Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

What he and Crassus had both realised was that civil war transformed the rules of the political game. The most ruthless and clear sighted of the younger generation had been presented with an unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog their elders. Sulla, who regarded the younger Marius as his deadliest foe, commented ruefully that as he aged his enemies grew younger. So too did his supporters. Pompey, in particular, led his army with the insouciance of a schoolboy handed a toy. To the Romans, the passions of youth were violent and dangerous, and only discipline could tame them. Pompey, however, had been given his head. ‘Adulescentulus carnifex’, his enemies labelled him: ‘teenage butcher’.² Not having had to master either custom or law during his short career, Pompey could kill without respect for either.

One man could have reined him in, of course – yet the example provided by Sulla himself was of a savagery which put even that of the ‘teenage butcher’ in the shade. Deliberately, it seems, he provoked one final uprising from the Samnites, massacring them whenever he had the opportunity, as though to cast himself not as a warlord but as the defender of Rome. Once again Samnium and Campania were pillaged mercilessly, and once again, for the last time in history, the Samnites strapped on their gorgeous armour and high-crested helmets and marched down into the plains. They joined a Marian cause already on the point of collapse. By 83, after a year of civil war, one consul had already fled Italy for Africa, and the other, the younger Marius, was bottled up in the hill town of Praeneste, some twenty-five miles east of Rome. The Samnites, shadow-boxing with Sulla, first attempted to march to Marius’ relief, but then, with the sudden realisation that Rome lay unprotected in their rear, swung round abruptly and marched on the capital. Sulla, taken by surprise, pursued them at frantic speed. As the Samnites appeared within sight of Rome’s walls, their commander ordered them to wipe out the city. ‘Do you think that these wolves who have preyed so terribly upon the freedoms of Italy will ever vanish until the forest that shelters them has been destroyed?’³ he cried. But even as the Samnites began to mass before the Colline Gate, the wails of women sounding in their ears from the terrified city beyond, Sulla was drawing near. Already by noon his vanguard of cavalry had begun to harass the enemy lines, and by late afternoon, against the advice of his lieutenants, Sulla was ready to throw his exhausted army into battle. All evening, and long into the night, the struggle ebbed and flowed. Crassus shattered the Samnite left wing, but Sulla found his own wing being broken and his troops in danger of being crushed against the city gates. Yet still his fortune held. Praying to the gods who had always been his protectors, he rallied his men and by dawn, when the news of Crassus’ success finally reached him, the victory was his.

The bloodbath of the Colline Gate was decisive. His enemies had no more armies left in Italy with which to continue the war. As the Samnite prisoners began to be rounded up Sulla was the absolute, unquestioned master of Rome.

Sulla Felix

Three thousand prisoners were taken at the Colline Gate. A further three thousand, the Samnite reserves, surrendered on Sulla’s promise of safe conduct. No sooner had they emerged from their stronghold, however, than they were rounded up and led off to join the other Samnite captives. These had already been imprisoned on the Campus Martius, the flood plain that stretched north beyond the walls of the Capitol. Even in defeat the Samnites were kept out of Rome.

Sulla’s scrupulousness in this matter was ironic. Until his own legions had broken the taboo in 88 BC the only men in arms ever to have entered the city had been citizens marching in triumphal parades. Otherwise, Rome had always been off limits to the military. Since as far back as the time of the kings civilians had first had to gather on the Campus Martius – the Plain of Mars – before taking the oath that transformed them into soldiers. Here they had been ranked according to their wealth and status, for in war, as in peace, every citizen had to know his place. At the summit of the hierarchy there had been those rich enough to afford their own horses, the equites; below the equestrian class were five further classes of infantry; at the bottom of the heap were citizens too poor to buy even a sling and a few sling-stones, the proletarii. These seven classes had in turn been divided into further units, known as ‘centuries’. This allowed status to be calibrated with exquisite precision. Long after ‘classes’ and ‘centuries’ had ceased to provide the basis of their army the Romans could not bring themselves to abandon so eminently satisfying a system. Instead, it remained at the heart of their political life.

Naturally, there were few citizens who did not dream of clawing themselves up the ladder, century by century, towards the uppermost rung. The higher a Roman climbed, the more fresh vistas emerged, to tempt him on further. Become an equestrian, for instance, and membership of the Senate became a sudden possibility; join the Senate and the tantalising prospect of a senior magistracy, a praetorship or even consulship, might hove into view. It was typical of the Republic that the greatest privilege it could grant one of its citizens was the chance to put himself to the vote of his fellows, and win even greater glory. Typical also that the mark of failure was to lose the class inherited from one’s father.

Out on the Campus only a few structures stood on its flat and open expanse. Of these, the largest in area was an enclosure filled with barriers and aisles, of the kind used to pen livestock. The Romans called it the Ovile, or ‘sheepfold’. This was where elections to the magistracies were held. The voters would be herded down the aisles in separate blocs. It was the nature of the Republic to thrive on complexity, and the organisation of these blocs varied confusingly from election to election. To vote for tribunes, for instance, the citizens would be divided into tribes. These were fabulously ancient in origin, and had been tweaked over the centuries in typically Roman manner as the Republic expanded and changed. With the enfranchisement of the Italians, they had been reorganised once again to cope with the influx of new citizens. Every member of every tribe was entitled to his vote, but since this had to be delivered in person at the Ovile the practical effect was to ensure that only the wealthiest out-of-towner could afford to travel to Rome to exercise his right. Inevitably, this served to skew the voting in favour of the rich. To most Romans, this seemed only fair. After all, the rich were the ones who contributed most to the Republic, and so it was generally conceded that their opinions should carry the greatest weight. Disproportionate voting power was yet another perk of rank.

Nowhere, however, was this principle more clearly expressed than in elections to the most senior magistracies of all. It was in these that the original functions of classes and centuries still maintained a ghostly after-life. Citizens assembled to vote for the consuls in the same way that their earliest ancestors had massed to go to war. Just as in the days of the kings, a military trumpet would be blown at daybreak to summon them to the Campus. A red flag would flutter on the Janiculum Hill beyond the Tiber, signalling that no enemies could be seen. The citizens would then line up as though for battle, with the richest at the front and the poorest at the rear. This meant that it was always the senior classes who were the first to pass into the Ovile. Nor was that their only privilege. So heavily weighted were their votes that they usually served to decide an election. As a result, there was often little point in the other classes even turning out. Not only were their votes worth a fraction of those of the equestrians, but they would only rarely be called on to register them anyway. Since they received no financial compensation for a day spent queuing outside the election pens, most of the poor must have decided that they had better things to do with their time. The equestrians no doubt agreed.

Even so, for those who could afford to succumb to election fever, the tension of voting day was one of the greatest excitements of Roman civic life. The candidates in their specially whitened togas, the milling crowds of their supporters, the tumult of yells and jeers, all contributed to the sense of occasion. Not until late in the day would heralds announce the results – at which point the successful candidates would be greeted with a great roar, and escorted amid further cheering from the Ovile towards the Capitol. Most voters chose to stay and wait for the spectacle of this climax. On a hot day, however, with clouds of brown dust scuffed up by the crowds, this might require some stamina. There were few public amenities on the Campus. Most weary voters tended to head for the Villa Publica, a walled complex of government buildings set just back from the Ovile. Here they could gossip, fan themselves and stay out of the sun.

And here it was too that Sulla, after the Battle of the Colline Gate, ordered his Samnite captives brought. They were penned beyond the arches of the central building, a square, two-storeyed reception hall, its rooms magnificently ill-suited to serve as cells for prisoners of war. The splendour of the statues and paintings that adorned these rooms reflected their decisive role in the life of the Republic, for the Villa Publica was where the hierarchies of Roman society were maintained and reviewed. Every five years a citizen had to register himself there. He also had to declare the name of his wife, the number of his children, his property and his possessions, from his slaves and ready cash to his wife’s jewels and clothes. The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even ‘personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review’.⁴ It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations. Classes, centuries and tribes, everything which enabled a citizen to be placed by his fellows, were all defined by the census. Once the raw information had been collated by scribes, it would then be carefully scrutinised by two magistrates, who had the power to promote or demote each citizen according to his worth. The office of these magistrates, the censorship, was the most prestigious in the Republic; even more than the consulship it was regarded as the climax of a political career. So sensitive were the duties of a censor that only the most senior and reputable of citizens could be entrusted with them. The maintenance of everything that structured the Republic depended on their judgement. There were few Romans who doubted that if the census were not conducted adequately, then the entire fabric of their society would fall apart. No wonder that it was universally regarded as ‘the mistress and guardian of peace’.⁵

By locking up his prisoners of war where he did, then, Sulla was once again demonstrating his taste for irony in even the grimmest of circumstances. The irony was soon to darken further. In the shadow of the Capitol, but within hearing distance of the Villa Publica, stood the temple of Bellona. Sulla sent orders to the Senate to meet him there. As they hurried to obey him, the senators would have glanced up and seen the charred ruins of Jupiter’s temple on the hill high above them. It was Bellona who had warned Sulla to win his victory quickly or see the Capitol destroyed. By choosing her temple as the venue for his address to the Senate, Sulla neatly reminded his audience that he stood before them as the favourite of the gods, divinely sent to be the saviour of Rome. What this might mean in practical terms was soon to be made brutally apparent. As Sulla launched into his address, describing his victory over Mithridates, the senators began to hear the muffled sounds of shrieking from the Samnite prisoners. Sulla continued, apparently oblivious to the screams, until at last he paused and ordered the senators not to be distracted from what he had to say. ‘Some criminals are receiving their punishment,’ he explained dismissively. ‘There is no need for worry, it is all being done on my orders.’⁶

The massacre was total. In the cramped conditions of the slaughter-house the bodies piled up high. Once the executions had been completed, the corpses were dragged across the Campus and flung into the Tiber, clogging the banks and bridges with pollution, until ‘at last the river’s currents cut a swath of blood through the azure open sea’.⁷ The stains on the Villa Publica itself were not so easily removed. The census had been held there only three years previously. Now the rooms in which the rolls had been completed were filthy with gore. The symbolism was shocking and obvious: Sulla rarely made any gesture without a fine calculation of its effect. By washing the Villa Publica with blood he had given dramatic notice of the surgery he was planning to perform on the Republic. If the census were illegitimate, then so too were the hierarchies of status and prestige that it had affirmed. The ancient foundations of the state were unstable, on the verge of collapse. Sulla, god-sent, would perform the repairs, no matter how much bloodshed the task might require.

In its blending of superstition with the flaunting of naked power this was a vintage Sullan performance. There was no one in the Senate willing – or foolish enough – to stand up to it. Even Sulla’s bitterest enemies had little choice but to acknowledge the unprecedented scale of his triumph. To Sulla himself, success had always been the surest proof of Fortune’s blessing. This was why he chose to downplay his own role in the victory at the Colline Gate, and overplay that of Crassus: not because he was modest, but because, on the contrary, he wished to portray himself as Fortune’s favourite – a man of destiny. Ancient writers were unclear whether to attribute this to conviction or cynicism – although in Sulla’s case the two appear always to have been perfectly compatible. What is certain, however, is that by casting his victory as god-given, the man who had been the first to march on Rome, and who had devastated Italy with ‘war, fire and slaughter’,⁸ aimed to absolve himself of all blame for the Republic’s woes. This was why Sulla’s exhumation of Marius’ ashes, and his scattering of them into the River Anio, was an act of calculated propaganda as well as petty revenge. The death-struggle with his great rival, the very feud that had brought the Republic to its perilous pass, was reconstituted as a war in the Republic’s defence. In this way alone could Sulla justify the position of supremacy that he had wrested for himself. Even Marius, in the grim insanity of his final months, had taken care to cloak himself in the tattered legitimacy of his seventh consulship. Sulla, however, was too shrewd to attempt a similar sham. He knew that there was no point in picking up the shreds of a conventional magistracy. If he were to conceal the nakedness of his power, then he would have to look elsewhere for a fitting disguise.

Before he could do that, however, he had to make absolutely certain of his victory. Leaving Rome, he headed directly for the neighbouring town of Praeneste, final stronghold of the Marian cause. On the way, the news reached him that the city had surrendered and Marius’ son was dead. Rome was now without consuls. The fact that it was Sulla who had destroyed the two heads of state only served to emphasise the constitutional anomaly of his position. Sulla himself was too exultant with self-belief to care. He celebrated the scotching of his enemy’s bloodline by awarding himself the title of Felix – ‘The Fortunate One’. This had always been a cherished private nickname, but now Sulla decided to broadcast it publicly. By doing so, he signalled that there would be no herding of voters into the Ovile to validate his rule. Luck had brought Sulla to power, and luck – Sulla’s famous luck – would save the Republic in turn. Until her favourite’s work was done, and the constitution restored, Fortune was to rule as the mistress of Rome.

Her reign would prove to be savage. The casting down of the great, the raising up of the insignificant, these were the dramas in which Fortune most delighted. So too, of course, in its own way, did the Republic. Yet the constitution, subtle and finely modulated as it was, had evolved to restrain any violent change. Not for the Romans the mass executions and asset-stripping of opponents that had periodically engulfed Greek cities. Sulla, capturing Athens, had overthrown a regime dependent on precisely such tactics. Now, having captured Rome in turn, he prepared to copy them. In the practice of political terror as in so much else Athens, ‘the school of Greece’, could still inspire.

The death squads had fanned out through Rome even as the Samnites were being butchered in the Villa Publica. Sulla himself made no attempt to restrain them. Even his supporters, inured to bloodshed, were appalled by the resulting carnage. One of them dared to ask when the murderers would be reined in. Or at least, he added hurriedly, ‘let us have a list of all those you want punished’.⁹ Sulla, sardonically obliging, duly posted a list in the Forum. It featured the entire leadership of the Marian regime. All were condemned to death. Their properties were declared forfeit, and their sons and grandsons barred from standing for office. Anyone who helped to protect them was likewise condemned to death. An entire swath of Rome’s political elite was summarily nominated for annihilation.

Further lists followed. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of names appeared. In a grotesque parody of the census, the names of men without Marian sympathies, but whose wealth and status made them tempting targets, began to be sneaked in. Ghouls who gathered in the Forum to inspect the lists might easily find their own names featured. Villas, pleasure gardens, swimming pools, all were now potential death warrants. Everywhere, bounty-hunters tracked down their prey. The severed heads of victims would be brought back to Rome, and Sulla, once he had inspected them and released the promised fee, might keep particularly prized specimens as trophies in his house.

Such a grisly system of accounting was easy to abuse. No one exploited it more profitably than Crassus, who had the nose for gain of a man who had suffered from confiscations himself. As the general who had saved Sulla at the Colline Gate, he was in a privileged position to throw his weight about. Gifts were duly extorted, estates snapped up cheap. At length, however, when Crassus added the name of an innocent millionaire just a little too flagrantly on to a proscription list, Sulla lost patience. In the resulting scandal relations between the two men broke down irreparably, and Sulla withdrew his favour from his former lieutenant. Crassus was already so rich that he could afford not to care.

As for Sulla, ever the master strategist, he picked quarrels only as a matter of policy. By slapping down his own ally so publicly, he could represent himself as the selfless cleanser of the Republic, washing it in blood without thought of personal gain. For all the ostentation of his shock at Crassus’ avarice, however, there were few who were convinced by it. Sulla’s policy had always been to cut down his enemies and build up his friends. Crassus was far too powerful and ambitious to serve as anyone’s parasite, but those whom Sulla did not regard as threats were duly rewarded. Often, he would personally sell on properties at ludicrously knock-down prices. His policy was a deliberate one of ruining his opponents by enriching his supporters. ‘Not until Sulla had glutted all his followers with wealth did the slaughter at last come to an end.’¹⁰

Generous though he was, however, the man who profited most from the proscriptions was Sulla himself. The pauper who had once been forced to doss in squalid flop-houses was now richer than any Roman in history. It so happened that during the course of the proscriptions a senator who had been condemned to death was found hiding in the house of one of his former slaves. The freedman was duly brought before Sulla to be condemned. The two men recognised each other at once. Both, long before, had shared lodgings in the same apartment block, and the freedman, even as he was hauled away to his execution, yelled at Sulla that there had once been little difference between them. He meant it as a taunt, a scream of defiance, but Sulla is unlikely to have interpreted it as such. Nothing could have better illustrated the distance he had travelled. Nothing could have better demonstrated that he was ‘Felix’ indeed.

Sulla Dictator

Sulla aimed to build as well as destroy. Even as the streets of Rome ran red he talked loudly of restoring the Republic to full health. As ever with him, opportunism was the obverse of an icy conviction. The cycle of wars and revolutions through which he had hacked his way so savagely had done nothing to diminish his deeply held conservatism. Sulla had the true patrician’s contempt for innovation. Far from wishing to impose some radical new model of autocracy on his fellow citizens, he looked to the past for solutions to the crisis facing Rome.

Most urgently of all, he faced the need to regularise his own position. Even with his enemies proscribed, Sulla still refused to submit himself to the judgement of the voters. Fortunately, a precedent for this lay conveniently close to hand. The Republic’s ancient history did indeed provide examples of citizens who had wielded absolute power without being elected. In moments of particular crisis the authority of the consuls had sometimes been suspended and a single magistrate nominated to take control of the state. Such an office fitted Sulla’s requirements perfectly. The fact that it was a constitutional fossil worried him not in the slightest. By dropping heavy and menacing hints, he persuaded the Senate to dust down the antiquated office, and appoint him to it. The result was not only to legalise his supremacy, but to give it the patina of tradition. After all, how could the Romans consider themselves threatened by a magistracy as authentically Republican as the dictatorship?

In fact, though, it had always been regarded with suspicion. Unlike the consulship, split as it was between two citizens of equal rank, the unified powers of the dictatorship were inherently offensive to Republican ideals. This was why the office had fallen into abeyance. Even back in the dark days of the war against Hannibal, citizens had been appointed to it only for very short, fixed periods. Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous. Sulla, however, who enjoyed alcohol and power equally, was proud of his head for both. He refused to accept a limit on his term of office. Instead, he was to remain dictator until the constitution had been ‘revised’.¹¹ What this might mean he would judge for himself.

A consul had twelve lictors. Sulla had twenty-four. Each one bore on his shoulders not only the fasces, but also, bundled up with the scourging rods and symbolising a dictator’s powers of life and death, an axe. Nothing could better have indicated the disproportion in status now existing between Sulla and his fellow magistrates. He was quick to ram home the message. No sooner had he been appointed dictator than he ordered consular elections to be held. Both the candidates were selected by himself. When one of his own generals, the war hero who had captured Praeneste, no less, attempted to stand, Sulla warned him to back off, and then, when he refused, had him murdered publicly in the Forum. More than anyone, Sulla had reason to appreciate just how dangerous war heroes might be.

It was an irony that shadowed the entire programme of his reforms. Sulla’s task as dictator was to ensure that in the future no one would ever again do as he had done and lead an army on Rome. Yet it is doubtful whether Sulla himself would have regarded this as a paradox. If, as his propaganda relentlessly insisted, he was guiltless of provoking civil war, then the fault had to lie elsewhere. And if, as his propaganda also insisted, ambition had tempted Marius and Sulpicius into endangering the Republic, then it was the corruption of the Republic’s own institutions that had permitted them to thrive. Sulla was too much of a Roman to imagine that a desire to be the best might ever in itself be a crime. He certainly had no intention of suppressing his countrymen’s inveterate thirsting after glory. Instead, he aimed to channel it, so that once again, rather than tearing the state to shreds, it might serve the greater glory of Rome.

The complexities, the ambivalences and the paradoxes of the constitution all infuriated the new dictator. Sulla interpreted them as loopholes, and worked hard to close them. No openings were to be left that a future Marius might exploit. Instead, ambition was to be strictly regulated. Each magistracy was to have an age threshold. Sulla, who had spent his own twenties chasing after whores, must have relished the chance to discriminate against youthful over-achievers.

Under his legislation, no one under the age of thirty would be permitted to seek election to even the most junior magistracy. This, the quaestorship, entitled a successful candidate to serve for a year as an assistant to one of the more senior magistrates, and to learn from the example of the older man. Some quaestors might even be given independent responsibilities, managing the Republic’s finances, habituating themselves to the disciplines and duties of power. This was important training, for the citizen who had served as quaestor would be entitled, once he had reached his thirty-ninth birthday, to aim for a further, even more prestigious honour: the praetorship. If elected to this office, he would now, for a year, be junior in rank only to the consuls themselves. A praetor had awesome responsibilities and privileges: charged as he was with the weighty task of administering the Republic’s laws, he also had the right to convene a session of the Senate, and preside over its debates. Under Sulla’s new scheme of things, however, the real attraction of the praetorship was that it now served as an obligatory step on the ladder that led, rung after ordered rung, towards the consulship itself. This remained the top, the glittering prize. As always, only a few would ever win it, but the goal of Sulla’s reforms was to ensure that, in the future, the victors would prove worthy of their rank. There were to be no more scandals like the career of the younger Marius. From quaestorship to praetorship to consulship, only a single path to power, and no short cuts.

The deliberate effect of this legislation was to place a premium on middle age. In this it accorded with fundamental Roman instincts. Statesmen were expected to be middle aged. Greek rulers may have portrayed themselves as preternaturally young, but the portraiture of the Republic suggests a positive relish for wrinkles, thinning hair and sagging jowls. It was no coincidence that the traditional ruling body of Rome, the Senate, derived its name from ‘ senex’ – ‘old man’ – nor that senators liked to dignify themselves with the title of ‘Fathers’. The ideal of an assembly rich in experience and wisdom, acting as a brake on such irresponsible elements as the young or indigent poor, was one dear to every conservative’s heart. In the mythology of the Republic it was the Senate that had guided Rome to greatness, prevailing over Hannibal, breaking kings, conquering the world. Sulla, despite having trampled over the Senate at every opportunity, made the restoration of its authority the major goal of his career.

Repair work was urgently required. Civil war and proscriptions had left the august body in a parlous state. Sulla, having played a major part in the reduction of its numbers from three hundred to barely one hundred, promoted newcomers with such assiduity that by the time he had finished the Senate was larger than at any time in its history. Equestrians from all walks of life – businessmen, Italians, plunder-rich officers – were hurriedly crammed into the Senate House. Simultaneously, the opportunities for self-advancement within the Senate were also broadened. Under Sulla’s reforms, the number of praetorships on offer in any one year was increased from six to eight, and of quaestorships from eight to twenty – a conscious attempt to ensure that the upper reaches of power would be regularly infused with fresh blood. The established nobility, not surprisingly, were appalled by such measures. Roman snobbery, however, was skilled at keeping newcomers in their place. Senators, like everyone else in the Republic, were bound by ironclad rules of hierarchy. Rank structured the order in which they were called upon to speak, and junior senators rarely had the chance to speak at all. Even men who had once been outspoken critics of the Senate were no sooner promoted to the body than they found themselves silenced. Sulla, not known for his generosity towards enemies, appears to have decided that there were certain opponents it was wisest to co-opt.

Some, of course, still remained beyond the pale. The aspirations of the mob Sulla regarded with contempt. Those who represented them he regarded with naked loathing. Even as he built up the power of the Senate, Sulla emasculated the tribunate with the vindictiveness that characterised all his vendettas. He never forgot that Sulpicius had been a tribune. Each snipping away of the tribunate’s powers was a delicate act of personal revenge. To ensure that tribunes could never again propose bills attacking a consul, as Sulpicius had done, Sulla barred them from proposing bills altogether. To prevent the tribunate from attracting ambitious trouble-makers in the future, he throttled it of all potential to advance a career. With carefully nuanced malice, Sulla banned anyone who had held the office from seeking further magistracies. Quaestors and praetors might dream of the consulship, but not tribunes, not any more. Their office was to be a rung on a ladder leading nowhere. Revenge, as ever with Sulla, was sweet.

One of the ancient pillars of the constitution now lay in rubble. Even Sulla’s conservative supporters in the Senate appear to have been shocked.¹² No one had ever before attempted such a work of demolition. The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic. It spread everywhere that Sulla cared to look. It could be seen in the very appearance of Rome herself. Sulla, whose invariable response to provocation was to launch a single, rapid killer-blow against it, quickly proved himself as impatient with the urban fabric as he had been with the Marians or the tribunate. Frustrated by the city’s congestion, he simply pushed back the pomerium, the first man to do so in the whole of Roman history. Just as coolly, he levelled the cramped but venerable Senate House, and rebuilt it to suit the proportions of his own new, inflated Senate. Not that the senators themselves displayed much gratitude. Decades later they were still mourning the original building, sanctified as it had been by the Republic’s historic heroes, and complaining that ‘its enlargement appeared to have shrunk it’.¹³ Sulla could afford to dismiss all such moaning with a contemptuous shrug. Only on the Capitol was he inhibited by the sanctions of custom. The temple of Jupiter might have been burned to the ground, but its outline still remained. As a new temple rose from the ashes, the gigantic columns that Sulla had conveniently plundered from Athens gleamed from within the confines of the original, sacrosanct structure. Monumentalism squatted awkwardly on archaic foundations. Sulla’s dictatorship could hardly have raised a more fitting memorial to itself.

Long before the completion of Jupiter’s great temple, however, Sulla had resigned his office. One morning, some time late in 81 BC, he suddenly appeared in the Forum without his lictors. The man responsible for the deaths of more citizens than any Roman in history had laid aside the sanctions of supreme power, ‘fearing neither the people at home nor the exiles abroad … Such was the extent of his daring and good luck.’¹⁴ Once again his nerve was justified. Sulla remained a figure of dread. Only on a single occasion did anyone dare to criticise him to his face, a young man who cat-called him in the Forum; then, having failed to get a rise, he jeered him all the way home. Otherwise, the terror of Sulla’s name held good.

The year after he resigned his dictatorship Sulla served as a consul; the year after that he stood down from office altogether. Relieved of formal responsibilities, he returned to the wild living of his youth. It was a lifestyle for which he had never lost his talent. As dictator, he had thrown the largest parties in Rome’s history. Everyone in the city had been invited. Spit-roasts had sizzled in the streets, vintage wines had flowed from public fountains. The citizens had gorged themselves, and then, when no one had been able to eat or drink another thing, whole sides of meat had been slung with delirious wastefulness into the Tiber. As a private citizen, Sulla’s parties were inevitably more intimate affairs. Whole days would be spent in drinking bouts with his old bohemian set. Dizzyingly high though he had risen, Sulla remained as loyal in his friendships as he was implacable in his feuds. Actors, dancers, down-at-heel hacks, all had been tossed crumbs from the estates of the proscribed. Those without talent had been given money never to perform again. Those who did have talent were cherished, however much they might have passed their prime. Brutal cynic though he was, Sulla would still flatter and cosset a fading drag-queen. ‘Metrobius, the female impersonator, had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him all the same.’¹⁵

Certainly, there was none of Marius’ muscle-bound need to prove himself a man: no workouts on the Campus Martius for Sulla. When he retreated to his villa in Campania, he gloried in his retirement. He had restored the Republic, and the fruit of his work was peace. The crisis was over. Who could doubt, seeing Sulla in his Greek tunic, strolling with other tourists through the back streets of Naples, that the good times were back?

Yet in Italy, as in Rome, the good times had been founded on savagery and bloodshed. Not far beyond Sulla’s estate rose the hills of Samnium, harrowed in a policy of deliberate extirpation. All around it, dotted across the Plain of Campania, stood cities still scarred by their resistance to Sulla. Even Naples had been stormed by his legions. Nola too, eventually, had fallen. Besieged for almost a decade, the rebel stronghold had held out until 80 BC, steeled by the same spectacle of atrocities that had persuaded other towns to incinerate themselves rather than surrender. To punish Nola, and to provide a permanent occupying force, Sulla had planted a colony of his veterans in the city, one of numerous similar settlements imposed all over Campania and Samnium. Triumphant even in his enemies’ most obdurate stronghold, Sulla had celebrated by giving Nola a new and humiliating name – Colonia Felix. Only one other act of appropriation can have given him more pleasure. Just down the coast from his own estate stood Marius’ celebrated villa, raised on its promontory like a military camp, a shrine to the old soldier’s glory and masculine pride. Sulla sold it cheap to his daughter, Cornelia. He had always believed in rubbing salt into open wounds.

This streak of cruelty would never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies, but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?’¹⁶

The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: had he been the saviour or destroyer of the constitution? Terrible though he had proved himself to be, the dictator had also laboured hard to restore the Republic, to ensure that he would have no successor. Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it. No wonder that his own contemporaries found him such a baffling and contradictory figure. When he died – most probably of liver failure – no one could even agree how to dispose of his body. One consul wanted to award him a state funeral, the other to deprive him of funereal honours altogether. Fittingly, it was the threat of violence that served to resolve the debate. A huge escort of veterans assembled to bring their dead general from Campania, and the people of Rome found themselves ‘as terrified of Sulla’s army and his corpse as if he were still alive’.¹⁷ No sooner had the body been laid on a huge pyre in the Campus Martius than a strong wind came gusting across the plain, whipping up the flames. And no sooner had the corpse been consumed than it started to rain.

Sulla stayed lucky to the very end.

FAME IS THE SPUR

A Patrician’s Progress

The life of a young Roman nobleman was filled with opportunity and risk. Civil war heightened the extremes of both. Under Sulla, a young man might be plunged straight into the deep end of adult life. Some profited spectacularly. Most dazzling of all was the example of Pompey, who continued to pose and preen perfectly unruffled by Sulla’s legislation against boy-wonders. Even as the dictator moved to forbid anyone under the age of thirty from holding political office, his fresh-faced lieutenant was thrashing an army of Marian die-hards in Africa, and being hailed by his troops as ‘The Great’. Pompey was exceptional, however, and gloried in the fact. Others of his generation were less fortunate. Sulla’s secret police respected neither youth nor pedigree. So it was, for instance, that because Marius had married into the Julians, the heir of that ancient, patrician family found himself on the run. Only nineteen, a young man whose family connections should have ensured him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an experience he would never forget. In future years he would prove himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune. No less than Pompey, the young Julius Caesar emerged from the years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.

In this both men were only proving themselves true to their upbringings. Hardness was a Roman ideal. The steel required to hunt out glory or endure disaster was the defining mark of a citizen. It was instilled in him from the moment of his birth. The primary response of Roman parents to their babies appears to have been less tenderness than shock that anything could be quite so soft and helpless. ‘An infant, like a sailor hurled ashore by savage waves, lies naked on the ground, unable to speak a word, utterly dependent on other people for his survival.’¹ To the Romans, such a condition verged on the scandalous. Children were certainly too weak to be idealised, and the highest praise a child could be given was to be compared to an adult. The result is, to modern eyes at least, a curious and frustrating gap in ancient biographies. Never do the great figures of the Republic appear chillier or more remote from us than when their earliest years are being described. We are offered portraits of them as prodigies of physical toughness or learning – stiff, priggish, implausible. Anecdotes that portray them as children rather than as mini-adults are few and far between. The greater the figure, the less adequate the portrait of his childhood is likely to appear. The early years of a man such as Caesar are effectively a blank. Any attempt to recreate them must depend, even more than is usually the case in ancient history, on supposition and generalisation. Yet the attempt is still worthwhile. The Romans were as aware as any psychologist that ‘Nature displays her blueprints most clearly in a man’s earliest years.’² Childhood was where the future citizen was made.

What, then, can we say with any certainty about the infant who would one day destroy the Republic? Gaius Julius Caesar was born on 13 July 100 BC, six years after Pompey, fifteen after Crassus. Ritual would have surrounded him from his earliest moments. A Roman did not become a citizen by right of birth. It was within the power of every father to reject a newborn child, to order unwanted sons, and especially daughters, to be exposed. Before the infant Caesar was breastfed, his father would first have had to hold him aloft, signalling that the boy had been accepted as his own, and was therefore a Roman. Nine days later he would have been named. Evil spirits would have been swept out of the house with a broom. The boy’s future would have been read in the behaviour of passing birds. A golden good-luck charm, the bulla, would have been placed around the baby Gaius’ neck, to stay there until he came of age and became a full citizen.

No delay would have been permitted in preparing for that moment. The Romans lacked a specific word for ‘baby’, reflecting their assumption that a child was never too young to be toughened up. Newborns were swaddled tightly to mould them into the form of adults, their features were kneaded and pummelled, and boys would have their foreskins yanked to make them stretch. Old-fashioned Republican morality and new-fangled Greek medicine united to prescribe a savage regime of dieting and cold baths. The result of this harsh upbringing was to contribute further to an already devastating infant mortality rate. It has been estimated that only two out of three children survived their first year, and that under 50 per cent went on to reach puberty. The deaths of children were constant factors of family life. Parents were encouraged to respond to such losses with flinty calm. The younger the child, the less emotion would be shown, so that it was a commonplace to argue that ‘if an infant dies in its cradle, then its death ought not even be mourned’.³Yet reserve did not necessarily spell indifference. There is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry and private correspondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could feel. The rigours imposed on a child were not the result of wilful cruelty. Far from it: the sterner the parents, the more loving they were assumed to be.

Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia, was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breastfed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman who supplied it. How could a slave’s milk ever compare with that of a freeborn Roman woman? Irresponsible aristocrats who handed their babies over to wet-nurses were clearly compromising their children’s future. Yet still they did it. It was a clear and shocking symptom of the degeneracy of the times. Aurelia’s boast that she had devoted herself to child-rearing had a proudly anachronistic ring.

And paragon of Republican motherhood that she was, no sooner had she weaned her children than she set about the business of their education. Gaius was not the exclusive focus of Aurelia’s attentions. As well as her son, she had two daughters, Julia Major and Julia Minor. The Romans believed that girls had to be moulded just as much as boys. Physical as well as intellectual exercises were prescribed for both. A boy trained his body for warfare, a girl for childbirth, but both were pushed to the point of exhaustion. To the Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one’s endurance. It was only by testing what these might be that a child could be prepared for adult life.

No wonder that Roman children appear to have had little time for play. Far fewer toys have been found dating from the Republic than from the period that followed its collapse, when the pressure to raise good citizens had begun to decline. Even so, children were children: ‘As they grow older, not even the threat of punishment can keep them from playing games with all the energy they have.’⁴ Girls certainly had their dolls, since it was the custom to dedicate these to Venus as part of the rituals of marriage. Boys, meanwhile, played obsessively with spinning tops. Dice appear to have been a universal mania. At wedding parties the groom would be expected to toss children coins or nuts that could then be played for as stakes. Caesar would one day talk of rolling a die when he faced the gravest crisis of his life, and his taste for the metaphor must surely have derived from his childhood. Even throwing dice, however, he would still have been supervised by the implacable Aurelia, who was as concerned to ‘regulate his behaviour when he was playing games as when he was hard at his studies’.⁵ Perhaps it was from his mother, then, that Caesar first learned to practise one of his greatest skills, the art of distinguishing an acceptable risk from a heedless gamble.

If so, then it would only serve to emphasise a glaring omission in accounts of Caesar’s childhood – mention of his father’s influence. By supervising her son’s upbringing so closely, Aurelia, model parent though she was, ran the risk of stepping on her husband’s toes. The freedoms granted to Roman women may have been exceptional by the standards of the age, but the authority of a Roman father was even more so. His powers of life and death did not end with the acceptance of a child into his household. His daughters, even once they had been married off, might well remain his wards, while his sons, no matter how old they grew, no matter how many magistracies they might win, never ceased to be his dependants. There was no father quite so patriarchal as a Roman one. As was invariably the case with the Republic, however, rights brought obligations. At the census every head of a household would be asked whether he had married for the purpose of having children. It was a citizen’s patriotic duty to contribute to his city’s future manpower. More immediate, however, and no doubt far more keenly felt, was a father’s duty to the prestige of his family. Status in the Republic was not inherited. Instead, it had to be re-earned over each successive generation. The son who failed to equal the rank and achievements of his ancestors, the daughter who neglected to influence her husband in the interests of her father or her brothers – both brought public shame on their family. It was the responsibility of the pater familias to ensure that such a calamity never occurred. As a result, child-rearing, like virtually every other aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of competition. To raise heirs successfully, to instil in them due pride in their blood-line and a hankering after glory, these were achievements worthy of a man.

Caesar’s own ambitions were one day to consume the entire Republic. His father must have had some influence in fostering them. There were certain things in Rome that it took a man to teach. The young Gaius’ most valuable lessons would have come not at his mother’s feet but standing beside his father as he greeted political allies, or strolling across the Forum, or overhearing gossip at a senator’s banquet. Only by breathing in the subtle scents of power at first hand could a boy hope to develop a nose for the Republic’s manifold complexities. Caesar’s father was well connected, and his name would have opened many doors. In return he would also have held an open house himself. The Romans had little concept of private space. The town house of an aristocrat was less a domestic retreat than a stage on which he could pose and be admired, a projection in stone of how he wished to be seen. Distant from the centres of power the Julians’ mansion may have been, surrounded by the taverns and slums of the sloping Subura, yet it would still have provided Caesar’s father with a formidable headquarters. Suitors and clients would have thronged its hallway. The relationship of such dependants to their patron constituted yet another cross-current that had to be mastered by the aspirant politician. Exploited properly, the support of clients might prove crucial to his ambitions. A Roman aristocrat was always careful to look after his own. The more influential he became, the more clients would inevitably be drawn to his flame. After 92 BC, the year in which Caesar’s father became a praetor, his retinue would have begun to mark him out as a figure of consequence. But would it have been large enough to satisfy the expectations of his eight-year-old son?

These were immense. To an extent that was regarded as excessive even by Roman standards, Caesar never let slip a chance to insist on the respect due to his ancestry. His descent from Venus had been drummed into him from his earliest years. His family mansion wore the appearance of a shrine to the Julian name. Beyond a portico designed to echo the features of a temple, the walls of the atrium were hung with forbidding images, the wax death-masks of magistrates, bearing witness to the honours won by the family in the past. Painted lines connected the portraits, reaching backwards into time, towards a Trojan hero and, beyond him, a goddess. Foreign observers were in no doubt about the effect of such a spectacle on an impressionable child. ‘It would be hard to imagine a more impressive scene for a youth who aspires to win fame and practise virtue.’⁶ The Romans themselves described children’s spirits as blazing like flames at the sight.⁷ Correspondingly, however, an heir to a great mansion who proved himself unworthy of its heritage was a figure of scorn. ‘It is dreadful when men can walk by it and say, “Venerable old house, dear oh dear, what a let down your current owner is!”’⁸ In Caesar’s case, contemplation of his family’s ancient glories could only have emphasised its recent honour-famine. His father might have been a praetor, but he was not a consul. He might have been followed by a retinue of clients whenever he walked through the Forum, but he could not call on entire cities or even provinces filled with his clients, as the very greatest families could. Pompey’s, for instance, arriviste though it may have been, was able to mobilise a swath of territories in eastern Italy. The treacherous and brutal Strabo had been an exemplary parent. It was by studying a eulogy of his father’s achievements that Pompey had first learned to read. By contrast, we know nothing of the youthful Caesar’s reading, only what he wrote. The themes of these compositions must have been recognised by his contemporaries as significant, else the memory of them would not have been preserved. One was written ‘in praise of Hercules’,⁹ greatest of the Greek heroes, the secret son of Jupiter, whose achievements ultimately won him immortality. Another told the story of Oedipus.

Whatever Caesar’s precise views of his father may have been – and it is perilous to argue from silence – one thing is certain: a far more impressive role-model was readily to hand. Following his year as praetor, Caesar’s father was appointed to the governorship of Asia. This was a plum posting. Only some strong string-pulling behind the scenes could have fixed it. Mithridates was yet to launch his invasion, but Marius was already angling for some form of Eastern command. The sudden elevation of his in-law had the general’s fingerprints all over it. As first the Italians’ revolt and then civil war engulfed the Republic, Marius continued to serve as the patron of his Julian relations. Just before his death, during his bloodstained seventh consulship, he planned to shoehorn the young Caesar into the priesthood of Jupiter, a post that demanded a patrician and had been left vacant by the forced suicide of its previous incumbent. Since Caesar was only thirteen, the office had to be kept on hold for him, but already, just a child, he had been sucked directly into the vortex of the civil war.

In 84 Caesar’s father died – of what we are not told. In the same year Caesar himself set aside his bulla, draped his body in the heavy folds of a grown man’s toga and officially came of age. The consul Cinna, Rome’s strongman following Marius’ death, now moved fast. Caesar’s priesthood was officially confirmed. The sixteen-year-old must already have cut an impressive figure, because Cinna also offered him the hand of his daughter, Cornelia. Caesar was engaged at the time, but no young man was going to miss out on the chance of having the Republic’s supremo as his father-in-law. Marriage in Rome was a typically unsentimental business. Love was irrelevant, politics was all. Upper-class women, especially if they proved fertile, were prized stakes in the dice game of advancement. Because girls were far more likely to be exposed at birth than boys, there was a permanent lack of eligible fiancées. ‘Spinster’ is another modern word, like ‘baby’, with no equivalent in Latin. So keen were fathers to cash in on their daughters’ marriageability that girls would typically come of age some three or four years before their brothers. The moment a girl had celebrated her twelfth birthday she could expect to be veiled behind the traditional saffron of a bride. If a wife remained her father’s ward – and most wealthy women did – then her loyalty to her husband might at best prove shallow. Marriages could be formed and broken with dizzying speed, for a sudden reversal of alliances might require an equally sudden divorce. For as long as Caesar had Cornelia as his wife he could be confident of Cinna’s favour. A man did not need to love his wife to prize her all the same.

When Cinna was lynched at the hands of his mutinous soldiers, however, Cornelia must suddenly have begun to seem like a liability. Once Sulla had annihilated the Marians and obliterated the last remnants of Cinna’s regime, she was transformed into something even worse. As Marius’ nephew and Cinna’s son-in-law, Caesar was hardly likely to recommend himself to the new dictator. Even so, his name did not feature on the first proscription lists. Protégé of the Marians though he was, Caesar also had close links to Sulla. The multiform character of the Republic frequently bred contradictory loyalties. The world of the aristocracy, in particular, was a small one, and the complex web of marriage alliances could end up entangling even the bitterest rivals. Caesar’s mother came from a family who had provided Sulla with some of his most influential supporters. It was an association that was to save Caesar’s life.

Rather than having him killed, Sulla contented himself with depriving the young priest of Jupiter of his office, and demanding that he divorce Cornelia. Caesar, astonishingly, refused. It was this near-suicidal act of defiance that led to him fleeing Rome with a price on his head. Only the continued intercession of Aurelia’s relatives finally persuaded Sulla to pardon the impudent youth. The dictator gave way with a resigned shrug and a warning that the boy had an abundance of Mariuses inside him. If Caesar resembled anyone, however, it was not Marius. The refusal to divorce Cornelia had required not only bravery, but loyalty, a strong measure of patrician hauteur and a willingness to trust to his own luck. These were qualities that Sulla, of all men, could certainly appreciate – appreciate and mistrust.

It must have been evident to Caesar that he would never be entirely safe while Sulla remained alive. He decided to head abroad, but this was not simply a retreat into exile. Now that the fast-track to political pre-eminence had been closed to him, Caesar needed to make a splendid name for himself by more conventional means. As the priest of Jupiter he would have been forbidden to ride a horse, see armed troops or even leave Rome for more than two days at a time. For a man like Caesar, a brilliant horseman, a regular at weapons practice on the Campus, restless with energy and brio, such archaic taboos would have proved stifling. His entire education had taught him to regard glory as his birthright. Now, thanks to Sulla, he had the chance to follow his desires.

They led him to Asia. Caesar travelled there as a staff officer. A political career was impossible for any Roman who had not first served as a soldier and seen at least some action. The East promised Caesar plenty. Mithridates, the great survivor, was licking his wounds and rebuilding his power. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the city of Mytilene still held out against the savagery of Sulla’s peace terms. Everywhere there was military and diplomatic confusion. It was a situation tailor-made for a young man on the make.

Caesar appears to have made an immediate splash. Back in Rome his hyper-fashionable dress sense had raised the eyebrows of Sulla, who had commented disapprovingly on the young man’s habit of wearing his belt too loosely. In the courts of Eastern kings, however, stylish dressers were much admired, and the provincial authorities were quick to realise that the patrician dandy would be ideally cut out for diplomatic missions. Caesar was accordingly dispatched to Nicomedes, the King of Bithynia – who was indeed charmed by his Roman guest. Too charmed, perhaps. Nicomedes was believed to have demonstrated his appreciation of Caesar by taking him as a lover, a scandal that was to provide Caesar’s grateful enemies with gossip for decades. All the same, whatever it may have taken, his mission was a success. Not only had he kept Nicomedes sweet, but he had managed to borrow much of Nicomedes’ fleet. Sailing it to Lesbos, he joined in the assault on Mytilene, where he acquitted himself with conspicuous bravery. For having saved a number of fellow citizens in battle, he was awarded a particular honour, the civic crown, a wreath of oak leaves that served as a public token of his valour. From now on, whenever Caesar entered the Circus to watch the games, even senators would have to rise to their feet to salute him. In this way he would become a familiar figure to the people, and his name widely known. His deed would be bruited throughout Rome. This was an honour of which every citizen dreamed.

But if military glory was the surest way to win the people’s hearts, Caesar was far too clear sighted to imagine that it was sufficient on its own. Even though by now it was 80 BC and Sulla had laid down his dictatorship, Caesar did not hurry back to enjoy the acclamation of the Circus. Instead he remained in the East, serving with the army, studying how provincial administration worked and winning a reputation among his superiors as a safe pair of hands. Only in 78, once Sulla was safely dead, did he finally return to Rome. In a city still terrified of the dead dictator’s shadow, Caesar was like a splash of colour. ‘He had a talent for being liked in a way remarkable in one of his youth, and since he had an easy, man-of-the-people manner, he made himself hugely popular with the average citizen.’¹⁰ Effortlessly charming though Caesar was, this was still a statement of political intent. Crowd-pleasers marked themselves out as populares. Marius had been one, Sulpicius too. Sulla’s entire political programme had been an attempt to scotch the popularis tradition – the tradition to which Caesar regarded himself as heir.

It did not take long for him to lay claim to it publicly. The year after his return from the East he launched an audacious prosecution of one of Sulla’s former officers. The regime established by Sulla still held a firm grip on power, and the officer was predictably acquitted, but Caesar’s performance proved so effective that it established him overnight as one of the most admired orators in Rome. Already a war hero, seasoned in the practical politics of diplomacy and the provinces, Caesar was now also a public figure. He was not yet twenty-four.

The sheer range of Caesar’s abilities, and the energy with which he developed them, marked him out as a man with a brilliant future. Greatness clearly beckoned. Even so, exceptional as he was, Caesar was not an aberration. The Republic had bred him, and it was the Republic that had channelled all his ambitions and aspirations. Despite the anarchy of the previous decade, the Romans’ loyalty to their civic traditions remained unshaken. They were weary of civil war. Family honour and personal conviction might have stamped Caesar as an enemy of Sulla’s settlement, but he was not prepared to oppose it by unconstitutional means. That attempt had already been made. No sooner had Sulla’s ashes been scattered on the wind than one of the consuls had launched an uprising against the entire Sullan regime. The revolt had been speedily and brutally put down. Had Caesar joined it, as he had been invited to do, then his career would surely have been finished. All would have been lost on a single throw. Caesar was not interested in such odds. Instead, as generations of the aristocracy had done before him, he readied himself for the ascent to the top, the steady advance from post to ever more senior post. None of his youthful achievements had any value save as foundations for such an attempt. The Republic had always given free rein to the desire of its citizens for glory. Far from shattering it, this was what had raised it to its world-conquering greatness. Caesar’s early career appeared to indicate that, despite the traumas of civil war and dictatorship, nothing had really changed.

Round and Round the Racetrack

What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the ‘Cursus’. This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves, the most popular event held in the Circus Maximus, that great sounding board of public opinion. To call a nobleman a charioteer was an insult – little short of describing him as a gladiator or a bandit – yet there, embedded in the language of the racing fan, the comparison persisted, a hint of what was perhaps an unpalatable truth. In the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport. Just as the skilled charioteer had to round the metae, the turning posts, lap after lap, knowing that a single error – a clipping of a meta with his wheel-hub, or an attempt to round it too fast – might send his vehicle careering out of control, so the ambitious nobleman had to risk his reputation in election after election. To the cheers and boos of spectators, charioteer and nobleman alike would make their drive for glory, knowing that the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success. Then, once it was over, the finishing line breasted, or the consulship won, new contestants would step forward and the race would start again.

‘The track which leads to fame is open to many.’¹¹ Such was the consolatory maxim – but it was not strictly true. Because the track in the Circus was narrow, only four chariots could compete on it at a time. In elections, too, there was a similarly restricted field. Glory was not on infinite supply. Only a limited number of magistracies could be held each year. Sulla, by increasing the number of annual praetorships from six to eight, had attempted to broaden the opportunities on offer. But because he had simultaneously neutralised the tribunate and doubled the size of the Senate, his legacy was in fact one of increased competition. ‘The clash of wits, the fight for pre-eminence, the toiling day and night without break to reach the summit of wealth and power’¹² – this was the spectacle that the Cursus provided. Over the succeeding decades it would become ever more gruelling, carnivorous and frantic.

As they had always done, established families dominated the competition. The pressure that afflicted Caesar, of belonging to a family with few consulships to its name, was no more burdensome than the pressure on a consul’s son. The greater the ancient triumphs of a house, the more horrific was the idea that these might end up squandered. To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, ‘and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate’¹³ – but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. Fail to gain a senior magistracy or – worse – lose membership of the Senate altogether and a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only ‘to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all’.¹⁴ No wonder, then, that the great houses so resented intruders into the Senate. The election of arrivistes to the quaestorship, first and most junior of the stages on the Cursus, they might just about tolerate, but access to the more senior magistracies – the praetorship and the consulship – was ferociously guarded. This made the task of an ambitious parvenu – a ‘new man’, as the Romans called him – all the more arduous. Yet it was never impossible. As old families crashed out of the race, so new ones might find themselves in pole position to overtake. The electorate was capricious. Sometimes, just sometimes, talent might be preferred to a celebrated name. After all, as new men occasionally dared to point out, if magistracies were hereditary, then what would be the point in holding elections at all?¹⁵

Marius, of course, provided the great example of a commoner made good. If it were sufficiently dashing, a military career might well provide a new man with both glory and loot. All the same, it was hard for anyone without contacts to win a command. Rome had no military academy. Staff officers were generally young aristocrats adept at pulling strings. Caesar would never have had the opportunity to win his civic crown had he not been a patrician. Even once it had been obtained, a military posting could bring its own problems. Lengthy campaigns, of the kind that might win a new man spectacular glory, would also keep him away from Rome. No one on the make could afford long-term leave of absence. Ambitious novices in the political game would generally serve their time with the legions, and maybe even win some honourable scars, but few made their names that way. That was usually left to established members of the nobility. Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the Cursus, to the ultimate glory of the consulship and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite, was the law.

In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans no end to point out how ‘incredibly muddled – almost verging on the ridiculous – other legal systems are compared to our own!’¹⁶ In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirrelling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the Cursus had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation, the shameless pulling of strings – anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.

To the Romans, with their inveterate addiction to passionate and sensational rivalries, this made the law a thrilling spectator sport. Courts were open to the general public. Two permanent tribunals stood in the Forum, and other temporary platforms might be thrown up as circumstance required. As a result, the discerning enthusiast always had a wide choice of trials from which to choose. Orators could gauge their standing by their audience share. This only encouraged the histrionics that were anyway part and parcel of a Roman trial. Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only ‘those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law’.¹⁷ Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.¹⁸ Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Romans should have had the same word, ‘actor’, for both a prosecutor and a performer on a stage. Socially, the gulf between the two of them was vast, but in terms of technique there was often little to choose. Rome’s leading orator in the decade following Sulla’s death, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, was notorious for apeing the gestures of a mime-artist. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated fop, who ‘would arrange the folds of his toga with great care and exactness’,¹⁹ then use his hands and the sweep of his arms as extensions of his voice. He did this with such grace that the stars of the Roman stage would stand in the audience whenever he spoke, studying and copying his every gesture. Like actors, orators were celebrities, gawped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed ‘Dionysia’, after a famous dancing girl, but he could afford to brush all such insults aside. The prestige he won as Rome’s leading orator was worth any number of jeers.

Naturally, there were always opponents looking to snatch his crown. It was not in the Romans’ nature to tolerate any king – or queen – for very long. Hortensius’ own pre-eminence had been established during the years of Sulla’s dictatorship, when the law courts had been muzzled. Committed to upholding the Senate’s authority, he was strongly identified with the new regime. Such was his friendship with the dictator that it was Hortensius who had delivered Sulla’s funeral speech.* In the following decade his authority as a dominant member of the Senate inevitably served to buttress his legal reputation. But as the seventies BC wore on Hortensius’ pre-eminence came increasingly under threat, not from a fellow member of the senatorial establishment, not even from a member of the nobility, but from a man who was an upstart in every way.

Like Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a native of the small hill town of Arpinum – and, like Marius, he was filled with ambition. There the resemblance ended. Gawky and skinny, with a long, thin neck, Cicero was never going to make a great soldier. Instead, even from his childhood, he planned to become the greatest orator in Rome. Sent to the capital as a boy in the nineties, Cicero’s precocious aptitude for rhetoric was such that the fathers of his fellow students would come to his school just to hear him declaim. The anecdote can only have derived from the infant prodigy himself, and even to the Romans – who never regarded modesty as a virtue – Cicero’s conceit was something monstrous. Not unjustified, however. His vanity was as much prickliness as self-promotion. A deeply sensitive man, Cicero was torn between a consciousness of his own great talents and a paranoia that snobbery might prevent others from giving them their due. In fact, his potential was so evident that it had been spotted early by some of the most influential figures in Rome. One of these, Marcus Antonius, provided the young Cicero with a particularly encouraging role-model. Despite coming from an undistinguished family himself, Antonius’ powers of oratory had succeeded in elevating him to both the consulship and the censorship, and a status as a leading spokesman of the senatorial elite. He was one of a clique of orators who dominated both the law courts and the Senate throughout the nineties, the spokesmen for an aggressive conservatism, strongly opposed to Marius and to anyone who threatened the traditional status quo. Cicero, who was always prone to hero-worship, never forgot him. Antonius and his colleagues were to prove a formative influence on what was already a passion for the Republic’s ancient order. Despite the fact that it was this same order that placed so many obstacles on the path of his advancement, Cicero never wavered in his belief that it embodied the acme of constitutional perfection. During the eighties, as the Republic began its collapse into civil war, this conviction was only reinforced.

Antonius himself was murdered following Marius’ putsch in 87 BC. His head was displayed in the Forum and his body fed to birds and dogs. The finest orators of their generation were culled along with him. The stage had now been swept clear of competition, but Cicero, unnerved by the murder of his patrons, elected to keep his head down. He spent the years of civil war studying and honing his rhetorical skills, and not until 81, when he was already in his mid-twenties, did he finally plead in his first trial. Sulla had just resigned the dictatorship, but Cicero still had to move warily. A year after his debut in the law courts he agreed to defend the son of an Umbrian landowner charged with parricide. The case was politically highly sensitive. As Cicero was to demonstrate, the murdered man’s name had been illegally slipped on to a proscription list by one of Sulla’s favourite freedmen, who had then trumped up the charge of parricide to cover his tracks. The defendant was duly acquitted. Sulla did nothing to indicate that he was in any way displeased. Cicero’s reputation was made.

But not yet to his own satisfaction. Aiming for the political heights as he was, he knew that he first had to seize Hortensius’ oratorical crown. Accordingly, he threw himself into defence work, taking on other prominent cases and using the courts to test himself to the emotional and physical limits, ‘drawing on all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body’.²⁰ After barely two years of public life he found himself near breakdown. Warned by his doctors that he was putting a terminal strain on his throat, Cicero took leave of absence and headed for Greece. For six months he stayed in Athens, sight-seeing and indulging in a spot of recreational philosophy. The city still bore the scars left by Sulla’s legions, but for the Romans, Athens remained inviolably the home of beauty and culture. Tourists had begun returning there even as blood was drying in the streets. Among them had been an old schoolfriend of Cicero, Titus Pomponius, a prudent refugee from the judicial murders back in Rome. Recognising the bottom of a market when he saw it, Pomponius had invested his inheritance in provincial real estate, then used the profits to fund a life of cultured leisure in the shadow of the Parthenon. Eight years later he still had not the slightest intention of returning to Rome. His friends called him ‘Atticus’, a nickname that suggests how distinctive his expatriate lifestyle was perceived to be. Even so, he was a straw in the wind. ‘Atticus’ was not the only wealthy citizen to have witnessed a decade of violence and political collapse, and decided that there might be no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.

Sometimes Cicero was tempted to agree. He was perfectly capable of acknowledging that ‘electioneering and scrabbling after office can be a wretched business’.²¹ But whether his breakdown had been purely physical, or perhaps something more, he retained his passionate conviction that public life was the ideal. Leaving Athens, he crossed the Aegean to Asia. There he met Rutilius Rufus, the old enemy of the publicani, and still in exile fifteen years after being convicted in the most notorious scandal in Roman legal history. Rutilius was an object lesson in how dangerous it could be to uphold ancient values against the predatory greed of corrupt officials, and yet, despite his hounding, he had not despaired of the Republic. For several days the old man entertained his guest with anecdotes about the heroic figures of his youth, then sent him onwards to visit his friend, the philosopher Posidonius, on Rhodes. The great sage’s conversation would have been even more motivational than that of Rutilius. Posidonius had lost none of his faith in Rome’s global destiny, nor in the traditional virtues that she could bring to such a mission: ‘Rugged fortitude; frugality; a lack of attachment to material possessions; a religion wonderful in its devotion to the gods; upright dealing; care and attention to justice when dealing with other men.’²² So the list ran on. Cicero, who had always dreamed of being the most traditional kind of Roman hero, was thrilled. What was a sore throat to stand in the way of fulfilling such a destiny? By a fortunate coincidence, the world’s most famous oratory clinic was also to be found on Rhodes. The rhetorician Molon, who ran it, was typical of a new breed of celebrity professors who had begun tailoring their courses to suit high achievers from Rome. Cicero was soon able to establish himself as Molon’s star pupil. Having encouraged him to adopt a more restrained manner of speaking, the teacher ended up in a theatrical state of despair, lamenting that even in the field of oratory Greece had now been surpassed by Rome. Cicero, always a sucker for flattery, was delighted. ‘And so I came home after two years not only more experienced,’ he recalled later, ‘but almost a new person. The excessive straining on my throat had gone, my style was less frenetic, my lungs were stronger – and I had even put on weight.’²³

Energy and self-confidence now fully restored, he returned to his legal practice in the Forum, where he continued to speak for the defence. Favours were duly earned and obligations totted up. Cicero was starting to close the gap on Hortensius. At the same time he was also picking up speed in the Cursus. At the age of thirty, the youngest legitimate age, he was elected to the quaestorship, the most junior of the Republic’s great offices, it was true, but a start all the same and, considering his background, an impressive one. The provincial from Arpinum was now not only a magistrate of the Roman people, but a member of the Senate. Assigned to Sicily, he spent a year there, attempting to put the example of Rutilius to good use, earning the respect of the provincials, and efficiently organising shipments of grain back to Rome. The brilliant young quaestor, with his customary lack of modesty, imagined that his fellow citizens would be talking of little else. Landing at Puteoli on his way home, however, Cicero was appalled to discover that no one had even realised he had been away. Typically, however, he soon managed to put the lesson to good account:

I now believe the incident benefited me more than if everyone had been offering me congratulations. I realised that the Roman people are prone to deafness, but that their eyesight is keen and observant, and so I stopped worrying what people might hear of me, but made sure that they saw me in person every day. I lived in the full glare of their observation, I was always in the Forum. Neither sleep nor the bouncer by my door ever prevented anyone from getting to see me.

²⁴

For those on the Cursus, exposure was all. A new man had to hype himself or else he was nothing. This was a lesson that Cicero would never forget.

He was now fast becoming a fixture in Rome. People who mattered were waking up to the fact that Cicero’s estimation of his own talents was not merely insufferable egotism, and that his genius as an advocate was indeed something exceptional. The more this perception gathered pace, the more Cicero could begin to eye the prospect of a real breakthrough, past the staging-post of the junior magistracies and into the laps where only the aristocracy might normally be expected to advance. To achieve that, however, he would first have to establish his dominance as an orator beyond all doubt. Hortensius had to be toppled, and not only toppled, but comprehensively drubbed. His ‘tyrannical rule of the law courts’²⁵ had to be brought to a public end.

So it was that when Cicero finally met Hortensius face to face, in a case ripe with scandal and prurient detail, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The defendant was a former governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, and it was Cicero, breaking the habit of a lifetime, who brought the prosecution. This was a risk, but a well-calculated one. Even upon the modest record of Roman provincial administration, Verres appears to have been a spectacular blot. Treachery and greed had been the keynotes of his career. A supporter of the Marians for as long as the Marians clung to power, he had soon sensed the way the wind was blowing, and absconded to Sulla with his commanding officer’s cash box. Armed with the favour of the new regime, Verres had duly found himself launched on a series of increasingly lucrative overseas postings. Whether he was really, as Cicero was to claim, ‘distinguished by nothing except his monstrous offences and his obscene wealth’,²⁶ he certainly seems to have had an eye for ready perks – ships, disputed wills, the daughters of his hosts. Verres’ real specialisation, however, was antiques. Years of pillaging the Greek world had given the Roman upper classes an immense enthusiasm for high art. Officially, this was despised as effete self-indulgence, but behind the scenes Roman grandees would chase frantically after any valuable painting or statue that was going. Now that the days of sacking Greek cities were over, the world’s first art market had developed to plug the gap. Prices had duly spiralled and dealers made fortunes. Verres’ own refinement had been to bring the methods of a gangster to the trade. Even as he was mass-producing fakes he was employing a team of experts, ‘bloodhounds’,²⁷ to sniff out genuine masterpieces. Verres had a talent for making offers that no one dared refuse. One provincial elder who had tried to outface the governor had been stripped naked and lashed to an equestrian statue in the town’s main square. Since it had been the dead of winter, and the statue had been made of bronze, the old man had soon changed his mind. Other trouble-makers, even Roman citizens, Verres had simply had crucified.

This, then, was the man whom Cicero had decided to go after. Despite the defendant’s record, he knew that the case would be no walk-over. Verres had friends in high places and a long reach. When Cicero travelled to Sicily to pursue the case in person, he found that witnesses had a suspicious tendency to fall silent or disappear. Fortunately, following his quaestorship, he had plenty of Sicilian contacts of his own. Evidence was everywhere, even in the silence of the countryside, its farmers ruined by Verres’ depredations. Clearly, as a prosecutor, Cicero relished what he found, but as an aspiring statesman he was simultaneously appalled. Verres’ corruption struck at two of his most passionately held convictions: that Rome was good for the world, and that the workings of the Republic were good for Rome. This was why Cicero could argue with a perfectly straight face that the stakes in the coming trial were apocalyptic. ‘There is nowhere, no matter how distant or obscure, within the boundary of the encircling Ocean, that has not suffered from the lust for oppression which drives our people on,’ he warned. If Verres were not convicted, then ‘the Republic will be doomed, for this monster’s acquittal will serve as a precedent to encourage other monsters in the future’.²⁸ Magnificently over the top though all this was, there was more to it than a mere lawyerly desire to make the flesh creep. For the sake of his political ideals, and his own self-respect, Cicero had to believe what he was saying. If the Cursus rewarded greed rather than patriotism, and if a man such as Verres could emerge triumphant over a man such as himself, then the Republic was rotten indeed. Here was an argument that Cicero would cling to all his life: that his own success was to be regarded as the measure of the health of Rome. Genuine principle fused seamlessly with inordinate self-regard.

It did not take Hortensius long to recognise what he was up against. Rather than argue the case on Cicero’s own terms, he instead sought to have the trial postponed. It was finally set for a date just before the law courts went into a lengthy recess. For the prosecution, this was a potentially devastating setback. The conventions governing an advocate’s mode of address were time-consuming, and, if Cicero were to stick to them, the trial might be expected to drag on for months. The longer it continued, the more opportunities for bribery and arm-twisting Verres would have. As the trial opened the defendant had every reason to crow. Cicero, however, had prepared a devastating ambush. Rather than follow the customary rituals of the law courts, he took the unprecedented step of laying out his evidence immediately in a series of short speeches. Hortensius needed to hear only the first of these to realise that the game was up. He waived his right of reply and the trial promptly collapsed. Verres, not wanting to wait for the inevitable conviction, cut and ran with his art collection to Marseille. Cicero celebrated by publishing the full text of the speeches he would have given, no doubt nicely sharpened for popular consumption, and with a few well-aimed jabs at Hortensius thrown in for good measure. The news was broadcast all over Rome: the king had lost his crown; Hortensius’ rule of the law courts had been brought to a close.

Cicero’s own supremacy was to last a lifetime. The advantages this brought him in terms of influence and contacts were immense. There were also more immediate spoils. At the start of his prosecution Cicero had claimed to have no concern with personal gain. This had been disingenuous in the extreme. As Cicero would well have known, a prosecutor had the right to claim the rank of any criminal he successfully brought to justice. Verres had been a praetor, and so, once he had been convicted, all the perks of his status passed directly to Cicero. Among these were the right to speak in debates ahead of non-praetorian senators. For a man of Cicero’s eloquence this was a crucial privilege. His oratory could now start to weave its magic not only in the law courts, but also in the very cockpit of politics.

Of course, he still had a long way to go, but he had taken great strides. ‘Reflect on what city this is, on the nature of your goal, and on who you are,’ his brother advised him. ‘Every day, as you are walking down to the Forum, turn these thoughts over and over in your mind: “I am a new man! I want the consulship! This is Rome!”’²⁹

The ultimate prize was no longer an impossible dream.

The Bull and the Boy

Throughout the seventies BC the Capitol remained a building site. The great temple of Jupiter rose gradually from its ashes long after Sulla’s own had been scattered on the wind. As the very grandest of the Republic’s grands projets, it was unthinkable that such a monument should be jerry-built. Even before its completion Cicero could hail it as ‘the most famous and beautiful building’ in the city.³⁰ Just as the destruction of the previous temple had been a portent of civil war, so the new one, clearly visible to everyone who passed through the Forum, was evidence that the gods were smiling on Rome again. Peace had returned, and the Republic itself had been restored.

Or so Sulla’s adherents wished everyone to believe. This was why they were so careful to keep supervision of the Capitol in their own hands. After Sulla’s death, official responsibility for the temple passed to his most distinguished associate, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. He was the very embodiment of senatorial hauteur. Distinguished ancestry combined with a reputation for stern, old-fashioned integrity to win him unrivalled authority in the Senate. He was easily Sulla’s most eminent heir. Yet even Catulus’ loyalty had its limits. Sulla had intended to have his name immortalised on the giant architrave of the temple, but Catulus had other plans. Rather than Sulla’s name, he had the temple inscribed with his own.

Catulus’ reputation for austere probity does not appear to have been damaged by this act of one-upmanship. Just the opposite, in fact. The memory of Sulla was tainted and his name regarded as malign. By promoting himself at the expense of his dead leader, Catulus was effectively acknowledging this. His commitment to Sulla’s legacy remained unshaken, but the way in which it had been imposed on the Republic, at the point of a sword, was an obvious embarrassment to any self-proclaimed conservative. Together with Hortensius, who was not only his closest political ally but his brother-in-law, Catulus sought to uphold a proudly backward-looking ideal, one in which a grateful Roman people would be guided towards honour and glory by the Senate. In turn, the Senate was to be guided by men like himself, embodiments of Rome’s ancient order, bound by the flinty traditions of their ancestors. The Republic, however, had many different traditions, confused and confusing, and defying codification. In the past the challenge for a citizen had always been to negotiate the swirling of their cross-currents, but Sulla, having seen where they might lead, had instead sought to tame and – in some cases – to dam their flow. Like a mighty system of dykes, his legislation served to channel what had previously been unchecked. Ritual and a shared sense of duty and obligation, these were what had defined the Republic for centuries. Unwritten custom had been all. Now that was changed. Implacable traditionalists though they were, men such as Catulus were also the heirs to revolution.

Behind the embankments raised by Sulla, however, there was a constant churning pressure. The attachment of citizens to their ancient rights was not easily diverted, and legislation against the tribunate in particular was massively resented. In 75 BC, only three years after Sulla’s death, the crucial law that had prohibited tribunes from holding further office was swept away. Despite a desperate manning of the dykes by Sulla’s supporters, a sizeable majority of senators ended up supporting the measure. Some caved in to a violent protest movement, others were just as likely to have been influenced by personal ambition, or by feuds with opponents, or by ties of obligation, or by totally obscure factors. Motives in Rome had always been opaque. As the traditional order of the Republic began to reassert itself, so too did the old incalculability of Roman politics. Sulla’s dream – that there should be a single, public conduit to power – was crumbling along with his settlement.

How was it, for instance, that even the ineffably prestige-laden Catulus might on occasions be outsmarted in the Senate by a notorious turncoat, Publius Cethegus? Like Verres, Cethegus had switched to Sulla just in time to save his skin. During the siege of Praeneste he had persuaded his former colleagues to surrender, then coolly turned them over to Sulla’s stormtroopers for execution. Thoroughbreds such as Catulus regarded him with revulsion, but Cethegus was hardly the man to care. Rather than compete for public honours, as a Roman nobleman was expected to do, he instead wheeled and dealed behind the scenes, bribing, cajoling and scheming his way to the control of a vast bloc of senators’ votes. This was a political weapon that even the snootiest of aristocrats could respect. Any time an appointment needed fixing, or a bill had to be finessed, the midnight visitors would start flitting to and from Cethegus’ doors.

The idea that power might be separable from glory in this way was mystifying to most Romans; disturbing too. In any election Cethegus’ unsavoury reputation would have proved lethal to his hopes. His prestige was that of a lobbyist, nothing more. No Roman who aimed for the consulship could afford to keep to the disreputable backrooms in which Cethegus lurked. The established aristocracy might sometimes find themselves reduced to employing him, but their reluctance to emulate his career pattern spoke loudly of their disdain. Yet there was one nobleman, of high birth and overweening, almost threatening prestige, who had already long surpassed Cethegus in the dark arts of political fixing, and who had never betrayed the slightest scruples about doing so; who glided with equal facility through the shadows and the brilliant glare of public life; who ‘would go to any effort, make himself amenable to anyone he came across, just so long as he obtained what he wanted’.³¹ And what Marcus Crassus wanted was clear: to be the leading citizen in the state.

In the years following Sulla’s death, although he was yet to win the praetorship, still less become consul, there were those who regarded Crassus as already closing in on that ambition. The row with Sulla had proved only a limited setback. Indeed, in some ways it had served to enhance Crassus’ prestige. Unlike Catulus, he stood at a remove from the dictator’s regime. This was how he preferred to operate, without ties or obligations to any cause except his own. Principles, to Crassus, were merely gambits in a vast and complex game, to be adopted then sacrificed as strategy required. Rather than risk leaving his fingermarks on anything, he employed proxies to test the limits on his behalf. Of such willing dependants he had an endless supply. Crassus was assiduous at cultivating men on the make. Whether he wished to help promote them to high office or merely have them serve him as patsies or ciphers, he would treat them all with the same menacing geniality, keeping open house, avoiding airs, remembering the name of anyone he ever met. In the law courts he would tirelessly plead for defendants who might later provide him with a return. A debt taken out with Crassus always came with heavy interest.

Not for nothing did he operate as the Senate’s banker. Crassus had deeper funds than anyone else in Rome. Slaves, mines and real estate remained his principal investments, but he regarded no scam as too low if it would add to his coffers. Whenever a house went up in flames, Crassus would have his private fire-brigade rush to the scene, then refuse to extinguish the fire until the owner had sold him the property cheap. Prosecuted for sleeping with a Vestal Virgin – a particularly sacrilegious crime – he could protest that he had only seduced the woman in order to snap up her property, and be believed. Despite his reputation for avarice, however, Crassus lived simply, and when his interests were not at stake he could prove notoriously mean. A philosopher, Alexander, to whom Crassus had provided grudging hospitality, would be lent a cloak for journeys then required to give it back. Alexander, as a Greek, did not have the vote. Had he been a citizen, then he would have been encouraged to borrow far more than a cloak. The more eminent his status, the more spectacularly he would have been encouraged to fall into debt. Money was easily Crassus’ favourite instrument of power. The threads of gold he spun entangled the whole Republic. Little could happen in Rome of which Crassus was not immediately aware, sensitive as he was to every tremor, every fluttering of every fly caught in his web.

No wonder that he inspired in his fellow citizens a rare dread. Campaigners against Sulla’s laws would violently abuse other public figures, but never Crassus. Asked why, a tribune compared him not to a spider but to a bull with hay on its horns – ‘it being a custom among the Romans’, as Plutarch explains, ‘to tie hay round the horns of dangerous bulls, so that people who met them might be on their guard’.³² Such respect was what Crassus most craved. More clearly than anyone else in Rome, he had penetrated to the heart of the lesson of the civil wars: that the outward trappings of glory were nothing compared to pre-eminence among the people in the know. In a society such as the Republic, where envy and malice always followed fast on greatness, supremacy was a perilous status. Only if it inspired fear without undue resentment could it hope to endure. In the art of preserving such a balance Crassus ruled supreme.

Yet, to his chagrin, he found himself overshadowed by one rival to whom the laws of political gravity appeared simply not to apply. The show-stealer, as ever, was Pompey. Where Crassus manoeuvred to enjoy the substance of power, Pompey never ceased to enjoy the glitter and clamour of its show. But by play-acting the general he rapidly became the genuine thing, and not merely a general, but the darling of Rome. The ‘teenage butcher’ had an innocent’s charm. ‘Nothing was more delicate than Pompey’s cheeks,’ we are told: ‘whenever he felt people’s eyes on him, he would go bright red.’³³ To the public, such blushes were an endearing reminder of their hero’s youth, of the boyish modesty that appeared all the more estimable when set against the unparalleled arc of his rise. What citizen had not dared to imagine himself doing as Pompey had done, seizing the chance for glory with both hands and soaring towards the stars? The Romans’ tolerance of his career betrayed the depth of their crush. Far from provoking their jealousy, Pompey enabled them to live out – however vicariously – their deepest fantasies and dreams.

Pompey’s superstardom was something that even Sulla had been forced to respect. No one else had tested the limits of the dictator’s patience quite like Pompey, the spoiled and favoured son. After routing the Marian armies in Africa he had crossed back to Italy and refused a direct order to disband his legions – not with any intention of toppling Sulla’s regime, but because, like a small child with his eye on a new and glittering treat, he had wanted a triumph. Sulla, either in mockery or admiration, had agreed to confirm his protégé in the title awarded him by his troops: ‘Magnus’ – ‘The Great’. The granting of the supreme honour of a triumph, however, to a man who was not even a senator, had given him pause. Pompey, typically, had met condescension with impudence. ‘More people worship the rising than the setting sun,’³⁴ he had told the ageing dictator to his face. Sulla, wearily, had at last given way. Pompey, no doubt blushing becomingly, had duly ridden in triumph through the streets, the spoils of his victories preceding him, cheered to the hilt by his adoring fans. And not even twenty-five.

After an excitement like that, the grind of a conventional political career was unappealing. No slogging after quaestorships for Pompey the Great. Having helped Catulus to put down the armed revolt that had followed Sulla’s death, he had then pulled his favourite stunt of refusing to disband his troops. Again, this had not been with any intention of carrying out a coup himself, but because he had been enjoying himself too much as a general to be prepared to give up his legions. Instead, he had demanded to be sent to Spain. The province was still infested with Marian rebels, and the Senate, in confirming Pompey’s command, had not been merely surrendering to blackmail. The war against the rebels promised to be deeply unglamorous, with plenty of hazards and few rewards. Catulus and his colleagues had been glad to see Pompey go.

Crassus, too, must have hoped that his young rival was riding for a fall. Once again, however, Pompey was to prove himself insufferably successful. Gruelling though the war did indeed prove to be, the rebel armies were gradually subdued. Crassus, who never ceased to regard Pompey’s title of Magnus as a joke, began to hear it used ever less ironically by everyone around him. In 73 BC, the year in which Crassus became praetor, Pompey was busy extinguishing the final embers of rebellion, and settling Spain to his own immense advantage. In the province that had provided Crassus with his first army, Pompey was now securing a client base as well. Soon he would be returning to Rome, trailing clouds of glory, his army of seasoned veterans at his back. No doubt he would demand a second triumph. After that, who could tell?

Crassus, faced with a threat like Pompey, appears to have reevaluated his strategy. Immense though his own prestige was, it remained half in the shadows. Now was the time to move into the full glare of public approbation. Crassus was no Cethegus. He knew perfectly well that power without glory would always be limited, especially in competition with a rival such as Pompey. He needed a smashing victory of his own, and fast. But where? And against whom? Suitable enemies were in frustratingly short supply.

And then suddenly, like a storm out of the blue, his opportunity arrived.

The Shadow of the Gladiator

That midsummer of 73 there was a breakout from a gladiatorial school in Campania. Like shellfish and luxury accommodation, such schools had become increasingly big business in the region. Gladiators were very much a home-grown speciality. Long before the arrival of Rome on the scene, tombs across Campania and Samnium had been the settings for duels between armed warriors, staged in honour of the spirits of the ever-thirsty dead. Even as the rituals of blood-spilling began to be commercialised by a growing Roman interest in them, gladiators continued to dress in the style of Samnite warriors, complete with brimmed helmets and ungainly, bobbing crests. As time went by, and Samnite independence faded into history, so the appearance of these fighters came to seem ever more exotic – like that of animals preserved from extinction in a zoo.

To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries, but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies – if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls. Yet this spectacle of savagery, staged in the Forum, the very heart of Rome, inspired emotions of admiration as well as loathing and contempt. The upper classes might like to pretend that the games existed for the benefit of the plebs, but the example of a gladiator’s courage could affect anyone. ‘Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,’ enthused the sophisticated Cicero. ‘And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the deathblow?’³⁵ Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired.

Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting for his life was only one of degree. A Roman was brought up to thrill to the spectacle of both. In a society such as the Republic, fascination with the violence of the arena came naturally. The more excessive its gore-spattered theatricality, the more the Romans found themselves craving it. But the carnage also served them as a deadly warning. Gladiatorial combat was evidence of what might happen once the spirit of competition was given free rein, once men started to fight each other not as Romans, bound by the restraints of custom and obligation, but as brutes. Blood on the sand, corpses dragged away on hooks. Should the frameworks of the Republic collapse, as they had almost done during the years of civil war, then such might be the fate of everyone, citizen as well as slave.

Here, then, was another reason why the training schools tended to be concentrated in Campania, at a safe distance from Rome. The Romans could recognise the savagery in the soul of the gladiator and feared to have it harboured it in their midst. In the summer of 73, even though the number on the run was well below a hundred, the Romans still sent a praetor to deal with them, along with an army of three thousand men. The fugitives having taken refuge on the slopes of Vesuvius, the Romans settled down to starve them out. Gladiators, however, knew all about lunging at an opponent’s weak spot. Finding the slopes of the volcano covered with wild vines, they wove ladders out of the tendrils, then descended a precipice and attacked the Romans in the rear. The camp was captured, the legionaries routed. The gladiators were immediately joined by further runaways. Leg irons were melted down and forged into swords. Wild horses were captured and trained, a cavalry unit formed. Spilling out across Campania, the slaves began to pillage a region only just starting to recover from Sulla’s depredations. Nola was besieged yet again, and looted. Two further Roman armies were routed. Another praetor’s camp was stormed. His fasces were captured, and even his horse.

What had begun as a makeshift guerrilla force was now forming itself into a huge and disciplined army of some 120,000 men. Credit for this belonged to the leader of the original break-out, a Thracian named Spartacus. Before his enslavement he had served the Romans as a mercenary, and combined the physique of a gladiator with shrewdness and sophistication. He recognised that if the rebels stayed in Italy, it would be only a matter of time before their outraged masters annihilated them, so in the spring of 72 he and his army began to head for the Alps. They were pursued by Gellius Publicola, the humorist whose joking at the expense of Athenian philosophers had so amused his friends years before, and who had just been elected to the consulship. Before he could engage with Spartacus, however, the slaves met with the Roman forces stationed to guard the northern frontier, and destroyed them. The route over the Alps, and to freedom, now stood wide open. But the slaves refused to take it. Instead, meeting and brushing aside Gellius’ army, they retraced their steps southwards, back towards the heartlands of their masters and everything they had previously been attempting to escape.

The Romans were perplexed by this volte face. One explanation they offered for it was overconfidence: ‘the slaves were stupid, and foolishly laid too much confidence in the huge numbers who were flocking to join their force’.³⁶ In fact, it would have been hard for the rebels not to have been overwhelmed by the discovery of just how many other slaves there were in Italy. Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandise, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the centre of the empire, there to toil for their new masters. Even the poorest citizen might own a slave. In rich households the labour glut obliged slave-owners to think up ever more exotic jobs for their purchases to specialise in, whether dusting portrait busts, writing invitations or attending to purple clothes. By their very nature, of course, such tasks were recherché. The work of most slaves was infinitely more crushing. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded and shackled, then set to labour from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive. Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialised in the torture – and sometimes execution – of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could expect to be cast aside, like diseased cattle or shattered wine jars. It hardly mattered to their masters whether they survived or starved. After all, as Roman agriculturalists liked to remind their readers, there was no point in wasting money on useless tools.

This exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic – its culture of citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame. It was not merely that the leisure which enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent upon the forced labour of others. Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need. ‘Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else’:³⁷ so every Roman took for granted. All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

It was a logic that slaves accepted too. No one ever objected to the hierarchy of free and un-free, merely his own position within it. What the rebels wanted was not to destroy slavery as an institution, but to win the privileges of their former masters. So it was that they would sometimes force their Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators: ‘Those who had once been the spectacle became the spectators.’³⁸ Only Spartacus himself appears to have fought for a genuine ideal. Uniquely among the leaders of slave revolts in the ancient world, he attempted to impose a form of egalitarianism on his followers, banning them from holding gold and silver and sharing out their loot on an equal basis. If this was an attempt at Utopia, however, it failed. The opportunities for violent freebooting were simply too tempting for most of the rebels to resist. Here, the Romans believed, was another explanation for the slaves’ failure to escape while they had the chance. What were the bogs and forests of their homelands compared to the temptations of Italy? The rebels’ dreams of freedom came a poor second to their greed for plunder. To the Romans, this was conclusive evidence of their ‘servile nature’.³⁹ In fact, the slaves were only aiming to live as their masters did, off the produce and labour of others. Even on the rampage they continued to hold a mirror up to Roman ideals.

It was no wonder that the Romans themselves, who could recognise efficient looting when they saw it, should have begun to panic. With the defeat of Gellius’ army, and the Republic’s other legions all serving abroad, the capital suddenly found itself perilously exposed. Crassus, who had not boasted of being rich enough to raise his own army for nothing, now made his move. His supporters in the Senate were mobilised. After a furious debate the consuls were stripped of their two legions, and Crassus was awarded sole command. The new generalissimo immediately launched a recruiting drive, quadrupling the size of the forces at his disposal. Having won the chance to establish himself as the saviour of the Republic, he did not intend to waste it. When two of his legions, in direct contradiction of his orders, engaged with Spartacus and suffered yet another defeat, Crassus’ response was to resurrect the ancient and terrible punishment of decimation. Every tenth man was beaten to death, the obedient along with the disobedient, the brave along with the cowardly, while their fellows were forced to watch. Military discipline was reimposed. At the same time, a warning was sent to any slaves tempted to join Spartacus that they could expect no mercy from a general prepared to impose such sanctions upon his own men. Ruthless as Crassus was, he never did anything without a fine calculation of its effect. At a single brutal stroke the property-grubbing millionaire had transformed his image into that of the stern upholder of old-fashioned values. As Crassus would have been perfectly aware, the traditions of Roman discipline always played well with the voters.

With his authority now firmly established, Crassus moved to ring-fence the capital. Spartacus responded by retreating further south. He knew that this was where he was most likely to find new recruits. Leaving behind the town-dotted prosperity of central Italy, his army began to pass through a dreary succession of vast estates. On the plains all was desolate save for toiling chain-gangs, while across the uplands there was no one to be met with save for the occasional foreign slave driving huge flocks or herds across otherwise empty ranches. What had once been a landscape of flourishing towns and villages was now ‘Italiae solitudo’ – ‘the wilderness of Italy’. Driving the rebels further southwards through this desolation, and away from Rome, Crassus finally succeeded in penning them in the very heel of the peninsula. By now winter was starting to close in, and to ensure that his quarry could not escape, Crassus raised a barricade stretching from shore to shore. Spartacus found himself trapped. Two despairing attempts were made to storm the legionaries’ ditch and wall. Both were repulsed, to Crassus’ immense relief, for he, like his quarry, was starting to grow desperate. Time was running out. An enemy far more threatening than Spartacus was looming on the horizon. After five years in Spain, Pompey was on his way home.

When Spartacus learned of this he attempted to capitalise on Crassus’ discomfiture by offering to negotiate. Crassus contemptuously refused. Spartacus responded by crucifying a Roman prisoner in full view of the barricades. All day long the screams of the dying man were borne on the icy wind to his fellow citizens. Then, as evening darkened and snow began to gust, Spartacus made a third attempt to force the barricades. This time he broke free. Fleeing Crassus, he began to zigzag northwards. Crassus, with one eye on the rebels and the other on the ever-nearing Pompey, followed him at a frantic speed, picking off stragglers in a series of escalating clashes. At last the rebels were cornered again, and Spartacus turned and prepared to fight. Ahead of his marshalled men, he stabbed his horse, spurning the possibility of further retreat, pledging himself to victory or death. Then the slaves advanced into battle. Spartacus himself led a desperate charge against Crassus’ headquarters, but was killed before he could reach it. The vast bulk of the rebels’ army perished alongside their general. The great slave uprising was over. Crassus had saved the Republic.

Except that, at the very last minute, his glory was snatched from him. As Pompey headed south with his legions towards Rome he met with five thousand of the rebels, fugitives from Spartacus’ final defeat. With brisk efficiency he slaughtered every last one, then wrote to the Senate, boasting of his achievement in finishing off the revolt. Crassus’ feelings can only be imagined. In an attempt to counteract Pompey’s glory-hogging he ordered all the prisoners he had captured to be crucified along the Appian Way. For over a hundred miles, along Italy’s busiest road, a cross with the body of a slave nailed to it stood every forty yards, gruesome billboards advertising Crassus’ victory.

To most Romans, however, the war against Spartacus had been an embarrassment. Compared to Pompey’s achievement in slaughtering thousands of tribesmen in a far-off provincial war, Crassus’ rescue act in Rome’s backyard was something to forget. This is why, even though both men were voted laurel wreaths, Crassus had to be satisfied with a second-class parade, touring the streets of Rome not in a chariot but on foot. No pavement-pounding for Pompey, of course. Nothing but the best for the people’s hero. While Pompey, preening like a young Alexander, rode in a chariot pulled by four white horses, his trains of loot and prisoners snaking ahead of him through the streets, his adoring fans going wild, Crassus could only watch, and fume.

All the same, he was careful not to let his resentment show. Cheering crowds, however gratifying in themselves, were only means to an end, and that end, for Crassus, was always the substance of power. Infinitely more than a triumph, he wanted the consulship. With elections fast approaching, he performed a characteristically adroit somersault by suggesting to his great rival that they run on a joint ticket. Pompey, as nervous of Crassus’ political skills as Crassus was of Pompey’s popularity, at once agreed. Both men were duly elected unopposed.

Pompey was thirty-six when he became his country’s head of state, well below the minimum age set by Sulla. Uniquely for a consul, he had never even been a senator. Nervous about making gaffes, he had to ask a friend to write him a bluffer’s guide to the Senate House. Even so, for all his inexperience, Pompey was not the man to go tiptoeing around. Dash was what had raised him to the pinnacle of military glory, and dash was what he brought to the battlefields of politics. No sooner had he become consul than he introduced a bill to unmuzzle the tribunate and restore to it all the ancient privileges abolished by Sulla. The cornerstone of the dead dictator’s legislation was thereby casually demolished, and a colourful, and potentially destabilising, element restored to the Republic’s political life. The crowds, who had been demanding just such a measure for almost a decade, went delirious once more.

This time round, however, Crassus shared equally in their applause. Not wishing to miss out on the credit for giving the people back their ancient rights, he had been careful to co-sponsor the reform. Even Catulus, sensing the way the wind was blowing, had withdrawn his opposition. Not that this implied senatorial approval of Pompey. Far from it. His greatness, and the irregular nature of his consulship, remained deeply offensive to the traditionalist leaders of the Senate. This enabled Crassus, whose own consulship was entirely legal, to present himself as their champion. As he was always happiest doing, he chose to hedge his bets. With one hand he splashed out on huge public banquets and free supplies of grain for the poor, while with the other he poured poison into his fellow senators’ ears, abusing Pompey as a dangerous demagogue and manoeuvring to block off any further crowd-pleasing measures. As a result, rather than working together for the good of the Republic, as consuls were supposed to do, Pompey and Crassus were soon openly at each other’s throat.

Nothing excited the crowds in an arena more than to see a duel between two gladiators armed with different weapons and skills. The most popular form of combat set a swordsman, magnificently armoured with breastplate and helmet, against a nimble-footed trident-carrier, whose aim was to entangle the swordsman in the meshes of a net. Pompey and Crassus provided a similar spectacle: two opponents so different, yet so evenly matched that neither could establish an advantage over the other. Rather than providing the Romans with entertainment, however, the duel shocked and disturbed them. Slaves might fight to the death, but not the consuls of the Roman people. A gladiator might slash the throat of a defeated opponent, but for one of the two heads of state to finish off his fellow was an affront to every ideal of the Republic. Ultimately, Pompey and Crassus seem to have realised that they were both being equally damaged by their feud. Towards the end of their year in office, as they were presiding at a public assembly in the Forum, a citizen suddenly interrupted them and asked for permission to relate a dream. It was granted. ‘Jupiter,’ the citizen announced, ‘appeared to me, and told me to announce in the Forum that the consuls should not lay down their office until they have become friends.’⁴⁰ There was a long pause. Then Crassus crossed to Pompey and took his hand. He praised his rival. The two were reconciled.

The episode sounds suspiciously like a put-up job, but that makes it no less significant. A decade after Sulla’s death, the idea that anyone might repeat what he had done, and establish a primacy over the state, still filled the Romans with horror. Powerful as Pompey and Crassus both were, neither could afford to be seen as more powerful than the other. This was the lesson that the Republic, even as it instilled in its citizens the desire to be the best, still insisted upon. Achievement was worthy of praise and honour, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself.

A BANQUET OF CARRION

The Proconsul and the Kings

To the Romans, it was the intoxicating quality of power that made it so dangerous. To command the affairs of one’s fellow citizens and to lead them into war, these were awesome responsibilities, capable of turning anybody’s head. After all, what else had the Republic been founded upon if not this single great perception – that the taste of kingly authority was addictive and corrupting? Except, of course, that with Rome now the mistress of the world and the arbiter of nations, the authority of her consuls far exceeded any king’s. All the more reason, then, to insist on the checks that had always hedged about their office.

And yet – the growing extent of the Republic’s reach confronted the Romans with a dilemma. Now that they were the citizens not of a small city state but of a superpower, the demands on their attention appeared limitless. Wars flared up everywhere. The more distant and intractable the enemy, the greater the logistical demands upon the consuls. In extreme circumstances, this left the Senate with little choice but to appoint a magistrate who could take their place, who could be, as the Romans put it, ‘pro consule’. As the Republic’s empire expanded throughout the second century BC so recourse to proconsuls had become ever more common. By the nature of their duties, they might find themselves campaigning for a period far longer than the conventional single year. Pompey, for instance, had spent five years in Spain. The war was duly won, but not without raising conservative hackles back in Rome. Pompey’s grandstanding only confirmed the Senate in its distaste for extravagant commissions of proconsular power. The situation in Spain had been desperate, but elsewhere, if Rome’s interests were not immediately threatened, then senators might prefer to tolerate any amount of low-level anarchy rather than grant one of their peers a licence to clear it up.

Such was the situation with the province of Asia. There, the war against Mithridates had left a legacy of misery and chaos. The cities groaned under punitive exactions; the social fabric was nearing collapse; along the frontier, petty princelings snarled and snapped. Over the wounds of the ruined province Roman flies buzzed eagerly, not only ambitious young officers like Julius Caesar, but also the agents of the publicani, ruined by Mithridates, now drawn back by the scent of fresh blood. Despite everything, Asia remained Rome’s richest province – and this was precisely what prevented the Senate from imposing an equitable settlement on the region. Who could be trusted to administer it? No one had forgotten the last proconsul appointed to deal with trouble in the East. Even over his own supporters, Sulla cast a warning shadow.

All the same, everyone in Rome was aware that the war against Mithridates was a job left unfinished. Eager to return to Italy and win the civil war, Sulla had consciously forfeited the Republic’s right to full vengeance: his decision to spare the butcher of eighty thousand Italians when he could have destroyed him had been an act of pure expediency. It particularly rankled with those who felt themselves to have been implicated in the policy. This was why the officers left behind by Sulla continued to launch periodic raiding missions against Mithridates, trying to provoke him into a response. It was also why the senatorial establishment, led by those arch-Sullans Catulus and Hortensius, refused to ratify the peace treaty that their own generalissimo had signed. When Mithridates’ envoys travelled to Rome they were fobbed off with the excuse that the Senate did not have the time to see them. For month after month the ambassadors were left to stew.

All of which left Mithridates in no doubt that the Romans wished to see him toppled. Not that he had ever given up on his own ambitions. Asia appeared as full of rich pickings as it always had. Away from the prying eyes of Roman observers, Mithridates was slowly rebuilding his offensive capability, which had been shattered by the sanctions imposed by Sulla. This time round he looked abroad, to his enemy, for inspiration. Jewelled armour and gilded weapons were out, Roman-style discipline and efficiency were in. Mithridates began to arm his infantry with the gladius, the short, double-edged Spanish sword that the legionaries had adopted a century or so before. The savage injuries inflicted by this weapon, used as it was to stab and strike at the vital organs, had always provoked a particular horror in the East. Now Mithridates aimed to make it his own.

To this end, in the summer of 74 BC he approached the Marian rebels in Spain and secured their assistance in equipping and training his army. The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their pre-emptive strikes were defensive in nature. Mithridates, of course, was no negligible foe. Asia once again seemed at genuine risk. Such was the groundswell of outrage that the authorisation of an Eastern command at last became inevitable. But still the perilous question had to be answered: to whom?

In 74 the Sullan establishment retained sufficient control over the Senate to veto anyone too potentially overweening. This ruled out Pompey, who at this stage was in any case still embroiled in Spain, and Crassus, preoccupied as he was with his campaign for the praetorship. Fortunately for Catulus and his allies, one of their own was serving as consul that year. Lucius Lucullus was the most able and impressive of all the great noblemen who had attached their stars to the dictator and his settlement. His career, however, had been tumultuous from the start. He came from an ancient family chiefly celebrated for bad marriages and feuds. His mother had been insatiably unfaithful, and his father had indulged in a series of vendettas that had culminated in his prosecution and exile. Lucullus had inherited the blood-feud, and first made a name for himself by taking to court the man who had convicted his father. Such implacability was to prove an enduring feature of his character. It could translate all too easily into stiffness, for Lucullus was not blessed with the common touch, and rather than attempt to buy popularity, he was grimly content to be regarded as aloof and stingy. But he was also a humane and highly cultivated man, a philosopher and historian, steeped in Greek culture and possessing a genuine concern for the well-being of Rome’s subjects. Inveterate in his hatreds, he was also passionate in his loyalties and beliefs. He was particularly devoted to Sulla and his memory. It was almost certainly Lucullus who had been the one officer prepared to accompany Sulla on his first march on Rome. During the war against Mithridates he had balanced his duty to his general’s commands and his desire to protect the wretched Greeks with integrity and skill. Subsequently, he was the dedicatee of the dictator’s memoirs, the executor of his will and the guardian of his children. Unlike Pompey or Crassus, Lucullus could be trusted to stay true to his dead friend.

The Sullan establishment was therefore quick to mobilise in his support. Other powerful factions also moved to back him. Just before winning the consulship, Lucullus had married into the very grandest of Rome’s patrician dynasties. The Claudii were notorious for their arrogance and waywardness, but they could also boast half a millennium of high achievement, a record of consistency without parallel in the Republic. No family had more portrait-masks in its hall, or more hereditary clients, or more fingers in lucrative foreign pies. The prestige of the Claudii was such that it could transform even an aristocrat of Lucullus’ pedigree into a frantic social climber. So eager had he been to make a Claudian match that he had even agreed to forgo a dowry. His wife, in the best tradition of Lucullan brides, had soon proved herself fabulously unfaithful, but Lucullus must have calculated that she was a price worth paying to have the Claudii on his side. Not that his in-laws were any less hard-headed in their own calculations. The head of the family, Appius Claudius Pulcher, had only recently inherited that position on the death of his father, and had two brothers and three sisters to provide for, as well as his own ambitions. Sublimely imperious and opportunistic as he was, Appius could recognise that Lucullus was his likeliest ticket to a glamorous career in the East. The baby of the family, Publius Clodius, also had military aspirations. He had just turned eighteen, the traditional age for a young Roman to start his service as a soldier. Clodius, like Appius, had his eyes fixed on the glory trail.

Before they and their brother-in-law could set out for Asia, however, Lucullus still had to be confirmed in his command. Even with the backing of both Catulus and the Claudii, he found that a majority of senators remained against him. Desperate, he realised that there was no alternative but to put out the feelers to the Senate’s arch-fixer, Publius Cethegus. Too proud to do so directly, Lucullus opted for the lesser evil of seducing Cethegus’ mistress, and persuading her to bring her lover on board. The ploy worked: Cethegus began to spin and strongarm in Lucullus’ favour. His bloc of tame senators was brought into play and the deadlock was broken. Lucullus was finally given his command.

With him went his consular colleague Marcus Cotta. This was either a compliment to Mithridates’ fearsome reputation or, more likely, a sign that the Senate could still not quite bring itself to entrust the war to a single man. Whatever the reason for it, the arrangement rapidly backfired. While Lucullus prepared to invade Pontus, Cotta managed to lose an entire fleet to Mithridates, then narrowly avoided losing his army as well, and ended up ignominiously blockaded in a port on the Bosphorus. Mithridates was now within striking distance of the province of Asia. To the indignation of his men, Lucullus loyally aborted his own invasion and swung back to the rescue of his incompetent colleague. At the news of his approach, Mithridates raised the siege, not to retreat but to launch a full-blown invasion of Asia itself. He had every reason to feel confident: his new model army had already put paid to one consul and it outnumbered Lucullus’ five legions by almost four to one. Mithridates must have thought that he had every chance of once again sweeping the Romans into the sea.

Lucullus, however, refused to take the bait. Instead of staking all on a frontal engagement, he harried the Pontic army, cutting off its food supplies, ‘making its stomach the theatre of war’.¹ With the coming of winter, Mithridates was forced to retreat, leaving behind him the wreckage of his siege engines and thousands of his men. Then, in the spring of the following year, Lucullus struck again. This time he was able to launch his invasion of Pontus undistracted by events in his rear. Over the next two years he systematically destroyed Mithridates’ grip on power. By 71 BC virtually the whole of the kingdom was in Lucullus’ hands, and a new province stood ready to be absorbed into the Romans’ empire. The war against Mithridates appeared to have been brought to a triumphant close.

Except that Mithridates himself, unyielding still in his defiance, had managed to slip through Lucullus’ fingers. A man with such an instinct for self-preservation that he had conditioned his body to tolerate poison was never going to accept defeat lightly. Instead, dodging every Roman attempt to capture him, he crossed the mountains to neighbouring Armenia, where he threw himself on the mercy of its powerful king, Tigranes. Lucullus promptly dispatched Appius to demand Mithridates’ surrender. This was the first official mission that Rome had sent to Armenia, a kingdom that had rarely disturbed the Republic’s calculations before, for it had always been remote from Rome’s sphere of influence, and its rise to prominence had been only a recent phenomenon. In little more than a decade Tigranes had established himself as the dominant power in what is now Iraq, adopting the grandiloquent title of the ‘King of Kings’ and all the gorgeous ritual of an Oriental court. Wherever he rode he was attended by four client kings, puffing as they ran to keep pace with his horse. Whenever he sat the same kings stood waiting beside his throne, ready to hop like slaves to their master’s bidding. Naturally, none of this flummery cut the slightest ice with Appius. When he met Tigranes he treated the King of Kings as the Claudii always treated everyone – with supercilious disdain. Tigranes, not used to being sneered at by anyone, still less by foreigners in their early twenties, was outraged. He refused to hand over Mithridates. The diplomatic chill further intensified when Appius, in defiance of all international niceties, turned his nose up at the gifts that Tigranes offered him and contemptuously accepted only a single cup.

So it was that Lucullus, without any official authorisation, found himself at war with a country of which few back in Rome had even heard. Despite the lateness of the season he acted with his customary decisiveness. Braving the floods of the Euphrates, he struck eastwards. His target was Tigranocerta, a city that the Armenian king had not only lovingly built from scratch, but honoured with his own royal name. At the news that his showpiece capital was under siege, Tigranes came storming to its relief. This was exactly what Lucullus had been banking on, despite the fact that he was now further from Rome than any Roman general in history, and that his legions were, as usual, vastly outnumbered. Tigranes himself, when he saw the pitiable size of the force opposed to him, joked that the Romans ‘were too many to be an embassy, and too few to be an army’.² The royal quip provoked much sycophantic mirth, but the smile was soon to be wiped from Tigranes’ face. In one of the most stunning victories in the annals of the Republic, Lucullus not only annihilated the Armenian army, but stormed Tigranocerta and literally took it to pieces. With their customary brutal efficiency, the Romans stripped the city bare, Lucullus taking the royal treasures, his men everything else. Then the city was levelled. Tigranes, a fugitive within his own kingdom, was powerless to intercede. Of the splendid monuments and palaces that the King of Kings had so recently erected to his glory barely a brick was left.

But the destruction – and the profit – were not as total as they might have been. By the accepted rules of war, Lucullus would have been perfectly justified in enslaving the defeated population. Instead he set them free. Most had been forcibly transported to Tigranocerta, and by sending them back to their homes Lucullus aimed to foster separatist movements across Tigranes’ kingdom. It was a policy that combined shrewdness and humanity in equal measure. No Roman ever questioned that the defeated should pay for the privilege of being conquered, but Lucullus combined an eye for plunder with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He certainly did not regard himself as an agent of slave-dealers or publicani, breeds for whom he had nothing but aristocratic contempt. Already, before setting out on the war against Tigranes, he had moved to deal with the blood-sucking that had disfigured Asia for so long. Interest rates had been slashed. The more scandalous abuses of the moneylenders had been banned. Regulation had been rigorously imposed. As a result, the indemnities that had left the Greek cities of Asia mortgaged to the hilt had at last begun to be paid off. Within a bare four years they would all be cleared.

The ancient ideals of the aristocracy had always provided the Republic’s empire with its conscience, but in the figure of Lucullus the traditional paternalism of a senator combined with a radical new interpretation of Rome’s globalising mission. His passion for Greek culture enabled him to see clearly that Roman rule had no long-term future in the East unless the Greeks were given at least a stake in it. The clemency shown to the population of Tigranocerta had reflected a consistent policy. In Pontus Lucullus had not only spared Greek cities that held out against him, but paid for their restoration once they had been stormed. By refraining from their obliteration, he invested in their future and the empire’s own security and long-term health.

Naturally, this did nothing to quieten the howls of indignation back in Rome. Debt relief for provincials was not a popular policy with big business. For as long as his provincial record remained one of brilliant success, Lucullus was unassailable, but the storming of Tigranocerta marked the high point of his career, and from that moment on he became ever more vulnerable to attacks on his command. Breathtaking though his victory over Tigranes had been, he had failed in his primary objective: Mithridates remained on the loose. Throughout the following year of 68 BC, Lucullus found himself on a wild-goose chase through the badlands of Armenia, harried by an enemy that now knew better than to meet him face to face. Increasingly, his triumphs seemed to be melting in his grasp. Back in Rome the financial lobby no longer had any qualms about unleashing their tame politicians on him. Various tribunes began to strip Lucullus of his provinces one by one, snapping at him like wolves on the trail of a wounded beast. In Pontus the irrepressible Mithridates popped up with yet another army and won a series of quick victories over the Roman garrisons. Meanwhile, Lucullus himself was bogged down far away from the field of these disasters, in southern Armenia, vainly attempting to bring the war against Tigranes to a satisfactory close. The strategically important city of Nisibis was captured, and Lucullus prepared to hunker down there for the winter. But the gravest threat to his position no longer came from Tigranes. Instead, as he was soon to discover, it would emerge from within his own camp.

During that winter of 68 Lucullus was surrounded by soldiers who had been with him for six years. Subject to merciless discipline, paid the barest minimum required to keep them alive, they had been marched across mountains and over deserts, zigzagging backwards and forwards, for over a thousand miles. To many of them – and some had been serving in the East for almost two decades – home must have seemed the haziest of memories. Yet all dreamed of returning there. It was why they fought: not merely to test themselves, in the approved Roman manner, against the savagery of the enemy and the fear of a violent death, but to reclaim a status that poverty had caused them to lose. The regard of his fellow citizens was as much of an obsession for the outcast as it was for the rich. Only war enabled him to demonstrate what even the most snobbish acknowledged, that ‘there is no condition so base that it cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory’.³ And – of course – of loot.

The armies of the Republic had not always been filled with penniless volunteers. When the citizens assembled for elections on the Campus Martius, ranked strictly according to their wealth, they were preserving the memory of a time when men of every class had been drafted, when a legion had indeed embodied the Republic at war. Ironically, in those nostalgically remembered days, only those without property had been excluded from the levy. This had reflected deeply held prejudices: among the Romans, it was received wisdom that ‘men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers’.⁴ The horny-handed peasant, tending to his small plot, was the object of much sentimental attachment and patriotic pride. Unsurprisingly, for the Republic had become great on his back. For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman-farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their ploughs left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years. During a soldier’s absence, his property might become easy prey. Small farms had been increasingly swallowed up by the rich. In place of a tapestry of fields and vineyards worked by free men, great stretches of Italy had been given over to vast estates, the ‘wilderness’ through which Spartacus had marched. Of course, it was not truly a wilderness, being filled with chain-gangs – but it lacked free-born citizens. The sight of ‘a countryside almost depopulated, with a virtual absence of free peasants or shepherds, and no one except for barbarian, imported slaves’,⁵ was what had shocked Tiberius Gracchus into launching his reform project. He had warned his fellow citizens that the foundations of their military greatness were being eroded. Every peasant who lost his farm had meant a soldier lost to Rome. To generations of reformers, the miseries of the dispossessed had seemed a portent of the entire Republic’s doom. The crisis in Italian agriculture was so overwhelming as to prove virtually intractable, but the crisis in military recruitment, at least, had begged an obvious reform. In 107 Marius had bowed to the inevitable: the army was opened to every citizen, regardless of whether he owned property or not. Weapons and armour had begun to be supplied by the state. The legions had turned professional.

From that moment on, possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service, but the reward. This was why, when the first mutterings of mutiny began to be heard in the winter of 68, the whispers were all of how Pompey’s veterans, merely for fighting rebels and slaves, were already ‘settled down with wives and children, in possession of fertile land’. Lucullus, by contrast, was starving his men of loot. The charge was patently untrue – Tigranocerta had fallen and been plundered only the previous year – but it was widely believed. After all, was Lucullus not notoriously mean? Had he not prevented the Greek cities back in Pontus from being looted? Were his men not ‘wasting their lives roaming across the world, with no reward for their service save the chance to guard the wagons and camels of Lucullus, and their freight of gold and gem-encrusted cups’?⁶

Discipline in the professionalised legions was even more merciless than it had been in the citizen levies of the past. Sentiments of mutiny were not lightly articulated. Fortunately for the resentful soldiery, however, there was a spokesman ready to hand. To Lucullus, his identity could not have come as more of a betrayal. The young Clodius Pulcher, unlike his elder brother Appius, had not been entrusted with flamboyant foreign missions. Nor had he been given the rapid promotion that he believed, as a Claudius, was his god-given right. Piqued by the perceived disrespect, Clodius had been waiting for the opportunity to stab his brother-in-law in the back. His revenge, when it came, was brazen. The patrician scion of Rome’s haughtiest family began to present himself as ‘the soldier’s friend’.⁷ His rabble-rousing had an immediate and devastating effect: Lucullus’ entire army went on strike.

Withdrawing their labour had always been the ultimate – indeed, the only – sanction available to disgruntled plebeians. In a camp on the very limits of civilisation, far from the frontiers of the empire, let alone from Rome herself, the primordial history of the Republic was once again replayed. But the world in which the mutineers staged their strike was no longer that of their ancestors. Their own interests were almost the least of what was at stake. Not only was the mutiny hopelessly entangled with the snarl of aristocratic rivalries, but it was imperilling a vast swath of territories, containing millions of Rome’s subjects, and sending reverberations throughout the whole of the East. This was the potential greatness of a proconsul, that even in the hour of catastrophe the whole world might seem filled by the shadow-play of his downfall. As the legionaries sat on their weapons the news was brought to them that Mithridates had returned to Pontus and reclaimed his kingdom. And Lucullus, the aloof and haughty Lucullus, went from tent to tent, taking the hand of each soldier like a suppliant, and the tears streamed down his cheeks.

The War against Terror

In the months following his soldiers’ strike, as Lucullus struggled to deal with Mithridates and mutineers simultaneously, a rare smile would have been brought to his face by the news that Clodius had been taken prisoner by pirates. ‘The soldier’s friend’ had been quick to abscond from Lucullus’ camp. Heading west, he had arrived in Cilicia, a Roman province on the south-eastern Turkish coast. Another of his brothers-in-law, Marcius Rex, the husband of Clodius’ youngest sister, was the governor there. Marcius, who disliked Lucullus and was perfectly happy to cock a snook at him, had rewarded the young mutineer with the command of a war fleet. It was while out on patrol with this that Clodius had been seized.

Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. Eight years previously Julius Caesar had been abducted while en route to Molon’s finishing school. When the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar had indignantly claimed that he was worth at least fifty. He had also warned his captors that he would capture and crucify them once he had been released, a promise that he had duly fulfilled. Clodius’ own dealings with pirates were to contribute less flatteringly to his reputation. When he wrote to the King of Egypt demanding the ransom fee, the response was a derisory payment of two talents, to the immense amusement of the pirates and the fury of the captive himself. The final circumstances of Clodius’ release were lost in a murk of scandal. His enemies – of whom there were many – claimed that the price had been his anal virginity.

Whatever the rewards it was capable of bringing them, however, kidnapping was only a sideline for the pirates. Calculated acts of intimidation ensured that they could extort and rob almost at will, inland as well as at sea. The scale of their plundering was matched by their pretensions. Their chiefs ‘claimed for themselves the status of kings and tyrants, and for their men, that of soldiers, believing that if they pooled their resources, they would be invincible’.⁸ In the nakedness of their greed, and in their desire to make the whole world their prey, there was more than a parody of the Republic itself, a ghostly mirror-image that the Romans found unsettling in the extreme. The shadowiness of the pirates’ organisation, and their diffuse operations, made them a foe unlike any other. ‘The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone,’ Cicero complained. ‘There can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties.’⁹ How was such an adversary ever to be pinned down, still more eradicated? To make the attempt would be to fight against phantoms. ‘It would be an unprecedented war, fought without rules, in a fog’;¹⁰ a war that appeared without promise of an end.

Yet for a people who prided themselves on their refusal to tolerate disrespect, this was a policy of unusual defeatism. It was true that the rocky inlets of Cilicia and the mountain fastnesses that stretched beyond them were almost impossible to police. The area had always been bandit country. Ironically, however, it was Rome’s very supremacy in the East that had enabled the pirates to swarm far beyond their strongholds. By hamstringing every regional power that might pose a threat to its interests, and yet refusing to shoulder the burden of direct administration, the Republic had left the field clear for the triumph of brigandage. To people racked by the twin plagues of political impotence and lawlessness, the pirates had at least brought the order of the protection racket. Some towns paid tribute to them, others offered harbours. With each year that passed the pirates’ tentacles extended further.

Only once, in 102, had the Romans been provoked into tackling the menace head on. The great orator Marcus Antonius, Cicero’s hero, had been dispatched to Cilicia with an army and a fleet. The pirates had quickly fled their strongholds, Antonius had proclaimed a decisive victory, and the Senate had duly awarded him a triumph. But the pirates had merely regrouped on Crete, and they soon returned to their old haunts, as predatory as before. This time round the Republic chose to turn a blind eye. An all-out war against the pirates promised to be as hopeless as ever, but there were also powerful interest groups in Rome that positively encouraged inactivity. The more that the economy was glutted with slaves, the more dependent it became on them. Even when the Republic was not at war this addiction still had to be fed. The pirates were the most consistent suppliers. At the great free port of Delos it was said that up to ten thousand slaves might be exchanged in a single day. The proceeds of this staggering volume of trade fatted pirate captain and Roman plutocrat alike. To the business lobby, profit talked louder than disrespect.

Many Romans, particularly in the upper reaches of the aristocracy, were naturally appalled by this blot on Rome’s good name. Lucullus was merely the boldest to take a stand against it. But the Senate had long been in bed with the business classes. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the most far-sighted critic of the Republic’s hunger for human livestock was not a Roman at all, but a Greek. Posidonius, the philosopher who had celebrated the Republic’s empire as the coming of a universal state, recognised in the monstrous scale of slavery the dark side of his optimistic vision. During his travels he had seen Syrians toiling in Spanish mines, and Gauls in chain-gangs on Sicilian estates. He was shocked by the inhuman conditions he had witnessed. Naturally, it never crossed his mind to oppose slavery as an institution. What did horrify him, however, was the brutalising of millions upon millions, and the danger that this posed to all his high hopes for Rome. If the Republic, rather than staying true to the aristocratic ideals that Posidonius so admired, permitted its global mission to be corrupted by big business, then he feared that its empire would degenerate into a free-for-all of anarchy and greed. Rome’s supremacy, rather than heralding a golden age, might portend a universal darkness. Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.

As an example of what he feared, Posidonius pointed to a series of slave revolts, of which that of Spartacus had been merely the most recent. He might just as well have cited the pirates. Bandits, like their prey, were most likely to be fugitives from the misery of the times, from extortion, warfare and social breakdown. The result, across the Mediterranean, wherever men from different cultures had been thrown together, whether in slave barracks or on pirate ships, was a desperate yearning for the very apocalypse so feared by Posidonius. Rootlessness and suffering served to wither the worship of traditional gods, but it provided a fertile breeding ground for mystery cults. Like the Sibyl’s prophecies, these tended to be a fusion of many different influences: Greek, Persian and Jewish beliefs. By their nature, they were underground and fluid, invisible to those who wrote history – but one of them, at least, was to leave a permanent mark. Mithras, whose rites the pirates celebrated, was to end up worshipped throughout the Roman Empire, but his cult was first practised by the enemies of Rome. Mysterious threads of association bound him to Mithridates, whose very name meant ‘given by Mithra’. Mithras himself had originally been a Persian deity, but in the form worshipped by the pirates he most resembled Perseus, a Greek hero, and one from whom Mithridates, significantly, claimed descent. Perseus, like Mithridates, had been a mighty king, uniting West and East, Greece and Persia, orders far more ancient than the upstart rule of Rome. On Mithridates’ coinage there appeared a crescent and a star, the ancient symbol of the Greek hero’s sword. This same sword could be seen in the hand of Mithras, plunging deep into the chest of a giant bull.

In a distortion of the original Persian myth, the bull had become the symbol of the Great Antagonist, the Principle of Evil: was this how the pirates saw Rome? The cloak of secrecy that veiled their mysteries makes it impossible to know for sure. What is certain, however, is that the alliance between the pirates and Mithridates, which was very close, went far beyond mere expediency. And what is equally certain is that the pirates, preoccupied with plunder as they were, also saw themselves as the enemies of everything embodied by Rome. No opportunity was wasted to trample upon the Republic’s ideals. If a prisoner was discovered to be a Roman citizen, the pirates would first pretend to be terrified of him, grovelling at his feet and dressing him in his toga; only when he was wearing the symbol of his citizenship would they lower a ladder into the sea and invite him to swim back home. Raiding parties would deliberately target Roman magistrates and carry off the symbols of their power. Because Antonius had abducted treasures to lead in triumph through Rome, the pirates struck back by seizing his daughter from her villa on the coast. These were carefully calculated outrages, reflecting a shrewd awareness of Roman psychology. They struck at the very essence of the Republic’s prestige.

Honour, naturally, demanded a response – but so too, increasingly, did commercial self-interest. Roman business, having sponsored a monster, now began to find itself menaced by its own creation. The pirates’ growing command of the sea enabled them to throttle the shipping lanes. The supply of everything, from slaves to grain, duly dried to a trickle and Rome began to starve. Still the Senate hesitated. Such had been the growth in piracy that it was clear that nothing less than a Mediterranean-wide command would prove sufficient to deal with it. This, to many senators, seemed to be a proconsulship too far. In the end, a second Marcus Antonius, the son of the great orator, was awarded the command in 74 BC, but his chief qualification was certainly not any hereditary talent for fighting pirates. Rather, it was his very incompetence that recommended him – as it was waspishly observed, ‘it is no great deal, the promotion of those whose power we have no cause to fear’.¹¹ Antonius’ first measure was to indulge in some lucrative free-booting of his own off Sicily; his second to be roundly defeated by the pirates off Crete. Roman prisoners were bound in the fetters that they had brought to chain the pirates, then left to dangle from the yardarms of the pirates’ ships.

Even this bobbing forest of gibbets was not to be the most humiliating symbol of superpower impotence. In 68 BC, as Lucullus was striking east against Tigranes, the pirates responded by launching an attack against the very heart of the Republic. At Ostia, where the Tiber met the sea, barely fifteen miles from Rome, the pirates sailed into the harbour and burned the consular war fleet as it lay in dock. The port of the hungry capital went up in flames. The grip of famine tightened around Rome. Starving citizens took to the Forum, demanding action on the crisis and the appointment of a proconsul to resolve it – not a paper tiger like Antonius, but a man who could get the job done. Even now, the Senate dug in its heels. Catulus and Hortensius understood perfectly well who their fellow citizens wanted. They knew who was waiting in the wings.

Ever since his consulship, Pompey had been deliberately lying low. His displays of modesty, like all his displays, were carefully staged for their effect. ‘It was Pompey’s favourite tactic to pretend that he was not angling for the things which in fact he wanted the most’,¹² a shrewd gambit at the best of times, but especially so when his ambitions aimed as high as they did now. Instead of vaunting himself, he had adopted Crassus’ stratagem of employing proxies to do the boasting on his behalf. Caesar was one of these, a lone voice in favour of Pompey in the Senate – less out of any great enthusiasm for Pompey than because he could see clearly how the dice were going to fall. Now that Sulla’s reforms had been rolled back, the tribunes were back in play. Not for nothing, during his consulship, had Pompey restored their ancient powers. The tribunes had helped him to dismantle Lucullus’ command, and it was a tribune, in 67 BC, who proposed that the people’s hero be given a sweeping licence to deal with the pirates. Despite an impassioned appeal from Catulus not to appoint ‘a virtual monarch over the empire’,¹³ the citizens rapturously ratified the bill. Pompey was granted the unprecedented force of 500 ships and 120,000 men, together with the right to levy more, should he decide that they were needed. His command embraced the entire Mediterranean, covered all its islands, and extended fifty miles inland. Never before had the resources of the Republic been so concentrated in the hands of a single man.

In every sense, then, Pompey’s appointment was a leap into the dark. No one, not even his supporters, quite knew what to expect. The decision to mobilise on such a scale had in itself been a gesture of despair, and the pessimism with which the Romans regarded even their favourite’s prospects was reflected in the length of his commission: three years. As it proved, to sweep the seas clear of pirates, storm their last stronghold and end a menace that had been tormenting the Republic for decades took the new proconsul a mere three months. It was a brilliant victory, a triumph for Pompey himself and an eye-opening demonstration of the reserves of force available to Rome. Even the Romans themselves appear to have been a little stunned. It suggested that no matter how hesitant their initial response to a challenge might be, there was still no withstanding them should their patience be pushed too far. Campaigns of terror were containable. Rome remained a superpower.

Yet, even though Pompey’s victory had demonstrated once again that the Republic could do pretty much as it pleased, there was none of the savagery that had traditionally been used to drive that lesson home. In a display of clemency quite as startling as his victory, Pompey not merely refrained from crucifying his captives, but bought them plots of land and helped to set them up as farmers. Brigandage, he had clearly recognised, was bred of rootlessness and social upheaval. For as long as the Republic was held responsible for these conditions, there would continue to be a hatred of Rome. Yet it hardly needs emphasising that the rehabilitation of criminals was not standard Roman policy. Perhaps it is significant that Pompey, midway through his campaign against the pirates, should have found the time to visit Posidonius on Rhodes. We know that he attended one of Posidonius’ lectures and then spoke privately with him afterwards. Since it was not the role of philosophers to challenge Roman prejudices, but to give them an intellectual gloss, we can be certain that Pompey would have heard nothing that he did not want to hear – but Posidonius must have helped him, at the very least, to clarify his opinions. Posidonius himself was deeply impressed with his protégé. In Pompey he believed that he had finally found the answer to his prayers: a Roman aristocrat worthy of the values of his class. ‘Always fight bravely’, he advised the parting proconsul, ‘and be superior to others’, a pithy admonition from Homer that Pompey was delighted to accept.¹⁴ This was the spirit in which he pardoned the pirates. So it was that the town where he settled them was titled Pompeiopolis: his mercy and munificence were to contribute eternally to the greatness of his name. Stern in war, gracious in peace, it was no wonder that Posidonius could hail him as the hero of the hour.

But Pompey, greedy as ever, wanted more. It was not enough to be the new Hector. From his earliest days, teasing his quiff in front of the mirror, he had dreamed of being the new Alexander. Now he was determined to seize his chance. The East lay all before him, and with it the prospect of glory such as no Roman citizen had ever won before.

The New Alexander

One day in the spring of 66 BC Lucullus watched a cloud of dust rise up on the horizon. Although he was camped by the side of a wood, the plain that stretched before him was parched and treeless. When he finally made out an endless line of troops emerging from the dust, he saw that the lictors of the commanding general had wreathed their rods in laurel, and that the leaves were dry. His own lictors rode out to greet the new arrivals, and in a gesture of welcome handed over fresh laurel. In exchange they were given the faded wreaths.

By such a sign did the gods confirm what everyone already knew. Since the mutiny the winter before Lucullus had found his authority withering by the day. Barely on speaking terms with his men, and certainly unable to trust them in combat, he had dragged his army in slow retreat back from Armenia. Licking his wounds in the uplands west of Pontus, he had been forced to watch helplessly as Mithridates entrenched himself once again in his old kingdom. Yet this was not the worst agony. Lucullus’ replacement was the very man who had always most hankered after his proconsulship, and who had connived with the financiers and their tame tribunes to hack away at his command.

In the aftermath of the victory over the pirates there had been few prepared to stand in the way of Pompey the Great. The majority of the Senate, recognising a winner when they saw one, had abandoned their qualms and voted to award him further, and even more unprecedented, powers. Not only was he to command the largest force ever sent to the East, but he was given the right to make war and peace as he chose, on the spot. Lucullus, by contrast, had been left with nothing. Plenty of his erstwhile allies, including two former consuls and a raft of ancient names, had eagerly signed up to serve with the new proconsul. Lucullus, watching as his fresh laurel wreaths were handed over to Pompey’s lictors, would have recognised a host of impeccably aristocratic faces in his enemy’s train. Did they meet his gaze or, embarrassed, look away? Triumph, failure – both, to the Romans, provided an irresistible spectacle.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting between Lucullus and Pompey, conducted with chilly politeness at first, soon degenerated into a slanging match. Pompey jeered at Lucullus for his inability to finish off Mithridates. Lucullus retorted with a bitter description of his replacement as a carrion bird maddened by blood, only ever settling on the carcasses of wars fought by better men. The abuse turned so violent that the two generals finally had to be pulled apart, but it was Pompey who was the proconsul and could therefore land the killer-blow. He stripped Lucullus of his remaining legions, then continued on his way, leaving Lucullus to nurse his injured dignity, and depart, a private citizen again, on the long road back to Rome.

Even so, his insult had been the more wounding. Events were to confirm his boast that he had broken the backs of both Mithridates and Tigranes, and in Pompey’s eagerness to fix on his prey there was indeed something of the scavenger smelling blood upon the wind. For the last time Mithridates was swept from his kingdom. As usual he vanished into the mountains, but even though he evaded his pursuers yet again, all he had left to menace them now was a phantom, his name. Tigranes, recognising overwhelming force when he saw it, and having no wish to take to the mountains himself, hurried to accommodate himself to Pompey’s dispensation. Arriving at the Roman camp, he was forced to dismount and hand over his sword. Proceeding on foot to where Pompey was waiting, he removed his royal diadem, then knelt in his gold and purple to grovel in the dust. Before he could prostrate himself, however, Pompey had taken his hands and raised him back up to his feet. Mildly, he invited the King to sit by his side. Then, in a polite tone, he began to set out the peace settlement. Armenia was to become a Roman dependency. Tigranes was to hand over his son as a hostage. In return he would be permitted to retain his throne, but not much else. The wretched King hurriedly assented to the terms. To celebrate, Pompey then invited Tigranes to his field tent to dine. This was the very model of a Roman general’s behaviour: after the ruthless assertion of the Republic’s might, the gracious gifting of scraps from the table.

Pompey’s genius for posing had found its perfect stage in the East. Acutely conscious that the eye of history was upon him, the great man rarely did anything without angling his profile towards it. As Alexander had done, he had even brought a tame historian with him, to chronicle every act of heroism, every magnanimous deed. He fought campaigns as he handled kings, with half an eye to providing sensational copy. It was not enough to thrash recalcitrant Orientals. He had to tangle with poisonous snakes, hunt after Amazons, push eastwards towards the great ocean that encircled the world. And all the while, uninhibited by finicky cavils from the Senate, he could fuss with territories as though they were counters on a gaming board, rearranging them as he pleased, handing out crowns, abolishing thrones, the still-boyish master of the fate of millions.

Not that Pompey ever forgot that he was a magistrate of the Roman people. After all, a citizen was only as great as the glory he brought to the Republic. Pompey’s proudest boast would be that ‘he had found Asia on the rim of Rome’s possessions, and left it in the centre’.¹⁵ His humbling of kings, his disposal of kingdoms, his far-flung campaigns at the edge of the world, all had this achievement as their strategic goal. When Pompey raised Tigranes from the dust, he did so as the stern protector of the Republic’s interests. The scene would otherwise have lacked its heroic glow. The flummery of kingship was all very well for impressing barbarians, but its only true value was to serve as a backdrop to the free-born virtues of Rome. No wonder that Pompey’s apeing of Alexander, however much it might provoke the contemptuous snorts of rivals like Crassus, was so relished by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. They could instinctively recognise it for what it was: not a display of impatience with the Republic, but, on the contrary, an affirmation of its superior dignity and worth.

For the memory of Alexander’s greatness had always served the Romans as a reproach. Even worse, it provided an inspiration to their foes. In the East the model of kingship established by Alexander had never lost its allure. For more than a century it had been neutered and systematically humiliated by Rome, yet it remained the only credible system of government that could be opposed to the republicanism of the new world conquerors. Hence its appeal to monarchs, such as Mithridates, who were not even Greek, and hence, most startling of all, its appeal to bandits and rebellious slaves. When the pirates had called themselves kings, and affected the gilded sails and purple awnings of monarchy, this had not been mere vanity, but a deliberate act of propaganda, as public a statement as they could make of their opposition to the Republic. They knew that the message would be read correctly, for invariably, whenever the order of things had threatened to crack during the previous decades, rebellion had been signalled by a slave with a crown. Spartacus’ communism had been all the more unique for the fact that the leaders of previous slave revolts, virtually without exception, had aimed to raise thrones upon the corpses of their masters. Most, like the pirates, had merely adopted the trappings of monarchy, but there were some who had brought the fantastical worlds of romances to life, and claimed to be the long-lost sons of kings. This, in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean. The royal pretensions of slaves fed naturally into the swirling undercurrents of the troubled age, the prophecies, which Mithridates’ propaganda had exploited so brilliantly, of the coming of a universal king, of a new world monarchy, and the doom of Rome.

So when Pompey presented himself as the new Alexander, he was appropriating a dream shared by potentate and slave alike. If any Roman was qualified to appreciate this, it was Pompey himself. The conqueror of the pirates, and the patron of Posidonius, he would have been perfectly aware of the menacing links that existed between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed. Having stamped out the threat of piracy, it was now his aim to stamp out similar threats wherever they smouldered throughout the East. One realm in particular appeared to invite his intervention. For decades Syria had served as a breeding ground for anarchy and violent visions of apocalypse. During the first great slave revolt against Roman rule, in Sicily back in 135, the leader of the revolt had even called his followers ‘Syrians’ and himself ‘Antiochus’, the latter a title filled with resonance. Kings of that name had once ruled a great empire, a successor to that of Alexander himself, stretching at its height to the gates of India. Those glory days were long gone. Tolerated by the Republic precisely because it was weak, all that was left to the dynasty was its heartland of Syria. Even that, in 83, had been stolen by Tigranes, and it was only Lucullus, resuscitating what had appeared beyond all hope of resurrection, who had placed an Antiochus back on the Syrian throne. Pompey, glad of the chance to reverse anything that his predecessor had done, pointedly refused to recognise the new king. But personal spite, while it may have added relish to this decision, did not explain it. Antiochus was both too enfeebled and too dangerous to be permitted to survive. His kingdom was in chaos, a focal point for social revolution, while the glamour of his name continued to cast its hypnotic and subversive spell. If Syria were left as it was, a festering sore on the flank of Rome’s possessions, then there was the constant danger that its poison might infect a new Tigranes, a new generation of pirates or rebellious slaves. This, to Pompey, was intolerable. Accordingly, in the summer of 64, he occupied Antioch, the capital of Syria. Antiochus, the thirteenth king of that name to have held the throne, fled into the desert, where he was ignominiously murdered by an Arab chieftain. The wraith of his kingdom was dispatched to its grave at last.

In its place a new empire was rising. Rather than the Senate’s traditional isolationism, Pompey embodied a new doctrine. Wherever Roman business interests were threatened, the Republic would intervene – and, if need be, impose direct rule. What had once been a toehold in the East was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the pax Romana was to mean. Pompey, who had won his proconsulship with the backing of the financial lobby, had no intention of repeating Lucullus’ error by treading on its toes. But while he was happy to identify himself with its interests, he was also careful not to appear its tool. The age of unbridled exploitation was over. Bureaucracy was no longer to be uninhibitedly laissez-faire. In the long run, as even the business lobby had come to recognise, this was a policy that promised just as many pickings as before. It was certainly in no one’s interest to kill off geese that were laying such splendid golden eggs.

The great achievement of Pompey’s proconsulship was to demonstrate that the concerns of business could truly be squared with the ideals of the senatorial elite. It established a blueprint for Roman rule that was to endure for centuries. It also, not coincidentally, raised Pompey himself to a pinnacle of glory and wealth. The client-rulers who swelled the train of Rome also swelled his own. In the autumn of 64 Pompey headed south from Antioch to bag a few more. His first target was the fractious kingdom of Judaea. Jerusalem was occupied. The Temple, despite desperate resistance, was stormed. Pompey, intrigued by reports of the Jews’ peculiar god, brushed aside the protests of the scandalised priests and passed into the Temple’s innermost sanctum. He was perplexed to find it empty. There can be little doubt as to whom Pompey thought was more honoured by this encounter, Jehovah or himself. Not wishing to aggravate the Jews any further, he left the Temple its treasures, and Judaea a regime headed by a tame high priest. Pompey then marched south, aiming to strike across the desert for Petra, but he was never to reach the rose-red city. Midway he was halted by dramatic news: Mithridates was dead. The old king had never given up on his defiance, but when even his son turned against him and blockaded him in his chambers, Rome’s arch-enemy had been cornered at last. After vainly attempting to poison himself he had finally been dispatched by one of the few things to which he had not cultivated an immunity, the sword point of a loyal guard. Back in Rome the news was greeted with ten days of public thanksgiving. Pompey himself, after announcing the news to his cheering legions, sped back to Pontus, where Mithridates’ body had been brought by his son. Not caring to inspect the corpse, Pompey contented himself with rifling through the dead king’s belongings. Among them he found a red cloak that had once belonged to Alexander. Looking ahead to his triumph, he promptly tried it on for size.

Few would have denied that it was his by right. His achievements stood comparison with any in the history of Rome. Yet as the great man prepared to head for home at last, the East finally pacified, his immense task done, there were few of his fellow citizens who did not find themselves unsettled by the prospect of his return. His wealth was beyond the dreams of avarice – even of Crassus himself. His glory was so dazzling as to blot out every rival. Could a Roman become the new Alexander while also remaining a citizen? In the last resort only Pompey himself could answer this question – but there were plenty, as they waited for him, prepared to fear the worst. Much had happened in Rome during Pompey’s five-year absence. Once again, the Republic had found itself in the grip of crisis. Only time would tell whether Pompey’s homecoming would help resolve it, or lead to a crisis greater still.

THE DEBT TO PLEASURE

Shadows in the Fishpond

While Pompey lorded it over the East the man he had replaced indulged himself with the most flamboyant sulk in history.

Lucullus had every reason to feel peeved. His enemies, not content with having had him dismissed from his command, continued to goad him on his return to Rome. Most vindictively of all, they blocked his triumph. In doing so they cheated him of the ultimate tribute that the Republic could pay to one of its own. Driven through the grateful streets, borne on the clamour of deafening applause and acclamation, a general on the day of his triumph became something more than a citizen, something more even than a man. Not only was he dressed in the gold and purple of a king, but his face was painted red like the holiest statue in Rome, that of Jupiter in the great temple on the Capitol. To partake of the divine was a glorious, intoxicating, perilous thing, and during the few brief hours when it was permitted a general became a spectacle of wonder and edification. To the Roman people who lined the streets to cheer him, he was living reassurance that ambition might indeed be sacred, that in struggling to reach the top, and to achieve great things, a citizen was fulfilling his duty to the Republic and to the gods.

Few could doubt that the victor of Tigranocerta merited such an honour. Even Pompey, stripping Lucullus of his legions, had left him a few thousand men for his triumphal procession. Yet in the Republic there was nothing so awe inspiring that it was not also touched by the sordid day-to-day. Those who had profited from intrigue – as Lucullus had done when he had first won his pro-consulship – might expect to suffer from it too. These were the rules by which every politician played. The sniping of enemies was proportionate to the stature of a man. The prospect of what Lucullus might achieve as a civilian filled his opponents with fear, just as it inspired his allies with high hopes. Behind the scenes assorted grandees did what they could to reverse the opposition of the tribunes, and see that Lucullus was granted his triumph, but however genuine their outrage, and however loud their cries of scandal, they had their own selfish reasons for campaigning on his behalf. No friendship in Rome was ever entirely devoid of political calculation.

But Catulus and his supporters, who had been relying upon Lucullus to take his place as a leader of their cause, were to be disappointed. With humiliation following upon humiliation, something inside Lucullus appeared to have snapped. The man who had spent six gruelling years in pursuit of Mithridates was by now drained of enthusiasm for combat. He abandoned the political battlefield to others, and surrendered himself instead, with all the ostentation he could muster, to pleasure.

In the East, as a triumphant assertion of the Republic’s greatness, Lucullus had ripped apart the palaces and pleasure-gardens of Tigranes until not a trace of them had remained. Now, returned to Italy, he set about surpassing all the wonders he had destroyed. On a ridge beyond the city walls he built a park on a scale never before witnessed in Rome, a riot of follies, fountains and exotic plants, many of them brought back from his sojourn in the East, including a souvenir from Pontus, most enduring of all his legacies to his homeland, the cherry tree. At Tusculum his summer villa was extended until it spread for miles. Most spectacularly of all, along the Bay of Naples, where Lucullus had no fewer than three villas, he built gilded terraces on piers, fantastical palaces shimmering above the sea. One of these same villas had belonged to Marius, the very estate to which the old general had refused to retire, dreaming of yet more campaigns, yet more triumphs. Lucullus, who had bought the villa for a record price from Sulla’s daughter, seemed determined to transform it and everything else he owned into monuments to the vanity of ambition. His extravagances were deliberately raised to be offensive to every ideal of the Republic. Once, he had lived by the virtues of his class. Now, retiring from public life, he trampled on them. It was as though, embittered by the loss of first power and then honour, Lucullus had turned his contempt upon the Republic itself.

In place of a triumph he instead flaunted his fabulous appetites. Sulla, to celebrate his victories, had feasted the whole of Rome, but Lucullus, with a greater expenditure of gold, positively revelled in private – and even solitary – excess. Once, when he dined alone and his steward provided him with a simple meal, he cried out in indignation, ‘But Lucullus is feasting Lucullus today!’¹ The phrase was widely repeated, amid much shaking of heads, for nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying haute cuisine. Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence. Back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves’, but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art’.² In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial. The Senate, alarmed, had accordingly attempted to restrain it. As early as 169 the serving of dormice at dinner parties had been banned, and later Sulla himself, in a fine show of hypocrisy, had rushed through similar laws in favour of cheap, homely fare. All mere dams of sand. Faddishness swept all before it. Increasingly, millionaires were tempted to join their cooks in the kitchens, trying out their own recipes, sampling ever more outlandish dishes. This was the crest of the wave that Sergius Orata had ridden to such lucrative effect, but oysters did not lack for rivals in the culinary stakes. Scallops, fatted hares, the vulvas of sows, all came suddenly and wildly into vogue, and all for the same reason: for in the softness of a flesh that threatened rapid putrescence yet still retained its succulence, the Roman food snob took an ecstatic joy.

Most treasured, most relished, most savoured of all were fish. So it had always been. The Romans had been stocking lakes with spawn for as long as their city had been standing. By the third century BC Rome had come to be ringed by ponds. Freshwater fish, however, because so much easier to catch, were far less prized than species found only in the sea – and as Roman gastronomy grew ever more exotic, so these became the focus of intensest desire. Rather than remain dependent upon tradesmen for their supply of turbot or eel, the super-rich began to construct salt-water ponds. Naturally, the prodigious expense required to maintain these only added to their appeal.

The extravagance of it all was justified by the ancient principle that a citizen should subsist off the produce of his land. Roman nostalgia for the countryside cut across every social boundary. Even the most luxurious of villas also served as farms. Inevitably, among the urban elite, this tended to encourage a form of play-acting that Marie-Antoinette might have recognised. A favourite affectation was to build couches in a villa’s fruit store. A particularly shameless host, if he could not be bothered to grow and harvest his own fruit, might transport supplies from Rome then arrange them prettily in his store for the delectation of his guests. Pisciculture had a similarly unreal quality. Self-sufficiency in fish came at a staggering price. As agriculturalists were quick to point out, homemade lakes ‘are more appealing to the eye than to the purse, which they tend to empty rather than fill. They are expensive to build, expensive to stock, expensive to maintain.’³ The claim that fish-breeding had anything to do with economy became increasingly impossible to justify. In 92 BC a censor, no less, a magistrate elected to maintain the Republic’s stern ideals, had burst into tears at the death of a lamprey. He had grieved, it was reported, not for a ruined supper but ‘as though he had lost a daughter’.⁴

Thirty years later the craze had reached epidemic proportions. Hortensius, rather than even contemplate eating one of his beloved mullets, would send to Puteoli if he ever needed fish for his table. As one of his friends commented wonderingly, ‘You would sooner get him to let you take his carriage-mules from his stable and keep them, than remove a bearded mullet from his fish-pond.’⁵ In pisciculture, as in every other form of extravagance, however, it was Lucullus who set the most dazzling standards of notoriety. His fishponds were universally acknowledged to be wonders, and scandals, of the age. To keep them supplied with salt water, he had tunnels driven through mountains; and to regulate the cooling effect of the tides, groynes built far out into the sea. The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered. ‘Piscinarii’, Cicero called Lucullus and Hortensius – ‘fish fanciers’. It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair.

For Cicero, with the acuity of a man who wanted desperately all that Lucullus was busy throwing away, could penetrate to the heart of the mania for fish-ponds. It spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome’s public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one’s ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man’s flight threatened the entire line of battle. Cicero, despite having seized Hortensius’ oratorical crown, had no wish to see his rival retire. The new man closely identified himself with the principles for which great aristocrats such as Hortensius and Lucullus had always stood. As he drew, step by careful step, ever closer to the supreme prize of the consulship, so it appalled him to see men he regarded as his natural allies sitting by their fish-ponds, feeding their bearded mullets by hand, leaving the Republic to twist in the wind.

But for Hortensius, as for Lucullus, the consciousness of having been bested, of holding only second place, was a burning agony. The orator’s retirement was not as total as the proconsul’s, but it was, in its own way, just as pointed. Increasingly, the law courts in which Hortensius had been so publicly routed by Cicero came to serve him as a stage for his eccentricities. A man who had brushed against his toga and damaged the arrangement of the folds was prosecuted for insulting behaviour. Just as flamboyantly, in the middle of a trial Hortensius moved for an adjournment, explaining that he wished to hurry back to his estate and supervise the irrigation of his plane trees with vintage wine. His opponent on this occasion, as on so many others, was Cicero. Wild extravagance was one arena in which the parvenu could hardly compete.

So it was that the ancient Roman yearning for glory turned pathological. Lucullus, splitting mountains for the benefit of his fish, and Hortensius, serving peacocks for the first time at a banquet, were both still engaged in the old, familiar competition to be the best. But it was no longer the desire for honour that possessed them. Instead it was something very like self-disgust. Lucullus, we are told, squandered his money with every appearance of contempt, treating it as though it were something ‘captive and barbarian’, to be spilled like blood.⁶ No wonder that his contemporaries were appalled and perplexed. Not properly understanding his condition, they explained it as madness. Ennui was an affliction unknown to the Republic. Not so to later generations. Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. ‘They began to seek dishes,’ he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, ‘not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.’⁷ The fish-fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood.

Party People

Self-indulgence did not have to be a stigma of defeat. What to great noblemen were the honeyed venoms of retirement might well to others promise opportunity. A few short miles down the coast from Lucullus’ villa at Naples stood the fabled beach resort of Baiae. Here, out into the glittering blue of the bay, stretched gilded pier after gilded pier, cramping the fish, as the humorists put it. To the Romans, Baiae was synonymous with luxury and wickedness. A holiday there was always a source of guilty pleasure. No statesman would ever willingly admit to spending time in a town so notorious, yet every season Rome would empty of the upper classes as they headed south to its temptations. It was this that made Baiae such a hot spot for the upwardly mobile. Whether at its celebrated sulphur baths or over a dish of the local speciality, purple-shelled oysters, the resort offered precious entrées into high society. Baiae was a party town, and the strains of music and laughter were forever drifting through the warm midnight air, borne from villas, or the beach, or yachts out in the bay. No wonder that the place drove moralists apoplectic. Wherever wine flowed and clothes began to be loosened, traditional proprieties might start to slip too. A handsome social climber who had barely come of age might find himself talking on familiar terms to a consul. Deals might be struck, patronage secured. Charm and good looks might secure pernicious advantages. Baiae was a place ripe with scandal, dazzling in its aspect but forever shadowed by rumours of corruption: wine-drenched, perfume-soused, a playground for every kind of ambition and perversion, and – perhaps most shockingly of all – for the intrigues of powerful women.

The queen of Baiae, and the embodiment of its exclusive, if faintly sleazy, allure, was the eldest of the three Claudian sisters, Clodia Metelli. Her eyes, dark and glittering, had the ox-like appearance that invariably made Roman men go weak at the knees, while her slang set trends for an entire generation. The very name she adopted, a vulgar contraction of the aristocratic ‘Claudia’, reflected a taste for the plebeian that would influence her youngest brother to spectacular effect.⁸ To affect a lower-class accent had long been a mark of the popularis politician – Sulla’s enemy Sulpicius, for instance, had been notorious for it – but now, with Clodia, plebeian vowels became the height of fashion.

Naturally, in a society as aristocratic as that of the Republic, it required blue blood to make a trend out of slumming – Clodia, by virtue of marriage as well as breeding, stood at the heart of the Roman establishment. Her husband, Metellus Celer, came from the only family capable of rivalling the prestige and arrogance of the Claudii themselves. Fabulously fecund, the Metelli cropped up everywhere, often on opposing sides. So it was, for instance, that while one of the Metelli loathed Pompey so passionately that he had come within a whisker of attacking the proconsul with a full war fleet, Clodia’s husband spent much of the sixties BC on active service as one of Pompey’s legates. The great lady herself no doubt endured this separation with equanimity. Her primary loyalty was to her own clan. The Claudii, in contrast to the Metelli, had always been famously close; in the case of Clodius and his three sisters, notoriously so.