Marius had won.
Thinking the Unthinkable
Late autumn 89 BC. Election time. Sulla left his army and headed north to Rome. He arrived there with a reputation brightly burnished by his recent exploits. First, he had forced the capitulation of all the rebel-held cities in Campania, until only Nola, bristling with her strengthened defences, had continued to hold out. Ignoring the threat that this presented to his rear, Sulla had next launched a dagger-thrust at the very heart of the rebel hinterland. Invading Samnium, he had gained a belated revenge for the Caudine Forks by ambushing a Samnite army in a mountain pass and then, having routed them, marched on the rebel capital, storming it in a brutal three-hour assault. Although Nola remained defiant, along with a few other isolated pockets of resistance, Sulla had effectively finished off the rebellion for good.
Such an achievement spoke for itself. This was just as well because that year, in the elections, there was particularly stiff competition. Supreme honour as the consulship was, it had begun to dawn on everyone that in 88 it might serve as the ticket to an even juicier prize. This, of course, was command of the war against Mithridates, a post that promised not only honour but fabulous profit as well – to say nothing of the pleasure of leaving Marius an also-ran. No wonder that Sulla wanted it so desperately – and increasingly what Sulla wanted Sulla tended to get. First, his aura as the conqueror of Samnium swept him into office. Then, a few weeks later, there was an even sweeter fulfilment: he was confirmed in the command against Mithridates. For Sulla triumph; and for Marius humiliation.
The public had little sympathy for their former favourite. Roman society was full of cruel double standards. The same moralists who warned old men that ‘there was nothing of which they should more beware than the temptations of idleness and inactivity’1 would also mock them savagely should they refuse to age gracefully. When the new consul, keen to finish off the war in Italy before heading east, hurried back to the siege of the still-defiant Nola, Marius was advised to leave for Campania too. After all, as the satirists pointed out, it would be perfectly safe for him to settle in his villa now – thanks to Sulla. Instead of making himself look ridiculous in Rome, why did Marius not just bow to the inevitable, retire to the Bay of Naples and gorge himself silly on oysters?
Marius replied to this question by starting on a very public workout. Every day there he was on the training ground, pushing himself to the limit, running, riding, practising with javelin and sword. It did not take long for crowds to start gathering, to gawp and cheer. At the same time Marius also began looking around for political support. What he really needed, of course, was a man who could propose a law to the people, transferring Sulla’s command against Mithridates to himself. That, effectively, meant that he needed a tribune.
He found one in the person of Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a man blackened by subsequent propaganda as ‘cruel, reckless, avaricious, shameless, and lacking in any scruples whatsoever’2 – a rich description, considering that it most likely originated with Sulla. Whatever else he may have been, Sulpicius was not a man lacking in principle. Causes mattered to him, even to the point of destruction. Nowhere had this campaigning zeal been shown to better effect than in his lifelong advocacy of Italian rights, which still, even with the granting of full citizenship, required vigorous defence. Afraid that conservatives in the Senate were plotting to water down the enfranchisement, Sulpicius had drawn up legislation to ensure that it would be done fairly, canvassed the consuls, then presented his bill to the people. To his fury, however, both Sulla and his colleague in the consulship, Pompeius Rufus, having made what Sulpicius regarded as a commitment to support him, had opted instead to oppose the bill and ensure its defeat. Sulpicius was left nursing a bitter sense of betrayal. Previously, he had regarded Rufus as an intimate friend; now, vowing revenge, he scouted around for a fresh alliance. It was at this very moment that Marius came calling. The general and the tribune speedily reached a discreet compact. Marius agreed to support Sulpicius’ legislation, while in return Sulpicius promised to propose the transfer of Sulla’s command to Marius. With his hand thus strengthened, Sulpicius proceeded to reintroduce his bill. Simultaneously, his supporters took to the streets and rioting swept through the city.
News of the unrest was brought to Sulla at his camp outside Nola. Alarmed, he sped back to Rome. On his arrival he held a secret council with Pompeius Rufus, but Sulpicius, catching wind of it, led a band of his heavies to break up the meeting. In the resulting confrontation Rufus’ son was murdered, Rufus himself barely escaped with his life, and Sulla, mortifyingly, had to take refuge from the mob in Marius’ house. Worse humiliations were to follow. Consul though he was, Sulla now found himself powerless to resist Sulpicius’ demands, for it was the tribune’s mobs, not the fasces, who ruled Rome. Forced to agree that the pro-Italian legislation be passed and that Rufus, as payback for his treachery, be stripped of his consulship, Sulla himself appears to have been offered nothing more in exchange than the chance to continue in office and to return to the siege of Nola. At this stage there was no mention of the Mithridatic command. Sulla had no reason to doubt that his commission, at least, remained sacrosanct. All the same, returning to his camp, where the trappings of his office would have remained on magnificent and awful display, he cannot have helped but reflect bitterly upon the gap that had opened with such alarming speed between the show and the substance of his power. Such had been the damage to his prestige that only a triumphant Eastern war would ever repair it. Otherwise, far from covering him in glory, his consulship threatened to terminate his career.
For Sulla, then, as for Marius, the stakes had grown perilously high – except that Sulla, unlike Marius, was yet to realise just how high they still had to go. Then, with the dust of Rome upon him, another messenger came galloping down the road that led to Nola. Arriving among the siege works, he was brought before the consul. The messenger proved to be one of Marius’ staff officers, and Sulla had only to see him to know that the news was likely to be bad. Even so, just how bad still came as a shock. There had been a plebiscite, Sulla was informed. Proposed by Sulpicius, it had been ratified by the Roman people and passed into law. By its terms, Sulla was demoted from the command against Mithridates. His replacement – inevitably – was Marius. The staff officer had come to take command of the army. Sulpicius had paid off his debt.
Sulla, first in consternation and then in mounting fury, retired to his tent. There he did some quick calculations. With him at Nola he had six legions. Five of these had been assigned to the war against Mithridates and one to the continued prosecution of the siege – in all, around thirty thousand men. Although much reduced from the numbers Sulla had commanded the previous summer, they nevertheless represented a menacing concentration of fighting power. Only the legions of Pompeius Strabo, busy mopping up rebels on the other side of Italy, could hope to rival them. Marius, back in Rome, had no legions whatsoever.
The maths was simple. Why, then, had Marius failed to work it out, and how could so hardened an operator have chosen to drive his great rival into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready to hand? Clearly, the prospect that Sulla might come out of it fighting had never even crossed Marius’ mind. It was impossible, unthinkable. After all, a Roman army was not the private militia of the general who commanded it, but the embodiment of the Republic at war. Its loyalty was owed to whomever was appointed to its command by the due processes of the constitution. This was how it had always been, for as long as the Republic’s citizens had been going to war – and Marius had no reason to imagine that things might possibly have changed.
But Sulla did have reason: his hatred of his rival, his fury at the frustration of his ambitions and his utter belief in the justice of his case all helped him to contemplate a uniquely audacious and dreadful possibility. No citizen had ever led legions against their own city. To be the first to take such a step, and to outrage such a tradition, should have been a responsibility almost beyond a Roman’s enduring. Yet it seems that Sulla, far from havering, betrayed not the slightest hesitation. All his most successful operations, he would later claim, had been the result not of a measured weighing of the odds but of a sudden flash of inspiration. Such flashes, it appeared to Sulla, were divinely sent. Baleful cynic though he was, he was also an unusually religious man. He believed with perfect certainty that a goddess was prompting him; a great goddess, more powerful than any of the gods who might be affronted by his actions. Whatever he did, however high he reached, Sulla could be confident of the protection of Venus, who granted to her favourites both sex appeal and fortune.
How else, after all, to explain his extraordinary rise? As a man who set great store by loyalty, he had never forgotten that he owed everything to the two women who had left him their fortunes. Did this influence how he saw his relationship with Venus herself ? Did he see the goddess as another woman to be seduced and worshipped, in return for all she could provide? Certainly, throughout his life, Sulla deployed his charm as a weapon, on politicians and soldiers as much as on whores. In particular, he was adept at winning the rank-and-file legionaries to his side. He could speak their language and enjoy their jokes, and he soon developed a reputation as an officer prepared to do his men a favour. When combined with his parallel reputation for extraordinary good luck, fostered over the years by a succession of military victories and daring personal escapades, Sulla’s popularity with his troops was hardly a surprise.
Yet, to many, there remained something sinister about his charm. It could be read in his physiognomy. For, handsome as Sulla was, he had a violent, purple complexion, and all over his face, whenever he grew angry, mysterious white spots would appear. Medical opinion explained this disfigurement as the consequence of sexual perversion, a diagnosis that was also reckoned to confirm the persistent story that Sulla lacked a testicle. The seamy nature of such rumours had always dogged him. When Sulla had been appointed to his first campaign, Marius, as his commander, had expressed disgust at his new officer’s frivolous reputation. Much later, when Sulla had more than proved his military worth, and was boasting to a nobleman of lesser achievement but greater pedigree, the nobleman would only comment that there was something not quite right about a man who had come into such wealth after being left nothing by his father. Such disquiet about Sulla’s triumphs was expressed too consistently for it to be dismissed as snobbery and jealousy alone. His great victories against the Samnites, for instance, had required him to appropriate legions from their legitimate commanders, and even, on one notorious occasion, to wink at murder. In the early months of 89 BC, during the siege of Pompeii, a particularly obdurate defence had led the Roman troops to suspect their commander of treachery and lynch him. When Sulla arrived to take control of the siege from the murdered officer, he conspicuously failed to punish the mutineers, and was even rumoured to have instigated the crime himself. It says much about the ambiguous character of his reputation that such a story could not only be believed, but apparently boost his popularity with his men.
Certainly, having clubbed one officer to death, it appears that Sulla’s troops had developed a taste for dispatching uppity legates. When Sulla summoned them to a meeting on the parade ground and broke the news that he had received from Rome, they immediately turned on Marius’ envoy and stoned him to death. Unprompted, they then clamoured for Sulla to lead them on the capital, a demand to which Sulla delightedly acceded. His officers were so appalled by this plan that all except one resigned, but Sulla, knowing that he had already set himself beyond the pale, could no longer turn back. Leaving behind a single legion to continue the siege of Nola, he marched northwards. The news of his approach was greeted in Rome with disbelief. Some, such as Pompeius Rufus, the deposed consul, welcomed the news and hurried off to join him, but most felt only consternation and despair. Frantic embassies were sent in an attempt to shame Sulla into turning back, but to every appeal he would only answer blithely that he was marching on Rome ‘to free her from her tyrants’.3 Marius and Sulpicius, all too aware who were the objects of this menacing aim, desperately sought to buy time. As Sulla approached the outskirts of Rome they sent one final deputation, promising that the Senate would be assembled to discuss his grievances, and that they too would attend its meeting and be bound by its decisions. All they asked in return was that Sulla stay camped five miles from the sacred boundary of Rome herself.
Everyone knew that to traverse this would be a gesture of awesome and terrible significance. Rome was numinous with the presence of gods, but there were few spaces more holy than the pomerium, the ancient boundary that marked the furrow ploughed by Romulus, and had not been altered since the time of the kings. To cross it was absolutely forbidden to any citizen in arms: within the pomerium was the realm of Jupiter, the city’s guardian, and the guarantor of her peace. He was a god it was perilous to anger, so when Sulla told Marius’ envoys that he would accept their terms they may even have believed him. But Sulla had been dissembling: no sooner had Marius’ envoys set off back for Rome than he ordered his legions to follow, advancing in separate divisions to seize three of the city gates. Mighty though Jupiter was, Sulla continued to rely upon the blessings of Venus, the goddess of fortune, and a divinity – he trusted – just as great.
As the legionaries passed over the pomerium and began pushing through the narrow streets, their fellow citizens greeted them with a hail of tiles flung down from the rooftops. Such was the ferocity of this assault that for a moment the soldiers quailed, until Sulla ordered that fire-arrows be shot at the roofs. As flames began to crackle and spread down the line of the city’s highways Sulla himself rode along the greatest of them all, the via Sacra, into the very heart of Rome. Marius and Sulpicius, after a futile attempt to raise the city’s slaves, had already fled. Everywhere, mail-clad guards took up their new posts. Swords and armour were worn outside the Senate House. The unthinkable had happened. A general had made himself the master of Rome.
It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honours had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, nor could its presence there, a lurking toxin, easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate – these had previously been the worst that a citizen might have had to dread. But Sulla, in his pursuit of Marius, was pushing rivalry and personal hatred to new extremes. From that moment on, the memory of it would haunt every ambitious citizen – both as a temptation and as a fear.
And naturally, having taken his fateful step, Sulla was desperate to force his advantage home. Summoning the Senate, he demanded that his opponents be branded enemies of the state. The Senate, with one nervous eye on Sulla’s guards, hurriedly obeyed. Sentences of outlawry were duly pronounced on Marius, Sulpicius and ten others, including Marius’ young son. Sulpicius, having been betrayed by a slave, was hunted down and murdered, but the other condemned men all escaped. Marius himself, after a series of hair-raising adventures that saw him hiding in reed beds and outfacing contract killers, eventually reached the relative safety of Africa. To that extent, Sulla’s gamble had failed: the snake had been scotched, not killed. Marius had survived to fight another day. But Sulla, although he was disappointed, was not unduly alarmed. The condemnation of his great rival had been something more than just a deeply satisfying act of personal vengeance. He had also intended it to give another message: by identifying his own cause with that of the Republic, he hoped to recast his march on Rome as an action in its defence. Backed by five legions he may have been, but to Sulla legitimacy remained more important than any naked use of power. During the outlawry debate, when a venerable senator had told him to his face that a great man such as Marius should never be made a public enemy, Sulla had accepted the old man’s right to dissent without demur. Whenever he could, he would behave with a similar regard towards the sensibilities of his compatriots. Far from playing the military despot, he preferred to pose as the defender of the constitution.
Nor was this mere hypocrisy. If Sulla was a revolutionary, then it was very much in the cause of the status quo. Hostile towards any hint of innovation, he had all of Sulpicius’ legislation declared invalid. To replace it, he brought in laws of his own, aimed at bolstering the traditional supremacy of the Senate. Despite distaste for its soi-disant champion, the Senate can hardly have been averse to such measures. Yet Sulla remained caught in a dilemma. Eager to leave Italy for the Mithridatic war, but afraid of what might happen in his absence, he knew that it was vital for him to leave supporters in positions of power. Interfere too blatantly in the annual elections, however, and his claim to embody the rule of law would become laughable. As it was, he suffered the humiliation of seeing his allies failing to gain either of the consulships. True, one of the successful candidates, Gnaeus Octavius, was a natural conservative, like himself, but the second, Cornelius Cinna, had gone so far as to threaten him with prosecution. In the circumstances Sulla accepted defeat with as good a grace as he could muster. Before he would agree to the new consuls taking up their office, however, he required them to swear a public oath on the sacred hill of the Capitol that they would never overturn his legislation. Octavius and Cinna, evidently unwilling to push their luck, agreed. As he took the oath Cinna picked up a stone and hurled it, publicly praying that if he failed to keep his word to Sulla he might similarly be hurled out of Rome.
And with that Sulla had to be satisfied. Before he crossed from Italy to Greece, however, he took one final measure. Wishing to reward a faithful ally at the same time as ensuring his own security, he arranged for the command of Strabo’s legions to be transferred to Pompeius Rufus, his colleague in the consulship of 88 BC. In fact, far from ensuring his friend’s safety, such a measure served only to demonstrate how blind Sulla had been to the implications of his troops’ willingness to march with him on Rome. Just as Marius’ legate had done, Rufus arrived at his new army’s camp armed with a bill and nothing more. Strabo welcomed the man come to take his place with a menacing politeness. He presented Rufus to the troops, then absented himself from the camp – on business, he claimed. The next day Rufus celebrated his new command by performing a sacrifice. A gang of soldiers clustered round him where he stood by the altar, and as he raised the sacrificial knife they seized him and struck him down, ‘as though he were the sacrificial offering himself’.4 Strabo, claiming to be outraged, hurried back to the camp but took no action against his murderous troops. Inevitably, the rumours that had dogged Sulla in similar circumstances now attached themselves to Strabo. There were few who doubted that he had ordered the murder of his replacement himself.
A consul butchered by his own soldiers: Rufus’ fate might seem to confirm the doom-laden judgement of a later generation, that after Sulla’s coup ‘there was nothing left which could shame warlords into holding back on military violence – not the law, not the institutions of the Republic, nor even the love of Rome’.5 In fact, it illustrated the opposite. Far from following up Rufus’ murder by launching a coup of his own, Strabo held back from committing himself to any course of action at all. Aware that with Sulla gone from Italy he now held the balance of power, he spent the year 87 veering from faction to faction, offering his support to the highest bidder, all the while making ever more extravagant demands. Such avarice and trimming served only to compound his already massive unpopularity. Then, towards the end of the year, nemesis struck. Following his spectacular death, when the tent in which he lay dying of plague was struck by lightning, crowds mobbed his funeral procession and dragged the corpse from its bier through the mud. Without the intervention of a tribune, it would have been torn to shreds. In a society where prestige was the principal measure of a man’s worth Strabo’s posthumous fate was a grisly warning to anyone tempted to gamble with the interests of the state. Yet not even Strabo, grasping as he was and armed with opportunity, had thought to aim for military dictatorship. Sulla’s coup had been an outrage but not, it seemed, a fatal one. The laws, the institutions of the Republic and the love of Rome still held good.
As was only natural. The Republic, in the eyes of its citizens, was something much more than a mere constitution, a political order to be toppled or repealed. Instead, hallowed by that most sacred of Roman concepts, tradition, it provided a complete pattern of existence for all those who shared in it. To be a citizen was to know that one was free – ‘and that the Roman people should ever not be free is contrary to all the laws of heaven’.* Such certainty suffused every citizen’s sense of himself. Far from expiring with Sulla’s march on Rome, respect for the Republic’s laws and institutions endured because they were expressions of the Romans’ profoundest sense of their own identity. Yes, a general had turned on his own city, but even he had claimed to be doing so in defence of the traditional order. There had certainly been no revolution. For all the trauma of Sulla’s march on Rome, no one could imagine that the Republic itself might be overthrown, because no one could conceive what might possibly replace it.
So it was that, even after the shocks of 88, life went on. The new year of 87 dawned with an appearance of normality. Two consuls, elected by the Roman people, sat in their chairs of state. The Senate met to advise them. The streets were empty of soldiers. Meanwhile, the man who had dared to march on Rome was disembarking in Greece. His ferocious talents, no longer turned against his own countrymen, could at last be deployed in a fitting manner. There was a war, sternest of all the Romans’ traditions, to be won; enemies of the Republic to overthrow and chastise.
Sulla was marching east.
Missing the Joke
Six years earlier, in 93 BC, a Roman commissioner had paused in Athens on his way to Asia. Gellius Publicola was a man who combined a taste for Greek culture with the sensibility of a joker. Wishing to meet the philosophers for which Athens was still celebrated, he had summoned the various representatives of the squabbling philosophical schools and urged them, with a perfectly straight face, to resolve their differences. If this proved beyond their abilities, he added, then he was very graciously prepared to step in and settle their controversies for them. Forty years later, Gellius’ proposal to the Athenian philosophers would still be remembered by his friends as a prize example of wit. ‘How everyone roared!’6
Quite when the philosophers realised that Gellius was joking we are not told. Nor whether they found the joke quite so rib-tickling as Gellius himself seems to have done. One suspects that they did not. Philosophy was still a serious business in Athens. The very idea of being lectured by a bumptious Roman prankster must surely have struck the heirs of Socrates as a humiliating indignity. All the same, they no doubt laughed politely, if hollowly: Roman offers to settle squabbles had a certain ominous resonance in Greece.
And anyway, in Athens servility and arrogance had long been sides of the same coin. More than anywhere else in Greece, the sanctity of history clung to the city. The Athenians never forgot – nor let anyone else forget – that it was they who had saved Greece at the Battle of Marathon, and had once been the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. Resplendent still upon the Acropolis, the Parthenon stood as a permanent memorial to the years of Athenian supremacy. All gone, though; long gone. In the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, composed in the century after Alexander’s death, the Parthenon was conspicuous by its absence. It was too small, too out-of-date, reflecting the presumptions of an age in which empires as well as monuments had grown gigantic. Compared to the super-state of Rome, Athens was a provincial backwater. Her memories of empire were nostalgia, nothing more. Any ideas above their station, any hints that the Athenians still imagined themselves a great power, were regarded by the Romans with hilarity. During the Republic’s campaigns against Macedon Athens had presumed to give her support, declaring war with a masterpiece of rhetorical invective. The Romans were not impressed. ‘This was the Athenians’ war against the King of Macedon, a war of words,’ they sniffed. ‘Words are the only weapon that the Athenians have left.’7
Gellius’ joke was cruel because it suggested that even this last weapon might be taken away from them. As, in truth, it already had been. Whether they cared to admit it or not, philosophers, like every other legacy of the Athenian golden age, had become mere adjuncts to the service industry. Those who did particularly well out of Roman patronage had long since learned to cut the cloth of their speculations accordingly. Typical was the age’s most celebrated polymath, Posidonius. Although he had studied in Athens, Posidonius was widely travelled, and rationalised what he observed in Rome’s provinces – rather optimistically – as a commonwealth of man. He was a close associate of Rutilius Rufus, that upright defender of his province’s interests, and evidently believed that his friend was a truer face of Rome than the publicani who had destroyed him. In the new order that the Republic was bringing into the world, Posidonius somehow managed to catch a reflection of the order of the universe. He argued that it was the moral duty of Rome’s subjects to accept such a dispensation. Differences of culture and geography would soon dissolve. History was coming to an end.
Posidonius may have been expressing himself in high-flown terms, but he was only putting a gloss on what was evident enough anyway. The coming of Rome had indeed shrunk the world. It did not take a philosopher to recognise this – or to turn it to profit. The Athenian ruling classes may privately have regarded their Roman masters as bullying philistines, but they knew better than to voice such an opinion publicly. While the Romans had few compunctions about beggaring their defeated enemies, they had always been careful to reward their friends, and Athens had benefited accordingly. The juiciest prize of all had come in 165, following the final war against Macedon, during which the island republic of Rhodes had been less than full-blooded in her backing for Rome. This had been duly noted by the Senate. Rhodes had long been the major trading entrepôt in the eastern Mediterranean, and in punishing her the Romans had demonstrated that they could toy with economies to the same devastating effect that they fought on the battlefield. A toll-free harbour had been opened on the island of Delos, and presented to Athens. Rhodes had consequently seen her revenues collapse; Athens had grown rich. By the start of the first century, so prosperous had the Athenians become that their currency, with Roman encouragement, had established itself as legal tender throughout the Greek world. Parallel measures synchronised the different systems of weights used in Italy and Athens. It was not only Rome that benefited from the resulting trade boom. Ships crammed with Italian commodities began to throng the harbours of Athens and Delos. The Athenian upper classes, their eyes now firmly fixed on the world beyond their city, concentrated on the only measure of achievement left to them – that of becoming millionaires.
This was not an option open to every Athenian, of course. In an economy run by and for the super-rich the wealthier a minority of citizens became, the more the resentments of the majority seethed. This was true of every society in the ancient world, but in Athens – the birthplace of democracy – perhaps uniquely so. Among the Athenian poor, dreams of independence were indissolubly linked to memories of the time when the power of the people had been more than just a slogan. Nothing, of course, could have been more designed to give big business the jitters. As it progressively tightened its grip on government, the institutions that had once maintained Athenian democracy were allowed to wither. However, they were not abolished altogether because, apart from anything else, they were good for the tourist trade. Visiting Romans enjoyed the quaint spectacle of democracy in action. Sometimes Athens offered the pleasures less of a museum than of a zoo.
Then suddenly, in 88 BC, everything was turned upside down. While the Athenian business elite watched in horror as Mithridates’ armies camped in triumph on the opposite shores of the Aegean, their impoverished countrymen crowed in delight. The old desperate longing for freedom, so long repressed, convulsed the city. An embassy was sent to Mithridates, who welcomed it with open arms. An agreement was speedily reached: in return for providing him with a harbour, Athens would have her democracy restored. The pro-Roman business classes, realising which way the wind was blowing, began to flee the city. Democracy was officially re-established, amid wild scenes of rejoicing, and even wilder scenes of slaughter. Out of the exploding class war a new government emerged, pledged to defending the city’s ancient order and traditions. Athens being Athens, the revolution was led by a philosopher, one Aristion, an old sparring partner of Posidonius who did not share his rival’s positive perspective on Rome. With Italy riven by war, however, and an alliance with the all-conquering Mithridates in the bag, Aristion did not expect too much trouble from the Romans. To the ecstatic Athenians, independence and democracy alike appeared secured. Then, in the spring of 87, Sulla landed in Greece.
He headed directly for Athens. Almost before they knew what had hit them, the Athenians found themselves with five vengeful legions commanded by Rome’s most ruthless general camped outside their walls. Confronted by this nightmare, Aristion’s only tactic was to compose rude songs about Sulla’s face, comparing it with a mulberry topped with oatmeal. These would be chanted from the city walls while Aristion himself yelled obscene witticisms about Sulla and his wife, complete with extravagant hand gestures. Proof, as Posidonius commented acidly, ‘that swords should never be placed in the hands of children’.8
Sulla, whose enjoyment of comedians had its limits, responded to Aristion with a few pointed insults of his own. He ordered the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught to be chopped down and used to build siege engines. When an Athenian peace delegation did what Athenian peace delegations had always done and began to discourse windily on the glories of its city’s past, Sulla silenced the talk with a gesture of his hand. ‘Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.’9 With this dismissal, he sent the delegates back to their city to eat boiled shoe leather, and starve. Athens’ cultural capital had reached the limits of its overdraft.
When at length the city was stormed, and Sulla gave his troops licence to plunder and kill, many of the victims were suicides. They knew all too well what the fate of Corinth had been, and they dreaded the annihilation of their city. The destruction was certainly terrible: the port was obliterated and the Acropolis plundered; everyone who had served in the democratic government was executed; their supporters were stripped of the vote. The city itself, however, was not burned to the ground. Sulla, who had expressed such contempt for history, announced with a grand rhetorical flourish that he spared the living out of respect for the dead. Even as he spoke blood was spilling outwards from the city through the suburbs.
The wreckage was inherited by a government of the businessmen who had fled to Sulla when the trouble first began. They crawled back into a city from which every figleaf of independence and prosperity had been torn. Roman rule was soon confirmed beyond all doubt when Sulla, marching north from Athens, met and smashed two armies sent to Greece by Mithridates. Soon afterwards Sulla held a summit with Mithridates himself. Both men had good reason to come to an agreement. Mithridates, knowing that the game was over, was desperate to keep hold of his kingdom. Sulla, nervous of his enemies back in Italy, was eager to head home. In return for accepting controls on his offensive capability and the surrender of all the territory he had conquered, the murderer of eighty thousand Italians was rewarded by Sulla with a peck on his cheek. No one had ever emerged so unscathed from a war with the Republic before. Beaten he may have been, but Mithridates still sat on the throne of Pontus. The time would come when Rome would regret that he had not been finished off for good.
As it was, the immediate objects of Sulla’s vengeance were the wretched Greeks. In the province of Asia, Roman rule was briskly reimposed. Sulla, posing as the avenger of his murdered countrymen, despite the peck he had given Mithridates, applied the screws with relish. Not only were cities charged five years’ back-tax, but they were expected to pay the full costs of the war, and billet the garrisons sent to oppress them. Sulla, who liked to pretend that his terms had been generous, creamed off the tribute, and in 84 headed back to Greece. Now that Athens was no longer in arms against him he could display his respect for her cultural legacy in the traditional manner of victorious Roman generals – by pilfering it. The columns of the temple of Zeus were pulled down ready for transport to Rome. Athletes were rounded up, showpieces for Sulla’s triumph, leaving the Olympic Games so denuded of its stars that only the sprint could be staged. Most gratifying of all to Sulla’s sense of humour was the wholesale looting of Athenian libraries, which were stripped of their holdings. Henceforward, if anyone wanted to study Aristotle, they would have to do so in Rome. Sulla’s revenge on Athenian philosophy was sweet.
Even so, his capacity for vengeance had not yet been tested to the limits. As he pointed out proudly in a letter to the Senate, in barely three years he had won back all the territory annexed by Mithridates. Greece and Asia once again acknowledged the sway of Rome. Or so it suited Sulla to pretend. In fact, he no longer represented the Republic. The government he had established back in Rome had collapsed. Sulla himself had been condemned to death in absentia, his property razed, his family forced to flee. There was no one in the shattered East who could have doubted what Sulla’s response to these insults would be. Now that Greece had been tamed, he was ready to head back home. Still trusting in his luck and the protection of Venus, Sulla prepared to embark his troops and turn his vengeance back on his native city.
Once again, Rome would have to wait his arrival, and shudder.
RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Sulla Redux
On 6 July 83 BC the largest and holiest building in Rome was struck by lightning. The ancient temple of Jupiter loomed on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. Here, beneath a ceiling sheathed in gold, amid trophies of statues and shields, the guardian of Rome had his shrine. Back in the distant days of the kings, excavators digging the temple’s foundations had found a human head. Augurers, summoned to interpret this wonder, had explained that it foretold Rome’s future as the head of the world. Who could doubt, then, that it was Jupiter who had guided the Republic to its greatness? No wonder that the Senate should choose to hold its first meeting every year in the sanctum of the god. This was where Roman power was most touched by the divine.
But now Jupiter had decided to destroy his own temple with a thunderbolt. This was not a promising omen. It hardly required the Sibylline Books to reveal that – which was just as well, since they too were going up in the blaze. But what was the cause of the god’s anger? As the crowds gathered to watch the disaster, the flames billowed sparks and smoke across the Forum. This was the heart of Rome, stretching all the way from the Capitol, hill of the gods, to the Palatine, hill of power. The Forum, along with the Circus, was one of two open spaces within the city walls where Rome’s citizens could mix freely. In recent years it had begun to grow pompous, cleared of market traders and lined with luxury shops, yet still, more than anywhere else in the city, it symbolised the unity of the Roman people. This had been the case since ancient times. Originally a marsh, it had been drained to provide a meeting-place for the warring inhabitants of the neighbouring hills. As such, it was where the Romans had first learned to conduct their affairs as citizens. Like the city itself, the Forum was a jumble of discordant monuments, both a museum of the Republic’s history and the hub of the city’s life. Lawyers pleaded their cases, bankers negotiated loans, Vestal Virgins tended their goddess’s flame, and everyone came to chat or be seen. It was politics, however, that dominated the Forum. The crowds watching the destruction of Jupiter’s temple would have been used to assembling at the foot of the Capitol. Here was the Comitium, where citizens gathered to hear orators address them from the Rostra, the curved speaker’s platform made from the prows of long-ago captured ships. Immediately adjacent to it was the Curia, where the Senate met, and a little to its south the temple of Castor and Pollux, in front of which the tribunes would summon assemblies to debate and vote on laws. Along this axis of buildings and open spaces lay the great theatre of the Republic’s political life, Rome’s most potent expression of her citizens’ liberties and values. All the more portentous, then, that as the fire on the Capitol raged, it would have dyed the Forum below it an angry red. Red: the colour of Mars, the god of war and bloodshed.
Sulla was later to claim that Bellona, Mars’ female equivalent, had given him advance warning of the catastrophe. Shortly after landing in Italy, one of his slaves had fallen into a prophetic trance, revealing that unless victory were immediate, the Capitol would be destroyed by fire. Sulla’s superstitions did not prevent him from being a master of propaganda, and this story, no doubt assiduously repeated, neatly served to blacken his rivals’ cause. Certainly it would have reminded the public that Sulla, before his departure for Greece, had led the consul Cinna to the Capitol and there made him swear an oath not to attack him in his absence. Cinna had almost immediately gone back on his word. No wonder that the burning of the Capitol had come to Sulla as a godsend. From now on, as he plotted his reprisals, he could point to proof that the gods too wanted vengeance.
In fact, Cinna’s original oath-breaking had been as much an act of self-defence as treachery. In the brutalised political climate that Sulla had left behind, rivalries had continued to degenerate into ever greater violence. A dispute over that perennial bugbear, the Italians’ voting rights, had been sufficient to push the two consuls of 87 into open warfare. Cinna, expelled from Rome by Octavius, his colleague in the consulship, had promptly looked for ways to force a return. His first step had been to work some crowd-pleasing magic on the legion still camped at Nola, which as a result, for the second time in just over a year, had upped its siege and marched on Rome. But Cinna had conjured other allies too. The deadliest had brought not a legion but the magic of his name. After long months of exile in Africa, brooding amid the ruins of Carthage, Gaius Marius had returned.
Recruiting a personal army of slaves as he travelled through Italy, he had joined forces with Cinna, then turned on Rome. The city had fallen easily. Marius, psychotic with bitterness and rage, had launched a brutal purge of his enemies. Octavius, refusing to flee, had been hacked down where he sat in his consul’s chair, and his head brought to Cinna, who displayed it in triumph on the Rostra. Other opponents of Marius had either fled or been massacred with conspicuous brutality. Meanwhile, with his gangs of slaves still rampaging through the city, the old man had finally been elected to his long-prophesied seventh consulship. No sooner had he taken up office, however, than he had abandoned himself to violent drinking bouts and nightmares. A fortnight later he was dead.
This had left Cinna as the regime’s undisputed leader. With a strongman’s contempt for precedent, he had maintained himself in the consulship for three consecutive years, preparing for Sulla’s return. Then in 84, with Sulla poised to invade Italy, Cinna had decided to pre-empt him and take the fight to Greece. This time, however, the consul’s army-camp rhetoric had let him down. His soldiers had mutinied and in the resulting disturbances Cinna himself had been murdered. Most Romans, dreading the arrival of Sulla’s battle-hardened legions, must have believed that, with Cinna gone, there would be one final chance for peace. Sulla, however, contemptuously rejecting the proposals put forward by neutrals in the Senate, had refused even to contemplate reconciliation. Despite the loss of Cinna, the Marians had maintained their iron grip on power, and both sides now braced themselves for a fight to the death. Marius’ own blood feud had passed to his son, a famously good-looking playboy whose lifestyle did nothing to diminish his filial loathing for his father’s greatest foe. As the temple of Jupiter blazed on the Capitol, the younger Marius hurried to the scene and rescued not the statue of the god, not the prophecies of the Sibyl, but the temple treasures that would enable him to pay for more legions. A few months later he was elected to the consulship of 82. He was only twenty-six.
By now, such cavalier abuse of the constitution had become the norm. Senators who had endured years of having their ambitions blocked by Cinna and his stooges could only fume in silence at the sight of such a young man strutting around the Forum with his bodyguard of lictors. Yet, unpopular though the Marians undoubtedly were, the alternative hardly inspired much optimism. A sinister aura still clung to Sulla, the legacy of his own protracted record of violence. No great upsurge of support greeted his return. His claim to be restoring the Republic was treated with at best suspicion. Armies blocked the roads to Rome and failed to melt away.
All the same, Sulla was no longer the pariah among his peers that he had been during his first march on Rome, back in 88, when only a single officer had accompanied him. Five years on his entourage was thronged with noblemen. Many of these were pursuing personal vendettas against the Marians. Pre-eminent among them was a member of one of Rome’s most celebrated families, Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose father had led the opposition to Marius and been executed for his pains. In the resulting purge Crassus’ brother had also been killed and the family’s estates in Italy seized. These holdings would have been considerable: Crassus’ father had combined a glittering political career with a most unsenatorial interest in the import–export trade. Not for nothing was his family nicknamed ‘Rich’: Crassus would inherit from his father the recognition that wealth was the surest foundation of power. Later, he was to be notorious for claiming that until a man could afford to maintain his own army it was impossible for him to have too much money.1 This was a judgement founded on youthful experience. Fleeing his family’s killers, the young Crassus had travelled to Spain, where his father’s spell as governor had been immensely profitable. Even hiding out on a remote beach the fugitive had been able to live in style, with dependants delivering food and nubile slavegirls to his cave. Then, after several months of subsisting on such provisions, the news of Cinna’s death had encouraged Crassus to claim his patrimony in full. Despite being a private citizen, he had taken the unheard-of step of recruiting his own army, a huge force of some two and a half thousand men. Crassus had then led it round the Mediterranean, sampling alliances with various other anti-Marian factions, before finally sailing for Greece and throwing in his lot with Sulla, who, unsurprisingly, had welcomed the new arrival with open arms.
The warmest welcome of all, however, was reserved for a warlord even younger and more glamorous than Crassus. Sulla had crossed to Italy and was advancing northwards when news was brought to him that another private army had been raised on his behalf and was marching south to meet him. Since the roads were blocked by a variety of Marian forces, Sulla was nervous that the reinforcements might be wiped out, but just as he was pressing forward to their rescue there came further news: the tyro general had won a series of brilliant victories; a consular army had been put to flight. Now the army was waiting for Sulla on the road ahead, drawn up in full formation, arms glittering, faces glowing with success. Sulla, as he was meant to be, was duly impressed. Approaching the tent of the novice general, he dismounted from his horse. A young man stood waiting, his golden hair swept up in a quiff, his profile posed to look like Alexander’s. He hailed Sulla as ‘Imperator’ – ‘General’ – and Sulla then greeted him as ‘Imperator’ in turn. This was an honour that it usually took even the most accomplished soldier many years to earn. Gnaeus Pompeius – ‘Pompey’ – was barely twenty-three.
Precocious swagger, a genius for self-promotion and an almost childlike relish for the perks of success: these were to be the defining characteristics of Pompey’s rise to glory. Sulla, who indulged his protégé’s vanity with an inscrutable cynicism, had his measure from the very start. He was perfectly content to flatter the young man if it helped to ensure his support. Pompey both merited and required courting. From his father, the perfidious Pompeius Strabo, he had inherited not only the largest private estate in Italy, but an aptitude for switching sides. Unlike Crassus, Pompey had no personal feud with the Marian regime. Before Sulla’s arrival he had been spotted sniffing round Cinna’s camp. Evidently the spectacle of its collapse into mutiny had persuaded him that Sulla would be the better man to back. Pompey always had a nose for where the richest opportunities might lie.
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